There is an argument for the existence of God that theologians don’t use and perhaps should. It is not Aquinas’ cosmological argument, nor Anselm’s ontological one, nor Pascal’s wager. It is simpler and harder to refute. Johann Sebastian Bach.
I say this half joking and half serious, which is the only honest way to say something like it. Serious because there is something in Bach’s music that exceeds any purely materialist explanation of art, something that cannot be reduced to technique or genius or the historical conditions of the late German Baroque. And half joking because turning an aesthetic experience into a theological argument is a philosophically dubious operation, and it’s best to admit that before doing it.
But I’m going to do it anyway. Because Bach is a unique case in the history of music, and possibly in the history of human art: someone whose work is simultaneously perfect in its mathematical structure and devastating in its emotional impact, and that combination, formal perfection that does not sacrifice a single gram of emotional intensity, is something that should not be possible. In any other discipline, precision kills emotion or emotion kills precision. In Bach they coexist. And that coexistence is, at the very least, bewildering. At most, it is evidence of something.
Bach was not a philosopher. He was not a theologian in any academic sense. He wrote no treatises, published no essays, took no part in doctrinal debate. He was a church musician. A Kantor. A man who every week had to produce a new cantata for Sunday services at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, who also had to teach the choirboys, who also had to play the organ, who also had to contend with municipal authorities who paid him poorly and respected him less. He was, in contemporary terms, an ecclesiastical employee with an absurd workload and a difficult boss.
And yet what he produced under those conditions is the closest thing to pure theology that music has ever achieved. Not theology as illustration of religious ideas, which is what most composers of sacred music do. Theology as original thinking about God, expressed in a medium that is not verbal language but organised sound.
Bach wrote “S.D.G.,” Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone the glory, at the end of many of his scores. In his sacred manuscripts it appears often, sometimes alongside “J.J.,” Jesu Juva, Jesus help me, at the beginning. It is tempting to read this as period convention, the routine signature of a religious professional going through the motions. Eighteenth-century Lutherans signed their work this way the same way executives today sign off with “best regards”: without thinking, out of habit. But there is another possible reading, which is that Bach meant it. That when he wrote “to God alone the glory” he meant exactly that: that the music was not his, that he was an instrument, that what flowed from his pen came from somewhere else.
We have no way of knowing with certainty what Bach thought. His letters are scarce and mostly practical: complaints about his salary, requests for materials, administrative matters. He was not a man given to written introspection. But we have his music, which is a form of introspection far more eloquent than any letter. And what the music says, if you listen carefully, is that this man thought about God with a depth and a seriousness that have no equivalent in the history of Western music.
The Mass in B Minor
The Mass in B Minor, BWV 232, is Bach’s most ambitious work and also his strangest from a practical standpoint. Bach was a Lutheran. Lutherans do not use the complete Catholic mass in their liturgy. The Mass in B Minor, which follows the full Catholic ordinary, Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei, was not written for any specific liturgical service. It was not commissioned by anyone. It was not performed in its entirety during Bach’s lifetime, at least not that we know of. It is a work that Bach compiled and revised during his final years, gathering material from different periods of his career, rewriting it, perfecting it, as though he were building a cathedral he knew no one would see finished.
Why? The most plausible answer, and the one favoured by the most serious musicologists, is that Bach conceived it as a summa, a total demonstration of what sacred music could be. Not for an audience, not for an occasion, but as an offering. Soli Deo Gloria taken to its logical end: a mass written for God, literally, with no consideration of whether any human being would ever hear it complete.
The work lasts nearly two hours. It is impossible to describe in a text without betraying what it is, but there are moments one can point to as ways in.
The opening Kyrie is one of the most imposing beginnings in all of music. A massive orchestral chord, and then a choral fugue of a complexity that defies analysis. Five voices interweaving over a theme that descends chromatically, each entry layering over the last, building a density that is at once intellectually rigorous and emotionally crushing. It is a prayer that sounds like a storm. “Kyrie eleison,” Lord, have mercy. And the music says: yes, mercy, because look at what we are, look at the complexity of human suffering, look at how many voices cry out at once and none can silence the others.
The Gloria is something else. Luminous, exuberant, nearly festive at its heights. Bach understood that liturgy is not only lament. It is also celebration, gratitude, wonder. The “Gloria in excelsis Deo” at the opening carries an energy that is hard to square with the image of the solemn, severe Bach that tradition handed down. It is the music of a man who feels joy, a joy that is not shallow but theological: the joy that God exists, that the world has an order, that there is something rather than nothing.
The Crucifixus
The Crucifixus is a choral passacaglia. A chromatic descending bass of four notes repeated thirteen times while the choir sings the text of the Creed: “Crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub Pontio Pilato, passus et sepultus est.” He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, suffered, and was buried. That is all. Four descending notes. A choir repeating the text. Thirteen cycles. Under four minutes.
What Bach achieves with those minimal materials has no name in conventional aesthetic theory. Each repetition of the bass is identical, yet each sounds different because the choir shifts above it, because the harmonies darken progressively, because the texture thins and thickens like breathing. It is the sonic representation of something sinking, falling, descending inexorably towards a point of no return. The crucifixion not as historical event but as cosmic fact: God dies, and the music descends with him.
On the thirteenth repetition the bass reaches its lowest note, the choir fades, and there is silence. A real silence, written into the score, measured. The silence of the tomb. The silence of the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, the day Christian theology calls Holy Saturday, the most desolate moment in the liturgical calendar: God is dead and has not yet risen. We do not know if he will. There is only silence and darkness and the feeling that something fundamental has broken.
And then, without transition, without preparation, the choir enters with “Et resurrexit,” and he rose again, and the key changes abruptly to D major, and the trumpets sound, and the music explodes into a brightness that is almost violent after the darkness of the Crucifixus. It is the most powerful moment in the entire mass, and it works precisely because Bach built the descent with such patience, such precision, such accumulated darkness, that the light that follows is unbearable.
No theologian ever expressed the Resurrection with that force. No sermon, no treatise, no poem. Because the Resurrection, if you think about it seriously, is not an argument. It is an event. And events are not explained. They are experienced. Bach does not explain the Resurrection. He makes it happen. In the space of two bars he makes it happen inside the listener’s body, which passes from the weight of the Crucifixus to the eruption of the Et Resurrexit with no rational mediation, no time to process, exactly as the disciples must have experienced it: first death, then silence, then something impossible.
That is theology. Not metaphorically. Literally. It is thinking about God expressed in a medium that reaches further than words because it does not have to pass through the filter of the proposition. Bach does not say “Christ is risen.” He makes you feel it. And feeling it is not the same as believing it, but it is a step before believing, a step that verbal theology cannot take.
The Goldberg Variations
Perfection is a concept that modern aesthetics abandoned some time ago, for good reasons. Modern art values expression, rupture, authenticity, gesture. Perfection sounds closed, dead, academic. And generally this is fair: the pursuit of perfection tends to produce work that is correct and cold, technically impeccable and humanly empty.
The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988, are the exception. They are the most perfect work of art ever made. Not the most moving, not the greatest, not the most important. The most perfect. And the perfection, in this case, is not a synonym for coldness. It is a synonym for fullness.
The story of the commission is probably apocryphal, or at least embellished. According to Bach’s first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, Count Kaiserling, the Russian ambassador to the Saxon court, suffered from insomnia and asked Bach to compose something his personal harpsichordist, Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, could play for him at night to help him sleep. The story is charming and almost certainly overstated, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is the work.
The structure is this: an aria, thirty variations, the aria again. The aria is a sarabande, a slow dance in triple time, of a serene beauty that does not call attention to itself. It is a melody that sounds as though it always existed, like a folk song nobody remembers learning. But what matters about the aria is not the upper melody but the bass, the line of low notes that supports it. Because the thirty variations that follow are not variations on the melody. They are variations on the bass. The melody disappears after the aria and does not return until the end. What persists, beneath everything, is the harmonic structure, the invisible skeleton holding up thirty completely different constructions.
It is a compositional decision of an elegance that still astonishes musicians. By varying the bass instead of the melody, Bach freed himself from any thematic constraint. The variations can be anything: a canon, a fugue, a French dance, an Italian overture, a virtuosic exercise for crossing hands on the keyboard, a meditative adagio, a musical joke. And they are all of these things. The thirty variations traverse virtually everything keyboard music could be in 1741, and a few things that did not yet exist.
Every third variation is a canon. This is the work’s secret organising principle. Variation 3 is a canon at the unison: both voices enter on the same note, separated by one bar. Variation 6 is a canon at the second: the second voice enters a tone higher. Variation 9 is a canon at the third. And so on through Variation 27, a canon at the ninth. Each canon is more complex than the last, the interval between voices grows, and the difficulty of making it sound like music rather than a technical exercise grows in proportion. Bach solves it every time. Nine times. Without the casual listener realising there is an organising principle at all, because the canons sound like songs, not engineering problems.
Variation 25 deserves separate mention. It is an adagio in G minor, the only minor-key variation with enough length to develop a complete emotional world. Glenn Gould, who recorded the Goldbergs twice and made them a lifelong obsession, called it “the black pearl” of the work. It is a melody ornamented to the point where the ornamentation becomes the substance, like a tree whose branches matter more than the trunk. Within a work that tends towards formal perfection, it is the moment of greatest emotional vulnerability. Bach showing that structure does not exclude suffering, that mathematics and grief can share the same bar.
And Variation 30, the last before the aria’s return, is not a canon. It is a quodlibet, a musical form in which two or more well-known popular songs are superimposed. Bach takes two German songs of the period and combines them over the aria’s bass: one that says something like “it’s been a long time since I’ve been round here” and another about cabbages and turnips. It is a joke. After twenty-nine variations of mounting complexity, after canons and fugues and heartbreaking adagios, Bach closes with two tavern songs layered on top of each other. It is the musical equivalent of a man who has just proved the most elegant theorem in mathematics and celebrates with a beer. It is humility, it is humour, it is the refusal to take yourself too seriously, and it is also, if you want to read it that way, a theological statement: the glory of God is in the cabbages and turnips as much as in the canons and the fugues.
After the quodlibet, the aria returns. The same aria. Note for note, bar for bar, identical to the one at the beginning. But it does not sound the same. It cannot sound the same, because the listener has passed through thirty variations that transformed his relationship to this material. What at the start was a pretty melody is now a homecoming after an enormous journey. What was simple is now profound. What was serene is now charged with everything that happened between the first time and this one. It is the same place, but you are someone else.
There are few experiences in art that compare. The closest I can think of is the end of In Search of Lost Time, when the narrator recovers the past through involuntary memory and understands that the entire path, with all its detours and losses, was necessary to arrive at this point. But Proust needed three thousand pages. Bach does it in an hour.
The Chaconne
The Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D minor for solo violin, BWV 1004, is something else altogether. If the Goldbergs are perfection, the Chaconne is abyss.
It is a fifteen-minute piece for a single violin. No accompaniment. No other instrument. One person alone on a stage with four strings and a bow, and what comes out of it has the emotional scale of a symphony. Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann that the Chaconne was “an entire world of the deepest thoughts and the most powerful feelings” and that if he could imagine having composed such a piece, “the excitement and shock would have driven him mad.” Brahms was not a man given to overstatement. If he said it, he felt it.
The structure is once again a repeated bass, like the Crucifixus, like the Goldbergs. Bach loved variation over an ostinato bass, the idea that repetition is freedom, that the firmer the foundation the freer what is built upon it. The Chaconne contains sixty-four variations on a four-bar theme. It begins in D minor, moves to D major at the centre, returns to D minor at the close. A symmetrical arch of a structural perfection that is dizzying.
But the structure is not what hits you when you listen. What hits you is the intensity. The Chaconne opens with chords that sound as though the violin is being forced beyond its limits, and in a sense it is: a violin has four strings and can play at most three or four notes simultaneously, and only briefly, and Bach asks it to sound like an organ. The tension between what the instrument can do and what the music demands of it is part of the piece’s expressiveness. It is music that fights against its own material conditions, that wants to be more than its medium allows, and in that struggle finds an intensity a more comfortable medium would never have.
There is a theory, advanced by the musicologist Helga Thoene, that Bach composed the Chaconne as a memorial for his first wife, Maria Barbara, who died in 1720, the same year Bach completed the Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin. Thoene argues that hidden quotations from Lutheran chorales on death and resurrection are woven into the Chaconne’s structure. The theory is controversial and not universally accepted, but even without it there is something in the piece that sounds like mourning. Not mourning as lamentation but mourning as process: the music passes through darkness, through light, through darkness again, like someone who walks through grief and comes out the other side, not unscathed but changed.
The central section in D major is one of the most luminous moments in all of music. After the density and darkness of D minor, the arrival at the major key has a quality of revelation that recalls, once more, the Et Resurrexit of the Mass in B Minor. Light after darkness, hope after grief, but not an easy or cheap hope. A hope that cost something, that bears the marks of everything that came before, that knows the darkness will return because in fact it does: the Chaconne ends in D minor, not D major. The darkness comes back. But it comes back different, because the light was there.
What Cannot Be Said
Wittgenstein ended the Tractatus with a sentence that became a cliché but remains true: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” A fine sentence. But Wittgenstein was a philosopher, and philosophers tend to assume that verbal language is the only language there is. What cannot be said in words, one must pass over in silence. But what if there is another way of saying it?
Bach is the proof that there is. What Bach says in the Crucifixus about the death of God, what he says in the Goldbergs about the relationship between order and freedom, what he says in the Chaconne about grief and hope, cannot be translated into propositions without losing what is essential. It is not merely that words are inadequate, though they are. It is that what Bach communicates is not of the order of the concept. It is of the order of experience. And experience, as any medieval mystic knew, is not transmitted. It is undergone.
Thomas Aquinas, near the end of his life, had a mystical experience during mass and stopped writing. When asked why, he said: “All that I have written seems to me like straw compared to what has been revealed to me.” It is the sentence of a man who reached the limit of what language can do and discovered there was something on the other side. I am not comparing Bach to a mystical experience, or perhaps I am, a little. Because what Bach produces in the attentive listener is something closer to revelation than to entertainment, closer to prayer than to aesthetic pleasure, closer to awe before what exceeds understanding than to admiration for what satisfies it.
Bach was no mystic. He was a Lutheran craftsman who fulfilled commissions, raised children, quarrelled with his employers, and wrote music because it was what he knew how to do. But what he knew how to do turns out to be the thing closest to theology that human art has produced. Not theology as reflection on God, which is what professional theologians do. Theology as contact with something that reason cannot reach, that language cannot capture, that philosophy cannot resolve, and that music, in this particular man’s hands, makes present.
Does this prove that God exists? No. Not in the strict philosophical sense. It is neither a deductive argument nor an empirical demonstration. It is something more modest and perhaps more important: an indication. A finger pointing in a direction and saying: there, look, there is something we do not understand and that is larger than us. Aquinas’ arguments are more rigorous. Anselm’s are more elegant. Pascal’s are more cunning. But none of them makes you feel what the Crucifixus makes you feel, and if the existence of God is true, it seems reasonable to think that feeling it is at least as important as thinking it.
Bach wrote Soli Deo Gloria at the end of his scores. To God alone the glory. After two hundred and some years, after the entire critical apparatus of modern musicology has taken his work apart note by note, after secularisation turned his cantatas into concert pieces and his masses into aesthetic experiences severed from their liturgical context, after all of that, the inscription is still there. And every time the Crucifixus sounds, or Variation 25, or the central section of the Chaconne, you get the uncomfortable suspicion that maybe the man was not being conventional. Maybe he knew something we have forgotten. Maybe the glory was real.