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Was JS Bach an atheist?

24K views 113 replies 27 participants last post by  mmsbls 
#1 ·
Is it possible to prove Bach was an atheist, or even why bother trying I expect you'll say? I take some axioms that logically express a path to a possible answer.

Axiom one. JS Bach was a highly intelligent man.

Axiom two. JS Bach was a grieving father and husband.

He lost ten children in infancy and his first wife died while he was away and he didn't even attend her funeral. Taking just these two axioms you could conclude that perhaps he had doubts about the existence of a loving God although unable to express them.

Axiom three. He had access to various reading materials in Leipzig University and he lived around the start of the Age of Enlightenment.

Axiom four. He wrote music because from a young age he realised he had a special talent and spent his entire life making the most of it, sacred or secular. I doubt anyone listens much to the words when listening to his cantatas (which I think are the greatest body of work ever written). Listen to BWV 54 or BWV 4 or BWV 134, they are truly amazing pieces and it is the music that matters.

Axiom Five. He had to 'believe' in God as he may have been burnt at the stake if he expressed doubts. Also the church provided him with an income and a place to show off his talents.

This is an interesting article I came across which puts the argument over better then I can: http://www.bach-cantatas.com/Articles/Bach-Atheist.htm

I suppose I have to answer the why bother questions. Same as a mountaineer climbs mountains because they are there. I am interested in important figures in history and possibly what they really thought about religion. Sorry if this offends anyone!
 
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#3 · (Edited)
Actually, being a highly intelligent man would be as likely to lead him to believe in God.

Being a grieving father would be irrelevant, but most likely would cause him to look into spiritual things.

The rest of the reasons don't compute with somebody not believing in God either.

Bizarre thread, but not offensive to anyone, I'm sure... :)
 
#4 ·
So do you just accept he was religious because that is what people had to do in that era? Bach lived for 65 years and I believe he must have doubted 'god' at some point, surely? And I bet he wasn't the only one either. Don't know why this is a bizarre thread. Pretty straight forward I would think, was JS Bach an atheist? Nothing wrong is questioning things. I love Bach,more than any other composer (just pips Beethoven), still I am an atheist so I must be biased. Read the article attached it is better then what I can say here but it rather long but well argued out. Why do we always have to accept something without question? It is not a conspiracy as I don't believe he would have expressed his views to anyone else, but he must have doubted, he must have! :)
 
#8 ·
It's bizarre because the axioms sound forced. To me, anyway. But even people of the strongest faith sometimes doubt. This is all part of it. I suppose it was the fact that somehow his intelligence would lead him to only one conclusion struck me as funny, too. Atheists in general are never really good at understanding faith. They tend to have a very simplistic view of it, as if it can be explained away if only those silly folks in the pews would listen. But things are more complicated than that, and I think Bach's music reflects this also...
 
#5 ·
Even after reading the article I'm not convinced. Losing children in infancy is equally likely to strengthen someone's faith as it is to break it; I've seen it firsthand. Why would Bach be any different, especially since there's no indication his faith took a hit?
The first axiom seems rather irrelevant; intelligence, contrary to popular belief, has little to no correlation with someone's intelligence. The third follows a similar vein, and the fourth also sounds irrelevant. The rest of them are valid points, but no sure-fire indication that Bach harbored secret atheism or was putting on when he glorified God in word or music.
 
#6 ·
Bach was different, we all know that, that is why we are talking about him over 250 years after his death. He made a pretty big impact on Western Music or is that my imagination too? Bach was like a god himself but above any perceived christian god of that title because he didn't kill anyone and he wrote music that makes men weep.

To live on the same planet that through natural selection created a man as great as JS Bach is an honour.
 
#7 ·
Your points are the thinking of a 21st century person. This is a very common fallacy in historical analysis: that we cannot use 21st century social values and impose them to centuries ago and deduce reasoning based on that for today.
 
#9 ·
What do we do then? I think it is important to try and work out what important figures thought and did and expressed. Perhaps you have a way that I don't know about, if you do please share it I am keen to learn.

We could all agree maybe that Brahms and Tchaikovsky were atheists but they lived in a different era, a time when science was unravelling the secrets of nature especially with Darwin, Planck, and Boltzmann et al. Bach maybe read Newtons Principia and we know he was clever in his compositions he changed the face of music. Nothing really compares, he is an extreme outlier, his thought processes must have been staggering. I don't think we can ever appreciate just how good JS Bach was at his job. I would say he was beyond the pettiness of organised religion.
 
#33 · (Edited)
What do we do then? I think it is important to try and work out what important figures thought and did and expressed. Perhaps you have a way that I don't know about, if you do please share it I am keen to learn.

.... Bach maybe read Newtons Principia and we know he was clever in his compositions he changed the face of music.
OK. I hope I'm not just repeating something that has been pointed out by somebody else. Newton wrote Newton's Principia and he wasn't an atheist.

As to JSB - he began his scores of sacred music with JJ - Jesu Juva - and ended with SDG - Soi Deo Gloria. He had a quite good library, mostly of theological works. I'm repeating from memory, so am open to correction.

Another quick reflection. We don't have to "work out" what important figures thought and expressed. I've noticed that we want to appropriate great people of previous ages, want them to fit into the categories we inhabit - atheist, gay, liberal, pacifist, whatever .... This may not be what you meant, but it is something I find disappointing about Gardiner's massive book on Bach's sacred music.

And, just as a personal reflection, though I do not believe in a God I am an early C18 Lutheran when I listen to the cantatas and Passions. I think I get a lot more out of them by paying attention to the words and the intentions behind them - for me, it's a matter of identifying, sympathising, feeling.
 
#10 · (Edited)
Funny haha!? I don't see what is so complicated about faith. A person believes in a supernatural entity that they can't see but when they die they will spend eternity with it. But In The meantime keep putting money in the church pots and do as you are told. Bach was above that, I would expect. He had to work and the church was the only place he could secure himself an income.

Science is difficult, I can't see how faith is anything more than just wishful thinking.
 
#18 · (Edited)
The man's personal library - you know, the one he assembled for himself, not the one "at work" he had access to at all times - contained some 80 volumes on various theological subjects. And the only references we know he made to literature were all about theology - Pfeiffer's works listed on the cover of the 1722 AMB book, and Bach's scribbles in his Bible. And the piece Bach worked on while on his deathbed - with multiple witnesses attesting to that, if I remember correctly - was the chorale prelude Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit, which deals specifically with death and dying.

Besides, Bach's entire catalogue speaks volumes on his interest in sacred subjects. Organists of the era rarely bothered to through-compose their chorale preludes, unless they were obligated to by contract, yet Bach did the Orgelbuchlein, the 3rd volume of Clavier-Übung, the Schübler chorales, and the Great Eighteen. Why would he prefer to work on chorale melodies, when he could just as easily and perfectly develop Buxtehude-style expansive preludes, to name just one route he could choose.

And this:

A person believes in a supernatural entity that they can't see but when they die they will spend eternity with it. But In The meantime keep putting money in the church pots and do as you are told.
is just silly. If the priests of your town are corrupt, it doesn't disprove anything from the Bible, and doesn't cast doubt on the existence of the Christian God. The corruption that existed for centuries in the church was well known to most people, and much discussed, and would now and then cause all kinds of conflict and change, which history textbooks and those on the history of art can tell you about, if you care to pick any up someday.
 
#12 · (Edited)
For the record, I'm an atheist. And I'll admit the proposition that it's *possible* JSB was an atheist is hard to argue against. "Possible" is such a weak thesis.

Was it likely Bach was an atheist? I don't see any evidence here. If his thought process was "staggering," than how can you get inside his mind and reason that he was a non-believer? E.g., that organized religion is petty is your thought, not his.
 
#13 ·
You are misusing the word axiom. I think the word you want is "factoid," modified by "irrelevant" and "dubious" in several cases. Everybody had dead children in that era, and if one rutted with the regularity of JS and his wives, one had lots of dead children. It was normal and people probably learned not to get too attached to them until they had survived a few years. He was a musician because, like Beethoven and Mozart, it was the family business. Nobody was going to burn him at the stake. That is just silly. By the way, I do not believe in supernatural beings or phenomena of any kind.
 
#16 · (Edited)
I didn't say he didn't get attached to his children. I was suggesting that in a society with an extreme childhood mortality rate, it is likely people took the deaths of children as an inescapable fact of life. People don't react to the normal and the commonplace the way they do to unexpected tragedies. And after the first five or six dead babies and toddlers, anyone in their right mind is going to take the little blighters as provisional humans until they prove viable.
 
#15 ·
I'd like to present a "third option." What religion looks like today, is not what it looked like back then. Furthermore, the amount of time spent reflecting on spiritual matters for someone from that time would be far more than what we have today merely because of the fewer distractions available. The fundamentalists of today that make the news every week are taking various ancient collections of stories as if they were literal modern documents and so the "version" of religion so railed against by many atheists is actually a very modern one. Fighting to claim figures of the past as a part of one camp or another therefore strikes me as a little like questioning the witness' great grandfather that never actually met the witness instead of the actual relevant witness.
 
#17 ·
Yes, but wouldn't the parents have huge doses of oxytocin flowing through their veins which makes them attached to the child. I understand your point that infant mortality was much more common then but I don't see why parents would be less upset then parents today.
 
#48 ·
Attachment behaviour is very complex, and depends on much more than an individual's current neurochemical environment. Attachment experience leads to neurochemical up- or down- regulation and even epigenetic modifications (altering the expression of genes), resulting in long term altered orbito-frontal cortex and limbic system function. Those are the parts of the brain now known to have most influence over emotional regulation and attachment behaviour.

Basically, experience modifies development of the human brain, especially in infancy, but not limited to that period. And thereby feeling, thought, behaviour etc are modified, those being some of the outputs of a human 'system'.

So it is perfectly possible (and regularly observed) for humans, individually and collectively, to modify their behaviour, including their attachment to a child, in the light of experience of and in attachment relationships that is painful and distressing, to take only one possible example. (Abused and / or neglected children are especially likely to have difficulty functioning as a parent in adult life, for instance). They will not be over-riding their neurochemistry; they are likely not to be producing as much oxytocin (again, to take only one possibility from a complex biochemical environment) as humans who have grown up in an environment / culture where children usually survive infancy and childhood.

This sort of emotional adaptability can be seen to have personal survival value.
 
#21 ·
This is obviously not going anywhere, given your attitude, but I'm curious as to how would you know what being religious is about, if you so obviously aren't religious? I'm an agnostic, by the way, but I like studying various religions and religious texts.

Also, can't help but notice that you're wrong about the Bible, which apart from stories contains several law codes, collections of terrific poetry, personal and public letters, and genealogies. It is also far from the only religious text people of Bach's era would've read and re-read on a regular basis.
 
#20 · (Edited)
If Bach had been atheist, I would sympathize even more with him than just for his music (being of that mindset). I don't rule it out but consider it highly unlikely. Bach would have to have lived a completely false life considering his career in composing religious music.

ArtMusic is correct here. Even very intelligent people of the 18th century would hardly question the existence of God. To postulate that they might is outside of the historical, cultural and social context of the time. There just wasn't enough developed science to explain the universe then, leaving religion as the only (what seemed) rational answer.

But this is a very interesting thread, and I find it interesting to try to get inside the minds of past composers and what was driving them.
 
#23 ·
There was a fair amount of science around in Bach's time. Newton, Hooke, Halley, Leibniz, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, Da Vinci had all produced and contributed to the scientific movement before or during Bach's lifetime. Wasn't Bach also very good at mathematics? Did he not incorporate it into his music?
 
#22 · (Edited)
I had religion foisted upon me at school and cub/scouts. I can sort of know what religion is about without having to be a believer. I sincerely believe it to be a con and when they built these magnificent cathedrals people were starving to death. Yet these people had to give a portion of their income to the church. Richmen going through the eye of a needle springs to mind. Religion obviously doesn't follow its own preachings. And why isn't this going anywhere, what an odd statement? Because I am not immediately agreeing with you. You make some very false assumptions.
 
#24 · (Edited)
And why isn't this going anywhere, what an odd statement?
Well, for one reason, because you continually equate belief in God with belief in the Church, which is quite baffling. One can think the same way you do - cathedrals while people are starving, rich men going through the eye of the needle - and still be a believer, drawing spiritual support from the psalms, and thinking about Jesus's parables. For another reason, this bit here is exactly what I said before, and you simply ignored it, the same way you did with EdwardBast's argument - that despite being attached to their children, parents would eventually get used to high child mortality, as horrible as it sounds to us. For a third reason, what kind of talk is "I've been put firmly in my place"?

And finally, the topic of religious belief as such, and in particular how the church enters into it, is too huge for a forum, and certainly can't be discussed in short posts such as ours here.

You make some very false assumptions.
Such as?
 
#26 ·
You then missed what I said about new born children and parents brain being flooded with oxytocin thus making them very attached to the child. I fail to see how losing a child would just be low on the list of priorities for parents, or they just got used to it. No matter what era I fail to see how this could be a given.

Of course the church and god equate. That is a given. People go to church to praise god don't they? Oh they get a sermon maybe from a 60 yr old virgin, depends on which church of course, who thinks he has the right to dictate dogma to the sheep about how they should have sex. Then they have the satisfaction of putting hard earned money stupidly into a pot.

But what about Jehovah Witnesses they let their children die if they need a blood transfusion. 2016, it is 2016, all religion should have been swept away by now. I bet Bach wrote a secret set of essays under a pseudonym and it is waiting to be discovered in some crypt and it'll talk about how he ruddy well hates god. :lol:
 
#27 ·
Trying to figure out whether Bach was a closet atheist is like trying to figure out if he was a closet coprophiliac or if he liked to daydream about turtles. Sure we can speculate all we want though it doesn't get us much closer to any kind of truth.

Isn't it enough to just revel in his music? He lived long ago enough that there are many holes in our understanding of who he was as a human being. Trying to fill those holes with speculation doesn't seem to serve any real purpose IMHO, especially if the speculator comes at it with their own bias.

Stephen




.
 
#28 ·
Stepping aside from discussing religion, here's an interesting factoid about the era's mentality. Some time after Johann Pachelbel lost his first wife and only child during a plague epidemic, he published a set of "Musical Thoughts on Death" (Musicalische Sterbens-Gedancken). Scholars have no choice but to connect the dots and consider the music as personal reflection on Pachelbel's part, on his personal tragedy. What was this reflection? Chorales with variations. One was Christus, der ist mein Leben, containing the words

Christ is my life,
to die is my gain,
to him I surrender myself,
with joy I depart.


Another was Alle Menschen müssen sterben:

Everybody must die,
all flesh passes like grass;
[...]
I am quite willing:
when it pleases my God
to give up this life of mine
and am not troubled about this;
[...]
There will be the joyful life
where many thousand souls already
surrounded with heavenly splendour
serve God before his throne.


And finally, Herzlich tut mich verlangen:

My heart is filled with longing
To pass away in peace;
For woes are round me thronging
And trials will not cease.
Oh fain would I be hasting,
From thee, dark world of gloom,
To gladness everlasting.
O Jesus! quickly come.


Sure, this is just one example, but from what I know about the epoch, it was hardly atypical to think of death in these terms. Weren't Froberger's "thoughts on upcoming death" mostly in D major?
 
#29 · (Edited)
Richard, I appreciate your response and you are right but Newton achieved quite a lot even developing new forms of maths in calculus and working out gravity. Bach was part of the intelligentsia and he knew it, I mean he must have been aware that he was pretty good at his job or he wouldn't have composed what he did. I don't know what kind of books based on Natural Philosophy were available in the Leipzig University library or whether Bach sought them out. Although I think a man of his stature would have been interested in the subject. Of course it is an assumption but most intelligent people seek out things beyond the dogma they are funnel fed. That is how the human race progressed. Without intelligent people we wouldn't be able to have this quick conversation while I listen to a JS Bach cantata (BWV 54).
 
#30 ·
This is an odd thread, and posts like this just make one cringe reading it. Not that it would cheapen or discredit your opinion, but are you under 20 years old? Learning about science has very little to do with learning about theology and philosophy.

In any case, I'm pretty sure the guy who appended "Soli Deo Gloria" to the end of his compositions wasn't an atheist. It sounds like you want him to be atheist because you believe atheism is somehow a rite of passage for the intellectual-minded. I wonder then who is the dogmatist, truly?
 
#31 ·
Is the OP simply trying to be controversial, and nothing else? I've read his posts in this thread several times now. They "jump all over the place" with regard to logic and seem like the thoughts of someone who simply doesn't want to believe the brilliant Bach could have been a sincere believer in what the OP most despises: this seems to be both the OP's starting point and his ending point. Talk about one's personal biases showing, particularly in that latest post! If you're going to argue that Bach was an atheist or anything similar, at least avoid bringing in issues of dubious relevance like "Jehovah Witnesses," your scouting years and oxytocin; avoid making a-historical claims (a Lutheran in post-Reformation Germany could have been burned at the stake for expressing doubt?!) -- and make sure you punctuate correctly so that your arguments at least "read" better than they actually are.
 
#35 · (Edited)
I don't find this thread odd nor does it make me cringe. But unusual, yes it is. What makes me cringe are the endless silly polls here day after day that are mostly meaningless and meant to show off trivial CM knowledge. These never get criticized for their banality.

At least this one poses a serious philosophical and historical question, whether one agrees with it or not. The OP definitely has an opinion (which I question), but it's a valid point of view open for discussion.
 
#36 ·
Well I won't speak to the relative banality of discussing anything about centuries old music with strangers in one's free time, but as to this topic I fail to see how it's any more enlightening than a topic for discussing whether Beethoven secretly murdered 46 innocent people. I mean I guess it's possible, more possible than the OP's query even since Beethoven never specifically said he didn't, but what will we gain by discussing an assertion which has zero evidence in favor of it and a mountain of evidence specifically contradicting it?
 
#37 · (Edited)
I have it on good authority that Bach was a Nazi. He was a German after all. And history does not record a single time he criticized that party or its Führer. And of course there's the St. John Passion... Close to an airtight case.

I realize this post in in contravention of Godwin's law, but sometimes great truths will not be covered up.
 
#38 ·
Godwin's Law was already fulfilled with the link to that article, which contains the following reasoning:

One of the Christians' favourite numbers is - for good reasons - the Hosanna which translates into German as "Heil!". I'm afraid you know this word - just don't mention the war! So "Heil Jesus!" it is. Only that Mr Bach pinched a Coronation Anthem he composed earlier on occasion of his boss being enthroned. So for Bach it's "Heil Boss!", "Heil Jesus!", "Heil whatever!"
 
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