Sometimes we forget how strange the Internet is, in terms of providing an environment for reading and sharing news stories and other features.
Readers used to be able to flip through their daily newspaper and know that they had a chance, in an orderly manner, to look at “everything” that was in those pages. Today, there is no way to know — for a variety of technical reasons — if you’ve looked at everything in the “daily” New York Times or any other news product . It all exists in a vast digital cloud of material that is always evolving and being updated. There is no logical sequence or form.
People find “news stories” with a search engine, they run into them on Facebook or people end them URLs in emails or texts. Often these articles are stripped of context — news or editorial, for example — and often the publication dates vanish, as well.
Thus, every now and then, GetReligion readers ship us a story that they think deserves praise or criticism. Sure enough, I’ll find that it’s amazing and start work on a post and then notice — oh no — that it’s actually several years old.
This happened to me the other day with a “feature” story from the Times with this headline: “Johann Sebastian Bach Was More Religious Than You Might Think.” Well, I love Bach. As far as I am concerned, the stunningly productive and brilliant Bach is either (a) evidence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, (b) the most important artist in the history of Western civilization or (c) both.
I dug into the piece and quickly realized that this essay by Michael Marissen, author of “Bach & God,” wasn’t a news feature and, on top of that, it ran in 2018. I’m sharing it as a weekend “think piece” because it is fascinating stuff and contains an interesting example of modern thinkers reaching conclusions about a historical figure — even though there is hard evidence that directly contradicts their views. This feature focuses on a piece of Bach material (not a piece of music) that I didn’t know about — with incredible implications for discussions of this cultural giant’s faith. Here is the overture:
Bach biographers don’t have it easy. Has there ever been a composer who wrote so much extraordinary music and left so little documentation of his personal life?
Life-writing abhors a vacuum, and experts have indulged in all manner of speculation, generally mirroring their own approaches to the world, about how Bach must have understood himself and his works.
The current fancy is that Bach was a forward-looking, quasi-scientific thinker who had little or no genuine interest in traditional religion. “Bach’s Dialogue With Modernity,” one recent, indicative book is called. In arriving at this view, scholars have ignored, underestimated or misinterpreted a rich source of evidence: Bach’s personal three-volume Study Bible, extensively marked with his own notations. A proper assessment of this document renders absurd any notion that Bach was a progressivist or a secularist.
Oh my. This is not a secondary source at all. We are talking about actual books packed with original Bach commentary, in his own handwriting.
Where are these amazing volumes?
Bach’s copy of these tomes — which were published in 1681-82 with commentary culled by Abraham Calov from Martin Luther’s sermons and other writings — was unexpectedly discovered in the 1930s among the belongings of a German immigrant family in Frankenmuth, Mich., and is housed today at Concordia Seminary Library in St. Louis. An enterprising publisher in the Netherlands, the Uitgeverij Van Wijnen, has now issued a spectacular facsimile.
All three volumes are inscribed “JSBach.1733” and contain a host of handwritten corrections and comments. Bach handwriting experts have identified the vast majority of these verbal entries as “definitely Bach” or “probably Bach.” Hundreds of passages are further scrawled with marginal dashes and other nonverbal markings. Although these are harder to evaluate, physicists at the Crocker Nuclear Laboratory have concluded through ink analysis that “with high probability, Bach was also responsible for the underlinings and marginal marks.”
Where does all this science get us? Bach’s notations bear witness to a life of conservative Lutheran observance.
The feature is packed with very specific examples of how these material provide illumination about Bach’s beliefs and how this impacted his work.
I could pull out all kinds of examples of the gems mentioned here, but readers who care about art, music and cultural history really need to read it all. I would argue that religion-beat professionals will want to stash away a copy of this URL somehow, since performances of Bach material often show up in public life and art — especially around the major feasts of the Christian year.
Here is one more (warning, this is long) example of the detail in this piece and how it relates to myths that have sprouted about Bach as a semi-modernist genius. I love the use here of the term “typology” — which plays a major role in Eastern Orthodox thinking (this is my church tradition).
Only a handful of Bach’s entries in Calov concern music, and these have received the most extensive — indeed, typically the only — attention from biographers. Leading writers have striven to explain these marginalia as progressive. In truth, all of them straightforwardly reflect conservative Lutheran thinking. What they share as well is a premodern interpretive approach called “typology,” whereby events and principles in the era of ancient Israel act as “types” or “shadows” for their correlated “antitypes” or “substances” in the era of Christianity. Typology was looked upon less as a scholarly path to intellectual understanding than as a doctrinal path to spiritual comfort.
Citing one of Bach’s annotations on music as key progressivist testimony, John Eliot Gardiner, in his 2013 biography “Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven,” wrote: “Bach understood that the more perfectly a composition is realized, both conceptually and through performance, the more God is immanent in the music. ‘NB,’ he wrote in the margin of his copy of Abraham Calov’s Bible commentary, ‘Where there is devotional music, God with his grace is always present.’ This strikes me as a tenet that many of us as musicians automatically hold and aspire to whenever we meet to play music, regardless of whatever ‘God’ we happen to believe in.”
What a lovely, modern idea! Alas, no aspect of it could possibly have been part of Bach’s understanding.
Lutherans like Bach certainly would have condemned as a grievous sin of idolatry any notion that the essence of a piece of music is, or turns into, the essence of God. And Bach’s somewhat cryptic note is not even about the less heretical notion of God’s possibly just “dwelling” within music, either. Its language plainly echoes more particularized orthodox Lutheran observations about God and music that were laid out in Johann Gerhard’s “School of Piety” (1623), one of many books of practical theology listed in Bach’s estate inventory.
Thus the impetus behind Bach’s remark was not progressivist but doctrinal.
This isn’t the stuff of news, I guess, unless one happens to live near a secular university or two. It’s amazing that such a crucial source document exists and can be quoted.