The Divine Dance

How music nurtures wisdom

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra famously proclaimed that the only god he would believe would be a god who danced. The undancing god in whom, it seems, Nietzsche could not believe was the Christian God, who is left brooding on the edge of the dance floor like a teenager at a prom (ironically, probably just the sort of teenager who reads Nietzsche). Yet this says rather more about the Christianity to which Nietzsche was exposed as the son of a 19th century Protestant pastor than it does about the reality of the Triune God.

One of the joys of the tradition of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and its successors is the exposure it gives to the Psalms. As any chorister can tell you, no book of the Bible is more read in the course of Anglican worship than the Psalter. In the Psalter alone we find vivid images of a God who rejoices in the dancing of his creation: think of the rivers and mountains clapping their hands in Psalm 98, joined by the trees in Isaiah 55. And of course, most of the psalms are attributed to the dancing King David, also famed as a harpist, in whose music God revelled.

Creation does not just dance: it sings, too. Psalm 19 portrays all of creation joining in a silent, cosmic hymn of praise to God. Not only sentient beings, nor even earthly ones, but the heavens, the stars and planets, unite with the angelic choirs in adoration of their maker.

This motif of the cosmos as choir is even more strongly expressed in the words of the Te Deum, sung daily at Mattins, and attributed to the 4th century bishop, St Ambrose of Milan. Despite this, Ambrose’s most famous pupil, the great African bishop St Augustine of Hippo, was at first sceptical of music in religion, perhaps because of his dubious past as a member of the heretical Manichee sect, whose tunes were so good that they lured Christian believers away from the Church. Yet in Milan, he heard chant of such beautiful simplicity that it lifted his heart to a greater apprehension of God. Augustine would come to say that to sing a prayer is to pray it twice. As a Christian Platonist, he also had a high view of the study of music for instilling a sense of harmony, rhythm and order in the soul and so strengthening the human desire for goodness and beauty. Plato himself wanted children aged 6-18 to study nothing but music and gymnastics, subjects often squeezed to the edge of the curriculum in modern schools. It is understandable that schools want to focus on skills which will make their pupils employable, but for pagan Platonists and Christians alike, no amount of ‘skills training’ could make up for a misdirected and disharmonious soul. Music was a vital element of character formation and growth in wisdom.

Moving from Africa to the Eastern Church, Augustine’s contemporaries in Cappadocia (now a region of Turkey) started using the word perichoresis to describe the nature of God. This word is cognate with the word chorus. Nowadays, a chorus is a group of singers, but its older meaning dates back to the troupes of singer-dancers in the Greek tragedies of ancient Athens. Perichoresis, then, literally means ‘singing and dancing around in a circle.’ The 8th century theologian St John of Damascus used this word to describe how God is Trinity: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are united together like three dancers singing and dancing together in a spiral so concentrated that they intersect in a single point of convergence. God is like the invisible point at the centre of a cosmic wheel. The centre gives motion to everything around it, yet in itself is unmoved. So perhaps we cannot give Nietzsche the dancing God he wants to believe in. We can give him something better: God who is the dance by which the cosmos is sustained.

“There is nothing unGodlike in Christ,” as Archbishop Michael Ramsey used to say. So can we find any instances of Christ dancing or singing in the Scriptures? Explicitly, no. The closest we can come is to recall that he went to at least one wedding, so presumably he danced there, and that he spent a lot of time in the Temple in Jerusalem, where the psalms were sung every day. This is not what you would call hard evidence. But there is something of the dancer and singer in the character of Christ - even something of the fool. The motif of Christ as a dancer and a fool resurfaces in the songs of the Muslim Sufi poet Rumi, the hermit traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church, and the works of the 20th century Anglican novelist Charles Williams, but it has an ancient heritage. None other than the Apostle St Paul describes God’s wisdom as foolish, and Christ is regarded as the incarnation of God’s wisdom. Christ himself said that we need to become like little children if we want to enter the Kingdom of Heaven: in other words, we need to play. What, after all, is more foolish, more absurd, than for Almighty God to take the form of a slave, executed on a Cross?

There’s an old joke among Scottish Presbyterians that their ministers are afraid of sex for fear that it might lead to dancing. Nietzsche thought that God would need to die, so that we could be free to dance on his grave. But anyone who thinks that God is indifferent to music and to the rhythm of the cosmos needs to get to know Him better. Church music is not an extravagance or luxury. It is vital to the work of the Church, a converting ordinance and medicine for the soul. The beauty that church musicians bring to worship lifts us up into the ecstasy of the heavenly choirs, and beyond them, at the centre of their dance, into the presence of the Three in One, whose dance of stillness and song of silence give harmony, stability, meaning and movement to the world.