Music and the Soul

By Doug Gehman

July, 2022

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is famous for his comments about the death of God, killed by secularism and the resulting nihilism that emerged among his western contemporaries. Nietzsche anticipated the consequences of these changes, particularly certain cultural features, the fruit of a Christian worldview, that were doomed to eventually disappear. The fact that those features are now rapidly disappearing in contemporary American culture is a frightening omen for what is to come.

In “The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization,” Indian author Vishal Mangalwadi observed that, besides the disappearance of these cultural features (what he called “civilizational fruits”), “not even Nietzsche realized that one philosophical implication of God’s demise would be the death of his own self.”1

Mangalwadi understands a dire truth: When God dies, our sense of self dies with him. With God gone, life quickly becomes meaningless, more like a wispy illusion than a clear and purposeful reality. The reduction of a person’s soul into meaninglessness has huge implications for individuals and for society. When this happens en mass, like day turns to night, disintegration of culture inevitably follows.

The demise of a Christian worldview in the West, where God once lived at the center, is now being revealed. Perhaps it is more accurate to say, it is now being experienced. Mangalwadi makes a terrifying observation about this trend: “Denying the reality of a spiritual core as the essence of every human being makes it hard to make sense of music, because music, like morality, is a matter of the soul.”2

Is Mangalwadi saying when God dies, music dies with him?

Music and the arts are a centerpiece of great civilizations. Western culture emerged in the last two millennium as a leader, not only in technology and the sciences, but also in the arts. Mangalwadi, and even Friedrich Nietzsche seem to agree that when God dies in our hearts, these great features of civilization die with him. It is something worth thinking about.

Like the finely tuned universe, music is the product of finely tuned physics. In a Christian worldview, the universe (that physical space the sciences study) is the product of God’s creativity. Music and the arts are made by man, our reflection about and wonder over what God did. A string instrument, for example, is comprised of filaments, each one of precise thickness and length, each stiffened to a precise tension, and located over an echo chamber at a precise distance. When struck in the proper way, the filaments produce precise vibrational tones. Struck together, a series of such “tuned” filaments, produce harmonious sounds. Strung and stretched randomly, these same strings will produce only cacophonous noise. That humans have learned this precision and harnessed these sounds to produce lengthy musical scores is nothing short of miraculous. That precision, created by God but mastered by humans, makes music that is beautiful to the soul! Like most things of the soul, music has a god-like resonance.

“Music serves no biological purpose,”3 Mangalwadi observes. At least not as a human function. We may consider the chirping of birds to be music, but chirping for birds has a simplicity of purpose that is too mundane for the musical aspirations of humans. Psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi points out that humans are drawn to the complexities of things, to the challenge of continued development of a skill to create beauty.4 By contrast, a bird is content to chirp a single song for his entire life.

As a matter of the soul, music expresses our connections to God. For some, music is a form of worship. For others, music can express our frustration with God’s authority. When humans suffer, we sing or cry or scream poems about running away, about the betrayal of a lover, or our regret for doing something that left us alone or in chains. But even in the fleeing, we are fleeing from a center, a center that is the domain of our expectations of God. God has let us down. God was not there when we needed him. When we run, we run from God. Country, Rock, and Blues music are filled with such themes. God might not be mentioned, but if we are honest, he is there in our minds.

But, when God is finally dead, when we finally kill him and forget him, there is no one left to reject or renounce. There is no one from whom to flee. There is nobody in the sky to shake our fists at. So, the human soul dies. Why? Because, there is no more reason to sing songs of joy or lament. When life has no meaning or transcendent reality, there is nothing left for the soul to do. There is only the physical world and its stark realities. Karl Marx summarized this philosophy saying that the only real point of existence is “brute economics.” Power of one over another.

The loss of music, that is, the creative expression of the human soul, is one of the most dire consequences of the rejection of God. CS Lewis suggested that hell is the reduction of existence… into lower, darker, smaller, grimmer. By contrast heaven is the elevation of existence into more, brighter, longer, happier. That the Bible claims hell and heaven are real places – or more precisely, real states of eternal existence – should concern every thinking person and be a quest for deeper understanding.

For Christians heaven and hell are ultimate and eternal destinations. Christians also agree that everyone identifies with one existence or the other, not only at a future time, but IN THIS LIFE RIGHT NOW. Our current lives are preparing for a future existence. Are Christians right about this belief? Or are we, as secularists claim, just animals, intelligent primates, with nothing better to do than eat, drink, sleep, defecate, defend our territory, and propagate our species? Is that the essence of human existence? Or, are we made for much, much more?

Jesus said, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10 ESV). Whether or not we believe the Bible’s narrative, or give credence to the teachings and work of Jesus, we cannot deny our innermost longing for meaning… and transcendence. If we abandon God, we will inevitably search for something else to fill our souls with music. But, we will not find it anywhere. Our souls are made to sing. Our souls are made for God. And it is in him alone that music thrives.