Jeremy Begbie on music and materiality

Alternative Title: “Jeremy Begbie takes on P.T. Forsyth (and the Christian West)”

In his recent essay in Books & Culture, Jeremy Begbie discusses the physicality of music, its “embeddedness in material reality.” Begbie begins with a theological point about creation—viz. that material reality is itself good. The physical creation comes from the ordo amoris, the creative love of God. “God,” he writes, “has pledged himself to the world in its physicality—a pledge confirmed in the coming of Jesus, the Word made material flesh.”

Following this theological point, Begbie goes on to discuss Christianity’s traditional discomfort with the physical and material. He notes two important tendencies: (1) “a proneness to doubt the full goodness, and with it sometimes the full reality, of the physical,” and (2) a corresponding desire to elevate music insofar as it is the least material of all the arts. Music became close to the Christian tradition for its lack of materiality. Throughout the centuries, music has been seen as the most “spiritual” of the arts—“spiritual” used in opposition to the “physical.” Begbie traces this view back to the ancient Greeks and the neo-Platonism that shaped a lot of early Christian literature.

When he arrives in the modern period, Begbie spends a good deal of time looking at the views of the famous modernist painter, Wassily Kandinsky, who was a major defender of a highly spiritualized conception of art. Begbie notes that what drives the modern resistance to physicality is not Platonism but rather the focus “on the inner life of the individual, especially the emotional life.” The rampant individualism and psychologism of modernity is what propels the modern aversion to materiality in art.

Along the way, Begbie discusses the work of P. T. Forsyth*, whom he locates within this trajectory of thinkers who view music as an intangible and non-physical art form. Begbie writes:

Interestingly, a not dissimilar view [from Kandinsky] emerges from one of the few Christian theologians of modern times to write about music (apart from those we have looked at already), the Congregationalist theologian P. T. Forsyth (1848-1921). Forsyth's basic belief is that music is concerned essentially with releasing us from the bonds and limits of the finite and material order. Music is the least material of the arts (with the sole exception of poetry). Forsyth is struck by its impermanence and insubstantiality (it does not end up as a concrete object), its inwardness (it primarily arises from and is directed toward our emotional life), and its indefiniteness (it cannot refer with any precision to things beyond itself).

Begbie’s point is made clear mid-way through the essay: “A biblically informed Christian response refuses to apologize for music's embeddedness in material reality and actually may want to recover a fuller sense of it.”

What do you think?
Is music substantially different from the other art forms? Or are they equally embedded in the material world?
What makes music so central to the Christian faith?
How might Christianity recover a more “biblically informed” view of music?
What might change if churches sought to adopt a more materially focused conception of music?
What is the proper place for the “spiritual” in art?
How ought we to understand the notion of the “spiritual”?
How do we define the “spiritual” and the “material”? How do we relate them to each other?
What is the proper role of art in churches?

*For more on P. T. Forsyth’s views on art and theology, see this article by Jason Goroncy in the Princeton Theological Review.