Arend Hoyer

Bach and the emergency chaplain

The more I engage with Bach’s music, the more I become aware that it transports me to another world every time. It is not the 300-year-old sounds that do this, or the flowery lyricism of the cantatas – at some point you get used to them and they become present to you. No, the demand that this music, this poetry clothed in sound, makes on me confronts me with an understanding of the world for which my mind was not made. What is brought to me is experience compressed into word and sound, is science clothed in the garb of poetry and music.

At this point, it is important to become aware of the enormous cultural upheaval that just barely spared Leipzig during Bach’s lifetime, or whose harbingers are only just reaching the city and just barely touching Bach’s music without influencing it more deeply. Leipzig, which is actually a cosmopolitan trade fair city, is still only on the threshold of the Enlightenment with its cult and music – I understand this to mean the younger, hard Enlightenment, as clearly represented by an Immanuel Kant a few decades after Bach; the form of enlightenment that no longer seeks to mediate between the book of nature and the book of revelation, but instead places the individual entirely on his or her own understanding and no doubt still accepts nature, but no book, no tradition – and even less tolerates a story in the canon of discourses guiding knowledge, such as that of the wise men from the Orient. What we have since become accustomed to is knowledge without heritage, without collected, mediated knowledge, without Greek or Latin.

But this is precisely the basis of the culture within which Bach writes his music: Greek and Roman, Near Eastern antiquity, books without end – not to mention the Book of Books – names, references, a compilation of doctrinal formations and individual doctrines, a layering of experiences, contexts and narratives; a world that somehow and mysteriously holds together, a unity of theology, philosophy, geometry, natural history, mathematics, astronomy, rhetoric: Science as art and art as science, all this regionally different and denominationally competing, but ultimately coherent, forming a mystical unity, bringing this world and the other world into conversation. Art liquefies the knowledge that has been collected and compressed over the centuries: Through measure, number, and weight, all phenomena can be accessed and actualized: Christian revelation with the cultural treasures of pagan antiquity, preaching with Greek and Roman rhetoric, opera with Jesus, worship with everyday life. Old and new complement each other, insight and devotion, pleasure and seriousness, humour and truth, order and freedom, pomp and simplicity, poverty and excess: all together without distinction, the one merging into the other, nature and spirit, knowledge and faith, body and soul, thinking and feeling, the individual and the whole, contradiction and wisdom, I, you and we, above and below, what is currently fashionable with the tried and tested. This is Bach’s science – where there is the All-One to see, hear, feel and understand and all questions are answered if you navigate within the systems just long enough.

And we today stand in a completely different place and have become completely blind to the All-One. The wise men from the Orient, mutated into kings, are orientalizing romance and nothing more. A fragrance from the Arabian Nights with its precious woods, spices, incense, a caravan led over dunes by moonlight and comet light with its camel drivers, musicians beating muffled drums and playing nasally shawms. Quite appropriately, we cannot help but smile at the staging of the royal procession in the first two movements of this cantata and dismiss as sentimental the attempt at actualization in the arias and recitatives that follow.

Indeed: sentimentality and kitsch have no place in my work as a chaplain, especially as an emergency chaplain. Here a logic has come to its end: A small business was painstakingly created and brought to flower. Now, however, a police officer sits at the breakfast table, which is only half cleared, the five-month pregnant wife with an immigrant background speaks little and only broken English, the district doctor examines the body of the forty-year-old who died of a heart attack this morning.
This is our world, facts that our life stories will come up against at some point, sooner or later. No escape, no “sweet consolation,” as in the sermons of a Salomon Deyling, who worked in Leipzig at the same time as Bach. No being lifted up into a greater whole, no confession except to oneself and to one’s own achievement. Important, very important, of course, the relatives and the circle of friends. But even there the helpless answer to all questions remains the same. At some point someone pronounces it: “Life goes on.” That’s as far as our horizon goes.
And I, as a pastor, in the midst of it, quietly encourage to find a language again for what we have experienced and thus prevent post-traumatic disorders.

Far closer to us than the Kings of Sheba and the grateful heart of the Bach Cantata is the story of the failure of one Torquato Tasso, as described by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his eponymous artist drama. Tasso lives as an artist at an Italian court and, according to Goethe, fails because of unrequited love, misunderstood art and the lack of freedom that comes with his status. Shortly before the curtain falls, Goethe has him speak before Antonio, his personal enemy and nonetheless companion in adversity:

Broken is the wheel, and it cracks
The ship on all sides. Bursting tears
The floor’s coming up under my feet!
I’ll take you in hand and foot!
So at last the skipper still clings
Stuck to the rock he was supposed to fail.

This image of the sailor who holds on to the same rock on which his ship was wrecked accompanies me as a pastor and in general as a theologian and observer of my time and my own life.
It is a counter-intuitive and at the same time inescapably logical train of thought: to what else
should one cling but to the rock on which his ship wrecked? So we are guided and steered by facts far more than by thoughts and fail, one sooner, the other later on some rock, that of our own health, that of an economic crisis, a crisis of faith, orientation or relationships, clinging on, looking for answers and of course finding none – except: “Life goes on. ”
A corps à corps with a life that gets in the way like Tasso’s rock, which appears at a time when one’s logic has come to an end. To the question “What now? ” we get the only answer: keep going! The body of the man, who of course did not want to go to the doctor the night before, still lies intubated on the floor. The child they share is growing in the wife’s womb. Is this not a mocking symbol of the inescapable “life goes on”?

Back to Bach: the
sailor with his broken rudder naturally also has a place with him – in the ideal-typical I, in the spiritual – as well as secular – stories and dialogues told in the cantatas, passions and oratorios. But theologically and philosophically speaking, the ground beneath one’s feet doesn’t just break at the end of the drama, but at its beginning. Bach’s I’s have long been aware of their abysses, struggle through the tangle of life, gasp for breath, accuse themselves and are carried along by poetry and music, which together re-stage figures from the Bible, but also a Hercules at the crossroads, astrologers and kings, in order to better accompany this errant I on its process of reconciliation with its own existence. In my eyes, Bach’s music is the knowledge of past millennia that is made available in each case, which, through harmonies, rhythms and echoes of further melodies and texts that are sometimes surprising even to our ears, opens up to the dispatcher as well as to the mind, and helps both to detach themselves from the rock of their own life’s tragedy and, accompanied and encouraged, to venture out onto the open water again.

In the course of my pastoral work I stand, sit and wander through the family home of the deceased, sometimes talking to the mother, sometimes to the father, sometimes to the neighbour. For a time I sit with the young widow in the attic. Relatives come to see her and leave. And I sit upright like a Mesopotamian sculpture from the Louvre, not taking up much space, hands clasped together, but sharing in what is happening and speaking when the silence becomes oppressive. This I see as my task for the moment, looking at the woman with benevolence as a mostly silent witness to a truth that must still remain barred to the woman, to those present, and to myself by the massive rock on whose hard flank her husband and her own life failed this morning. Perhaps those present read in my attitude and in my features the message, “Life goes on.” But perhaps they can also read from this scene the solidarity of those who have failed, and from the affection of a stranger, but friendly and almost familiar person, they can draw courage again to find a new language for the future life enriched with new knowledge and new experiences.

Bach and his science remain foreign to me. Nevertheless, this helps me not to lose my footing in a time exposed to the roughness of facts and to regard myself as an often silent witness of a life that has always meant well with us – and means well with us now.

This text has been translated with DeepL (www.deepl.com).