“Two of the earliest references to hymnody in Christian worship, the ‘spiritual songs’ of Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16 both appear in the context of advice to householders for maintaining an unimpeachable standard of conduct. Within three verses of counselling these spiritual songs the author of Ephesians is advising women to be obedient to their husbands, and having elaborated that theme he turns to the duties of children who should obey their parents, fathers who should be mild to their offspring and slaves who should be obedient to their masters. Often quoted out of context, the reference to hymnody in Ephesians is actually embedded in one of the so-called household codes.
“Why did such Christians have ritual song? The search for an answer can best begin with the earliest information about the forms household worship could take, all contained in Paul’s First Letter to the Church of Corinth. On one hand, Paul found the meals of the Corinthians too strict because they tended to preserve the social hierarchies of Hellenistic dining: the guests brought their own food during the Lord’s Supper whence the poorer members were thinly supplied and shamed (11:21–2). On the other hand, however, Paul believed some aspects of Corinthian worship were disturbingly informal. The meals were sometimes eaten without due recollection of the words of institution, painstakingly repeated by Paul at 11:23–5, and men attended the gatherings with their heads covered, women with their hair loose (11:4–7). Any member might bring something to worship so that a service was gathered from individual contributions like the food brought for the Lord’s Supper. The contributions could include a psalm, some perhaps new compositions, others the Davidic poems so vital to the effort of Jesus-believing Jews and Gentiles to understand the life and death of Jesus secundum scripturas and to debate with detractors or potential converts. The general context of this worship, when all the elements were assembled (one might say tabled), was seemingly fervent. It welcomed spontaneous interventions from those moved by the Spirit to prophesy or to speak in tongues, sometimes with results that were not always interpreted for the edification of the community. ‘Yet in the church’, says Paul, ‘I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue (14:19).
“Paul is not exactly describing a ritual here. There is no developed a sense of worship organized into a fixed sequence of words, gestures and events. Yet it is fundamental to most forms of religious ritual that predictability and repetition carry the principal burden of meaning, not surprise and innovation. Ritual often requires ‘an accepted conventional procedure having a certain conventional effect, the procedure to include the uttering of certain words by certain persons in certain circumstances.’ In contrast, the worship at Corinth included interventions that were valued (but not by Paul) because they arose from motions of the Holy Spirit beyond the control of any present. The results could be formalized in the ceremony of interpretation when the language of tongues was translated into intelligible speech, but the Corinthian believers were not always minded to take that step, or so Paul’s account suggests. Fervent commitment was still more important at their meetings than a show of acceptance. Religious ritual often provides a formalized sequence of words and gestures that everyone present accepts as authoritative and beyond disruption; formalization is vital for the worshipers to sense that quotidian experience has been momentarily suspended, that time is passing in a sanctified way, and that they may be approaching (as they are certainly invoking) the presence of the divine. Those who participate in ritual can momentarily transcend their doubts, or come to terms with their own want of fervency, by simply being present during the event and by accepting what is going forward. Participation ‘in liturgical performance may be highly visible, [yet] it is not very profound, for it neither indicates nor does it necessarily produce an inward state conforming to it’. The Christians of Corinth were much concerned with belief-producing or belief-confirming events such as prophecy and speaking in tongues, but there was not much place for a formalized liturgy as yet that marked a simple acceptance.
“Yet no matter how much worship may seek to establish a connection with divine power(s) too terrible or magnificent to be met with mere diligence and custom, hymnody contains the seed of a ritualizing process. Music is one of the most widespread ways in which communities at worship creates sequences of formalized actions and words. Song can be used to distinguish ministers with the right to sing certain interventions from those who are sanctioned to use their voice only somewhere else in the service, perhaps in a much less prominent way. Music is therefore a prime source of the roles, and the proprietary rights to use certain forms of words, that are fundamental to many forms of ritual. At the same time, however, song allows those roles to be established in a way that bonds the community, and the authority of those with special ritual tasks to perform is therefore confirmed precisely because it helps to establish a commonwealth of worship.
“This is because song has the power to abolish the familiar distinction between speaker and interlocutor established by speech. The reasons for this are poorly understood, and are ultimately a matter for psycho-acousticians to explain, but they are clearly registered in a simple and familiar contrast: singing to oneself is commonly regarded as a sign of insouciance whereas talking to oneself is popularly construed as the first mark of madness. It is arguably the presence of musical pitch that makes the cardinal difference, the organized and stabilized frequencies somehow working against the analytical categories of you and me established in speech:
“People sing to make sure, through direct experience, of their existence in a layer of reality different from the one in which they encounter each other and things as speakers, as facing one another and separate from one another — in order to be aware of their existence in a place where distinction and separation of man and man, man and thing, thing and thing, gives way to unity, to authentic togetherness.
“This manages to be both perplexing and persuasive. Music can weaken the listener’s default sense of language as an altercation demanding a calculated response. Its scaler patterns efface the swooping flight of intonation and speech so effectively that the transient impressions of daily existence associated with the pitch cues of speech patterns disappear; thus song can offer a release from evanescent associations and even from the fundamental structures of speaking self and listening other. This sense of unity can be fervent, but it does not have to be so. To sing in company with others is to participate in ways that may range from near vacuity of mind, the lips barely moving, to a state where music may seem to carry the singer beyond words altogether. Christian writings of the first millennium are thinly strewn with attempts to explain these things. In melodies, wrote Isidore of Seville soon after 600, ‘the divine words more readily and ardently stir our minds to piety when they are sung than when they are not.’ Why should this be so? Even a scholar whose principal work remained in use for a thousand years did not care to answer that question.”
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Christopher Page, The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years (Yale University Press, 2010)
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