The Echo of Paradise
Vol. 57 No. 21 The Second Sunday after Easter April 19, 2026
Those who attended the concert of the Tallis Scholars this past Sunday evening at St John’s heard unaccompanied vocal music of astonishing purity, beauty, and power. I confess, it gave me goosebumps. They sang works from the golden age of Renaissance polyphony—well-known works by Victoria and Tallis, and lesser-known works by de Wert and Gallus—but the concert closed with two electrifying works by the contemporary Estonian composer of the “new spirituality,” Arvo Pärt: Tribute to Caesar (a dramatic setting of Matthew 22:15–22 in the weight-bearing language of the King James Version) and Virgencita (a Latin and Spanish Marian devotion). These were all works of sacred music, grounded in the tradition of Christian worship. To use a word much abused but still indispensable, this is the music of transcendence—music that aspires to the absolute.
So what of “the absolute”? The human condition is an attempt to tame the powers of chaos, to discover or impose order and meaning in a world that often seems a bewildering jumble. For many in the late modern world, order is something we create, having no ultimate correspondence to reality as we find it. Our talk of “God” is merely a way of speaking about human aspirations to the highest good—it has no reality beyond our minds and works. Our fate is thus essentially tragic, for even our highest and noblest aspirations must inevitably fall short and come at last to nothing. Perhaps that is why we are often tempted to settle for substitutes—material prosperity, power, pleasure, the dream of an earthly paradise achieved through technology.
There is another vision, however, which also sees the human condition as an attempt to tame the powers of chaos, to cultivate a garden in the wilderness—and it too recognizes the transitory character of even our greatest accomplishments. What redeems those efforts from utter futility, and what motivates us to seek the highest good, is our knowledge, however dim, of an absolute reality that does endure, and is not affected by “the changes and chances of this fleeting world”: a transcendent goodness and truth that makes sense of all our strivings, whose beauty we glimpse from afar, and which fills us with deep longing and desire. This desire takes many forms—religion or justice, philosophy or poetry, art and music—but at its heart it is a longing for God. “Our hearts are restless, Lord, until they find their rest in thee.”
Longing for God, desire for absolute truth, goodness, and beauty, is intrinsic to human nature. Though we may sedate it with paltry substitutes or channel it into the service of idols, when we do so, our humanity is corrupted and enslaved. The gulf between our longing and its fulfillment is not merely metaphysical but moral: for the disorder without reflects the disorder within, and sinful man cannot ascend to the holy God by aspiration alone. Our redemption consists not merely in knowing that the transcendent exists, nor in aspiring toward it from afar, but in the revelation of a way there: a true mediation of the infinite and finite, of God and sinful man.
That mediation is given in Jesus Christ, in whom the eternal Word through whom all things were made has entered the disorder of this fallen world, taking our nature upon himself that he might restore it to communion with God. In him transcendence is no longer merely glimpsed from afar, nor dimly desired, but fully realized in human life. In him the infinite has crossed the gulf to meet the finite; eternity has entered into time; heaven has appeared in earth.
Sacred music belongs to this mystery. At its highest, it is not mere decoration, nor emotional stimulus, nor even simply religious art. It is the ordering of sound to the praise of God according to truth and beauty, and thus a fitting sign of creation restored to its proper end. When sacred music is worthy of its name, it gives audible form to the harmony of redeemed creation: multiplicity gathered into unity, freedom disciplined into order, beauty lifted beyond sentiment into adoration. It trains the soul to desire what is higher than itself.
This is why the greatest sacred music often affects us so deeply. It awakens in us not merely aesthetic pleasure but that strange homesickness of the soul of which C. S. Lewis wrote: a longing for the world made whole, for the beauty beyond all earthly beauty of which this world is only a shadow. It stirs the heart because it reminds us—however fleetingly—what we were made for.
And so when we hear such music, whether in the exquisite polyphony of Tallis and Victoria or the haunting austerity of Pärt, we hear more than technical brilliance or artistic genius. We hear an echo of paradise lost, and of paradise promised. We hear, if only for a moment, creation itself reaching toward its redemption in Christ. – GGD