The religious source of the newer music. — Soulful music arose out of the Catholicism re-established after the Council of Trent, through Palestrina, who endowed the newly-awakened, earnest, and deeply moved spirit with sound; later on, in Bach, it appeared also in Protestantism, as far as this had been deepened by the Pietists and released from its originally dogmatic character. The supposition and necessary preparation for both origins is the familiarity with music, which existed during and before the Renaissance, namely that learned occupation with music, which was really scientific pleasure in the masterpieces of harmony and voice-training. On the other hand, the opera must have preceded it, wherein the layman made his protest against a music that had grown too learned and cold, and endeavoured to re-endow Polyhymnia with a soul. Without the change to that deeply religious sentiment, without the dying away of the inwardly moved temperament, music would have remained learned or operatic; the spirit of the counter-reformation is the spirit of modern music (for that pietism in Bach’s music is also a kind of counter-reformation). So deeply are we indebted to the religious life. Music was the counter-reformation in the field of art; to this belongs also the later painting of the Caracci and Caravaggi, perhaps also the baroque style, in any case more than the architecture of the Renaissance or of antiquity. And we might still ask: if our newer music could move stones, would it build them up into antique architecture? I very much doubt it. For that which predominates in this music, affections, pleasure in exalted, highly-strained sentiments, the desire to be alive at any cost, the quick change of feeling, the strong relief-effects of light and shade, the combination of the ecstatic and the naive — all this has already reigned in the plastic arts and created new laws of style — but it was neither in the time of antiquity nor of the Renaissance. — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, “The Religious Source of the Newer Music”
The Steps of the Aphorism
The aphorism climbs three steps. First, learned music, a “scientific pleasure” in harmony and voice-training: cold, because it has number but no soul. Then the opera, the layman’s protest, which wants to give Polyhymnia a soul again and looks for it in the theatre. Finally the “soulful” music of Palestrina and Bach, born of deeply religious sentiment, of the inwardly moved temperament; whence the conclusion that the spirit of the counter-reformation is the spirit of modern music and that we are indebted to the religious life. The last question, whether this music, if it could move stones, would set them into antique architecture, receives a negative answer: affections, strain, thirst for life, the quick change of feeling, chiaroscuro, the union of ecstasy and naivety belong neither to antiquity nor to the Renaissance, but to the baroque.
Two truths are to be acknowledged in the aphorism, and one foundational error corrected. The first truth: song cannot be separated from the religious life. The second: scholastic coldness and theatricality are two diseases of song, and the Church knew both; the Council in Trullo (canon 75) asks that those who chant neither force nature to shouting nor introduce anything unfitting and foreign into the Church, but offer psalmody with great attention and compunction. The error: causality is reversed. The source of song is not the feeling of the devout man; feeling is, at best, its echo. And the word “soulful,” which Nietzsche uses as praise, carries in Scripture a weight its author did not suspect: “the natural man,” the psychikos anthropos, does not receive the things of the Spirit of God (1 Cor. 2:14). “Soulful” music remains, in the Apostle’s language, under a reservation: the question is not whether it moves the soul, but whether the moved soul has passed from psyche to pneuma.
The Source Before Man
If music were born of the religious feeling of the moved man, it would be younger than man. Scripture shows it older than the visible world: when the stars were made, the angels of the Lord praised Him with a loud voice (Job 38:7, Septuagint); before the throne, the six-winged creatures cry without ceasing “Holy, Holy, Holy” (Isa. 6:3; Rev. 4:8). Song is therefore the very structure of creation turned toward its Maker, doxology rather than expression; man does not invent it but is received into it, as he is received into light. What Nietzsche calls “religious life” is only the way a fallen creature hears again what had never ceased to sound.
The mystery of the Incarnation gives this doxology a human body and voice: “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14), and the Church’s service is “reasonable worship” (Rom. 12:1), logikē latreia, in which melody is not parted from word but carries it. That is why the Apostle asks neither song without mind nor mind without song: “I will sing with the spirit, and I will sing with the mind also” (1 Cor. 14:15). St. Basil the Great teaches that the Holy Spirit, seeing how hard it is for men to incline to virtue, mixed the sweetness of melody with doctrine, so that through the delight of the ear we receive the benefit of the words unawares, as physicians put honey on the rim of the bitter cup (Homily on Psalm 1). And St. Athanasius the Great writes to Marcellinus that the Psalms are sung not for the pleasure of sound but as a sign of the harmony of thoughts in the soul. Melody is thus the instrument of the mind’s union with the word, not of self-delight.
Here falls the aphorism’s first perplexity. The Church’s song never needed to be “released from its dogmatic character” in order to become soulful, because her hymnography is dogmatic by its very nature. The Octoechos carries in every tone a Dogmatikon, a hymn to the Theotokos that teaches the doctrine of the Incarnation in melody, and “Only-begotten Son and Word of God” is a sung Christology that declares in a few lines the two natures in one Person. The law of prayer is the law of faith (lex orandi, lex credendi). Pietism, in which Nietzsche sees Bach’s music loosened from dogma, is precisely the severing of feeling from the truth that calls it forth; and feeling cut from truth either ignites or withers, but has nothing left to feed on.
Moreover, the musical “counter-reformation” that the aphorism ties to the sixteenth century had been accomplished in the Church as early as the fourth. Arius had spread his teaching in songs, and St. John Chrysostom raised night processions with Orthodox hymns in Constantinople (Socrates Scholasticus, Sozomen); St. Ephrem the Syrian set his hymns against the songs of Bardaisan. This was not reaction: it was the same doxology defending its word. The spirit of the counter-reformation is the spirit of protest; the Church does not sing in protest, but answers a song older than herself.
Soulful and Spiritual: A Diagnosis of the Affections
The six features Nietzsche counts in the newer music are, in the language of the Fathers, almost a clinical description of the natural man: of the soul that has received life from God but lives it at the level of passion. They must be read one by one.
Affections and pleasure in strained sentiments. St. Maximus the Confessor calls self-love (philautia) the mother of the passions and sees its root in pleasure and pain, hedonē and odynē. Delight in one’s own inward exaltation is self-love rejoicing in itself through holy forms: what ascetic writing calls “sweetness” or tenderness of the blood, as distinct from humility from the Spirit (the teaching of St. Ignatius Brianchaninov on the deception that feeds on prayer). St. John of the Ladder, speaking of joy-making mourning (Step 7), measures a tear not by its force but by its fruit: if it leaves the soul more humble, it is from the Spirit; if more exalted, it is from the self. Intensity is not the criterion; fruit is (Matt. 7:16; Gal. 5:22).
The desire to be alive at any cost. The Epistle to the Hebrews names this passion: those who “through fear of death were subject to bondage all their lives” (Heb. 2:15). The baroque thirst for life is the form fear of death takes in art; it is not fullness but flight. Orthodoxy does not answer by intensifying life but by conquering death: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death.” Where death is trampled, “any cost” loses its meaning.
The quick change of feeling. Scripture knows it as instability: “a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways” (James 1:8), like a wave of the sea driven by the wind (James 1:6). Yet the Fathers ask not for insensibility but for steadfastness: dispassion (apatheia), which, according to Evagrius and Maximus, gives birth to love rather than killing it. An acoustic icon of this state is, in psaltic practice, the ison: the sustained note beneath the melody, which stays in place while the melody moves. The heart does not cease to sing; it ceases only to be ruled by weather.
The relief-effects of light and shade. Baroque chiaroscuro dramatizes the struggle between light and darkness as a spectacle of the soul, and its light always comes from a single source outside the painted body. The icon knows no cast shadow: its light does not fall upon the face but shines from within it, as at the Transfiguration, when “His face shone like the sun” (Matt. 17:2). The baroque depicts the struggle; the icon, the outcome: the body that the unwaning light has taken whole.
The combination of the ecstatic and the naive. The Fathers know both words, but turned the other way round. Ecstasy (ekstasis), according to Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus, is the going-out of oneself toward the Beloved (divine eros itself is ecstatic), not the reflection of exaltation back upon the self. And to naivety corresponds evangelical simplicity: “be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16), “unless you turn and become like children…” (Matt. 18:3). The baroque mixture is the counterfeit of the two: an ecstasy that returns to itself and a naivety that does not know, whereas the Gospel gives an ecstasy that gives itself and a simplicity that knows but does not keep evil.
The Psychological Lens: The Mechanism and Its Limit
Modern research gives affective music a mechanical explanation. Leonard Meyer (1956) showed that musical emotion arises from the building, delaying and fulfilling of expectations; David Huron developed the theory. Blood and Zatorre (2001) found that musical “chills” activate the same reward circuits as food and sex, and Salimpoor and colleagues (2011) measured dopamine release, anticipatory in the caudate and peaking in the nucleus accumbens. Juslin and Västfjäll listed several mechanisms (emotional contagion, evaluative conditioning, episodic memory) by which music evokes affect without the listener knowing why.
The result cuts two ways. Against the aphorism’s historical thesis: strain, relief, tension and resolution can be produced by musical structure itself, without any “change to religious sentiment”; intensity does not prove the source. Against naive piety: the shiver in the cathedral may be the reward system’s response and not repentance. Hence discernment of spirits remains indispensable: psychology describes how affect is produced, but cannot say what it does to the man.
About “the desire to be alive at any cost,” psychology has two names for the same thing. Ernest Becker and terror management theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, Solomon) show how awareness of death turns into agitation of meaning, ambition, frenetic vitality; the school of Melanie Klein and Winnicott speaks of the manic defence, the liveliness that flees the pain of loss. The patristic treatment is the opposite: not more vitality but the remembrance of death (Ladder, Step 6), which, once fear has left it, turns into joy. Finally, affect pursued as a goal becomes, in Winnicott’s terms, a reaction that takes the place of living: the opera, as the layman’s protest that wants to give Polyhymnia a soul, tries to buy the soul with affect, and obtains a borrowed one.
The Philosophical Lens: From Order to Affect
Antiquity thought music as number: Pythagoras and Plato’s Timaeus place harmonic ratios at the foundation of the World-Soul; in the Republic (III), the musical modes form character; Aristotle (Politics VIII) sees in music an imitation of states of the soul and a way of purification. Ancient music is cosmological and ethical: the soul is tuned to the order. The newer music, with Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation, I, §52) as its philosopher, becomes the immediate copy of the Will itself: affect raised to metaphysics. The passage from ordo to affectus is exactly the one the aphorism names: the affections “reign.”
The patristic answer is of another kind. In St. Maximus’s thought every creature bears a logos, a note of the one Word; man is the priest of creation, who gathers them and offers them back to the Maker. Music, in this horizon, is not expression but participation (methexis): it does not draw its song out of itself but receives it and brings it.
The question about stones is, at bottom, Amphion’s question: the myth says his lyre raised the walls of Thebes. Scripture answers otherwise. Joshua’s trumpets do not build but bring down the walls of Jericho (Joshua 6). When the disciples are silent, the stones cry out (Luke 19:40). But the Church is not built of stones moved by sound; she is built of “living stones” (1 Pet. 2:5), and the heaviest stone, the heart, is not moved by melody but by God’s promise: “I will take the heart of stone out of your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek. 36:26).
There remains the answer to Nietzsche’s doubt about antique architecture. The church of Hagia Sophia was raised by two geometers, Anthemius and Isidore, and recent work in historical acoustics (Bissera Pentcheva) suggests that its space and its sound were conceived together: Byzantine chant was shaped by the resonance of this space rather than shaping it. There, the antique measure of proportion and doxology do not exclude each other but embrace. Music born of doxology can dwell in measured architecture; Nietzsche’s incompatibility concerns the music of affect, not music.
The Stone Rolled Away
If music could move stones, where would it take them? The only stone moved so that a way might open was the one at the tomb: “an angel of the Lord descended from heaven and came and rolled back the stone” (Matt. 28:2). It was not moved by a human voice but by a descent. And what is heard afterwards answers every feature of the aphorism: life without fear, steadfastness in place of changeability, unwaning light in place of chiaroscuro, ecstasy that gives itself in place of ecstasy turned inward, simplicity that knows in place of naivety. “Christ is risen” is the end of “the desire to be alive at any cost”: there is no need to pay when life has been given.
“So deeply are we indebted to the religious life,” says the aphorism. Orthodoxy says more: we are indebted not to devout feeling, which is only an echo, but to the One who makes the heart able to feel truly. And when the Psalter closes the book of praise with the words “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord” (Ps. 150:6), it does not say “every soul” but “everything that breathes”: the breath, the gift of the Spirit. Then the natural man becomes spiritual, and song ceases to be what moves the soul and becomes what gives it rest in the One who made it.
