As part of the quadrivium, music is seen to be valuable on its own terms, as a description of the ways that the world actually works in a manner that is often compared to mathematics. Luther, being a product of good Augustinian monastic education, emphasizes music as the most important member of the quadrivium, the grouping of scientific disciplines set out by Boethius in late antiquity.
Musicologist Gary Tomlinson has noted the ways in which musical study in the Renaissance was “suspended between two categories of knowledge: the mathematical arts of the quadrivium, in which music had found its intellectual niche since late antiquity and to which it sill looked for its theoretical and rational foundation, and the speaking arts of poetry and rhetoric ” (Tomlinson, “Renaissance Humanism and Music,” 8). In addition to these differences in interpretations of the Decalogue, Luther and Calvin disagreed more broadly about the place of music within a worldview informed by educational paradigms of the day. Additionally, Calvin believed that it established a new theological paradigm called “the regulative principle of worship,” in which scripture should be used to completely and authoritatively regulate and prescribe the means and objectives of worship. In application, Calvin clearly believed the purpose of this new second commandment was to condemn idolatry as well as place emphasis on a transcendent God who cannot be subjected to representation or comprehensibility by the senses. Bypassing Augustine, Calvin grounds his interpretation in the writings of Origen. Though these opinions did not prevail in Wittenberg, this hardline stance won support from other reformers, including Martin Bucer and Johannes Oecolampadius, who influenced the most important Reformer of the next generation, John Calvin.Įven as early as the publication of the first edition of Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536, Calvin divides these same six verses from Exodus into two different commandments, explaining that “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” and “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” stand as two separate and equally important ideas.
In his Small Catechism of 1529, Luther interprets these six verses in the same way, reducing them to the statement, “You shall have no other gods before me.” In a series of challenges to Luther’s interpretation, Andreas Karlstadt and Huldrych Zwingli felt that the second half of the commandment was being ignored and that the implications of this marginalized portion of the text––the injunction against “graven images”––involved a radical simplification of corporate worship and a staunch rejection of the Roman Catholic practices of iconography. Augustine, maintains that all six of these verses are part of a single commandment.
Roman Catholic interpretation, going back to St. (5) Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me (6) And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.* (4) Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. (3) Thou shalt have no other gods before me. (1) And God spake all these words, saying, (2) I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. The primary dispute among the Reformers arises from varying interpretations of the first six verses which read: Unfortunately the text does not provide divisions or numberings, though it does suggest in numerous places that the Law of God consists of specifically ten commandments. Within the seventeen verses which comprise the Decalogue in Exodus 20, there are no less than twelve distinct statements that might be numbered as commandments. Many of the most important debates of the recent “worship wars” in evangelicalism (including the form/content divide identified in yesterday’s post) have their origins in two important conflicts from the first few decades of the Reformation: first, the debate over the exegesis of the Ten Commandments or “Decalogue,” and second, a broader conversation about the place of music within a liberal arts education. In this post, I’d like to take up both of these debates in turn and attempt to show how they relate more broadly to the construction of musical meaning.