Mozart, Merton and Barth's Dream

A new plan from today, seeing I am browsing dozens of books every day for cataloguing the library, but not really reading much, is to quote from something which has grabbed my attention each day. Today is the anniversary of Thomas Merton's death in 1968, and now the day set aside for commemorating him in the Anglican Church of New Zealand.

It was a relief when the piles of turgid Columba Marmion (although I see he's been extensively reprinted recently; perhaps if he didn't smell so musty he'd be a more attractive read) gave way to Merton late this afternoon. First was "Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander." with its opening passage about Karl Barth's dream:

Merton writes:

Karl Barth had a dream about Mozart.

Barth had always been piqued by the Catholicism of Mozart, and by Mozart's rejection of Protestantism. For Mozart said that "Protestantism was all in the head" and that "Protestantism did not know the meaning of the Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi."

Barth, in his dream, was appointed to examine Mozart in theology. He wanted to make the examination as favorable as possible, and in his questions he alluded pointedly to Mozart's masses.

But Mozart did not answer a word.

I was deeply moved by Barth's account of this dream and almost wanted to write him a letter about it. The dream concerns his salvation, and Barth perhaps is striving to admit that he will be saved more by Mozart in himself than by his theology.

Each day, for years, Barth played Mozart every morning before going to work on his dogma, unconsciously seeking to awaken, perhaps, the hidden sophianic Mozart in himself, the central wisdom that comes with the divine and cosmic music and is saved by love, yes, even by eros. While the other, theological self, seemingly more concerned with love, grasps at a more stern, cerebral agape: a love that, after all, is not in our own heart but only in God and revealed only to our head.

Barth says, also significantly, that "it is a child, even a 'divine' child, who speaks in Mozart's music to us." Some, he says, considered Mozart always a child in practical affairs (but Burckhardt "earnestly took exception" to this view). At the same time, Mozart, the child prodigy, "was never allowed to be a child in the literal meaning of that word." He gave his first concert at the age of six.

Yet he was always a child "in the higher meaning of that word."

Fear not, Karl Barth! Trust in the divine mercy. Though you have grown up to become a theologian, Christ remains a child in you. Your books and mine matter less than we might think! There is in us a Mozart who will be our salvation.

For me one of the revelations of the divine in Mozart is what's going on in the background, in the "accompanying" parts - for they are never routine space filling formulae, but filled with flashes of divine inspiration.