Passacaglia and predestination
One day, after fifteen years as a Catholic, I suddenly discovered that being Catholic implies believing in predestination. Not only does the Church teach it, it’s in Scripture: ‘For those whom God foreknew he also predestined…’ (Rom 8.29). Are we therefore obliged to believe that God intentionally predestines people to hell? Can we invent a vague-enough definition of hell to make such an idea palatable? Seemingly there are people who suffer and commit horrible evils even now. Does God’s providence destine this?
These questions seem best investigated by indirect paths. I believe there’s very much that Baroque violin music says about predestination, albeit in a rather oblique way. So I am going to write about Baroque violin music, and a specific piece within this category of music – Biber’s Passacaglia.
Baroque violin music is music composed to for Baroque violins, which are structurally different from modern violins. Baroque bows have a different weight, length, and curvature, for example. As a result, the violinist must move the bow and hold the violin differently, and generally employ a mechanically distinctive technique.
The first time I heard Biber’s Passacaglia, I found it inexplicably striking. It was clearly violin music, much like I had been listening to and playing for years. But it had this beautiful, alien sound, somehow completely unlike the sound of the violin music I was used to.
I wanted to play it myself, so I located the sheet music and began learning it. At first, the problem seemed to arise from my lack of technical skill. I simply couldn’t make my fingers move fast enough and sure enough to land in the right places. What I played halted and grated; instead of resounding between themselves, the notes stumbled against each other. Finally, after three or four years, I was able to play the notes written on the page with acceptable intonation. But to my extreme frustration, the sound other violinists could create remained absent.
It seems to me that all music involves a kind of motion of sound, and this motion has a type of order or pulse that propels it forward in a certain direction. This is what makes it music and not just noise. It’s analogous to how language works: there are linguistic practices (such as words) that exist within a linguistic space (language in the broad sense). This makes certain sounds speech and not just oscillating sound waves. Different socio-linguistic traditions employ varying concrete things as to achieve this. Consider how Italians talk with their hands, or the pitch accent in ancient Greek, for example. When you understand the logic of a linguistic tradition, you understand the synergetic relationship between the concrete things, the practices, and the space. Similarly, when you understand the logic of a musical tradition, you can explain how order and pulse emerge within a particular musical practice.
We can often recognize, without yet being able to explain, the emergence of an order, pulse, or rhythm in a given piece of music. Sometimes it’s deliberately and obviously measurable by a constant number of beats per minute. The conductor’s baton marches them. A waltz, however, can begin at a slow rate and end at a fast one, and the dancers’ motions still rhythmically reveal the order and motion of the music. It also doesn’t necessarily have to do with units of time. In Gregorian chant, the movement and rhythm of the sound issues organically from the length of the psalter’s linguistic phrases and the placement of accent in Latin words.
Biber’s Passacaglia has a beautiful, discernable motion, structured and ordered. In the logic of Baroque violin music, the structure doesn’t come from a uniform number of beats per minute or a persistent melody. It comes from the simple repetition of four descending notes. Three years into my struggle with the piece, I suddenly discovered this. I was stunned. In a ten-minute piece of high complexity, every single two-measure ‘section’ has the same four-note scale. Sometimes the scale breaks through alone and unornamented. Usually there are other notes played over or around it. Then those four notes are both audibly undistinguishable and distinctively present. They drive, measure, and order the unfolding of the sound.
What does this have to do with predestination? I suppose we should first inquire into what predestination is. Predestination seems to imply destination, and destination seems to imply location. So where does God predestine us for? St Paul is clear on this point. ‘God chose us before the foundation of the world to be holy and immaculate in his presence, in love’ (Eph 1.4).
I’ve never wished to be called holy; it’s too saccharine an adjective. But this aversion, I think, stems from a misunderstanding about holiness – that holiness is a quantity accrued through good actions and lost through bad actions. But according to Ephesians, holiness is not about actions; holiness is a place. St Paul says where that place is – God’s presence.
Holiness, then, is prior to either sin or virtue. What I mean is that there would be nothing bad about sin and or good about virtue if a person were not already holy. Sin is only bad because we can’t just indifferently turn up at any old destination, and sin impedes our motion to the destination we are constituted to have as our own – God’s presence. Holiness has to do with the location we’ve always been destined for, prior to any of our actions.
It follows that if we look for the cause of holiness in our actions, we are reversing the true order of things. We can similarly reverse the order of things when we go looking for the causes of events. John Ames from Marilynne Robinson’s Lila puts it very well:
Things happen for reasons that are hidden from us, utterly hidden for as long as we think they must proceed from what has come before, our guilt or our deserving, rather than coming to us from a future God in his freedom offers to us.
It is the same with Biber’s Passacaglia. As long as one examines the individual notes, trying to explain them based on an anachronistic musical logic, the sound remains is absent, completely hidden. In fact, there is no sound at all, no imperceptibly-arising inner motion and direction of music. But if one knows the font and logic of the piece – the explication of those four notes – then the sound and its motion emerges with all beauty.
The reason St Paul taught predestination, it seems to me, was to account for the rhythmic motion, visible, audible, and tangible, of absolutely everything toward Christ. He was observing an inexplicable but unmissable pulse – ‘all creation is groaning’ he says (Rom 8.22). And he concluded that it could only be because of the ever-prior logic of God: ‘We have been predestined by the decree of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will’ (Eph 1.11).
