Calm In Chaos by Rutler George William

Author:Rutler, George William [Rutler, George William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781642290516
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2018-07-04T16:00:00+00:00

Plato also knew the dangers of “antimusic”, or Corybanticism, which perverted rhythms to stimulate the bodily humors in defiance of the good purposes of the muses. Its consequence would be a moral chain reaction, dissonant music deranging society and inverting virtue. The Corybants were priests of the Phrygian goddess Cybele, and their music was atonal, ecstatic, and dissolute. It was inimical to the ideal republic. But it incubated the ethereal realms of David Bowie and Michael Jackson and their sort.

In speaking of the rock and roll genre, I certainly do not want to be lumped with those preachers who once condemned ragtime music, or even Chesterton, who in an unmeasured moment called jazz “the song of the treadmill”. But I am a pastor of a section of Manhattan called Hell’s Kitchen. I recently had the funeral of a young man who died of a drug overdose, and whose musical world was Corybantic. His cousin, a client of the rock and drug scene, is in prison for murder. So I speak not only as an aesthete who publicly avows that he prefers Mozart and Chopin to Jackson and Bowie but as a priest who has to pick up the pieces of those who never knew they had a choice. And I object to comfortable prelates in a higher realm penning panegyrics for the doyens of a culture that destroys my children.

Like a new Plato, Pope Benedict XVI said in his Spirit of the Liturgy:

On the one hand, there is pop music, which is certainly no longer supported by the people in the ancient sense (populus). It’s aimed at the phenomenon of the masses, is industrially produced, and ultimately has to be described as a cult of the banal. “Rock”, on the other hand, is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumed a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship. People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the experience of being part of a crowd and by the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe. The music of the Holy Spirit’s sober inebriation seems to have little chance when self has become a prison, the mind is a shackle, and breaking out from both appears as a true promise of redemption that can be tasted at least for a few moments.2

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.