Image credits: St Katharine, Gosfield – Credo cc-by-sa/2.0 – © John Salmon – geograph.org.uk/p/2755510
Summa is a choral setting of the Latin translation of the Nicene Creed, composed by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt in 1977. He later arranged it for strings, and that rendition is perhaps the more popular, but I have never been able to appreciate the music apart from the text. It is one of my favorite works of music, but I can’t listen to it without hearing the ideological dissonance within it. The music seems to be expressing something to which the text is antithetical.
It is important to remember that what we see of Christianity today are outcomes from a series of disputes that has lasted millennia. There were disputes as to what had actually occurred during the life of Jesus (cf. difference between the Synoptic Gospels, and between those and the apocryphal Gospels), disputes as to how to interpret and follow the new teachings (cf. the Epistles), disputes as to which books should be considered sacred (the Book of Revelation was not formally accepted for three and a half centuries after Jesus’ death, and there were several gospels that were never accepted). Gradually, these disputes were resolved (or, as in the case of the gospels, deemed unresolvable and left to stand), but what’s unavoidable in that is that it was people who decided what Christianity is today. And I have to wonder if all sacred texts meet that definition, that they be attempts at resolving some dispute.
Some would say that the resolution of these disputes was of divine origin. But “divinely inspired” is a cop out, a way of saying, “We don’t need to address these questions! It’s already been decided for us.” Never in Satanic religion is anything ever decided and final. It has been my experience that everyone has had something valuable to say about God; all have access to mystical experience, and those experiences are vital to me regardless of in whom such experiences manifest. But, if you mean to take the Bible at its word as a divinely-inspired text, then you must take all that God has said therein as such, and then even Exodus 20 and 21 are the very Word of God:
When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please her master, who designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed; he shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has dealt unfairly with her.
Exodus 21:7-8
This is the morality we are to take as God’s: A man may, if he wishes, sell his daughter into sexual slavery. If the one who bought her is not pleased with her, then it’s his problem. So God has at least afforded the daughter that much: she might be the sexual property of another, but at least it’s not her fault if she can’t get her Master off.
Maybe these laws were abrogated by Christ Jesus. Maybe not. In either case, if we are to rely on “divinely inspired,” then this is what is left to us of God, and how very just, then, is the Lord God of hosts.
And at the same time, I have begun to carry the Text with reverence. I don’t pull it from my shelf with one hand and throw it over to my writing desk with half a dozen other books, as I once did. I step over to my bookshelf and stand before it and ask what I might learn. And then I pick it up with both hands and carry it over. I didn’t and wouldn’t have planned this, but I can’t deny it, even as it tells me that Satan the Accuser is to be the object of my meditations.
The Nicene Creed is a statement of belief, a distillation of the complexity of religious thought into clear propositions, and it seems in particular to have been written to address a dispute. There were people who called themselves Christians, in sizable enough number to be a threat, who did not believe exactly the things that the Creed proclaims. In the Nicene Creed we see the roots of the Hegemon, an attempt to codify and exactify the abstractions of religious experience into absolute, analytical propositions, and that by way of dividing people based on whether they believe, or at least profess to believe, what they are told, rather than what they have learned for themselves. (Likely the opposition to the Nicene Creed was itself a conflicting Hegemon, but the principle stands regardless).
The Nicene Creed has been revised and modified over its life. This is the English translation of the original, from Wikipedia:
We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible.
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, the only-begotten; that is, of the essence of the Father, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father;
By whom all things were made both in heaven and on earth;
Who for us men, and for our salvation, came down and was incarnate and was made man;
He suffered, and the third day he rose again, ascended into heaven;
From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
And in the Holy Ghost.
It does not end here; there is one more line which I will address on its own. But as to the above, I’m sure there was someone, or even several people, for whom these statements were meaningful signifiers of their experience, but the intention behind the Creed is to detach those words from personal experience and to make others profess even in the absence of such experience.
Continuing with that additional line that I mentioned above:
But those who say: ‘There was a time when he was not;’ and ‘He was not before he was made;’ and ‘He was made out of nothing,’ or ‘He is of another substance’ or ‘essence,’ or ‘The Son of God is created,’ or ‘changeable,’ or ‘alterable’— they are condemned by the holy catholic and apostolic Church.
This line was removed in 381 CE, but reaffirmed in 431 CE. There’s some interesting theology here; researching the Creed and its history led me to a Wikipedia k-hole concerning the aforementioned disputes, and specifically the doctrine of Nestorianism, which was an attempt to resolve contradictions concerning Jesus between what must be true of God (which Jesus is) and what also must be true of humankind (which Jesus also is). The Wikipedia page even has a helpful Venn diagram illustrating how Nestorianism attempted to resolve these contradictions: Jesus is represented by an oval containing two circles, Divine Nature and Human Nature, which do not overlap. Both Natures are wholly contained within Jesus and are wholly separate from each other. But this does nothing to resolve the contradiction; it just draws pretty circles around it. The competing view, hypostatic union, simply embraces the contradiction: Jesus is both perfectly divine and perfectly human.
But the fact that I agree with the 325 CE First Council of Nicaea and the 431 CE Council of Ephesus over the 381 CE First Council of Constantinople in terms of their interpretations necessarily following from the text of the Bible does not mean that I think that I agree with it being phrased as an absolute statement of belief. I certainly don’t think it should be a mandated one.
My experience of Pärt’s Summa is a bit like certain mystical experiences that I have had. It is beyond words, and unfolds as if it were a chain made from folded paper, or Escher’s drawing of hands drawing themselves.The melody is at once strictly repeated like an ostinato but ever-shifting as rhythmic and ornamental patterns trawl across it, out of phase with it but still in relationship to it, while the counterpoint that structures the music’s harmony does nothing more than sound out the notes of a single minor triad, as if it were the ringing of church bells. At first it is only the upper voices that sing, and then all four together, and then only the lower voices, and then again all together. I wonder if Pärt meant that to reflect the Trinity, as the limitation of the counterpoint to a single triad might.
Summa is deeply immersed in the musical style of the Medieval and Renaissance periods but is not slavishly tied to it; indeed, there is nothing in those periods that would be mistaken for Pärt, and nothing of Pärt that is not immediately identifiable as his own. He has taken his experience of ancient musics and of his own religion and demonstrated them to us as Summa. It seems so strange to me that he would do so using externally-imposed statements of belief.
One of my aims in these writings is for them to be a guide for anyone who wants to reinvent religion for themselves in a way that is free, authentic, and intellectually honest. Because that’s all I’m trying to do for myself. That’s all this started as: I had some ideas and I started writing them down by way of trying to document what I could understand of things, and in the process I realized that I could understand things through the process of writing them down. I mean to be a Satanist in the fullest and deepest sense in which one can be a Christian. To wear it around my neck, to clothe myself in it, to hold certain texts as sacred and to study them in as much depth and breadth as I can manage. To pray on, to meditate on, to write about what Teresa of Avila spoke of, what Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sung about, what the Bible and the Upanishads were written about, but in my own terms, in terms of Satan the Accuser. I say to the faithful of the world: I will accept your necessity if you will accept mine.
Non serviam. If Christians would honor the principle of God rather than serving human tyranny, they should not recite anything like the Nicene Creed, except through having taken its propositions one-by-one and having positively correlated them to their own understanding and experience. And every Satanist might have a Nicene Creed of their own (“What I Mean When I Say that I Am a Satanist” and the opening of “Satan the Accuser” roughly serve that purpose for me, although I had not thought of those writings in that way at the time), and in neither case should they be fixed, but should rather be continually revisited, refined, altered, erased and rewritten, and always understood not as facts about the world but as an attempt to do the impossible: to signify what is beyond signs.