Hi!
I recommend very much to readers the work of the Dutch historian Van Loon and in particular his book "The Liberation of Mankind", and upon reading this, no doubt his book on the Life and Times of Johannes Sebastien Bach may well be illuminating to organists.
"The Liberation of Mankind" is subtitled "The story of man's struggle for the right to think". It details how the Roman Empire adopted Christianity - and I suspect brought elements of the Christ story and teachings into line with all the disparate religions of the Roman empire, bringing a unity in faith throughout an empire materially falling apart at the seams. As an aside and not documented by Van Loon, requiring 60 ships of wood per day to keep them fuelled, the Roman Baths were unsustainable and it is obvious that when the wood ran out increasingly throughout Europe, the trade relationships that kept the empire together disintegrated. Accordingly, Christianity was seen as capable of keeping the bureaucratic networks together.
For instance the story of the virgin birth brought forward the followers of the old worship of Mithras into Christianity and the roman soldiers converted their allegience wholesale.
Whilst vested interest authors in the net deny that the Council of Nicea and years leading to it in 325-321AD did not meddle with the bilblical texts handed down to us, Van Loon points out that the supervisoin of the written word became a routine duty of the clergy and that some books were absolutely forbidden.
It is pretty obvious that there were processes of significant vested interests which coincided to make Christianity a common demoninator throughout an Empire riven by corruption and visibly falling apart. The adoption of Christianity was seen as the solution to keep the show on the road. It's no coincidence that Christendom centered upon Rome and it's no coincidence either that those who through near two millennia have pointed out the ways in which perhaps post Nicean Christianity might not have accorded entirely with what really happened between Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem in the first three decades Anno Domini have been seen as a threat and been progressively discriminated against and put to death.
The French protestants, the Huguenots were discriminated against after the Edict of Nantes promising them freedom in 1598 but merely resulted in a fleedom, thus circuitously bringing the family of Benjamin Henry Latrobe to England and America. Their family motto "Qui La Cerca La Troba" - "he who searches finds" would have been poignantly relevant to them as protestants having searched beneath the surface of what Roman Catholic doctrine had enforced upon them. Of course, of the ancestors of these generations, many dissenters had come back from Crusades having experienced greater mercy at the hands of their Muslim "enemies" than they would have shown as "Christians" to their enemies, and in this way been impressed at how more Christian spirited the followers of Islam were than they as Christians themselves under the Roman Christian banner and doctrines. The Crusaders returning from entering Toledo in 1180 had discovered that the Arab muslim libraries had preserved the Greek myths and that these, although polytheistic, accorded with the story of Genesis. This had been the catalyst of the Renaissance and the translation of Genesis 6 and Job 1 and, of course, the wandering minstrels who sang playing Citern and Tambour, akin to the Citar and Tabla, were the Troubadours - the people who had Trouba - Troba - Trova - found.
Finding what others don't want you to find is :D troubling! So whilst heretics of the Catholic church were put to death and burned at the stake, especially for instance at Albi, where later the Cathedral was to house one of the greatest organs of our time, such activities were considered quite normal by the Calvinists and Anabaptists too - so for instance, one could not visit Geneva uttering unthinkable things to Calvin without being put to death. If you were Servetus, one did not not want to receive a letter from Geneva from Calvin inviting you to visit. Meanwhile as a free thinker such as Giordano Bruno you could not expect to be invited by Giovanni Mocenigo to Venice without subsequently an unwelcome visit to Rome to be burned.
So it was that were you to travel through Germany where some towns were catholic, some protestant, were you to express the wrong opinion in the wrong place, your travels would be cut short.
In researching temperament I came across
http://sites.google.com/site/bachtuning/theology
where it is apparent that in defence of Meantone tuning the perfect thirds were considered to be symbolic of the Trinity and any other tuning was heretical. To tune to anything but Meantone would send you to the stake.
For once I quite agree that Equal Temperament must be the work of the Devil ;) and that therefore all proponents of Equal Temperament should be burned at the stake. ;D
However, if Christianity is to survive, it is upon the teachings of Christ and not the edifices of religion that have been built around it. The arguments over "the trinity", virgin birth, death and resurrection and a few other things have hardly led to the creation of Heaven on Earth intended by the doctrines of Love thy God with all your heart and your neighbour as yourself, love your enemy and turn the other cheek to be slapped again should your enemy slap you.
All the arguable tenets of doctrine are only there as meditational focii or as carrots to induce unthinking people to follow in the promise of better things ahead.
"Love thy God" - what is God? Not in hard fact the Trinity - that is only a meditational focus - but The Immortal, The All Powerful, The Invisible, The All Knowing - in fact the all around us, all connected by the invisible strands of spiders' web in the dimensions beyond the here and now and the seen.
Many Christians of the indoctrinated sort have really forgotten their foundations. When asked "what is God?" they will answer "The Trinity", forgetting the real definition of God in terms of the "All around us". Telling them that God is more than "The Trinity" undermines the comfort of their doctrine on which they have built the edifice of faith in a God made in their image, and they will glare daggers no different to the fire with which Calvin had Servetus burned or as he wished Godspeed upon Sozzini upon his way to Zurich.
There are many that think that what is invisible does not exist. For the past 100 years such people have not been supported by the findings of modern physics which relies upon dimensions beyond the three and time, and indeed it was by plugging in a fourth and fifth demension into Einstein's equations of General Relativity that Theodor Kaluza found Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism emerged spontaneously, so demonstrating the physical existence of the invisible dimensions of which users of computers on WiFi connexions rely all the time.
So users of WiFi cannot deny the existence of God - the Omipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient and Invisible. Not even Stephen Hawking could deny that. Perhaps it's God that he has been studying all his life even without realising it. The Omipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient and Invisible all result from the physical laws from the moment of inception of the Big Bang, from which by cause and effect and within which all have to work and comply. There are no escapes from these laws. In the beginning was the law . . .
Can we not see how "law" and "word" to a disconnexion of physicists, theologians and the man in the street? By the mistranslation and loss of meaning, and especially with the resulting disconnexion with the physical universe, argument has been brought into the world.
This loss of meaning in translation and transmutation through similar words is the curse of the Tower of Babel. From my studies of the Parthenon Frieze, according with the concepts of Job 1, this is the work of Hermes (Mercury) himself, the figure representing communication - rather miscommunication, lying, deceipt and thieving. He is one of the number of cynics, Hephaestus, Artemis, Aphrodite and Ares, who try to persuade the Chairman of the Homeric assembly of Gods, that humankind is not worthy of support.
In contrast to arguing over words, "law", "word", the intimate relationship with the physical world, focussing on the fundamental meaning of God as the physical universe can bring universal understanding.
Best wishes
David P
Postscript - Equal Temperament is 11th comma meantone, but the point of Baroque meantone was the 8 pure thirds. Even today I'm aware of an organ voicer who bemoans his boss not building an organ tuned with 8 perfect thirds and accepting an impure compromise
I recommend very much to readers the work of the Dutch historian Van Loon and in particular his book "The Liberation of Mankind", and upon reading this, no doubt his book on the Life and Times of Johannes Sebastien Bach may well be illuminating to organists.
"The Liberation of Mankind" is subtitled "The story of man's struggle for the right to think". It details how the Roman Empire adopted Christianity - and I suspect brought elements of the Christ story and teachings into line with all the disparate religions of the Roman empire, bringing a unity in faith throughout an empire materially falling apart at the seams. As an aside and not documented by Van Loon, requiring 60 ships of wood per day to keep them fuelled, the Roman Baths were unsustainable and it is obvious that when the wood ran out increasingly throughout Europe, the trade relationships that kept the empire together disintegrated. Accordingly, Christianity was seen as capable of keeping the bureaucratic networks together.
For instance the story of the virgin birth brought forward the followers of the old worship of Mithras into Christianity and the roman soldiers converted their allegience wholesale.
Whilst vested interest authors in the net deny that the Council of Nicea and years leading to it in 325-321AD did not meddle with the bilblical texts handed down to us, Van Loon points out that the supervisoin of the written word became a routine duty of the clergy and that some books were absolutely forbidden.
It is pretty obvious that there were processes of significant vested interests which coincided to make Christianity a common demoninator throughout an Empire riven by corruption and visibly falling apart. The adoption of Christianity was seen as the solution to keep the show on the road. It's no coincidence that Christendom centered upon Rome and it's no coincidence either that those who through near two millennia have pointed out the ways in which perhaps post Nicean Christianity might not have accorded entirely with what really happened between Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem in the first three decades Anno Domini have been seen as a threat and been progressively discriminated against and put to death.
The French protestants, the Huguenots were discriminated against after the Edict of Nantes promising them freedom in 1598 but merely resulted in a fleedom, thus circuitously bringing the family of Benjamin Henry Latrobe to England and America. Their family motto "Qui La Cerca La Troba" - "he who searches finds" would have been poignantly relevant to them as protestants having searched beneath the surface of what Roman Catholic doctrine had enforced upon them. Of course, of the ancestors of these generations, many dissenters had come back from Crusades having experienced greater mercy at the hands of their Muslim "enemies" than they would have shown as "Christians" to their enemies, and in this way been impressed at how more Christian spirited the followers of Islam were than they as Christians themselves under the Roman Christian banner and doctrines. The Crusaders returning from entering Toledo in 1180 had discovered that the Arab muslim libraries had preserved the Greek myths and that these, although polytheistic, accorded with the story of Genesis. This had been the catalyst of the Renaissance and the translation of Genesis 6 and Job 1 and, of course, the wandering minstrels who sang playing Citern and Tambour, akin to the Citar and Tabla, were the Troubadours - the people who had Trouba - Troba - Trova - found.
Finding what others don't want you to find is :D troubling! So whilst heretics of the Catholic church were put to death and burned at the stake, especially for instance at Albi, where later the Cathedral was to house one of the greatest organs of our time, such activities were considered quite normal by the Calvinists and Anabaptists too - so for instance, one could not visit Geneva uttering unthinkable things to Calvin without being put to death. If you were Servetus, one did not not want to receive a letter from Geneva from Calvin inviting you to visit. Meanwhile as a free thinker such as Giordano Bruno you could not expect to be invited by Giovanni Mocenigo to Venice without subsequently an unwelcome visit to Rome to be burned.
So it was that were you to travel through Germany where some towns were catholic, some protestant, were you to express the wrong opinion in the wrong place, your travels would be cut short.
In researching temperament I came across
http://sites.google.com/site/bachtuning/theology
where it is apparent that in defence of Meantone tuning the perfect thirds were considered to be symbolic of the Trinity and any other tuning was heretical. To tune to anything but Meantone would send you to the stake.
For once I quite agree that Equal Temperament must be the work of the Devil ;) and that therefore all proponents of Equal Temperament should be burned at the stake. ;D
However, if Christianity is to survive, it is upon the teachings of Christ and not the edifices of religion that have been built around it. The arguments over "the trinity", virgin birth, death and resurrection and a few other things have hardly led to the creation of Heaven on Earth intended by the doctrines of Love thy God with all your heart and your neighbour as yourself, love your enemy and turn the other cheek to be slapped again should your enemy slap you.
All the arguable tenets of doctrine are only there as meditational focii or as carrots to induce unthinking people to follow in the promise of better things ahead.
"Love thy God" - what is God? Not in hard fact the Trinity - that is only a meditational focus - but The Immortal, The All Powerful, The Invisible, The All Knowing - in fact the all around us, all connected by the invisible strands of spiders' web in the dimensions beyond the here and now and the seen.
Many Christians of the indoctrinated sort have really forgotten their foundations. When asked "what is God?" they will answer "The Trinity", forgetting the real definition of God in terms of the "All around us". Telling them that God is more than "The Trinity" undermines the comfort of their doctrine on which they have built the edifice of faith in a God made in their image, and they will glare daggers no different to the fire with which Calvin had Servetus burned or as he wished Godspeed upon Sozzini upon his way to Zurich.
There are many that think that what is invisible does not exist. For the past 100 years such people have not been supported by the findings of modern physics which relies upon dimensions beyond the three and time, and indeed it was by plugging in a fourth and fifth demension into Einstein's equations of General Relativity that Theodor Kaluza found Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism emerged spontaneously, so demonstrating the physical existence of the invisible dimensions of which users of computers on WiFi connexions rely all the time.
So users of WiFi cannot deny the existence of God - the Omipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient and Invisible. Not even Stephen Hawking could deny that. Perhaps it's God that he has been studying all his life even without realising it. The Omipotent, Omnipresent, Omniscient and Invisible all result from the physical laws from the moment of inception of the Big Bang, from which by cause and effect and within which all have to work and comply. There are no escapes from these laws. In the beginning was the law . . .
Can we not see how "law" and "word" to a disconnexion of physicists, theologians and the man in the street? By the mistranslation and loss of meaning, and especially with the resulting disconnexion with the physical universe, argument has been brought into the world.
This loss of meaning in translation and transmutation through similar words is the curse of the Tower of Babel. From my studies of the Parthenon Frieze, according with the concepts of Job 1, this is the work of Hermes (Mercury) himself, the figure representing communication - rather miscommunication, lying, deceipt and thieving. He is one of the number of cynics, Hephaestus, Artemis, Aphrodite and Ares, who try to persuade the Chairman of the Homeric assembly of Gods, that humankind is not worthy of support.
In contrast to arguing over words, "law", "word", the intimate relationship with the physical world, focussing on the fundamental meaning of God as the physical universe can bring universal understanding.
Best wishes
David P
Postscript - Equal Temperament is 11th comma meantone, but the point of Baroque meantone was the 8 pure thirds. Even today I'm aware of an organ voicer who bemoans his boss not building an organ tuned with 8 perfect thirds and accepting an impure compromise
