The Letter to the Hebrews contains for me one of the most beautiful and poetically intriguing images in all of the Bible: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith.” (Heb. 12:1-2 NAB). The evocative phrase is ‘cloud of witnesses’ because it is not immediately obvious what these two have to do with one another: who would naturally describe a group of witnesses to be like a cloud? And the Greek words of the original do not offer a solution, lost in translation to us who read it rendered in English: nephos has to do with the heavens, a bank of fog, a cloud as we commonly know it; martyron, while rich in meaning for its gained association with those who die for faith, pre-dates this usage to mean simply ‘witness,’ one who gives voice to testimony, as in a legal proceeding. So what does the author of Hebrews mean by forging a link between ‘cloud’ and ‘witness’? Perhaps unusually (even for an unusual image), I think the music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt helps to see the beauty of this phrase, its context in the Letter to the Hebrews, and the place of ‘witness’ in the Christian life. 

 

I. On ‘Cloud’ (and its Biblical significance)

Clouds fill the heavens within the Bible. The Lord leads Israel out of Egypt in a pillar of fire and cloud; He gives the Law to Moses amid the thunderous violence of the clouds over Sinai; the Son of Man comes upon a cloud at the end of the age. A luminous cloud overlooks the mountain of the Transfiguration. Each indicates, to varying levels of grandeur and dread, the presence of God. 

 

If cloud indicates Divine presence, then a profound thing is being worked out in the Epistle to the Hebrews: “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith.” (Heb. 12:1-2 NAB) Two new things present themselves here: 1) We who are running the race are surrounded by the cloud: we are within the Divine presence, not observing it distantly. 2) The cloud is composed of witnesses (or, in Greek, martyrs), while it retains its divine valence and centeredness upon Christ (‘keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus’). These witnesses who surround us have in some way mediated their divine telos and have themselves taken on the character of divinity.

 

What has changed between the earlier iterations of the cloud and the one in Hebrews? The saving action of Jesus Christ in the world and the institution of a communion among those who, by Christ, share in a death and life like his own. Christ has been lifted up and is proceeding to draw everyone to himself (John 12:32). 

 

Something sacred to that divine cloud must now have to do with that communion, those dead and glorified with Christ, those dead to sin in baptism, those on the way, stumbling, moving slowly  center from further out on the radius. A cloud of witnesses, drawing us all to Christ, the perfecter of faith. 

 

“But when,” we press the author of Hebrews, “when and how do we see this ‘cloud of witnesses? How do we experience it? How do they make themselves known to us?” Yes, we know and assent to the efficacy of our prayers for intercession; we know and assent even to the miracles that break through the normal course of things because of these intercessors; and sometimes, when the church’s dome is particularly resonant and the priest uses a lot of incense, we can hear unheard voices singing and sense unearthly presences at the Mass. And we know and assent that these are really there, uniting us with the eternal heavenly worship. But the question remains: How do we verify for ourselves what we hold in faith, that we are surrounded by this cloud of witnesses? 

 

I submit that there might be a way to know this for oneself, based on a ‘cloud experience’ I sometimes have. This cloud-sense comes sometimes in experiences of ideas, of art, of prayer, that appear somehow part of this witness. It is hard to describe these encounters: I might say that a vaporous image comes into my mind, or that it feels as though I am within the cloud. I feel a slow whirling, bright and moving. 

 

Usually, art brings on my cloud encounter. I feel it at the steady motion of the famous chorale from Bach’s Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme cantata, in the footage of the horse rolling in the grass in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, in Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. I see it (and cry) nearly every time that I read the fifth chapter of the Book of Revelation. I recognize it in the positioning of Ignatius of Loyola, centered about his own heart, as in the sculpture of the saint by Pablo Eduardo that stands on the campus of Boston College. But, of late, there is one thing more than any other that triggers it: listening to ‘Movement II: Silentium’ of Tabula Rasa, the tintinnabuli masterpiece by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b.1935). In fact, any number of Pärt’s works take me there. 

 

This is indirectly a ‘cloud of witnesses.’ Sensory encounters with art, literature, and music are not the same as those saints who live and surround us with their good will for our salvation. But they are yet ‘witnesses,’ speaking for and pointing back to a center that is their ultimate source and our encouragement in the earthly race.  

 

II. On ‘Voice’ (and its theological value)

‘Voice’ is a rich term. In human experience, voice is embodied; it speaks, but it also sings. There are compositional analogues to voice in instrumental music, a voice being the line of a particular instrument, which may or may not interact with other voices. Voice also places an emphasis on the idea of freedom: there is a choice to freely speak or be silent, and freedom is violated when a voice is forcefully silenced. Voice is an important image in Scripture and Christian tradition, too. We see it in many places, including the human-divine encounter in prayer and liturgy; God’s act of creating through speech; Adam’s stewardship inaugurated by naming the creatures; the advent voice of the prophets; the eternal Word spoken forth; the voices of nature calling attention to their maker; the saints witnessing to their humanity re-vivified by Christ. 

 

Recent theology has paid attention to what could be called a ‘theology of voice,’ developing primarily out of two sources–liberation theologies and theological aesthetics. Voice has become a way of dealing with the plurality encountered in modernity, whether that plurality be spiritual, moral, rational, or cultural. That is, theologians of voice aim to reconcile the many and varied human voices with Christian claims and aspirations to unity, characteristically found in Jesus’ prayer “that they all may be one” (John 17:21). What is the relationship between plurality and unity, both empirically and normatively? In other words, how can Christianity propose a real unity that harmonizes, but does not suppress, human diversity? This question bears on all aspects of Christian thought, and reflection in the realm of voice is one way that thinkers have approached the question. I will argue that the music of Arvo Part offers a theological model for a Divine unity that perfects, without abrogating, the diversity of human voices.
 

I was drawn to Pärt’s music from the first time I heard it, but I was even more taken when I heard Pärt speak. He is quiet, subdued, shy, and heartfelt; each word seems intentional but not forced, not played for effect. Perhaps these are qualities shared by both composer and compositions. His interviews describe a musical method that has clear technical parameters, but are informed not by an artist’s manifesto but by the artist’s awareness of being a sinner and reliance upon prayer. Pärt, a convert to Orthodox Christianity, writes music that resonates with the peculiar, even paradoxical experience of the Christian in the world. 

 

There is the music itself. Tintinnabuli is the unusual word found at the core of discussions of Pärt’s music. Deriving from the Latin for ‘bell,’ the name describes the composer’s technique as well as the philosophical starting point of his music in the idea of harmonics. The peal of a bell will at first sound as a single, unified tone. But as that tone is let to ring, the sound changes, with higher parts of the sound stopping, the lower persisting. What is perceived as a single unified pitch is in fact composed of several pitches sounding together as one. The relationship among tones is the basis of musical harmony. What Pärt does in his tintinnabuli style is compose to represent the truth revealed in that peal of a bell: the relationship of unity and diversity, the one and the many.

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The peal of a bell will at first sound as a single, unified tone. But as that tone is let to ring, the sound changes, with higher parts of the sound stopping, the lower persisting. What is perceived as a single unified pitch is in fact composed of several pitches sounding together as one.

 

To do this, in its most basic way, Pärt composes a melody freely. In many instances in his oeuvre, this is the setting of some sacred text, whether Biblical, liturgical, or from the writings of a saint (Pärt will also often follow some ‘rule’ for how to write this melody). After the melodic voice is written, he will write the Triadic voice, a line that will follow along the melody with harmoniously resonant related notes. This may be most clearly heard in some of Pärt’s instrumental pieces such as Spiegel im Spiegel and Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten and vocal works like Magnificat. No matter what dissonant or twisting turns the melody may take, the triadic voice will be there embracing the sound with consonance that recalls it back to its origins, integrates, assures. 

 

Pärt intends the religious and spiritual valence of the description above. In interviews, he has gone as far as to describe the melodies he composes to be himself, wandering in sin and the triadic voice to be the forgiveness that God offers, present wherever he wanders, always recalling him back to the relationship at the essence of his being. 

 

In Pärt and his music, I found a Christian striving to live a life of prayer and give his music as an offering for the life of the world. The music was luminous, referring not to itself only or to the hand of the composer who wrote it, but to a fundamental human situation of createdness, of difference and unity, of harmony and dissonance, of sorrow and joy. It did not collapse these antinomies into facile nihilism or optimism, but held them as the real, sacred stuff of life in which God encounters us. If this is what Pärt’s music stands for, it is fertile grounds for Christian reflection, akin to how icons work by opening windows onto living divine realities. 

 

Pärt is as much a theologian as those who write books and hold academic chairs. In his exploration of the voice in the Divine-human relationship, he is in company with some of the most important theologians of the last several decades. Hans Urs von Balthasar, David Bentley Hart, and Jean-Louis Chrétien each place the idea of ‘voice’ within their constructions of the human-divine relationship, freely taking their cues from musical usage: for each, respectively, the concern is symphonic, polyphonic, antiphonic. With Arvo Pärt, however, the theological contribution is not in words but in musical artifact, an icon that opens the hearer up to a vocal reality of the divine and human: the freedom of the human subject, even unto dissonance, but also the loving embrace of the divine voice who follows the human to the lowest depths, offering the promise of resolution.  

 

In this essay, I hope to have shown something that may illuminate the phrase ‘cloud of witnesses,’ that is, a cloud of voices testifying to the Christian thing. It is idiosyncratic, I know, to have a nebulous, cloud experience with certain art (perhaps there are others?) but that is where Arvo Pärt puts me. If his musical voice of witness is also one surrounding us, encouraging us to run the race (as the voices in the cloud), perhaps Pärt sheds light on that unusual phrase from the Letter to the Hebrews.