As Christians, we don’t typically view music the way we view activities like recreational sex or drunk driving. While Christian morality warns against fornication and drunkenness, the Bible abounds with favorable references to music. “Shout joyfully to the Lord, all you lands . . . come before him with joyful song,” sings one of many jubilant psalms. David soothes the restless Saul with his harp playing, and angels sing at the birth of Jesus. Every Sunday in church, Catholics sing the Gloria, creed, and “Lamb of God.” The Catholic attitude toward music would seem to be unambiguously positive.
That hasn’t always been the case. Some early church fathers, while accepting liturgical chanting as legitimate, wrote against contemporary musical tastes. Clement of Alexander railed against those Christians who outside the church walls indulged in “impious playing, and amatory quavering, occupied with flute-playing, and dancing, and intoxication, and all kinds of trash.” Similarly, St. Jerome and St. Basil of Caesarea similarly discerned in the music of the day a temptation to frivolity and theatricality at odds with true worship. In his Confessions, St. Augustine ruminated over the place of music in a Christian’s life, worrying that listeners would succumb, like he himself had on occasion, to song’s sensual pleasure. “Thus,” he writes, “I fluctuate between the peril of indulgence and the profit I have found [in sacred music].” Such ambiguity led Christianity to distinguish “sacred” music, which, defined by Aquinas later on, was God-centered and encouraged devotion, from what we would now call “secular” music.
I converted to Catholicism when I was 24 but have been listening to music far longer. In my library there’s a playlist entitled “LOGOS,” a hundred or so songs whose lyrics, melody, and atmosphere evoke a sense of mystery I have come to associate with God (for reference, Bach, Bob Dylan, and Deerhunter are featured). Some of this music would seem to be secular, with little to no explicit references to Jesus or God, a world away from most music heard at Mass. By the standards of the church fathers, some of this music might be considered frivolous or even spiritually dangerous.
The culture of medieval Europe offers a different perspective. In the Middle Ages, the distinction between sacred and secular music was blurred. Shaped by the Rule of St. Benedict and given early impetus by the sociopolitical stability of the Carolingian empire, sacred music in this era reached a particular highpoint in St. Hildegard of Bingen, the German Benedictine abbess and doctor of the church whose musical compositions continue to be studied and performed. A recent stunning performance by the Slovenian St. Stanislav’s Girls Choir, for instance, shows how her music resounds into the 21st century.
If Augustine brooded over the beauty and danger of music’s power, Hildegard embraced it wholeheartedly as something sacramental, reenchanting creation with the perceptible presence of God. “Music,” she said, “is the echo of the glory and beauty of heaven.” According to the International Society of Hildegard, music for her was a graced instrument of salvation, intimately related to the Word which sung creation into being and was at work drawing divine harmony from a damaged and dissonant world. Music—as Opus Dei, the work of God characteristic of Hildegard’s Benedictine tradition—was an especially intimate way of participating in the life of God.
That sacramental understanding of the world shared by Hildegard and Aquinas, in which sacred music played an essential part, is not quite so prevalent today. A quick tour of Spotify would reveal a bewildering diversity of instrumentation, lyrical motifs, and worldviews, part of a wider contemporary tension between sacred and secular. This presents a challenge for a Catholic’s relationship to music today. What, from a Catholic standpoint, is “good” or “bad” music?
Painting with a broad brush, a common rule of thumb, going back to Aquinas, is that if it encourages devotion, then it’s good. (He defined devotion as the joyful willingness to give oneself totally to God). This offers some objective criteria and helps pilot past the in-your-face sexuality and unrestrained egotism in much of today’s pop tastes.
Despite its advantages, this approach struggles to account for the symphonic and often fugitive nature of musical beauty, as well as its relationship to devotion. As an example, take the song “Hurt” by Nine Inch Nails. Stark yet beautiful, the original features frontman Trent Reznor singing, “I wear this crown of shit/Upon my liar’s chair/Full of broken thoughts/I cannot repair.” Imagine that as a communion hymn! Then consider the cover version by country icon Johnny Cash. Inserting acoustic guitar and his unmistakable baritone, Cash’s only lyrical change was “crown of shit” to “crown of thorns.”
The accompanying music video (justly popular, viewed a quarter of a billion times) plays as a memento mori, a Christian’s haunted recollection of the past; featuring the same melody and almost the same lyrics, the cover transposes the original’s slow burn of despair to an old man’s wrestling with regret, death, and faith. Should we permit Cash’s version because it’s sung by a Christian and dismiss Reznor’s because it’s not? Or does music transcend the sacred-profane divide and force a more dynamic inquiry into what devotion is?
The latter is the position of the authors David Brown and Gavin Hopps in The Extravagance of Music (Springer International Publishing). They develop theologian Jean-Luc Marion’s notion of “saturated phenomenon,” something so excessively revelatory it overflows typical conceptual frameworks. The experience of God would be one such phenomenon; so would music. Despite his handwringing in Confessions, Augustine touches upon such excessiveness in his commentary on Psalm 100, associating it with “jubilation,” the exultant song of those who work and love God’s creation. “When then are we jubilant? When we praise that which cannot be uttered.” We might understand music as just that sort of praise, an activity cultivating prayerfulness—that is, openness, attentiveness, and awe—toward God.
Baptizing the imagination, in the words of C. S. Lewis, music’s jubilance initiates us into a mysterious intimacy and transcendence that even nonbelievers might be sympathetic to. As it was for Hildegard, music at its deepest is a sacramental undertaking pointing to some divine harmony, correlating well with the theory that music originated in our ancestors’ attempts to communicate with the divine, as if the human voice has always been pilgriming the air, seeking the holy in all places and at all times.
Listening to music, both sacred and secular, is a devotional act for me, and my musical library is a peculiar and personal kind of psalter, celebrating and lamenting the life I’ve been given, happy moments or dreadful but secondary in light of the prayerfulness of music. What seems to matter is that in listening to these songs, I return to myself out of the scatteredness which compromises the singleheartedness and simplicity of faith, toward a vista of memory so unsearchably vast it leads me to wonder, alongside Augustine and Hildegard and so many others before, “Who are you that created this world so enchantedly beautiful all I want to do is listen? How do I know you? How do I love you?”
This article also appears in the March 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 3, pages 45-46). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Unsplash/Nellie Adamyan
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