The Magnificat and The Flight to the East by Harriet Lobdell
One of the more mind-expanding pieces of world music is the second Monteverdi "Magnificat." Written for the echoing vaults of St. Mark's in Venice, it is polyphony to make your heart strings hum. As a non-Christian, I've listened to it many times and drawn sustenance from its soaring, complex melodies. As a non-Latin reader, I was never troubled by not understanding the words. My heathen soul could grasp that some kind of celebration on a really big, really successful scale was going on, and that was good enough for me. Imps recently prodded me to get on the Internet and check out the text. Alas. Alack. Woe. Stop reading here if you don't want your delight in the music spoiled. I will call your attention only to the opening line. (The rest of the text just gets too murky, gender-wise, all about how happy Mary is to have received a connubial visit from the deity, etc.) The opening line contains problems enough, for this heathen anyway: "Magnificat anima mea Dominum." "My soul magnifies the Lord." Excuse me? MY soul magnifies the LORD? Even allowing for the anthromorphized deity, I still have trouble seeing how my little squawks and peeps can possibly magnify "the Lord." Whatever its poetic beauty, and whatever musical beauty it has inspired, isn't the sentiment here nothing more or less than your standard Western hubris in theological clothing? The well-intentioned, thinking Christian of course comes back with: "That even such as we are given the power to magnify the Lord is only another indication of the infinite grace, goodness, and wisdom of the selfsame Lord." Do I not detect a certain circularity of argument here? I am tiny (we are tiny), the Lord is huge, I can praise "him" (he allows/enables me to praise him), therefore he is huge. Sorry. Even if dogs had wings, they still couldn't fly. The whole "magnificat" concept, stance, whatever you want to call it, plops us right into vast realms of anthropcentric illogic (Where is the new, metaphysical Copernicus when we need him?). The mere possibility that my squawks and peeps might magnify "the Lord" opens enough cans of worms to fill whole universes. For, if my squawking can make this Big Thing in Heaven bigger, then anyone's squawking can also do it. Which, by the very illogic in which this stance resides, produces such distressing equalities as: Pat Robertson's squawking = J.S. Bach's squawking. Or: Oral Roberts' peeps = Monteverdi's peeps. Our Worthy Christian jumps up immediately: "No, no, no. You've got it all wrong. 'Magnificat' doesn't really mean 'magnificat.' Clearly, no puny human can 'magnifiy' that which is already bigger than big. What 'magnificat' here means is more like 'praise'. And each of us praises as best we can, with the gifts we've been given." Ah. So the biblical writer chose the wrong word. A wrong word in the Bible? I don't think we want to go any farther with this. It only goes to show that Latin is better heard than understood. Why, it's almost enough to make a well-intentioned Western person flee to the understated, paradoxical likes of Lao-Tze. END
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