The Beauty of the Magnificat

Image: "Visitation," by Jacques Daret, via Wikimedia Commons.

In Chapter 2 of Bach's Major Vocal Works, Markus Rathey described the beauty of Bach's Magnificat in D Major (BWV 243).  At the time that he composed this work, Johann Sebastian Bach was employed as a musician and teacher at a Lutheran church in Leipzig, a city in Saxony, an area of Germany that is near Poland and the Czech Republic.

Bach composed this Magnificat for the vespers liturgy on July 2, 1723, the feast of the Visitation of Mary.  It was placed after the sermon and before the final prayers and closing hymn.

The key theme is Mary's praise of God's mercy and strength, and the work balances interpreting the text (from the first chapter of the Gospel of Luke) and creating a musical structure (which Rathey called its "architecture").  The piece has twelve movements, and it begins and ends with exuberant, celebratory movements that announce God's power using many instruments (including trumpets and timpani) and a five-part chorus.  The other movements include more celebrations with the whole chorus; arias for soloists, including sopranos, of course, because the Magnificat is the song of a woman; and a duet that highlights God's mercy and love.

Theological Aesthetics

In The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Volume I: Seeing the Form, Hans Urs von Balthasar describes a theological aesthetics that "develops its theory of beauty from the data of revelation itself with genuinely theological methods." 

According to von Balthasar, the supreme object of beauty is the form of divine revelation centered on Jesus Christ, who is God, bears witness to God as a man, and reveals God's glory, "the primal splendour of the love of a God who humiliates himself."  This sacrifice does not destroy, however, for it transfigures all of creation through love.  His form, "the most sublime of beauties," which can be seen by those filled with the Holy Spirit, captivates Christians and inflames their love, and thus the Christian form is the most beautiful human form.

(Quotes are from the translation by Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, published by Ignatius Press.)

Marijuana is dangerous

The May 2019 issue of First Things includes Peter Hitchens's review of Alex Berenson's book Tell Your Children: The Truth about Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.  Berenson's wife Jacqueline, a psychiatrist who evaluates mentally ill criminals, told her husband that most violent criminals smoke marijuana their whole lives.   The logical conclusion:

Marijuana can make you permanently crazy ... and once it has made you crazy, it can make you violent, too.

Berenson's book describes the pro-marijuana propaganda created by marijuana zealots and entrepreneurs and quotes one as saying "Medical marijuana is a way of protecting a subset of society from arrest." In other words, medical marijuana is "bogus."  Hitchens opposes not only marijuana legalization but also decriminalization, because the latter leads to de facto legalization, and "if marijuana is legal, how will we keep cocaine and ecstasy illegal?" Or heroin or LSD?

Marijuana is dangerous; tell your children.

The Spirit of the Liturgy

In his book The Spirit of the Liturgy, published in 2000, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI discussed the history of Christian liturgical music, which began after the Israelites crossed the Red Sea (Exodus 15:1-2):

Then Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to the LORD, saying, "I will sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously; the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea. The LORD is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation; this is my God, and I will praise him, my father's God, and I will exalt him."

According to Benedict, "Christians now sing an altogether new song, which is truly and definitively new in view of the wholly new thing that has taken place in the Resurrection of Christ. ... It is the Holy Spirit who teaches us to sing. ... Church music comes into being as a charism, a gift of the Spirit."

Liturgical music went through different phases, and each phase ended with changes that were made to keep it centered on Jesus Christ and the true nature of the liturgy.

Regarding music in the current age, Benedict laments that classical music is "an elitist ghetto," while two other types of music entertain everyone else: pop music, which is a commercial product, and rock music, which provides only "the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects."

Liturgical music, unlike these forms, must proclaim the Word in response to God's love, inspired by the Holy Spirit, so that it "elevates the senses by uniting them with the spirit" and expresses "man's special place in the general structure of being."  Finally, liturgical music should have a "cosmic character" because, in the liturgy, "we sing with the angels."