Fr. Michael Doyle

“For me to live is Christ.” (Philippians 1:21)

“Rely on the Cantus Firmus.” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer)

Summary: This chapter asks what remains at the centre of a Christian life when everything else is tested, stripped away or set aside. Drawing on Michael Mayne’s The Enduring Melody and the prison writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, it takes the musical image of the cantus firmus, the “fixed song” around which a polyphonic composition is built, as a way of describing the spiritual core of a believer. The chapter moves from the deathbed, where faith often shows itself as the last thing a person holds, to the history of Western music, then to Bonhoeffer’s claim that Christ is the cantus firmus of the Christian life, and finally to the idea of congruence: the agreement between what we believe at our deepest level and how we live. The chapter argues that we need not wait for illness or death to discover our own cantus firmus, and that a life lived in dialogue with it will be a harmony, however fragmentary it may seem.

1. Introduction

Every parish priest knows a particular scene. You are called to the bedside of a dying parishioner, at home or, more often now, in a busy hospital ward. The person may barely be conscious. You administer the Sacrament of the Sick, and then you invite the distraught family to pray with you, perhaps a decade of the Rosary or the Our Father. Sometimes a small miracle happens: the dying person begins to mouth the words with you. At the very end, what remains is faith.

We do not have to wait for that hour to learn what matters most to us. Moments of insight come in many ways: on retreat, on holiday, in silent prayer before the beauty of creation, when we glimpse the “golden thread” that ties us to God and that the busyness of life usually hides. They also come in fear and distress, through a sudden diagnosis or an unplanned change of circumstances, when we find that what served us in the morning of life no longer serves in the afternoon or the evening.

The saints understand this without difficulty. Cardinal Basil Hume (1923–1999), Archbishop of Westminster, wrote to his clergy after learning he had advanced cancer. He spoke of two graces: time to prepare, and an unaccustomed calm. “The future is in the hands of God,” he wrote. In the face of a terminal diagnosis he went back to the basics of his faith.

What does this mean for those of us who are still very much alive and trying to live our faith in ordinary circumstances? The late Michael Mayne (1929–2006), former Dean of Westminster Abbey, offered a musical answer: the cantus firmus.

2. Congruence

2.1 Mayne: a test of what we believe

Mayne was a very active Anglican priest when, in late middle age, he was diagnosed with inoperable cancer of the jaw. He recognised two things from the outset. The illness would be an unwanted but real test of the integrity of what he believed, “an inquest” on all the words he had spoken from pulpits and at hospital bedsides. And he did not want to waste the experience, so he resolved to write about it honestly, day by day. Late in the book he describes such writing as “a small act of love”, a sharing of what it means to be human and what matters most.

Mayne also warns about the “shallow end” of the Church’s swimming pool, where, as one former Archbishop of Canterbury put it, all the splashing goes on. Clergy and laity alike can be absorbed by the inessential and the noisy. Only in the deeper waters of silence, prayer and attentiveness to the Holy Spirit can we hear our own cantus firmus.

2.2 The musical origin of the term

For much of the early Middle Ages, Church music was Gregorian chant: a single line of melody carrying the words of the liturgy, sung at Mass and in the Divine Office. This simple music came to be called the cantus firmus, the “fixed song.”

By the twelfth century, composers discovered that several melodies could be combined. Counterpoint and polyphony developed, and the chant did not disappear. It became the tenor line, a word that comes from the Latin for “to hold.” It held the underlying melody from which the elaboration began and to which it returned. Without it, the other voices would lose their inspiration and direction.

In a great polyphonic work the cantus firmus is often heard first. The other voices develop it, and at the end the music comes home to it. Mayne saw Bach as the master of this art, a composer who decorates and inverts the fixed melody and always returns to it. The Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) are the standard example: a theme, many variations, and a return to the theme, so that the listener feels a journey with a beginning, a middle and an end, each part belonging to the others.

2.3 Mayne’s spiritual application

By analogy, Mayne holds that each of us has a cantus firmus: the central melody of our spiritual life, which makes sense of everything else. We may only discern it as we grow older. It is “mine and mine alone,” however far we have strayed from it, and it is the ground to which we return at every stage of an unpredictable journey. For the Christian, this base note is Jesus Christ, whom Mayne calls a “self-portrait of God in human terms,” revealing God as Father and love as God’s nature. We may not use Mayne’s Trinitarian language, but in whatever words, this is the bedrock around which everything else should harmonise.

2.4 Bonhoeffer: the source of the image

Mayne draws on Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945), who first used the term analogically for the Christian life. Bonhoeffer was born into a cultured, musical Berlin family, the sixth of eight children (four boys and four girls), and was gifted enough to be steered toward music. He chose theology instead, took his doctorate at twenty-one, and taught in Germany and briefly abroad. When Hitler came to power in 1933 he saw the totalitarian character of the regime and joined those in the German Evangelical Church who resisted its takeover of the Church’s message. He was eventually arrested, and in prison wrote the pieces later published as Letters and Papers from Prison, now regarded by many as a modern spiritual classic.

In prison, Bonhoeffer brought together two things he loved, theology and music. He saw music as part of Bildung, education and the formation of character in a spiritual as well as cultural sense. In 1944, writing for the baptism of his friend Eberhard Bethge’s infant son, he hoped that music would bring the child “from confusion to your clearest self” and from cares “to the underlying note of joy.” The German word is Grundton, the tonic of a scale or root of a chord. It is an early form of what would become the cantus firmus of the prison letters.

Bonhoeffer turned to the Lutheran hymnody that had formed him, and it sustained him. In music he found an analogy for Christian life in a fractured world: polyphony and cantus firmus offered what has been called an “exceptional prophetic possibility.” For him the cantus firmus in each Christian life is Christ. The closer we stay in dialogue with it, the more harmonious the polyphony of our lives.

Polyphony here does not mean life without conflict. As Andreas Pangritz notes, it includes light and shadow, love and suffering, longing and passion amid crisis, and both aspects of hope: resistance to fate and submission to God’s will. Shortly before his death, Bonhoeffer wrote that God wants to be loved with our whole heart, not at the expense of earthly love, but as a cantus firmus against which the other voices of life sound as counterpoint. Where the cantus firmus is clear, counterpoint can develop as fully as it wishes. The two are “undivided yet distinct,” as Chalcedon says of the divine and human natures of Christ. Polyphony may delight us because it is a musical image of that Christological fact, and so of our vita christiana.

2.5 Congruence

In my work as a priest and formation advisor at Allen Hall Seminary in London, I often speak to seminarians of congruence, the agreement of two things so that they can coexist without difficulty. I mean that what a man presents to the world in his actions, speech and behaviour must be congruent with what he believes at the deepest level of his being. When there is a clear route between his spiritual bedrock and his daily conduct, he enjoys unity of purpose, peace and simplicity. When that route breaks down, a double life can develop, and it always ends in some form of discord.

I was aware of this before I read Mayne and Bonhoeffer. Their language gave it a richer name: our outward life should be in harmony with our spiritual core, the person and teaching of Jesus Christ. If we are faithful to the cantus firmus, the polyphony of our lives will stay in tune.

3. Consequences

3.1 Theoretical consequences

  1. Christ-centred identity. The spiritual life is not a collection of devotions and duties. It is a single organising centre, Christ, from which everything else takes its direction and to which it returns. This links the metaphor to Paul’s “It is no longer I that live but Christ that lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).
  2. Unity without uniformity. Bonhoeffer’s polyphony, like the Chalcedonian formula, holds together what is distinct. Earthly loves, vocations and experiences keep their full independence yet are related to the centre. Faith does not diminish human life. It lets human life sound fully.
  3. Fragmentariness and hope. Bonhoeffer’s reflection on the Art of Fugue, a work that stays unfinished, suggests that a life may be fragmentary and still meaningful if its themes accumulate and harmonise, because only God can complete it. The Christian answer to a broken or incomplete life is not complaint but gratitude and trust.
  4. Faith as test and revelation. Illness, change and crisis do not create the cantus firmus. They reveal whether one exists and what it is. Mayne’s “inquest” on his own words shows that belief is tested by what we can still hold when circumstances change.

3.2 Practical consequences

  1. Seek the cantus firmus now. We need not wait for the deathbed. The questions are simple: What gives spiritual energy to my life? What gives life to yours? How do these core beliefs shape what I actually do?
  2. Leave the shallow end. Regular silence, prayer and attention to the Holy Spirit are the way into the deeper water where the fixed song can be heard. The more we return to Christ in prayer, the richer the harmony of life on every level.
  3. Test for congruence. Ask honestly whether there is a clear route between what I believe and how I behave. Where they diverge, the task is to bring conduct back into tune with the centre, not to quiet the centre.
  4. Formation of priests and all believers. Formation is not only the acquisition of knowledge or skills but the education of the whole person so that outward life expresses inward faith.
  5. Pastoral presence. Because faith can be the last thing a dying person holds, simple, familiar prayers matter greatly at the bedside. They speak to the cantus firmus itself.

4. Conclusion

At the bedside, in the hospital ward, the cantus firmus can be heard in its plainest form: a person who has little else left, mouthing the Our Father. Mayne and Bonhoeffer teach that this melody has been there all along, underneath the variations of a whole life. Our task is to listen for it now, to let Christ be the ground to which we return, and to let the counterpoint of work, love, suffering and joy sound against it without fear. A life so ordered may remain a fragment, but it will be a fragment that has its theme, its harmony and its end in God. Bonhoeffer leaves us a final word: it is not for us to complain about the fragmentary character of our lives, but to be glad for it.

Notes

  1. Basil Cardinal Hume, “Letter to the priests and deacons of the Archdiocese of Westminster,” London, 1999.
  2. Michael Mayne, The Enduring Melody (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2006), 29.
  3. Mayne, The Enduring Melody, 237.
  4. Mayne, The Enduring Melody, ix (foreword by Fr. Gerard Hughes S.J., quoting William Byrd).
  5. Mayne, The Enduring Melody, 3.
  6. Mayne, The Enduring Melody, 4.
  7. Johann Sebastian Bach, The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, 1741.
  8. Mayne, The Enduring Melody. [Page number to be supplied.]
  9. Mayne, The Enduring Melody, 9.
  10. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (SCM Press, 1953), 101.
  11. David E. Timmer, “The Underlying Note of Joy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Musical Theology,” Reformed Journal, April 2021, 3.
  12. Robert O. Smith, “Bonhoeffer and Musical Metaphors,” Word and World 26, no. 2 (Spring 2006).
  13. David F. Ford, Self and Salvation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
  14. Andreas Pangritz, The Polyphony of Life: Bonhoeffer’s Theology of Music (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019).
  15. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 106–107.
  16. Cambridge Dictionary, “congruence.”
  17. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 70–71.

Bibliography

  • Bach, Johann Sebastian. Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, 1741.
  • Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Letters and Papers from Prison. London: SCM Press, 1953.
  • Cambridge Dictionary. “Congruence.”
  • Ford, David F. Self and Salvation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
  • Hume, Basil Cardinal. “Letter to the priests and deacons of the Archdiocese of Westminster.” London, 1999.
  • Mayne, Michael. The Enduring Melody. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2006.
  • Pangritz, Andreas. The Polyphony of Life: Bonhoeffer’s Theology of Music. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019.
  • Smith, Robert O. “Bonhoeffer and Musical Metaphors.” Word and World 26, no. 2 (Spring 2006).
  • Timmer, David E. “The Underlying Note of Joy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Musical Theology.” Reformed Journal, April 2021.