Karl Barth: Mozart and the Preacher
Photograph of Barth taken at the University of Bonn where he taught from 1930-34. Whilst working in Bonn, Barth began the multi-volume Church Dogmatics and became involved in the resistance of at least some Protestant ministers to Hitler's religious policies and to the "Germanizing" of Christianity.
Barth's house at Safenwil (1911-21). The Commentary on Romans, together with some of his early addresses published in The Word of God and the World of Man, were written whilst Barth was serving as pastor of Safewil.
Kaiser Wilhelm I, at the beginning of World War I, delivers a speech from the balcony of the Schloss in Berlin, calling for national unity: "Political parties are a thing of the past, I recognize only Germans." The speech was written by Adolf von Harnack. The political positions taken by his teachers, especially regarding the war, were significant in stimulating Barth's critique of Liberal Protestantism.
Preaching to the Captives
During the mid-50's, the only congregation for whom Barth would preach were the inmates of Basle prison. As a friend observed, "Some people have even toyed slyly with the thought of committing a crime in Basle in order to have an opportunity to hear him preach." The sermon below was preached to these prisoners in 1957. It illustrates Barth's insistent emphasis on the radical priority of God's action over our human response. Thus, for Barth, the first Christian community is not that of the disciples after Easter but that of Jesus and the two criminals (note, both of them) crucifed on Golgotha. The presence of Jesus in this community of suffering - and not the proper or improper, pious or impious response of human beings - is what determines that this community is the community of God's grace. Barth also visited the prisoners. He once reported, "this morning I listened at length to three murderers, two confidence tricksters and one adulterer, added the odd remark here and there and gave each a fat cigar." He later observed with reference to the prisoners, "Am I really something of an optimist or a walking embodiment of the heresy of the restoration of all things? I found it impossible to be dispondent or disturbed over these men. Instead, I thought I had seen something encouraging and cheering in each of them."
from Deliverance to the Captives
"They crucified him with the criminals," Luke 23.33.
My DEAR BROTHERS AND SISTERS, I should like to invite I you, before I begin my sermon, to read for yourselves the story of Good Friday, the story of the suffering and death of Jesus Christ, as it is recorded in the four Gospels. Why don't you read it today and again and again? If we meditate and understand it rightly, this story contains the whole history of the world and, what is more, of God's dealing with man and hence of our dealings with God, including the life history of each of us here. I would need more than a half-hour were I to give an adequate summary of this history, let alone an insight into its complexity. Let me therefore select just one sentence for our meditation together. It is written in Luke 23.33:
They crucified him with the criminals, one on either side of him.
'They crucified him with the criminals'. Which is more amazing, to find Jesus in such bad company, or to find the criminals in such good company? As a matter of fact, both are true! One thing is certain: here they hang all three, Jesus and the criminals, one at the right and one at the left, all three exposed to the same public abuse, to the same interminable pain, to the same slow and irrevocable death throes. Like Jesus, these two criminals had been arrested somewhere, locked up and sentenced by some judge in the course of the previous few days. And now they hang on their crosses with him and find themselves in solidarity and fellowship with him. They are linked in a common bondage never again to be broken, just as the nails that fastened them to the piece of wood would never break. It was as inescapable for them as it was for him. It was a point of no return for them as for him. There remained only the shameful, painstricken present and the future of their approaching death. (Strangely enough, there are many paintings of Jesus' crucifixion where the two criminals are lost to sight. It would perhaps be more appropriate not to represent Jesus' death at all. But if it is done, then the two thieves on the right and on the left must not be left out. In any painting or representation where they are absent, an important, even an essential, element is missing.) They crucified him with the criminals.
Do you know what this implies? Don't be too surprised if I tell you that this was the first Christian fellowship, the first certain, indissoluble and indestructible Christian community. Christian community is manifest wherever there is a group of people close to Jesus who are with him in such a way that they are directly and unambiguously affected by his promise and assurance. These may hear that everything he is, he is for them, and everything he does, he does for them. To live by this promise is to be a Christian community. The two criminals were the first certain Christian community.
True, there existed before a vacillating, doubting community around Jesus. It was made up of disciples whom Jesus had called, who had wandered up and down Galilee with him and had followed him into Jerusalem, who had heard all his words and witnessed all his deeds. But what happened in the Garden of Gethsemane? 'So, could you not watch with me one hour?' No, they could not and they would not watch with him. They simply fell asleep while he watched and prayed alone. And what happened when the police came to fetch him? 'Then all the disciples forsook him and fled.' And what about Peter whom the Roman Catholic Church venerates up to the present as the first Pope? When a maid pointed to him in the courtyard of the High Priest, saying: 'This man also was with him', the great Peter denied: 'Woman, I do not know him.' And three times he thus spoke until the cock crowed for the third time. There was even Judas who betrayed the Master for thirty pieces of silver! Indeed there existed a Christian community before the two criminals. But what a wavering community it was!
The two criminals who at this hour were crucified with him had probably never heard of him before and were certainly no believing converts, no saints. Far from it! The opposite is true! But in this hour they could not abandon him, they could not sleep. Willingly or not, they were forced to watch with him many long hours on the cross. Nor could they escape his dangerous company. They could not very well deny him, being publicly exposed as his companions. This is how they were in fact the first certain Christian community! He and they, they and he were bound together, were not and are not to be separated in all eternity. Great things had to pass before Peter and the rest of the disciples joined this first Christian community. And when they did so, they could only 'get in line behind' the two criminals who were already first, and up there in front, with Jesus on Golgotha.
Before we take another look at these two criminals, we must say a word about Jesus together with whom they were exposed to the same abuse, the same pain and the same death throes. He was the principal actor, the hero of Good Friday, the head of this first Christian community. And now we are told that he was crucified. By whom? The hangmen, the Roman soldiers, obeying the order of Pilate, the governor. Pilate had been pressured by the church dignitaries of Jerusalem, they in turn had been mightily supported by the crowd shouting: 'crucify, crucify!'
What was happening here? Apparently the same thing that was happening to the two criminals. On account of his deeds and words a man had become unbearable for his fellowmen and they sent him from life to death, making him innocuous, extinguishing his life. Jesus would not have been himself, and his adversaries would not have been themselves, had they acted differently and not done this to him. Thus Jesus suffered the same lot which, for particular reasons, the two criminals had to endure (incidentally, a not uncommon or extraordinary human fate). Jesus was with them and they were with him. It has been rightly said that other people have been even more tormented by their fellowmen and have suffered harder pain than Jesus did on the cross - be it at war, in concentration camps, or on the sickbed. But this is beside the point, for Jesus' sufferings were but the outward and visible sign of an inward event.
Through the visible suffering and death of this man Jesus an invisible event took place which did not and could not happen through the suffering and death of the two criminals nor for that matter, of any other human being. Why not? Because Jesus, and he alone, was this man: a man like us, yet at the same time different from us because in him God himself was present and at work. The Roman centurion described this when he cried out after Jesus had died: 'Truly, this was a son of God!'
Who was God, and what did he do through the suffering and death of this man Jesus? The apostle Paul has summed it up in one sentence: 'He was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself ' I shall try to explain this to you in a few words.
It so happened that in this man Jesus God himself came into the world, which he had created and against all odds still loved He took human nature upon himself and became man, like the rest of us, in order to put an end to the world's fight against him and also against itself, and to replace man's disorder by God's design. In Jesus God hallowed his name, made his kingdom come, his will done on earth as it is in heaven, as we say in the Lord's Prayer. In him he made manifest his glory and, amazingly enough, he made it manifest for our salvation. To accomplish this, he not only bandaged, but healed the wounds of the world he helped mankind not only in part and temporarily but radically and for good in the person of his beloved Son; he delivered us from evil and took us to his heart as his children Thereby we are all permitted to live, and to live eternally.
It happened through this man on the cross that God cancelled out and swept away all our human wickedness, our pride, our anxiety, our greed and our false pretences, whereby we had continually offended him and made life difficult, if not impossible, for ourselves and for others. He crossed out what had made our life fundamentally terrifying, dark and distressing - the life of health and of sickness, of happiness and of unhappiness, of the highborn and of the lowborn, of the rich and of the poor, of the free and of the captive. He did away with it. It is no longer part of us, it is behind us. In Jesus God made the day break after the long night and spring come after the long winter.
All these things happened in that one man. In Jesus, God took upon himself the full load of evil; he made our wickedness his own; he gave himself in his dear Son to be defamed as a criminal, to be accused, condemned, delivered from life unto death, as though he himself, the Holy God, had done all the evil we human beings did and do. In giving himself in Jesus Christ, he reconciled the world unto himself; he saved us and made us free to live in his everlasting kingdom; he removed the burden and took it upon himself He the innocent took the place of us the guilty. He the mighty took the place of us the weak. He the living One took the place of us the dying.
This, my dear friends, is the invisible event that took place in the suffering and death of the man hanging on the middle cross on Golgotha. This is reconciliation: his damnation our liberation, his defeat our victory, his mortal pain the beginning of our joy, his death the birth of our life. We do well to remember that this is what those who put him to death really accomplished. They did not know what they did. These deluded men and women accomplished by their evil will and deed that good which God had willed and done with the world and for the world, including the crowd of Jerusalem.
Let us now go back to the two criminals who were crucified with Jesus according to God's will and deed. We do not know their names. We know nothing about their lives, of their misdoings and crimes. We do not know whether they could plead attenuating circumstances, or whether their guilt was even greater than we may think. We only know that the thieves were condemned, 'receiving', as one of them admitted, 'the due reward of our deeds'. We know above all that, without their consent and against their wishes, they were in fact crucified with him, with Jesus. No one before and no one afterwards has witnessed so directly and so closely God's act of reconciliation, God's glory and the redemption of the world, as these two thieves. True, only one of them acknowledged who Jesus was and what he did in his suffering and death for all men - the thief not excluded. His companion, as it is later recorded in the Gospels, shared in the general, blind and hollow mockery. Why did he not, if he really was the Christ, the Son of God, help himself and them? This is certainly an important and notable difference between the two criminals. But we shall not dwell on it today. For the difference is not important enough to invalidate the promise given so clearly, so urgently to both of them, indeed without distinction.
Consider the fact: Jesus died precisely for these two criminals who were crucified on his right and on his left and went to their death with him. He did not die for the sake of a good world, he died for the sake of an evil world, not for the pious, but for the godless, not for the just, but for the unjust, for the deliverance, the victory and the joy of all, that they might have life. These two companions were evidently and undeniably criminals, evil people, godless people, unjust people. And he, like them, was condemned and crucified as a lawbreaker, a criminal. All three were under the same verdict.
Consider furthermore: 'My body which is broken for you! My blood which is shed for you!' These are Jesus' words at the Last Supper. How could these words be understood before his death? But now it is achieved, now his body is broken, his blood shed. The two thieves witnessed this breaking and shedding. And how did they witness it? They participated in this act not as mere spectators. In community with him, in the indissoluble bond uniting them, their own evil, sad and gloomy life was spent, and their own blood, clotted by many passions, was shed. What witnesses they were! How directly and closely these two not only saw with their eyes and heard with their ears but experienced in their flesh and in their own dying hearts: 'broken for you, shed for you!'
And let us consider above all that God's mighty deed to his glory and our salvation, his victory for the salvation of the world was accomplished through the event which took place at their side, even in their own existence. He who has overcome death, the King of Life, was the poor suffering servant whose dying gasp mingled with theirs. He who was on the road to the Kingdom, to the proclamation of his sovereignty, to the resurrection from the dead on the third day, was the same who went to death with them! Were they not therefore in turn, even in their darkest hour, on the road to the same destination? 'But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him' wrote the apostle Paul (Romans 6.8). Now, these two thieves literally died with Christ, and theirs was the assurance that they were also literally to live with him.
Did they accept this miracle, understand it, believe it? Let us leave this question open. This much is certain, that the promise was meant for them, that they were covered by this promise, that they received and possessed it, that they were allowed to suffer and to die with him. This promise is given and is valid wherever men may suffer and die as criminals with Jesus. This promise and nothing else constitutes the Christian community and makes man a Christian. These two criminals were the first two who, suffering and dying with Jesus, were gathered by this promise into the Christian fold.
I said that Peter and the remaining disciples could only 'get in line behind' the two criminals who were first and up front. This is true for men of all times. Christian community exists only where the promise is heard and believed. The promise is given only to crucified criminals, who are utterly compromised before God and before men, who move relentlessly toward the end and cannot escape this destiny by their own doing. For men like these Jesus died. And mark this: precisely these, and these only, are worthy to go to the Lord's Supper.
And now, dear friends, we are not asked in the least if we want to be such people, thank God. We are such people, all of us - you in this house which is called a prison, with all the burden that brought you here and with your particular experiences in this place - those others of us outside who have different experiences and yet are, believe me, in the same predicament. In reality we all are these people, these crucified criminals. And only one thing matters now. Are we ready to be told what we are?
Are we ready to hear the promise given to the condemned, to 'get in line behind'? 'God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.' Those receive the promise who regard themselves as neither so exalted nor so debased that they cannot 'get in line behind' the two criminals who were first on Golgotha. May God give us all the grace to do so! May he help us to use this grace rightly! May he bless us all as we in this freedom go to his table now! Amen.
The Barth family in 1916, Nelly, Karl, Markus (aged 1), Franziska (aged 2).
A Parable of the Kingdom: the Music of Mozart
In 1923, Adolf von Harnack accused Barth of urging an implicitly gnostic attitude to human culture: "[your assessment] can be understood as a radical denial of every valuable understanding of God within the history of man's thought and ethics." Also, "If Goethe's pantheism, Kant's conception of God or related points of view are merely opposities of real statements about God, how can it be avoided that these statements are given over to barbarism?" Barth's theological interpretation of culture remains a matter of controversy amongst his commentators. However, his reflections on Mozart - for whose music Barth had a life-long passion - provide us with a practical example of his developing a positive relationship between the Gospel and the cultural achievements Harnack accused him of giving "over to barbarism." After Barth's "Letter to Mozart," are extracts taken from an address given at the Salzburg Mozart Festival.
LETTER OF THANKS TO MOZART
My dear Conductor and Court Composer:
Someone got the curious idea of inviting me and a few others to write a "letter of thanks to Mozart" for his newspaper. At first I shook my head and even looked at the wastebasket. But if there is anything which has to do with you I can say "No" only in the rarest cases. And did you not also write more than one somewhat funny letter during your lifetime? So, why not? They certainly know more there where you dwell now, unimpeded by time and space, about each other and about us than do we ourselves down here. Thus I actually do not doubt that you have known for a long time how grateful I have been to you almost all my life and always will remain. Nevertheless why shouldn't you read this in black and white?
Two excuses have to be made first. Number one: I am one of those Protestants of whom you are supposed to have said once that we were unable to understand properly the meaning of Agnus Dei, qui talus peccata mundi. Pardon me, probably you are now better informed on that. However, I do not want to bother you with theology. Believe it or not, I actually dreamed of you last week. Here is the dream: I had to examine you (why, I don't even understand, myself). I knew that under no circumstances would you be allowed to fail the examination. I asked you about the meaning of "dogmatics" and "dogma," by pointing in the most friendly way to your Masses, which I like especially. But to my great regret I got not the least answer from you!! Don't you think we'd better give this point a blessed rest?
The second excuse is far more complicated. I have learned that you could enjoy only the praise of connoisseurs, even in your childhood. As you know, there are not only musicians but also musicologists on this earth. You yourself were both. I am neither the one nor the other. I play no instrument nor do I have the faintest idea about the theory of harmony, let alone the mysteries of "counterpoint." Those very musicologists disturbed me deeply whose books I tried to decipher when I drew up an address for the recent celebration of your two hundredth birthday. By the way, I c5annot help thinking that if I were young and had to start this kind of studying I would clash with a few of your most outstanding theoretical interpreters in the same way that I did with my theological masters forty years ago. But be that as it may, how can I, under these circumstances, thank you as a connoisseur? In other words, how can I make you happy?
To my relief, I have also read that you sometimes made music for hours and hours for very lowly people. This you did only because you somehow had the feeling that they were pleased to listen to you. In this way, with a repeatedly delighted ear and heart I have heard and still hear you play. I myself am so utterly naive that I cannot tell in which of the thirty-four periods of your life, according to the classification of Wyzewa and Saint-Foix, you are nearest to my heart. Surely, surely, you began to become really great, let's say, about 1785. But I hope I won't hurt your feelings (or will I?) in confessing the following: It has been and always will be impossible for me to listen without deep emotion not only to Don Giovanni and to your last symphonies, to the Magic Flute and the Requiem but no less to the "Hafiner" Serenade and the Eleventh Divertimento, etc. Actually, I am deeply moved even by Bastien and Bastienne! Consequently, you are interesting and dear to me much earlier than the moment when you can be praised as the "pioneer" of Beethoven!
What I owe you, frankly, is this: whenever I listen to your music I feel led to the threshold of a world which is good and well ordered, in sunshine and thunderstorm, by day and by night. Thus you have repeatedly given me, a human being of the twentieth century, courage (not haughtiness!), tempo (not exaggerated tempo!), purity (not boring purity!) and peace (not complacent peace !). If he really digests your musical dialectics he can be young and become old, he can work and relax, he can be gay and depressed; in short, he can live. You know now, far better than I, that much more is necessary for that purpose than the very best music. But there is music which helps men to this end (ex post and only incidentally!) and other music which cannot help toward it. Your music helps. This I have experienced all my life (I am going to be seventy years old and if you were living you would dwell in our midst as a patriarch of two hundred years!). Moreover, I am convinced that our century, which is becoming more and more obscure, especially needs your help. For both these reasons I am grateful to you that you have lived, that you wanted to make and did make pure music in the few decades of your life, and that you still live in your music. Please believe me that many, many ears and hearts, scholarly and unscholarly, just as my own, still like to hear you for ever and ever - not only in the year of your jubilee.
I have only a hazy feeling about the music played there where you now dwell. I once formulated my surmise about that as follows: whether the angels play only Bach in praising God I am not quite sure; I am sure, however, that en famille they play Mozart and that then also God the Lord is especially delighted to listen to them. Well, this alternative may be wrong. Besides, you know that better than I do, anyhow. I mention this only in order to hint metaphorically at my meaning.
And so, with all my heart,
yours,
KARL BARTH
from Barth's Mozart Festival Address, "Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart."
In other words, Mozart's Figaro has nothing to do with the ideas of the French Revolution and Don Giovanni has nothing to do with the myth of the eternal libertine (as Kierkegaard asserted!). Certainly there does not exist a special Mozartian "philosophy of Cosi fan tutte" either, and one should not read too much "humanity-religion" and/or political mysteries into Mozart's Magic Flute. The fact is that, whether we like it or not (and it can be seen in his letters), neither the nature surrounding him nor the history, literature, philosophy or politics of his time touched him directly or in a concrete sense. Nor was he moved to represent or proclaim any decisions or dogmas. It is to be feared that he never read much, and he certainly never speculated or taught. There is no Mozartian metaphysics either. He sought and found only his musical possibilities, themes and tasks in the world of nature and spirit. With God, the world, men, himself, heaven and earth, life - and, above all, death - before his eyes, in his ears and in his heart he was an unproblematic person. For that reason he was a free man, in a way which was apparently allowed, ordered and therefore exemplary for him.
This involves the fact that his music was uniquely free from every exaggeration, basic friction and contradiction. The sun shines but does not dazzle the eyes, nor demolish nor scorch. Heaven arches above the earth but does not press upon or crush and swallow it. And so earth remains earth, but without being forced to hold its own against heaven in titanic revolt. In the same way darkness, chaos, death and hell render themselves conspicuous but are not allowed to prevail even for a moment. Mozart makes music, knowing everything from a mysterious center, and thus he knows and keeps the boundaries on the right and on the left, upward and downward. He observes moderation. Again he wrote, in 1781, that "the emotions, strong or not, never should be expressed ad nauseam and that music, even in the most horrible situation, never must offend the ears but must please them nevertheless. In other words, music must always remain music." He was (and I quote Grillparzer's beautiful words) the musician "who never did too little, and never did too much, and who always arrived at but never went beyond his goal."
There is no light which does not know the darkness too, no happiness which does not include sorrow; but also inversely, no alarm, no ire, no wailing to the aid of which peace would not come, from near or far. There is no laughter, therefore, without weeping, but no weeping without laughter either. There never was a Mozart of such utter gracefulness that the nineteenth century, after praising him, could grow justly tired of him. But neither did there exist this "demoniac Mozart" whom our century wanted to substitute. The very absence of all demons, the very stopping before the extreme, and precisely the wise confrontation and mixture of the elements (let us say it again) amounts to the freedom in which the true vox humana speaks in Mozart's music. In it the entire scale is unmuffled, but at the same time undistorted and uncramped. Whoever correctly hears him, may, as the human being he really is, feel himself understood and called to freedom: as the clever Basilio, the affectionate Cherubino, as Don Giovanni, the hero, or as the coward Leporello, as the gentle Pamina or the raging Queen of the Night, as the all-forgiving Countess, the terribly jealous Electra, the wise Sarastro and the foolish Papageno all of whom lie hidden in us. Or we may think, as all of us do, of ourselves as persons destined for death, who yet live on and on.
Something at the last, however, must be perceived and mentioned. Mozart's center is not like that of the great theologian Schleiermacher, identical with balance, neutralization and finally indifference. What happened in this center is rather a splendid annulment of balance, a turn in the strength of which the light rises and the shadow winks but does not disappear; happiness outdistances sorrow without extinguishing it and the "Yes" rings stronger than the still-existing "No." Notice the reversal of the great dark and the little bright experiences in Mozart's life! "The rays of the sun disperse the night" - that's what you hear at the end of the Magic Flute. The play may or must still proceed or start from the very beginning. But it is a play which in some Height or Depth is winning or has already won. This directs and characterizes it. One will never perceive equilibrium, and for that reason uncertainty or doubt, in Mozart's music. This is true of his operas as well as of his instrumental music, and especially of his church music. Is not each Kyrie or Miserere, even if it begins at the lowest depth, carried by the trust that the prayer for grace has in fact been answered? Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini! In Mozart's version he has apparently already arrived. Dona nobis pacem! This prayer, too, has already been answered in Mozart's music, in spite of everything. For this very reason his church music has to be called truly spiritual music, in spite of all well-known objections. Mozart never lamented, never quarreled. He would have been entitled to do so. Instead, he always executed that comforting turn which is priceless for everyone who hears it. That seems to me, as far as it can be explained at all, to be the secret of his freedom and thereby the nucleus of his singular quality, for which we asked at the beginning.
I leave one question unanswered: How is it possible that I, an evangelical Christian and theologian, can so proclaim Mozart? How could I do this even though he was such a Catholic and even a Freemason and besides through and through nothing else than just a musician? He who has ears to hear has certainly heard. May I ask all the others, who perhaps shake their heads in astonishment and alarm, to be momentarily contented with the general reference to the fact that the New Testament speaks not only about the kingdom of heaven, but also of the parables of the kingdom of heaven?
Barth toward the end of his life, playing chess with his grandson.