This use of music fit in with a striking change in the lives of Christians in Europe: the change from image to
text, from a church that communicated its truths through paintings and frescoes,tapestry and statuary, reserving the sacred language Latin for the clergy, to churches that cherished the Bible as the Word of God and proposed that God’sways could be known not through ritual but through the Word alone.
In this passage, Elie very neatly encapsulates some differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. First, Protestants have tended to shy away from the use of visual art to present their faith, in opposition to Catholics. This in part is explainable in terms of Protestants’ concerns about the use of images leading to idolatry—worship of the image rather than of God Himself. However, as Elie suggests, another reason is that Protestants have
tended to emphasize the Bible “as the Word of God,” by which “God’s ways [can] be known” without the need of any image. Second, the heart of worship for Catholics is “ritual”—the Eucharist (Communion), the means by which the worshipper approaches God. It is the Eucharist that is the focus of Catholic services. In contrast, for Protestants, the heart of worship is “the Word”—the exposition of Scripture through the sermon. Ritual is visual by nature, while preaching is aural in nature. Perhaps it should not be surprising that Protestants are more oriented toward the aural than the visual, for according to Elie, “the taking of the Bible and other books [during the Protestant Reformation] to ordinary people had a surprising side effect: even as it enabled those people to read, it brough about a shift from a visual culture to an aural one.” This not only explains the emphasis on preaching in Protestantism, but may also explain the great importance of music in Protestant worship. Furthermore, given the major role played by music in Protestantism, it is perhaps not surprising that one of the
greatest (if not the greatest) composers of all time was an ardent Lutheran—Johann Sebastian Bach.
Elie’s observations on this topic are particularly intriguing due to the fact that he himself is Catholic!
I hope to continue reading Elie’s book and perhaps in future posts I will comment on other issues of interest raised by his book.
Image of Paul Elie from georgetown.edu