# “Music or martyrdom” by C.S. Lewis

- Link: https://tollelege.net/2009/08/09/music-or-martyrdom-by-c-s-lewis/
- Published: 2009-08-09T22:36:04-05:00
- Author: tollelege

“What is looked for in us, as men, is another kind of glorifying, which depends 
on intention. How easy or how hard it may be for a whole choir to preserve that 
intention through all the discussions and decisions, all the corrections and disappointments,
all the temptations to pride, rivalry and ambition, which precede the performance
of a great work, I (naturally) do not know. But it is on the intention that all 
depends.

When it succeeds, I think the performers are the most enviable of men; privileged
while mortals to honour God like angels and, for a few golden moments, to see spirit
and flesh, delight and labour, skill and worship, the natural and the supernatural,
all fused into that unity they would have had before the Fall. But I must insist
that no degree of excellence in the music, simply as music, can assure us that this
paradisal state has been achieved. The excellence proves ‘keenness’; but men can
be ‘keen’ for natural, or even wicked, motives. The absence of keenness would prove
that they lacked the right spirit; its presence does not prove that they have it.

We must beware of the naïve idea that our music can ‘please’ God as it would please
a cultivated human hearer. That is like thinking, under the old Law, that He really
needed the blood of bulls and goats. To which an answer came, ‘mine are the cattle
upon a thousand hills,’ and ‘if I am hungry, I will not tell _thee_.’ If God (in
that sense) wanted music, He would not tell _us_. For all our offerings, whether
of music or martyrdom, are like the intrinsically worthless present of a child, 
which a father values indeed, but values only for the intention.”

–C.S. Lewis, [“On Church Music,” in _Christian Reflections_](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0802871844?tag=toletaupanre-20)(
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1967), 98-99.

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