A New Song for an Old World: Musical Thought in the Early Church (review)

Late twentieth-century philosophers have provided historians with new reasons for being cautious about the metanarrative. Instead of metanarration, many across a wide swath of disciplines have come to believe that only micronarration can credibly report in the midst of today's eclecticism, fragmentation, and political multipolarity. The analogous strand in contemporary theology is an emphasis on the contextual, one of the strongest global flows in Christian theology. These perspectives do not suggest that works with a more sweeping historical scope are no longer useful. Actually, in the face of so much micronarration and contextual awareness, carefully crafted overviews are more important than ever.

Calvin Stapert has attempted such an overview of musical thought in the early Church. Early on in his volume he admits one complexity of the task, i.e., that music was not something early Christians thought about in isolation from the rest of their lives (p. 3). It is a useful admission that could have been a critical insight in shaping his topic. Stapert does attempt to situate each era or author in their historical context, e.g., the twenty-two-page chapter on Chrysostom begins with a twelve-page introduction to Chrysostom's life and something of the city of Antioch. Unfortunately, there appears to be a uniform, almost monoscopic reading of each context as utterly depraved and its music rejected as spiritually dangerous.

There is no question that there were many facets of the Greco-Roman empire and its musics over the almost five centuries that Stapert considers that were depraved and antithetical to the Christian message. There is so little nuance about the historical, geographic, cultural, linguistic, and contextual differences of the different eras and personalities that he profiles, however, that this main argument is seriously weakened. For example, while it is true that "there was a great deal of hostility among the early Christian writers towards some of the music in the world around them" (p. 131), when he cites James McKinnon as characterizing the polemic against pagan music as "uniform and vehement" (pp. 86, 131), Stapert fails to mentions that McKinnon is writing particularly about instrumental music.

To suggest that Christianity rejected the musics of its various contexts is ethnomusicologically untenable. Stapert, for example, emphasizes the value that that early Christian writers place on emerging hymnody. He never recognizes that Christian hymns are works of metric poetry that are based on poetic models from the Greco-Roman world. While we are not sure exactly how Christian hymns "sounded," to suggest that they employed a totally different musical vocabulary to reject that of their surrounding cultures is implausible.

One reason for an absence of a more nuanced approach to the musical cultural contexts under consideration is the supporting bibliography, all of which is in English (even the primary sources) and is often quite dated. Multiple sources are over forty years old, e.g., the first book cited in chapter 1, The Spreading Flame, a history of the early Church from 1958; some historical sources are over one hundred years old. While an overview volume on musical thought in the early Church is a terrific idea, it will require different methods if it is to be historically credible and pastorally influential.