Herr Gott, dich loben wir

This text has been translated with DeepL (www.deepl.com).

Florian Werner

Have you praised today?

On Cantata BWV 16: ‘Lord God, we praise you’

A paw. The clawed paw of a bear. It hovers in the air, ready to strike, right next to the head of a little boy. He grins. Apparently, he has no idea of the danger threatening his cheek. He clearly knows nothing of the violent blow he is about to receive, which cannot adequately be described as a “slap in the face”. He is probably unaware of any danger or even guilt; perhaps he is even expecting encouragement — because beneath him and the paw is the question: “Have you praised your child today?”

That’s the first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word “praise”. It’s a sticker that was displayed on the tailgate of a neighbour’s car during my childhood, right next to the sticker with the stylised cannabis leaf and the warning slogan “Drugs kill!” Unlike the anti-drug sticker, the black educational sticker was certainly meant to be ironic — a “side swipe” at the excesses of anti-authoritarian parenting. Childish self-determination? Positive reinforcement? Oh, come on! Children don’t need praise, they need a good telling-off every now and then. A slap in the face has never hurt anyone, and light blows to the back of the head stimulate the mind.

It should be noted that I grew up in the 1980s in a region of southern Germany that is completely unsuspicious of an exaggerated affinity for praise and whose anti-laudatory attitude is best summed up in the dialect saying: Ned gschompfa isch globt gnuag. I should also mention that I spent many years of my otherwise happy childhood in a Protestant boys’ choir, where the Almighty was praised several times a week — in rehearsals, concerts and church services — but where this praise was primarily a technical matter. The decisive factor was not a feeling of gratitude, heartfelt emotion or a desire to praise — the decisive factor was that the diphthongs were articulated wide open, unlike in standard Swabian, so that one did not sing jåuchzen and prėisen, but ja-ochzen and prai-esen. And that the vowels in melismatic passages were not aspirated when changing notes. So instead of singing lo-ho-ho-ho-hoben, they sang looooooooooben.

Perhaps it is because of this childhood choir experience that I am rather sceptical about praise in general and praise of God in particular. And it is certainly due to the anti-anti-authoritarian sticker described above that praise has always seemed to me to be a strangely asymmetrical speech act. In order for praise to be given, there must always be a hierarchy, a social, professional, familial or educational inequality. A father praises his son (or not). A boss praises her employees, a teacher her pupils, a coach his team, a conductor (hopefully, if they don’t aspirate the vowels!) his choristers. But God? Why on earth should one praise God? Does it make him happy? Does it confirm his omnipotence? Does he need this kind of encouragement from such vain, sinful beings born above the grave and doomed to imminent death, decay and disappearance, as we humans are? By what right, with what presumption, should we praise someone who stands so high above us? Is it even possible to praise someone above us?

Which leads me to another question that we as modern humans inevitably have to ask ourselves — namely, whether the one we mean to praise even exists. And if he does exist, whether he can hear us; and if he can hear us, whether he answers us. Or whether what we call “God” is not rather a god-shaped void, a blind spot in the firmament, an abyss of silence, as described by the French philosopher Bruno Latour. “The ‘God’ who was invoked has no hands, no eyes, no ears, and his mouth is closed forever,” writes Latour: “I hear my own voice, and only my own, when I let it echo in the lonely church.” The absurd situation of modern man, to paraphrase a central tenet of existentialism, is that man praises and God remains silent.

A claw. The split hoof of a cow. He has just catapulted the half-tonne frame of the domestic bovine skywards with a determined movement, and now it seems to float for a brief moment, to remain weightless in the air — before gravity takes its toll and the cow’s foot, along with the cow itself, comes crashing down onto the pasture with a dull thud. The earth could open up under this force, but it remains closed — instead, the cow’s mouth opens and it bellowed loudly and audibly: Mooooo!

That’s the second thing that comes to mind when I hear the word “praise”: cows — or, as they are sometimes still called in Alemannic and Romance-speaking regions today: Loben. More precisely, I think of cows frolicking in the pasture, or even more precisely: cows jumping ecstatically through the vegetation under the influence of human a cappella singing, inspired by the power of music, thrilled by the wonderful chords sung by their shepherds. I am referring to the so-called Ranz des vaches or cow calls, which were traditionally sung in Switzerland to call cows to be milked. And at the risk of carrying coals to Newcastle, or rather, cows to Trogen — and furthermore, making a fool of myself with incorrect pronunciation — I would like to quote the refrain of the most famous cow call: “Lyôba, lyôba, por aryâ!”, roughly translated as “Cows, cows, come to be milked!”

The oldest known version of this song dates from 1730 – the cantata “Herr Gott, dich loben wir” (Lord God, we praise you) is therefore only four years older. However, cow calls had a dubious reputation at the time: they were said to trigger acute cases of homesickness among Swiss mercenaries serving abroad. At the end of the 18th century, the German physician Johann Gottfried Ebel wrote in his book “Description of the Mountain Peoples of Switzerland”: “When the Swiss regiments in France played or sang cowbell songs, the sons of the Alps burst into tears and, as if struck by an epidemic, suddenly fell into such homesickness that they deserted or died if they could not return to their homeland.”

And it wasn’t just people — Swiss cows also apparently went mad with longing when they were moved to a neighbouring canton and confronted with cowbells there. Ebel writes: “When cows from Alpine breeding, removed from their native land, hear this song, all the images of their former condition suddenly seem to come alive in their brains and arouse a kind of homesickness; they immediately throw their tails up in the air, start running, break all fences and gates, and become wild and frenzied. This is why it is forbidden to sing cowherds’ songs in the St. Gallen area, where Appenzell cows that have been purchased often graze in meadows.”

Wild and frenzied? I am no cow psychologist, but I think that Ebel is interpreting the body language of cows too negatively here. Anyone who has ever seen cattle being allowed back out to pasture for the first time in spring, seeing the sun with wide eyes after the dark season, taking their first steps of freedom with legs stiff from winter — can guess that there may be very different emotions behind the cows’ leaps. Isn’t it conceivable that the cattle — whether because of the harmonious singing of their shepherds, the rediscovered freedom of the pasture, or even just the lush clover — are simply feeling unbridled joy? Don’t their leaps express a zest for life? Enthusiasm? Gratitude? A fullness of heart that no words, however well articulated, can express? Yes, could it even be that the cattle are praising the Creator through their behaviour?

Perhaps this holds the solution to the dilemma we formulated at the beginning: that it is sometimes so difficult to praise God. Perhaps our language is simply too abstract, too bloodless, too fleshless and too tame for such a task. Perhaps we should not understand praise as a verbal act at all, but as a physical activity, something that is not said but done — frolicking, trotting, dancing, “poetry in motion”, as they say in English, or better: “piety in motion”, faith in motion. I don’t know about you, but when I heard the choir singing at the beginning of the bass aria, “Let us rejoice, let us be glad!”, I could clearly picture cows and people jumping ecstatically in my mind’s eye.

I do not want to tempt you to dance through the church during the second performance of the cantata that is about to follow. Rather, I would urge you to suppress this impulse until the end of the concert. But when you step out through the portal onto Landsgemeindeplatz afterwards — when you see the world outside as new and joyful, like cows after a long winter in the barn — then let your feelings run free and make a few joyful, life-affirming, in the best sense of the word: praising leaps of joy.

Have you praised your God today?