The New Song

Amphion of Thebes and Arion of Methymna were both musicians, and both are famous in the old stories. The Greeks still sing of them in chorus to this day: the one for drawing the fish to himself, the other for ringing Thebes with walls by the power of music. There was another, a Thracian, an expert at his craft — he belongs to a Greek legend too — who tamed wild animals by nothing but song, and moved trees, oak trees, by music. I could tell you about one more, a brother to these, a musician out of a story: Eunomos of Locri and the cicada of Pytho. A solemn Greek assembly had gathered at Pytho to mark the death of the Pythian serpent, and Eunomos was singing the snake’s funeral song. Whether his piece was a hymn in the serpent’s honor or a lament, I cannot say. But there was a contest, and Eunomos was playing his lyre in the heat of summer — the season when the cicadas, warmed by the sun, are chirping under the leaves all along the hills. They were not singing to that dead dragon. They were singing to God, who is all-wise — a song bound by no rule, and better than Eunomos’s measures. A string on the Locrian’s lyre snapped. The cicada jumped onto the neck of the instrument and sang there as though on a branch, and the musician, fitting his melody to the cicada’s song, made up for the missing string. So it was not Eunomos’s playing that drew the cicada, as the story would have it — the story behind the bronze statue set up at Pytho, showing Eunomos with his lyre and his ally in the contest. But the cicada flew to the lyre of its own accord, and of its own accord sang, and the Greeks took it for a musician.

How is it, then, that you have believed empty stories and supposed that animals can be charmed by music, while the shining face of Truth alone seems to you a disguise, and you look at her with disbelieving eyes? So Cithaeron and Helicon and the mountains of the Odrysians and the Thracians — places of initiation into deceit — are treated as holy because of their mysteries, and celebrated in hymns. For my part, the disasters that make the plots of tragedy give me pain, though they are only stories; but with you the records of human misery have been turned into stage plays, and the actors in those plays into entertainment.

Well then: let us crown the plays and the raving poets — thoroughly drunk by now — with ivy, and pack them off, out of their minds as they are, in Bacchic style with their satyrs and their frenzied crowd and the rest of the demon company, to Cithaeron and Helicon, which are out of date. But let us bring Truth down from above, out of heaven, with Wisdom in all her brightness and the holy chorus of the prophets, to the holy mountain of God. Let Truth shoot her light out to the farthest points and cast her rays all around on those who are wrapped in darkness, and rescue people from their delusion, stretching out her strongest hand — which is wisdom — to save them. Let them raise their eyes and look up; let them leave Helicon and Cithaeron behind and settle on Zion. “For out of Zion the law will go out, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem” — the Word from heaven, the true athlete crowned in the theater of the whole universe. What my own Eunomos sings is not the measure of Terpander or of Capito, not the Phrygian or the Lydian or the Dorian, but the deathless measure of the new harmony that carries God’s name: the new song, the song of the Levites.

A sweet and genuine medicine for grief is mixed into this song. So to me that Thracian Orpheus, and the Theban, and the man of Methymna — men who do not deserve the name — look like frauds. Under cover of poetry they ruined human life. Possessed by a spirit of clever sorcery bent on destruction, singing crimes in their rites and making human suffering into an act of worship, they were the first to lure people to idols. Worse: they built up the stupidity of custom out of blocks of wood and stone — that is, statues and images — and with their songs and their spells they put under the yoke of the harshest slavery the truly noble freedom of people who had lived as free citizens under the open sky. My song is nothing like that. It has come to break the bitter slavery of the tyrant demons, and to break it quickly; it brings us back under the gentle and kindly yoke of reverence for God, and calls back to heaven those who had been thrown down flat on the earth. It alone has tamed human beings, the hardest animals of all to handle: the flighty among them answer to the birds of the air, the deceivers to reptiles, the hot-tempered to lions, the pleasure-lovers to pigs, the greedy to wolves. The empty-headed are logs and stones, and a man soaked in ignorance is duller than a stone. As our witness, let us bring in the voice of prophecy, which agrees with the truth and mourns over those crushed under ignorance and folly: “For God is able to raise up children for Abraham out of these stones.” And he, pitying their great ignorance and the hardness of heart that had turned them to stone against the truth, raised up out of those stones — that is, out of the nations, who put their trust in stones — a stock of people who revere God and can feel the pull of goodness. Again, some poisonous, lying hypocrites who plotted against righteousness he once called “a brood of vipers.” But if even one of those snakes is willing to repent and follow the Word, he becomes a man of God.

Others he calls, in a figure, wolves in sheepskins — meaning creatures in human shape with the greed of beasts. And all these most savage animals, and all these blocks of stone, the song from heaven has changed into people you can deal with. “For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, misled, enslaved to all kinds of cravings and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hated and hating one another.” So the apostolic writing says: “But when the kindness of God our Savior appeared, and his love for people, he saved us — not because of anything we had done in righteousness, but according to his mercy.” Look at the power of the new song! It has made people out of stones, people out of beasts. And those who were as good as dead, with no share in real life, came back to life simply by becoming listeners to this song.

It also composed the universe into an ordered melody, and tuned the quarrel of the elements into an arrangement that agrees with itself, so that the whole world might be a harmony. It let the ocean run loose, and yet has kept it from overrunning the land. The earth, which was heaving, it settled and fixed, and made the sea its boundary. It softened the violence of fire with the air, the way the Dorian is blended with the Lydian, and it tempered the biting cold of the air by wrapping fire around it, tuning to each other these outermost notes of the universe. And this undying strain — the support of the whole and the harmony of everything — reaching from the center to the rim and from the edges back to the middle, has brought this whole frame of things into tune: not by the music of Thrace, which is like the music Jubal invented, but by the fatherly purpose of God, the purpose that fired David’s zeal.

And the one who is from David and yet before David, the Word of God, has no use for lyre or harp — they are lifeless instruments. He has tuned the universe by the Holy Spirit, and man in particular. Man is made of body and soul, and is a universe in miniature; on this instrument of many notes he makes his music to God, and to this instrument — I mean man — he sings in accompaniment: “For you are my harp, my pipe, and my temple.” A harp, for the harmony; a pipe, because of the breath of the Spirit; a temple, because of the word — so that the first may sound, the second breathe, and the third hold the Lord. And King David, the harper I mentioned a moment ago, who urged people toward the truth and away from idols, was so far from singing in honor of demons that in fact his music drove them off. When Saul was tormented by a demon, David cured him simply by playing. A beautiful breathing instrument of music is what the Lord made man to be, after his own image. And he himself, surely — the Wisdom that is above this world, the Word from heaven — is God’s own instrument, all-harmonious, tuneful, holy. What, then, does this instrument want, the Word of God, the Lord, the New Song? To open blind eyes, to unstop deaf ears, to bring the lame — or the wandering — to righteousness; to show God to the foolish, to put an end to corruption, to defeat death, to reconcile disobedient children to their Father. The instrument of God loves human beings. The Lord pities, teaches, urges, warns, saves, protects, and out of sheer generosity promises us the kingdom of heaven as the reward for learning; and the only profit he takes is that we are saved. For wickedness feeds on people’s ruin, but truth, like the bee, harms nothing and delights only in saving people.

So you have God’s promise; you have his love. Take your share of his grace. And do not suppose that the song of salvation is new the way a pot or a house is new. For “before the morning star it was,” and “in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Error looks old; truth looks new. Whether, then, the Phrygians turn out to be the oldest people, by the story of the goats; or the Arcadians, according to the poets, who make them older than the moon; or the Egyptians, according to those who dream that their country was the first to bring forth gods and men — not one of them existed before the world. But we existed before the world was laid down: we who, because we were meant to be in him, already were in God’s sight beforehand — we, the reasoning creatures shaped by the Word of God, on whose account we date from the beginning, for “in the beginning was the Word.” Now, insofar as the Word was there from the first, he was and is the divine source of all things; but insofar as he has now taken the name Christ, a name hallowed long ago and worthy of power, I have called him the New Song. This Word, then, the Christ, is the reason both that we exist at all (for he was in God) and that we live well; and this same Word has now appeared as a man — the only one who is both, both God and man — the source of every good thing for us. Through him we are taught to live well and sent on our way to life that never ends. As that inspired apostle of the Lord says: “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all people, training us to renounce godlessness and worldly cravings and to live sensibly, righteously, and devoutly in this present age, looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of the great God and our Savior Jesus Christ.”

This is the New Song: the shining out of the Word who was in the beginning, and before the beginning. The Savior, who existed before, has appeared in these recent days. He who is in the One who truly is has appeared; for the Word, who “was with God,” the Word by whom everything was made, has appeared as our Teacher. The Word who at the beginning gave us life, as our Maker, when he formed us, taught us to live well when he appeared as our Teacher, so that afterward, as God, he might bring us to the life that has no end. It is not now, for the first time, that he pitied us in our wandering; he pitied us from the first, from the beginning. But now, at his appearing, when we were already lost, he accomplished our salvation. For that wicked reptile, that monster, enslaves and torments people by his spells even now, taking a barbarous revenge on them — like those, it seems to me, who are said to tie their prisoners to corpses and leave them to rot together. This wicked tyrant and snake binds fast with the wretched chain of superstition whomever he can drag over to his side from birth — binds them to stones and logs and images and idols of that kind — and it is fair to say that he has taken living people and buried them with those dead idols, until the two decay together.

So, since the seducer is one and the same, the one who at the beginning brought Eve down to death is now bringing the rest of humanity down there too. And our ally and helper is likewise one and the same: the Lord, who from the beginning gave revelations through prophecy and now calls plainly to salvation. Following the apostle’s instruction, then, let us run from “the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience,” and let us run to the Lord our Savior, who is urging us toward salvation now, as he always has — as he did with signs and wonders in Egypt and in the desert, both through the bush and through the cloud, which by the favor of God’s love waited on the Hebrews like a servant girl. By the fear these produced he addressed the hard-hearted; but through Moses, trained in all wisdom, and Isaiah, who loved the truth, and the whole chorus of the prophets, he turned those who have ears to hear toward the Word in a way that appeals to reason. Sometimes he scolds; sometimes he threatens. Some people he mourns over, and to others he sings — just as a good doctor treats one patient with poultices, another with rubbing, another with warm compresses; opens one up with the knife, burns another, cuts a limb off a third, all in the hope of restoring the man to health, even at the cost of a part or a limb. The Savior has many tones of voice and many methods for saving people. By threatening he warns; by scolding he turns people around; by mourning he shows pity; by singing he cheers. He spoke through the burning bush, because the people of that time needed signs and wonders.

He struck men with awe by fire when he made flame break out of the pillar of cloud — a sign of grace and of fear at once. Obey, and there is the light; disobey, and there is the fire. But since a human being is nobler than a pillar or a bush, after these the prophets spoke: the Lord himself speaking in Isaiah, in Elijah, speaking himself through the mouths of the prophets. And if you do not believe the prophets, but take both the men and the fire for a story, then the Lord himself will speak to you — he “who, being in the form of God, did not count being equal with God something to be seized, but humbled himself” — the merciful God, going to every length to save man. And now the Word himself speaks to you plainly, putting your unbelief to shame; yes, I say it: the Word of God became a man so that you might learn from a man how a man may become God. Is it not monstrous, my friends, that God never stops urging us toward goodness while we shrink from the help he offers and keep putting off our salvation?

Does not John also call people to salvation? Is he not, from beginning to end, a voice of appeal? Let us ask him, then: “Who are you, and where do you come from?” He will not say Elijah. He will deny that he is the Christ, but he will admit to being “a voice crying in the wilderness.” Who is John, then? In a word, we may say: the pleading voice of the Word, crying in the wilderness. What are you crying, voice? Tell us too. “Make the paths of the Lord straight.” John is the forerunner, and that voice is the herald of the Word — an inviting voice, getting people ready for salvation, a voice pushing them on toward their inheritance in the heavens; and through it the barren, deserted woman is childless no longer. This fruitfulness was foretold by the angel’s voice, and that voice too ran ahead of the Lord, bringing good news to the barren woman as John did to the wilderness. So it is because of this voice of the Word that the barren woman bears children and the desert becomes fruitful. The two voices that heralded the Lord’s own — the angel’s and John’s — point, I think, to the salvation stored up for us: that when this Word appeared we should reap eternal life as the harvest of that fruitfulness. Scripture makes it all clear by tying both voices to the same thing: “Let her who has not given birth hear; let her who has not had labor pains raise her voice; for the children of the deserted woman are more than the children of the woman who has a husband.”

The angel brought us the good news of a husband. John begged us to recognize the farmer, to look for the husband. For the husband of the barren woman and the farmer of the desert are one and the same — the one who filled both the barren woman and the desert with divine power. The children of the well-born mother were many, and yet the Hebrew woman, once rich in children, was left childless through unbelief; so the barren woman receives the husband, and the desert the farmer, and both become mothers through the word: the one of crops, the other of believers. But for the unbelieving, the barren woman and the desert are still what they were. This is why John, the herald of the Word, begged people to make themselves ready for the coming of the Christ of God. And this is what Zechariah’s loss of speech meant: it was waiting for fruit, in the person of the man who would run ahead of Christ, so that the Word, the light of truth, by becoming good news, might break the mysterious silence of the prophets’ riddles.

But if you really want to see God, take up purifications worthy of him. Not laurel leaves, and not headbands woven of wool and purple: wreathe your head with righteousness instead, put the leaves of self-control around it, and set yourself seriously to find Christ. “For I am,” he says, “the door” — the door that we, who want to understand God, have to find, so that he may throw heaven’s gates wide open for us. The gates of the Word are gates of the mind, and the key that opens them is faith. No one knows God except the Son, and the one to whom the Son reveals him. And I am sure that the one who has opened the door that was shut until now will afterward show what is inside, and reveal what we could not have known before, since there was no way in except through Christ, through whom alone God is seen.