9 June 2025 – Now, what do I feel about God and Religion?

Nowadays, Nietzsche is famous for having said: ‘God is dead, and we have killed him!’  Without doubt, the poetry from his ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’, as set to music by Frederick Delius in his ‘A Mass of Life’, strongly proposes and supports the end of Religion and the total annihilation of the Christian, and Westernized concept of God.

[There are plenty of examples of so-called ‘Concert Masses’ with the text of the Latin Mass, set to music by composers who do not declare any specific religious affiliation or commitment – e.g.  Beethoven’s two Masses, Guiseppi Verdi’s famous ‘Requiem’, Ralph Vaughan Williams ‘Mass in G’, to name just a few.  So do composers and performers need to believe in God in order to create and perform music which has clear ‘religious’ connections?]

Why did Delius append the title ‘Mass’ to his ‘magnum opus’ ‘A Mass of Life’ when the text (libretto) is rooted in a firm denial of both ‘Religion’ and the existence of ‘God’?

Of course, Nietzsche was thorough-going and determined in his dissection of religion.  However, if you deny God and yet still wish to retain all the ethics and moral structures of society which have come into being under the influence of Christianity, this is ‘playing safe’ and ‘having your cake and eating it’.  Nietzsche, rather, has ‘gone all the way’, without holding back at any point. He had a mighty ‘bust up’ with Richard Wagner over this!

So, is Delius ‘holding back’ at all, especially by using the title ‘Mass’?

Does his music reflect and resonate this sense of ‘holding back’?

Here, then, are some of my current thoughts, jumbled together.  However, at this moment in time, by facing up to the ‘question’ of God in earnest, I’m feeling drawn to SILENCE!

What can a violin write about, play about, sing about, dance about now?

I can only leave you with a couple of quotations recently discovered:

“But in getting rid of the God of Christendom, Nietzsche warns us, we do not worship Nothing (Nihil).  Many less worthy gods fill the vacuum like evil spirits in Jesus’ parable. So, the question is not whether God exists, but what do we worship as God? Nietzsche’s project is to find the “true, noble God” and therefore a new basis for ethics and aesthetics “beyond good and evil.” But what if there is Nothing in that space? Both Nietzsche’s life and that of Leverkühn’s* disintegrate, not when they reach out to take hold of transcendence, but when they discover there is no transcendence, nothing to assuage their restless longing for the ultimate, only silence”.

• A reference to the novel ‘Doctor Faustus’ by Thomas Mann
  
  — Polyphonie der Theologie: Verantwortung und Widerstand in Kirche und Politik by Matthias Grebe, Gerhard Jankowski, et al.

As your violin, it may be a little while before I make further entries in this my ‘Diary’, but please feel free to scan back over my seventy-odd posts and pages, and keep in touch with any comments.  I am continuing to ‘reach out to take hold of transcendence’, that’s for sure! Even if there’s an apparent absence of sound……….!