This will be my final week in Grand Rapids (next week I will be in Detroit checking out Motown museum … gotta learn some more music history before heading home). I for sure will miss Meeter Center, especially the great people and resources. I have had chances to do or check out musical things, too: jazz, my first old-fashioned hymn-sing (the kind where people actually call out numbers spontaneously), and Sunday Strings founded by Grand Rapids musicians (my first time hearing music by Lera Auerbach)
On Wednesday I will be giving a presentation on musical metaphors in Puritan literature, mostly in the context of sympathy, building on Abram C. Van Engen’s idea that eighteenth-century sentimentalism extends beyond latitudinarianism and moral sense philosophy to a Calvinist theology of fellow feeling, which includes a Puritan past. A century before David Hume wrote that “the human mind…with regard to the passions… resembles a string-instrument, where after each stroke the vibrations still retain some sound,” Richard Sibbes had articulated something similar, on sympathy: “Sympathy hath a strange force, as wee see in the strings of an Instrument, which being played upon (as they say) the strings of another instrument are also moved with it.”
Some (not really musicological) thoughts came to mind as I was writing; they are not music-oriented, but they are backed by the idea of sympathetic vibration which, as Puritan writers as well as eighteenth-century philosophers and sentimental novelists show, is embodied in the stringed instrument. I was thinking how the idea of “sympathetic union” at times seems underrated in theology, at least according to my layman sensibility or impression? “Sympathy” doesn’t always have the best rep today in some discourses, partly because it has been misused, misapplied, or turned into an excuse for a low view of reason or intellect (in a way, this phenomenon calls to mind the so-called historical decline of sensibility, which led to the originally-positive “sentimentality” being used as a pejorative term).
Some fear is justifiable, since language can trap us and conceptual accuracy should be prioritized. Some theologians, for instance, were alarmed by Socinian and Arminian depiction of union with Christ as a (mere) sympathetic union. Louis Berkhof, for example, wrote: “Socinians and Arminians… represent the mystical union as a mere moral union, or a union of love and sympathy, like that existing between a teacher and his pupils or between friend and friend.” Some emphasized that the hypostatical union cannot be considered as a (mere) sympathetic union. Charles Hodges wrote: “The union of the two natures in Christ is…not a mere indwelling of the divine nature analogous to the indwelling of the Spirit of God in his people. Much less is it a mere moral or sympathetic union…” and John Miley also noted “the reality of the incarnation determines the personal oneness of the Christ in the union of the two natures…the divine Son did not place himself in a merely tactual or sympathetic union with a human person…”
Surely union with Christ is not about mere moral or sympathetic likeness and hypostatical union, too, is no (mere) sympathetic union. But much of Puritan literature and eighteenth-century writing suggests the possibility of having a sympathetic union with God (and with men), rooted in the idea that “sympathy” can be defined as “fellow-feeling” and “mutual sensibility.” Sympathy was in many cases used as a participatory language. Edmund Burke described the principle of sympathy as a God-given means of union: “…as our Creator has designed we should be united by the bond of sympathy.” He even suggested sympathy is akin to a kind of substitution, since we “enter into” the other’s feelings, so to speak. In the letter “Union with Christ,” John Newton also stated that being united to Christ means “universal union, communion, and ‘sympathy’ within the Church.”
Some nineteenth-century examples are worth considering, too. George Frederick Magoun (1821–1896) speaks of having a “vital union and sympathy with God”: he mentions how Paul was once an alien and an enemy “as is every child of Adam,” but when the Spirit renewed him, “union and sympathy took the place of alienation and enmity.” The experience of the new man is thus characterized by a “sympathetic and vital union” with Christ. Henry Christopher McCook (1837–1911) speaks of John 10:15 drawing “a parallel between the sympathetic union of Christ and His Sheep and that of the Father to the Son.”
Of course, one cannot speak of sympathetic union without quoting Jürgen Moltmann (though I am not sure why he refuses the idea of “mystical union” in this passage?) as he writes in The Crucified God (1974):
In the sphere of the apathetic God man becomes a homo apatheticus. In the situation of the pathos of God he becomes a homo sympatheticus. The divine pathos is reflected in man’s participation, his hopes and his prayers. Sympathy is the openness of a person to the present of another. It has the structure of dialogue. In the pathos of God, man is filled with the spirit of God. He becomes the friend of God, feels sympathy with God and for God. He does not enter into a mystical union but into a sympathetic union with God…
Later in The Trinity and the Kingdom (1980), he also speaks of sympathy, referencing the Greek philosophers and the Church Fathers:
…knowing does not transform the counterpart into the property of the knower; the knower does not appropriate what he knows. On the contrary, he is transformed through sympathy, becoming a participator in what he perceives. Knowledge confers fellowship. That is why knowing, perception, only goes as far as love, sympathy and participation reach.”
What Moltmann here indicates echoes how the language of sympathy was used in the eighteenth century, that sympathy is a participatory language. Perhaps a safe way to tie all things together, then, is to say that while faith is the means, by grace, for the actual union between man and God, sympathy – while not the instrumental cause of salvation, justification, all the big legal terms – is the means of experience; it is fundamental to the experience of the ordered, attuned heart. Something that I won’t have time to talk about in the presentation is how sentimental novelists and religious writers would use the term “heartstrings” to speak of the experience felt in divine sympathy. We don’t see this sort of terminology much today, but the Message translation of Isaish 16:11 does write: “My heartstrings throb like harp strings for Moab, my soul in sympathy for sad Kir-heres.”
Lastly, one thing that I found most insightful from Sibbes was his claim that when the soul is “set in tune,” there will be “pleasant harmony in our whole conversation.” His point is this (as he later sums up): “Unity in ourselves is before union with others.” I recall writing a few months ago that my grandfather used to teach that “if the man (人) is not in harmony with himself, his strings (弦) will not harmonize.” It is the same thing, although as shared before, what my grandpa found in Dao, he eventually found in Christ.