Sibylle Lewitscharoff

No time for redemption?

The text of the cantata “O Eternity, Thou Word of Thunder” radicalises the possibility of divine punishment and speaks of the most terrible: the torments of sinful man can be infinite. The mystery of redemption seems far away, for the question of the hereafter remains unanswered and, translated into the here and now, becomes a question of conscience. Bach’s music, however, undermines the horror scenario and offers the reconciliation with which the word has such difficulty.

A monstrous text! Hardly reconciliatory, it has absolutely nothing of what today’s pastors and priests proclaim from their pulpits, no, rather not proclaim, but rather scatter among the people more or less casually as weak good news.
Here the weight of despair, the fear of the great reckoning is strong. But not only that, perhaps the fear is even greater that the reckoning and also the possible redemption could be delayed for all eternity. A deeply sinister thought, indeed.
The measure of time that is being taken into consideration here cannot really be grasped by man. Suppose the torment of the damned lasted longer than the earthly time envisaged through millennia. However, trembling and fright would then also be gone, for no human soul, in whatever state it may be after death, can be frightened and tremble for such an unceasingly long time. The conjured “thousand million years” are nothing here. Flying hell time, which at the same time bears the stamp of the everlasting. Terrible, terrible, if there is to be no end to the torment, no hope glimmering beneath that there will be an end to it one day.
It is, of course, a fright text, a fright cantata. It is meant to make sinful people repent in view of the almost infinite punishment that awaits the sinner in the background. For the sin is short, the life of the sinner is short, and the punishment imposed afterwards is all the longer.
In any case, redemption does not approach from eternity, on the contrary, it is the terribly stretched time in which no trustingly elevated state of being can be established, nothing similar to paradise, nothing that could even come close to the heavenly Jerusalem.
And in the middle of the chorale, there is a little crazy passage in which a thought flashes up that actually borders on blasphemy, for it says of the inhabitants of hell:

“They will be tormented by cold and heat,
fear, hunger, terror, fire and lightning.
and yet not consume them.
For this torment will come to an end
When God is no more eternal.”

“When God shall be eternal no more” is something a Christian had better not think of at all, it is almost blasphemy, even as a mere thought, for the substance of God consists precisely in His eternal existence from the beginning and into all time, with which something like a beginning of the divine existence is likewise extinguished, because His being stretches beyond it.
The horror, the torment of hell, even if they are musically hinted at – to capture them entirely in music is fundamentally difficult, the music is simply too beautiful for that, its euphony alone holds something redemptive in store, even if at the word “Donnerwort”, in order to evoke a little of the horror in the imagination, there is a sudden change to notes that follow one another quickly. If one did not know the text of the cantata and could not hear it in the song, one could freely imagine a glorious song of praise spiralling up to heaven, even singing of the delights of heaven after suffering.
In the Baroque era, people knew very well how to speak and sing of suffering. Despite its splendour, this period was also a time of darkness, in which the torment of the tormented human being was exhibited. The sweeping, curved forms in the churches, the much gold that was applied, could not hide this. This period was both great and gloomy. One only has to think of the Thirty Years’ War, which devastated the whole of Europe and depopulated huge swathes of land. The cantata is based on a hymn by Johannes Rist from 1642, when this unfortunate war was still in full swing. Later, some verses from it were used, and an unknown poet added the others.
Johann Sebastian Bach performed them for the first time in 1724, when the Thirty Years’ War was over, but its horrors must still have been vividly present in people’s memories. And these horrors were also very much alive in the imagination, in transformed fantasy form. It is not difficult to imagine how the suffering of the thousandfold maimed, the bitterly dead, the starved and the stricken by disease found their mental counterpart in tumultuous fantasies of hell.
God is presented as just in His works, but He is a punishing, inexorable God who does not forgive easily. There is also talk of the sword that He wields, a sword that bores through the soul of the sinner. And only at the very last, almost as if He had already been forgotten above all the punishments that come down on sinners and do not let them out of their clutches for a long, long eternity, does Jesus come into play – quite as if it were now being made up for, as if it were being remembered at the last moment that He still exists. And the desperate human being, who thinks his soul is already pierced by the sword of the judge, throws himself into Jesus’ arms or at least asks him to take care of him, because in Jesus the only hope is incarnated. In Jesus lives the promise of possibility that the sinner will escape the eternal torment of hell.
Above all, the hopeful man who loves the display of splendour is called up and reminded of his sins. That all this will be destroyed at once when man dies, that nothing of it will be found in the world beyond, is a traditional idea. It ties in with the Jesuan ideal of poverty, which says that the poor man will find a place in the kingdom of heaven much sooner than the rich man. The torment of the rich man is particularly illustrated here, for he feels an agonising thirst in hell and cannot even find a “drop of water”.
It is precisely the spring, the pure spring, from which the thirsty man drinks, that is often associated with Jesus Christ. Whoever is granted to drink from such a spring is already granted, as a sinful inhabitant of the earth, an ounce of purity, a tiny foretaste, as it were, of the purity and beauty of heaven.
The sinner should strive to emerge from the despair of eternity. The cantata is an artful threat, sounding in the sinner’s ears just in time for him to turn his evil life around. And the glorious music is the beautiful seductress to go with it. Music is rightly believed to have a deeper effect on the soul than all other arts, to be able to carry us up into another state of mind. And this different, refined and at the same time loosened state of mind is needed if such a difficult undertaking as the conversion of a sinner is to succeed.
I have no doubt that it is precisely the works of Johann Sebastian Bach that are capable of such a thing, if such a thing can be accomplished at all. With good reason, the composer is jokingly referred to as the fifth evangelist in the Protestant church. When I hear his St Matthew Passion in a church, I am close to tears in some places. There is a heartfelt art of persuasion at work, directed at the ears, which makes one imagine the stations of Jesus’ suffering more strongly, more intimately, than any picture panel, no matter how great, of which there are many.
It is true that I enjoy listening to a number of works of classical music, and Johann Sebastian Bach is my favourite, surpassing all other highly talented composers, but at the same time I feel little competent to talk about them. Because I had no musical upbringing and have never played an instrument, can only read a bit of music with a lot of difficulty. Nevertheless, Johann Sebastian Bach’s music touches me deeply. If I manage to give myself completely to it during a performance, I actually sense something like the possibility of seeming to be a better person, or at least a less bad person, and perhaps even of remaining so for a while. This may be an extremely naïve idea, but I am convinced that a musical masterpiece can also touch the childlike heart in the adult at the same time. It sets airy sails and is able to lead the mind to freer heights in which something like a delicate foretaste of redemption already drifts.
Great music is an enchanting, heart-bewitching dizziness; it can more easily tell of what we at best suspect, but about which we can know nothing in detail. Germs of hope blossom in it. Even if there is talk of pain and torment, and the tones bring sounds of pain to the ear. There is a power in her that overcomes the body. Sometimes it can even soften stony matter. Greek mythology has produced one of the most beautiful stories in this respect. Orpheus plays his lyre and the wild animals of the forest gather around him and listen attentively. All of a sudden, peace reigns among the creatures that would otherwise devour each other. There is even a legend about the famous singer that his song could even soften the stones. The Greeks knew it well: Paradise on earth, the magic of the Asphodelos meadows can be summoned most strongly by music. When I listen to “O Eternity, Thou Word of Thunder”, I don’t think so much about the punishments that may await me as an inveterate sinner for eons, how terribly stretched time is already stretched out over my head, time that “no one can count” and that will not be given a good ending, but I give myself to the music, give myself to the voices and feel something like a blissful being carried upwards that doesn’t quite want to fit the powerful threat of punishment. This music can’t help but give comfort through the painting of the hellish abandonment. And I willingly surrender to it.
And then there is this beautiful, renunciatory ending, sad, depressed, without momentum – “I know not for great sadness / Where I turn / Take me, if it please thee, / Lord Jesu, into thy tent of joy!” Perplexed melancholy prevails. Fear too. The weighted heart of man simply does not know what to do. And as if it could not continue to exist with its own heart, with its own soul, it hands over everything, everything that makes up the body, the spirit, the wandering thoughts, to Jesus Christ. And he should make everything good, wipe away the tears and lead us into his place of joy, no, not into a house, but into a tent that reminds us a little of a wedding tent stretched out on a flowering meadow.

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