Recitative. Formerly recitative was dry, but now we live in the age of moist recitative. It has fallen into the water, and the waves carry it whithersoever they list. Nietzsche
The Moist Recitative
“Formerly recitative was dry, but now we live in the age of moist recitative. It has fallen into the water, and the waves carry it whithersoever they list.” (Nietzsche)
It is an image that cuts deep, even though it comes from a mouth foreign to the Church. Dry recitative was the word spoken with firmness, with its own measure, with a contour that let nothing from outside carry it away. Moist recitative is the word that has lost this contour — it has softened, sunk under water, and from then on no longer goes where it wills, but where the waves take it.
It is not hard to recognize in this the sickness of our age. We live in a century of moist speech: the word no longer has weight of its own, but lets itself be carried by the current of the day — by whichever opinion shouts loudest today, by the feeling that demands validation, by the crowd that applauds. Truth is no longer spoken because it is true, but because it is well received. And, sadly, this sickness has not stayed at the church door — it has entered the pulpit, the confessional, and each of our own lives, every time we say what is expected of us rather than what is.
The Lord spoke of this same danger, though with a different image — also of water: “Whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built his house upon a rock: and the rain descended, and the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand…” (Matthew 7:24-27).
Here is the difference: not whether the waters come — they come upon all, righteous and unrighteous alike — but on what the word was founded before the waters came. Nietzsche’s dry recitative was nothing other than the word built on rock: spoken from a foundation that does not shake, however many waves may come against it. The moist recitative is the house of sand: it never had a foundation of its own, so at the first wave it is swept away.
The Holy Fathers gave this same thing another name: steadfastness, or, in ascetic language, the mind’s freedom from wandering. Whoever has no center within — Christ, the Word who is the first and the last, the foundation that does not shake — inevitably ends up carried by every thought, every passion, every louder voice of the world.
That is why Scripture speaks of the Word of God, in contrast to all human words that flow away like water: “The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever” (Isaiah 40:8).
The question this foreign philosopher leaves us, without meaning to, is therefore very much our own: does our word — the one we speak every day — still have a foundation of its own, or has it long since fallen into the water, carried wherever the waves list?
