Modern Theology 16:4 October 2000

ISSN 0266-7177

MOZART AMONG THE

THEOLOGIANS1
DAVID J. GOUWENS
Encountering the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, many are reduced
either to silence or to brief stammering superlatives: incomparable,
angelic, even divine. But theologians, a loquacious lot, manage lengthier
meditations. Sren Kierkegaard, Karl Barth, and Hans Kng, each of them
theological2 writers, differ in much, but are bound together in praise of
Mozart. Not content with superlatives, each offers extended reflections on
the religious implications of Mozarts musical excellence.
But how strikingly different are their reflections on Mozart! This arises
only in part from the fact that each theologian responds to different
examples of Mozarts astounding productivity, or that the range of influences on the composer happily encompassed Enlightenment, Catholicism,
and Freemasonry. More important, the different readings of Mozart arise,
not surprisingly, from the various religious and philosophical traditions
they represent. Kierkegaards non-religious aesthete A celebrates the
daemonic Mozart. Barths Reformed vision discerns the free Mozart who
sounds the glory of the Creator. Kngs Roman Catholic Mozart signals
traces of transcendence.
Comparing these three admirers of Mozart provides a perfect occasion to
reflect on the interplay of Christian faith and the arts, especially music,
raising interesting interpretive questions concerning not only what do we
hear in Mozart?, but how do our religious visions shape our apprehension
of music?

David J. Gouwens
Associate Professor of Theology, Brite Divinity School, Texas Christian University, TCU Box
298130, Fort Worth, Texas 76129, USA
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Sren Kierkegaards A: The Daemonic Mozart

Sren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I: The Immediate Erotic Stages, or the
Musical-Erotic 3
In Either/Or, Part I, the papers of the unnamed aesthete A, Kierkegaard
presents not a religious or even ethical person, but a refined Epicurean who
holds as the highest value the cultivation of pleasure and the avoidance of
pain. Eminently reflective, this cultured aesthete takes his chief delight in
intellectual play, including reflection on music, mythology, literature, psychology, and religion. Admitting that he is no musician, he nonetheless
possesses a developed philosophy of music. As essay on Mozart, The
Immediate Erotic Stages, or the Musical-Erotic, is his occasion to use Mozart
to explore the excellence of musical art. For A, music is radically separated
from language, it is the kingdom of sound apart from idea, sensuous,
immediate, and pre-reflective. Granted, language too is sound, but in the
service of ideas and united with thought; language is hence the realm of the
spiritual, the reflectiveand the Christian. Indeed, A argues in Hegelian
fashion that music did not come into its own historically until the advent
of Christianity. For Christianity, In the beginning was the Word, the idea,
thought; and music is thereby set apart in its own domain.4 But this does not
mean that music is superseded or abandoned once spirit appears. As
essay (befitting an aesthete) is a labor of enthusiastic devotion to the sensuous, to music, and to Mozart; As goal throughout is to bring his readers
back to Mozarts music, and especially to what A considers Mozarts
supreme opera: Listen, he says, to Don Giovanni!
Why is A so exuberant about Mozart? What is the particular excellence of
Mozart, and why specifically is Don Giovanni not only the best opera ever
written but qualitatively different from all other operas?5 Mozart, supremely
in Don Giovanni, achieves a perfect union of form and content, wherein
absolutely musical subject matter (the Don Juan myth) is united with the
absolutely musical form that reflects it.
First, the subject matter: the character of Don Giovanni represents not a real
human being, but daemonic Desire; he is the Eternal Rake, the quintessence of immediate erotic passion. An unreflective seducer, he does not
plot or scheme; in his exuberant gaiety he is a primitive force of nature.6
Devoid of ethics, he is not immoral but amoral.7 In Christian terms, A argues,
one might say that he represents the flesh after the entry of spirit into
the world (which is why at the end of the opera, even in the face of the
Commendatores demand to repent, the Don refuses). In Freudian terms, we
might add, he stands for the libido in revolt, after the emergence of the id
and superego.
Second, A claims that Mozarts genius finds for this sensuous subject
matter, the Don Juan myth, the perfect sensuous form: music, as the art of
sound rather than language, is itself immediate and pre-reflective. Music
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sounds and ceases, it is momentary, expressing the play of erotic desire,
mixed with anxiety. Like Don Giovanni, music itself sounds and vanishes,
hastening on.
If As aesthetics appears at first abstract, the brilliance of the essay
emerges in its illumination of Don Giovanni both in theme and particulars.
The Overture captures Don Giovannis demonic zest for life coupled with
his anxiety.8 Don Giovannis Champagne Aria musically communicates the
bubbling, effervescent quality of this seducer.9 But A dwells longest on
Leporellos List Aria in which Don Giovannis servant, in mock-epic
fashion, narrates the Dons conquests to a shocked Donna Elvira.10 A notes
especially how the musics haste matches the haste of Don Giovannis seductions: the seductions in Spain are 1003, which, A points out, is an uneven
and accidental numberDon Giovanni is on the move!11
A is an aesthetic writer, not strictly speaking a theologian. Indeed, with
his questionable historical thesis about music as sensuous and Christianity
as spiritual, the distance between the aesthetic and the religious could not
be wider. What then does one make of As essay philosophically and
theologically?12
Even restricting our attention to this one essay, apart from Kierkegaards
wider works, one theme stands out: the opposition between music and language, between the sensuous and the spiritual. There are several issues
involved here that can be distinguished:
First, A does have a point: even without the dubious Hegelian historical
thesis that music only comes into itself with the advent of Christianity, many
want to say that much art, especially much music, is non-conceptual. Music
may only with qualifications be called a language; it does not embody
ideas (unless explicitly tied to a text). As claim that music is sensuous
means simply that it creates aural delight and pleasure. As Denis Donoghue
aptly sums up As point, Music exists in movement, force, succession,
and repetition of sounds. But repetition is not reflection; it is recovered
immediacy.13
Second, As analysis indicates another crucial point about Don Giovanni:
the operas main character is offensive to us, but just as the Don seduces
the women around him with his effervescent gaiety, so the music seduces
us as hearers.14 Indeed, the opera pits us against ourselves, bearing out the
very point that the sensuous is a realm, a kingdom, at war with reflection,
morality, spirit.
Third, in As terms, music is inadequate to the transcendent subject matter, the spiritual. This implies that music does not in itself have transcendent significance. As essay stands not only as an important testimony
to the secularization of art in modernity, but also, if I understand A correctly,
places him within a mainstream tradition of Western aesthetics. In this
tradition, art is not in itself a conduit of transcendent values; the core of
aesthetic experience is simply pleasure attendant on perceptual apprehension.15
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Fourth, remember that A is an aesthete and not religious; his judgments

about the spiritual and Christian may be deeply flawed. As dualism
between the sensuous and spiritual, flesh and spirit, certainly reflects As
own dualistic view of the sexes.16 But is A right that the sensual and the
spiritual are in such stark opposition?
With regard to this fourth point, it is helpful to consider that when Frank
Burch Brown seeks an example of music that combines the sensual and
spiritual, he chooses music by Mozart: the Et Incarnatus Est from the great
but unfinished Mass in C minor (Kchel 427). Scored for soprano, three wind
instruments, and strings, the music, Brown writes, is extraordinarily florid
and sensuous.17 (Mozart may have written this for his bride, Constanze.)
Browns observation suggests a way beyond As impasse between the
aesthetic and religious, between the musical and the spiritual.
Turning from As suggestive essay stressing Mozarts illumination of the
stark opposition of music and Christianity, we encounter now two other ways
of understanding the religious and Christian significance of Mozarts music.
Like A, Karl Barth and Hans Kng discuss the otherness of the spiritual,
calling it in more Christian terms the transcendence of God, but unlike A
they will also find in Mozarts music profound religious and specifically
Christian significance. In Karl Barth, we find a reading of Mozart that affirms
a classic Reformed understanding of the radical transcendence of God that
nonetheless allows music its part in glorifying God and celebrating the
goodness of creation. In Hans Kng, we will see a Roman Catholic reading
of Mozart as a musician who communicates more immediately traces of
Gods transcendence.
Karl Barth: Sounding Gods Glory: Mozarts Music as Parable of Human
Freedom and Creations Goodness
Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart18
The Reformed tradition is popularly considered so iconoclastic, so deeply
suspicious of religious abuses of visual art, in particular, that it is devoid of
aesthetics. The sources of this are many: God is radically transcendent; the
creature lacks the capacity for the infinite; finite realities, including art and
music and language, are therefore not vehicles of transcendenceexcept as
God graciously uses them. Moreover, the argument continues, God is lawgiver, and the appropriate response to God is obedience. Whereas other
Christian traditions value above all the contemplative vision of God, the
Calvinist values above all obedient action. Add to this, in some forms of
modern Calvinism, an intellectualism that values analytical reasoning
beyond everything, and the prospects for aesthetics seem doomed.19
This leads often to an erroneous conclusion that the Reformed tradition is
entirely insensitive to aesthetic matters. But as Nicholas Wolterstorff argues,
the artistic renunciation of the Calvinist church service was not typical of
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Calvinist life in general; moreover, where many see aesthetic insensitivity,
there is often aesthetic elegance, an aesthetics of simplicity, sobriety, and
measure, grounded in a sense of the right use of Gods gifts. The result was
not a denial of sensuous pleasure, but sensuous pleasure deployed with an
unusually frugal, and therefore exquisite, fastidiousness.20
Indeed, whereas visual image is often suspect, the Reformed aesthetic
tradition is strikingly aural, evident already in the Genevan Psalter. Indeed,
the transitory character of music makes it especially appropriate for worship, in a way visual images are not. Music exists in time; it sounds and
ceases, and does not tempt attention away from God.21
And this brings us to Karl Barth. It is not surprising that while Barth
was deeply opposed to visual images in churches, he found great religious
meaning in music, particularly, surprisingly for a theologian, the music of
Mozart.22 Barths love for Mozarts music is well known. Before beginning
work on his Church Dogmatics, he began each day listening to a Mozart
recording, followed by reading a newspaper. On his study wall hung a
portrait of Mozarton the same level, he pointed out to visitors, as the
portrait of Calvin. If I ever get to heaven, he said, I would first of all seek
out Mozart and only then inquire after Augustine, St. Thomas, Luther,
Calvin, and Schleiermacher.23 He and Rudolf Bultmann peppered their
correspondence with affectionate references to Mozart operas.24 He famously
included an excursus on Mozart in volume III of Church Dogmatics on the
doctrine of creation and the threat of nothingness.25 And during the
Mozart bicentenary in 1956, he appeared on several radio programs and
participated in Mozart commemorations.
Who is Barths Mozart? In contrast to As daemonic Mozart, Barths
Mozart sounds Gods glory26 by witnessing to Gods good creation and
providence, a confidence that embraces the shadow and the light. Barth
would gladly accept As sense of Mozarts playful exuberance; and he would
not object to As anti-transcendent account of music as sensual delight. But
Barth would hold a deep suspicion of As dualistic separation of the
sensuous and the spiritual. To be sure, Barths God is radically transcendent,
even in a sense more transcendent than As transcendence of the spiritual over the sensuous. But as John Updike notes, Barths insistence on Gods
Otherness seemed to free him to be exceptionally (for a theologian) appreciative and indulgent of this world, the world at hand.27
Barths desacralization of the world allows a cheerful desacralization of art,
by which I mean not that religious meanings are absent from art, but that art
(including music) does not have any inherent transcendent significance. As
with nature, so with art: if it is desacralized, it is eminently human.28
The humanity of Mozarts music is part of his appeal for Barth: Mozart
sings and sounds.29 Mozart is not Bach, with a religious message; he is
not Beethoven, the solitary genius striving for the infinite. Neither is he
As Eternal Rake, or the nineteenth-centurys daemonic Mozart.30 Indeed,
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in music as in theology, Barths tastes are decidedly anti-Romantic; in

contrast to the Romantic mania for self-expression, Mozart simply sings
and sounds.
Barths Mozart is therefore decidedly non-ideological. There is no
Mozartean metaphysics, no Mozartean political philosophy. Barth would
cheerfully dismiss not only those who want to see Mozart delivering a Christian message, but also those, like Angus Fletcher and Denis Donoghue,
who see Mozarts The Magic Flute to be in the service of enlightenment
over against the Christian.31
It is not that Barth fits Mozart into a Christian (certainly not Protestant!)
mold; he is happy to admit that Mozarts own churchly Catholic observance
was to all appearances somewhat casual. Mozarts music is not burdened
with dogma. Indeed, Barth recounts an actual dream he had: for some
inexplicable reason, and with the understanding that Mozart would under
no circumstances be allowed to fail, Barth dreams that he is examining
Mozart in theology. To Barths question what Dogmatics and Dogma
might mean, Mozart gives no answer at all, despite my most friendly
prompting and my hints about your masses, which I especially like!32
Barths dream actually goes to the heart of his Christian reading of
Mozart. Barth finds in Mozarts music, religious and secular alike, not
explicit Christian teaching, for Mozart does not preach or teach; Barth discovers rather in Mozarts music a parable of the kingdom of heaven.33
Parable is the key term here, for in this word Barth at once respects
Mozarts music as fully human, yet sees it as indirect reflection of the divine.
Barths desacralization of art certainly does not preclude Gods revelation in
the artistic; if God can speak to Hammurabi, God can speak to Mozart.34
Nonetheless, Barth prefers to speak of Mozarts music not as Gospel but as
parable.
That parable is twofold: first, Mozarts music is a parable of human freedom. For Barth the heart of the gospel is freedom: Gods freedom as the
source of true human freedom.35 Parabolically, then, Mozarts music is testimony to that creaturely freedom. Mozart does not say, he just sings and
sounds.36 He does not will to proclaim the praise of God; he just does it.37
And because Mozart plays, he is a free person; thus Barth could write, when
the angels go about their task of praising God, they play only Bach. I am
sure, however, that when they are together en famille, they play Mozart and
that then too our dear Lord listens with special pleasure.38
Second, Mozart is a parable of Christian faith in Gods good creation.
Mozarts center, Barth writes, is not like that of the great theologian
Schleiermachera matter of balance, neutrality, and, finally, indifference.
Rather, there is a glorious upsetting of the balance, a turning in which the
light rises and the shadows fall, though without disappearing, in which joy
overtakes sorrow without extinguishing it, in which the Yea rings louder
than the ever-present Nay.39
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Whether he is right on Schleiermacher or not, Barths description of the
turning from shadow to light is at the heart of his vision of Mozarts music.
Barths Mozart is anything but the prettified sunshine and salon Mozart of
legend; Barth hears and understands the pain in Mozarts music. This
awareness of tragedy in Mozarts music, yet the turn to the light, is starkly
evident in Barths Church Dogmatics, volume III, published in 1950, which
contains his famous excursus on Mozart. The theme is faith in God the
creator, the threat to that creation of nothingness, das Nichtige (with the
memories of Hitlerism all too recent). But in approaching this fearful topic
of nothingness, Barth strives to avoid the temptation to slander creation
by identifying creations shadows with that nothingness. There is a
shadow-side to creation, quite distinct from those horrors, but because
this is part of Gods good creation, the shadows do not overcome the light.
Mozart is invoked as one who understood the goodness of Gods creation in
its shadows and its lights: indeed, his music is, again, a parable of how that
darkness turns to light. Mozart
knew something about creation in its total goodness. 17561791! This
was the time when God was under attack for the Lisbon earthquake.
In face of the problem of theodicy, Mozart had the peace of God He
heard the harmony of creation to which the shadow also belongs but in
which the shadow is not darkness, deficiency is not defeat, sadness
cannot become despair, trouble cannot degenerate into tragedy and
infinite melancholy is not ultimately forced to claim undisputed sway.
Thus the cheerfulness in this harmony is not without its limits. But the
light shines all the more brightly because it breaks forth from the
shadow. The sweetness is also bitter and cannot therefore cloy. Life does
not fear death but knows it well He heard the negative only in and
with the positive Hearing creation unresentfully and impartially, he
did not produce merely his own music but that of creation, its twofold
and yet harmonious praise of God.40
Barth heard this turn, this confidence that embraces both the shadow and
the light, in much of Mozarts music, not only the sacred music, but such
works as the last (Jupiter) symphony, the serenades, and the operas.
Barth was especially fond of The Magic Flute. To Barths mind, as we have
seen, its Masonry was anything but an enlightenment rejection of Christianity. The opera rather confirmed his theological reading of Mozart. How
important this opera was to him is evident from his little essays on Mozart.
Recalling his childhood, he writes:
My very first hearing of great musicI must have been about five or
six years oldwas of Mozart. I can still recall: my father struck a few
measures of The Magic Flute on the piano (Tamino mine, oh what
happiness). They thrilled me through and through.41
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And in making his point about Mozarts turn from darkness to light, Barth
quotes Sarastros closing benediction to the same opera: The suns rays
drive out the night.42 Tellingly, Pamina and Tamino steel themselves for
their ordeal of fire and water with the words: By the power of music we walk
cheerfully through the dark night of death!43
Is Barth right about Mozarts turn, the realism that confronts tragedy
but is never defeated by it? It is exactly here that Mozart scholars disagree,
some sharing Barths realistic-but-optimistic appraisal of Mozarts center,
others seeing a more pessimistic Mozart. Certainly the secular critic
Wolfgang Hildesheimerwho influenced Peter Shaffers play Amadeus
finds Barths view merely touching. Noting Barths remark that when the
angels are together en famille, they play Mozart and that then too our dear
Lord listens with special pleasure, Hildesheimer comments, I see God like
Rembrandts Saul enjoying the music of Davids harp, lost in the thought
that one ought perhaps to have done something for this divine musician
during his earthly life.44 Yet even Hildesheimer can say, Mozart is an
utterly unique phenomenon, indisputably and forever on the credit side of
lifes ledger, so sovereign and omnipresent that he reconciles us somewhat
to the debit side.45
Perhaps more on the debit side, consider Maynard Solomons superb
biography of Mozart. Ending with a chapter entitled The Power of Music,
from Pamina and Taminos duet, Solomon reflects on how, especially, in the
late operas like The Magic Flute,
Mozarts universe is itself uncertain, a maze of doorways to the unknown and the unexpected. Everywhere there are dislocations, fissures,
tears, and weak spots; cynicism and disillusionment now permeate his
resolutions, corrupt his happy endings [For Mozart,] the beneficence
of the Creation was not self-evident, or, at least, it was necessary to
reconcile it with the stations of the Cross. Tranquillity must be earned,
not ratified or colluded in. Evil persists even after music has had its say.46
Does, perhaps, a theological assessment of Mozart need to take more seriously
those dislocations than did Barth? Do the secular critics Hildesheimer and
Solomon perhaps see something that Barthfor all of his acknowledgment
of the shadows in Mozart and despite his own theological concentration
on the Crosshas not quite caught in Mozarts music?
Be that as it may, there is something else deeply satisfying in Barths
Reformed reflections on Mozart. Barth hears in him (as he hears also in
Calvin and the Heidelberg Catechism) that the heart of Christian existence lies
not in worldly asceticism or even obedient service, but in gratitude, including
taking human delight in Gods good creation.47
Beyond the scope of this paper, but directly related, I am left with other
questions: does Barths deep appreciation for gratitude open the way to
a Reformed aesthetic? For example, a largely unexplored question is why
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Karl Barth, like Jonathan Edwards, sees in Gods beauty the supreme divine
perfection. Is it because God is to be gratefully adored simply for Who God is?
If so, then should not aesthetic delight be at the heart of Christian life and
worship?48 And is this perhaps something too that Barth hears in Mozart?
Hans Kng: Mozart and Traces of Transcendence
Hans Kng, Mozart: Traces of Transcendence 49
In many ways Kng agrees with Barths appreciation of Mozart, just as he is
often sympathetic to Barths theology. It is Kng who in his dissertation
compared the Tridentine doctrine of justification with Barths, discovering,
somewhat to Barths surprise, no essential difference between them. With
regard to Mozart, Kng like Barth does not wish to impose theological readings on this music, and he agrees too on the importance of the Mozartean
turn that embraces shadow and light.50
But Kng comes at Mozart a bit differently, for Kng is, of course, (if no
longer officially) a Catholic theologian. For Kng, the key phrase is traces
of transcendence. Referring to Barths dream about Mozart, Kng adds that
what Barth misses is Mozarts Catholic religious experience, an experience of
mystery often absent in Protestantism.51
I think that this clue to the difference between Barth and Kng can be
accurately summed up in another observation made by Frank Burch Brown.
He helpfully distinguishes between two different ways a Christian aesthetics
can understand transcendence: radical and proximate transcendence.
Brown writes:
Just as we can say that the theology and experience of the Reformed
tradition tends to place special emphasis upon a sense of Gods radical
transcendence, so can we also say that the pervasive sacramentalism of
Catholicism, including that of the Eastern Orthodox and Anglo-Catholic
traditions, fosters an especially keen sense of what we will call proximate or near transcendence.52
From Augustine to Aquinas to Rahner, and particularly for neo-Platonic
strains of Catholicism, he continues, all light and all beauty in nature as
well as in art share in some way (sometimes said to be literal, sometimes
analogical) in the light and beauty of God. They point beyond themselves, Brown concludes, to the Invisible Light and Beauty that can be seen
directly only in the spiritual Beatific Vision.53
Kngs phrase traces of transcendence matches well, I suggest, Browns
category of proximate transcendence. Kng writes:
Mozarts musicthough it is not heavenly music but completely earthly
musicseems to show in its sensual yet unsensual beauty, power and
clarity, how wafer-thin is the boundary between music, which is the
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most abstract of all arts, and religion, which has always had a special
connection with music. For both, though they are different, direct us to
what is ultimately unspeakable, to mystery.54
Like Kierkegaards A and Barth, Kng appreciates the sensual in Mozarts
music. But in contrast to their restrictions on transcendent aesthetic meaning, Kngs vocabulary of proximate transcendence, while acknowledging
the inadequacy of music to encapsulate the spiritual, goes beyond them both
to find in aesthetic experience not only delight but the communication of
religious mystery.
Kng gives several examples of the mystery, these traces of transcendence, that shine through Mozarts music. Of the 1791 Clarinet Concerto
(Kchel 622), Kng recounts autobiographically that
this last orchestral work of Mozarts completed precisely two months
before his death, of unsurpassable beauty, intensity and inwardness,
completely without any traces of gloom or resignation, delighted,
strengthened, consoled, and in short brought a touch of bliss to a
doctoral student in theology almost every day.55
Writing about the second movement adagio of this famous concerto
familiar even to many non-musicians from the 1985 Sydney Pollack film
Out of AfricaKng praises the sound that embraces us without using
any words, as something wholly other: the sound of the beautiful in its
infinity, indeed the sound of an infinite which transcends us and for which
beauty is no description. So here are cyphers, traces of transcendence.56
The aesthetic vocabularies of Kng and Barth differ primarily because
their theological, as well as aesthetic, traditions differ. Barths Reformed
aesthetic cheerfully accepts a secularized account of music, while theologically granting that music may become by Gods grace a human parable
of the Gospel. By contrast, as we have just seen, Kngs sacramentalism,
echoing themes in both natural theology and in apophatic traditions, considers the boundary between music and religion to be wafer-thin, for
music is analogous to religion in how they both point to unspeakable
mystery, communicating inexpressibly these cyphers, traces of transcendence. Kng thus opens the way to a much more expansive regard for music
as a vehicle of inherent religious and transcendent significance.57
Barth and Kng are thus in one sense far apart in their theological aesthetics, representing very different visions and styles of Christian existence
and experience, differences so great that one cannot simply incorporate the
one into the other without violence. Nonetheless, despite these differences,
the Reformed Barth and the Catholic Kng themselves open up the possibility
of ecumenical aesthetic convergence.
An anecdote from Mozarts life, mentioned by both Barth and Kng, points
to the possibility of such ecumenical convergence. Kng writes: When in
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the home of the cantor of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig [the Lutheran Bachs
home!], Mozart said that he thought that Protestants could not begin to
understand what Catholics felt when they said the Agnus Dei, and what
the Agnus Dei meant to him.58
Yet Barth too knows Mozarts comment on Protestants. In his letter
addressed to Mozart in heaven, after Barth apologizes to Mozart for his
Protestantism, he chides the composer for this remark about Protestants:
Pardon meyou probably know better now.59
But that is not the end of the story. Kng recounts how
Barth once told me with great satisfaction in Basel that he had wanted
Mozarts Coronation Mass to be performed at the World Council of
Churches Assembly at Evanston. Barth, whose attitude became
increasingly ecumenical as time went on, had surely noted that the
Coronation Mass ends with an incomparable setting of the Agnus Dei
with its Dona nobis pacem.60
The last half of Kngs little book is an extended theological reflection on
the Coronation Mass (Kchel 317) that Barth admired so much. Turning to
the concluding Agnus Dei, Kng notes especially how the Miserere begins
with a soprano solo, joined later by contralto, tenor and bass, leading finally
into the choral tutti of the finale. The petition for mercy is presented first of
all by an individual, but then is joined by the choir. Rhythm and tempo
quicken at the conclusion, culminating in the great petition of the peoples,
Dona nobis pacem, which resounds in a confident corporate expression of
praise and thanksgiving.61
Kng recalls again Barths desire that this Mass be performed in Evanston:
despite their theological and aesthetic differences, Kng suggests, might
there not be some ecumenical convergence, and even communions peace,
occasioned by Mozarts Agnus Dei?
NOTES
1

3
4
5
6
7
8

I encountered Jaroslav Pelikans Bach Among the Theologians (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress
Press, 1986) only after choosing the title for this paper. Pelikans book similarly considers
the problems involved in a theological assessment of music, especially the tension between
the sacred and secular Bach.
I use the scare quotes because Kierkegaard speaks not in his own voice but in that of his
pseudonym A, the aesthete, who would be greatly amused to be called a theologian.
Nonetheless, A is a theologian, reflecting as he does on Mozarts genius in relation to
Christianity.
Sren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, Part I, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 45135.
Ibid., pp. 5975. There is, A grants, Christian music, but always under the restraint of the
demands of liturgy and worship.
Ibid., p. 86.
Ibid., p. 101.
Ibid., p. 98.
Ibid., p. 129.

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9
10
11
12

13

14

15

16

17

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David J. Gouwens
Ibid., pp. 133134.
Don Giovanni, Act I, Scene 5, No. 4 Aria.
Kierkegaard, pp. 131133; p. 93.
Of course, As essay stands within Kierkegaards entire authorship, and I would argue that
we must see it within that wider context. So viewed, the aesthetic philosophy of life is
critiqued by Kierkegaards other pseudonyms who represent ethical, religious, and even
Christian stages of existence. But it is crucial to see that while the aesthetic sphere is
dethroned it is never eliminated; even more, I would claim, the aesthetic is in important
senses redeemed. On Kierkegaards redemption of the aesthetic, see David J. Gouwens,
Kierkegaards Dialectic of the Imagination (New York, NY: Peter Lang, 1989) and Sylvia Walsh,
Living Poetically: Kierkegaards Existential Aesthetics (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1994).
Denis Donoghue, Approaching Mozart, in James M. Morris (ed), On Mozart (Cambridge;
New York; Melbourne: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Cambridge University Press, 1994),
p. 16. At the same time, As essay suggests that despite this inadequacy of music to spirit,
and despite this opposition of the sensuous and the spiritual, art does convey an elusive
presence; we have the sense that a work of art as a sensuous medium (for music, it is sound)
carries with it something more. A does not want to call that something more spiritual,
but he would grant that the idea of sensuousness is conveyed in the opera without
canceling that musical form.
Diogenes Allen has commented on this in The Character of Mozarts Don Giovanni ,
Theology Today 45, no. 3 (October 1988), pp. 317325: Don Giovannis behavior is
despicable. Yet, we enjoy and love the opera, and, in spite of the awful things Don
Giovanni does, we find him attractive, because the music conveys to us the marvelousness
of sensuous delight (p. 320). But Allen misinterprets the Don as being a lustful person.
A is right: Don Giovanni is not a person but a principle.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, Until Justice and Peace Embrace (Grand Rapids, MI: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1983), pp. 129130, contrasts this mainstream tradition
both to the Clive Bell/Mikel Dufrenne theory of aesthetic transcendence and to Byzantine
aesthetics. As we will see, Karl Barth and Hans Kng indirectly take up this question of
musics being a natural vehicle of the transcendent, and disagree on the answer.
A acknowledges but never struggles with the cruelty toward Donna Elvira in Leporellos
List Aria (see Kierkegaard, p. 132). On the objectification of women in As pathological
heterosexuality, see Wanda Warren Berry, The Heterosexual Imagination and Aesthetic
Existence in Kierkegaards Either/Or, Part I, in Cline Lon and Sylvia Walsh (eds),
Feminist Interpretations of Sren Kierkegaard (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1997), pp. 2549. Berry, in my view rightly, sharply distinguishes between
As attitude toward the sexes and Kierkegaards own.
Frank Burch Brown, Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 167. He continues: It would not occur
to a theologian to imagine the Incarnation in quite the mode one imagines here. And no one
would want to claim that here one finds the meaning of the Incarnation. Yet this beauty is
not that of sheer carnality; its sensuality is transfigured. The peculiar tension between the
doctrine of Word made flesh and the experience of musical ravishment creates a religious
as well as aesthetic wondera Christian classic that courts heterodoxy only thereby to
enrich the tradition itself.
Brown thus erodes As dualism in the interests of outlining a spiritual sensuality. From
another angle, one may also erode that dualism by questioning As identification of music
as immediate sensuousness over against the spiritual (including language, ethics, religion).
For example, Francis Watson rightly criticizes As depiction of music as totally abstracted
from language and spirit. In operas, the music assists the language in portraying
dramatic action and character. Hence, music is not the immediate expression of eros or
sensuousness, understood as a total life-orientation or principle posited by Christian faith
in the act of excluding it. Therefore, there is no basis for the assumption that musics
natural habitat is the aesthetic life over against the religious. Francis Watson, Theology
and Music, Scottish Journal of Theology 51, no. 4 (1998), pp. 447448.
Karl Barth, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, foreword by John Updike, trans. Clarence K. Pott
(Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1986).

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Ibid., pp. 133134, citing Donald Davie, A Gathered Church: The Literature of the English
Dissenting Interest, 17001930 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 2526.
See Brown, p. 121, on the transitory character of music, akin to how early Anglican poetry
is, borrowing a phrase from Stanley Fish, a self-consuming artifact.
On Barths opposition to stained glass windows in Basels cathedral, I am indebted to
conversation with Professor Arnold Come of San Francisco Theological Seminary.
Barth, p. 16.
See Bernd Jaspert (ed), Karl Barth/Rudolf Bultmann: Letters 19221966, trans. and ed.
Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,
1981), p. 87 and p. 102 (Bultmanns letter of 1115 November 1952), p. 105 and p. 108
(Barths letter of 24 December 1952). I am indebted to Professor Jack Forstman of
Vanderbilt Divinity School for reminding me of these letters.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/3 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1960), 50, God and
Nothingness, pp. 297299.
This is the title Clifford Green aptly gives to his selection from Barths writings on Mozart
in his fine anthology, Karl Barth: Theologian of Freedom (London: Collins, 1989), pp. 322325.
Barth, Mozart, p. 7. Updikes comment is entirely apt, and illuminates Barths understanding of Gods radical Otherness. The radical transcendence of God in Barth (and in
the Reformed tradition generally) need not mean denigrating the created world. Because
God is radically transcendent, God is free to be with and for creation. Barth sees Gods
radical transcendence as qualitatively unique; unlike As relative transcendence of spirit
to the sensuous, Gods radical transcendence does not dualistically limit God to the
spiritual realm. This has important implications for Barths doctrine of creation: creation
possesses its own finite reality distinct from Gods reality. Creation is therefore neither
divine nor an illusory appearance hiding reality, but is secularized or better desacralized.
Nonetheless, creation in its desacralized finitude is affirmed as good.
See Robert J. Palma, Karl Barths Theology of Culture: The Freedom of Culture for the Praise of
God. Pittsburgh Theological Monographs: New Series. General ed. Dikran Y. Hadidian
(Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1983).
Barth, p. 37.
Ibid., p. 52.
In Donoghues words, in The Magic Flute as in Masonry, the God of Christianity is
dispersed into Isis and Osiris, and the power of these gods is taken into human hands, the
rhetoric of the Enlightenment silencing the claim of Christian theology. See Donoghue,
p. 26, who cites also Angus Fletcher, Colors of the Mind: Conjectures on Thinking in Literature
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Barth acknowledges Mozarts Masonry,
but thinks The Magic Flute is anything but ideological, much less anti-Christian.
Barth, p. 20.
Ibid., p. 57.
Palma, p. 47.
Clifford Greens Barth anthology rightly places the center of gravity of Barths entire
theology on human freedom and divine freedom.
Barth, p. 37.
Ibid., pp. 3738.
Ibid., p. 23.
Ibid., p. 55.
Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/3, p. 298.
Barth, Mozart, p. 15.
Ibid., p. 55.
The Magic Flute, Act 2, Scene 28: Wir wandeln durch des Tones Macht, Froh durch des
Todes dstre Nacht! Ingmar Bergmans 1975 film of The Magic Flute captures this
wonderfully, as Pamina and Tamino cautiously sing through the writhing human forms
expressing deaths dark night.
Hans Kng, Mozart: Traces of Transcendence, foreword by Yehudi Menuhin, trans. John
Bowden (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1993), p. 11, citing
Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Mozart (London: Dent, 1983), p. 15, and personal conversation
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Quoted in Colin Gunton, Mozart the Theologian [BBC broadcast talk, March 29, 1991],
Theology 94 (1991), p. 348. Gunton thus can minimize the conflict between Hildesheimer
and Barth by commenting as follows on Hildesheimers remark: Turn that into a major
key, and you have Barths point precisely. Whereas the modern sceptic [Hildesheimer]
allows Mozart to tip the balance a little way against pessimism, Barth hears a more
definitely affirmative note.
Maynard Solomon, Mozart: A Life (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1995), ch. 32, The Power
of Music, p. 509.
I am indebted to Nicholas Wolterstorff, p. 132, on this point concerning Calvin and early
Calvinism. Wolterstorff questions Max Webers well-known interpretation of early
Calvinism as worldly asceticism.
As George Stroup has written: It is telling, I think, that there is precious little in
contemporary theology about the beauty of God, a theme about which Jonathan Edwards
and many other pre-modern theologians had a great deal to say, and precious little about
adoration as the appropriate human response to God. Perhaps that is one reason why
so few Presbyterian worship services today begin with a prayer of adoration. To
which one could add: the indictment is not limited to Presbyterian worship services!
George W. Stroup, A Lovers Quarrel: Theology and the Church, in The Seminary:
A School of the Church: Speeches from the Presidential Inauguration, November 14, 1997 [The
Inauguration of Robert McElroy Shelton, The Eighth President of Austin Presbyterian
Theological Seminary], p. 13.
Hans Kng, Mozart: Traces of Transcendence, foreword by Yehudi Menuhin, trans. John
Bowden (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1993).
Kng, pp. 1920.
Kng, p. 10; cf. Barth, p. 20.
Brown, p. 123. Interestingly, Brown sees Evangelical and Black Free Church and
Pentecostal traditions as other examples of proximate transcendence; he cites in
particular (p. 126) James Cones The Spirituals and the Blues (New York, NY: Seabury Press,
1972). The two other forms of transcendence Brown discusses are negative transcendence
(as in the via negativa and apophatic traditions) and immanent transcendence (Western
Romanticism).
Ibid., p. 126.
Kng, p. 33.
Kng, p. 27.
Kng, p. 34.
In his recent essay, Francis Watson, influenced by Barths model of music as parable, is thus
sharply critical of what he considers Kngs unrestrained claims about the unlimited
significance of music. Watson, p. 462n36. Watsons criticism does have a point, especially
when Kng speaks of music as that in which we live and move and have our being. Yet
Watson, it seems to me, goes too far when he suggests that for Kng music provides
transcendence that has no need for Jesus and the Christian gospel. This ignores both
Kngs concern for Mozarts distinctively Roman Catholic religious experience, and
Kngs interest in Mozarts sacred music, in particular the Coronation Mass, treated at
length in the last half of Kngs little book.
Kng, p. 68, cf. p. 10.
Barth, p. 20.
Kng, p. 17, cf. p. 69.
Ibid., p. 68.

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