‘Religion never was designed to make our pleasures less’

An Occasional Essay. Isaac Watts: born 350 years ago on July 17th 2024

Image source: American Society of Church History

I almost missed this anniversary and hadn’t realised that Isaac Watts was born not far from where I now live. He’s a hero of mine and given that I won’t be writing posts in another 350 years, I’ll make my pitch now for this unusual chap who cheerfully lived through perilous times.

Everyone has heard something he wrote. Even if church is absolutely not your thing, you’ll struggle to make it to New Years Day without hearing several arrangements of Joy to the World, a cheerful anthem with added zest from Handel’s magnificent melody. Meanwhile, the more mournful, O God our help in ages past, seems to be the sort of thing religious people sing, at least in films and dramas.  I vaguely recall Ichabod Crane warbling it nervously in a Sleepy Hollow cartoon I saw as kid.

Isaac was an innovator who wrote hundreds of hymns when any church music bar the Psalms, was frowned upon, even though many congregations found them hard work. Apart from his theological doubts about the playbook restrictions, he found the quality terrible and complained to his father one day. Well, reasoned Isaac Watts senior, do something better.  Which he did. And kept on doing.

He was an educator who engaged with people and the topics of the day. Not liking what was around at the time and producing something better became a habit, so as a tutor he produced material from scratch. His textbook on Logic, for instance, was taken up at Cambridge, Oxford and Yale (in alphabetic order, other rankings are available).

It all started early, and there’s an intriguing couplet, allegedly to his father who was about to punish him for frivolous rhyming:

O father, do some pity take,

and I will no more verses make

But what would you expect of someone who started Latin at 4, Greek at 9, French at 10 and Hebrew at 13? His lyrical legacy is deft, robust and surprisingly free of religious jargon.  Although spelling has altered over the centuries (e.g. dy’d to died) he was easy on thee’s and thou’s, so that it’s still possible to sing whole hymns that he wrote without encountering such archaisms, Joy to the world being a nice example.

Music wars

That reference to archaisms may raise a few eyebrows, but it is nothing like the debate that raged at the time. Anglicans had their trained choirs who sang pieces other than psalms, but Isaac was a nonconformist where if you sang at all – and there were those who argued even that was wrong – it was Psalms, metrical Psalms, sometimes reduced to doggerel and sung to dreary tunes. Isaac wasn’t the first to break the mould, but the volume and quality of his contribution broke the dam and led to his reputation as the father of hymnody.

I can’t speak for Roman Catholic, Coptic or Orthodox worshippers, but music wars have generated plenty of heat in Protestant circles, where Isaac was at the eye of a particularly stormy epoch. Anyone attending church over the past half century will have sung their way through several revolutions as songbooks and hymnbooks proliferated and then disappeared with the advent of the big screen at the front. A friend of mine mischievously observed that at his church some of the most vocal in the fray were tone deaf, anyway.

CS Lewis, chronicler of the Narnian era, couldn’t really see the point of singing in church and reasoned that its purpose must lie in fostering gracious attitudes, as the musically cultured stood next to the cheerful bawler and both offered their praise to God. Isaac managed to connect these communities with robust rhymes and rhythms, accessible words and all within a well-articulated theology.

Old words, new music

The problem with many old hymns is that they come with gilded tunes that time’s reverse alchemy has turned to lead. The enduring quality of Isaac’s efforts becomes clear once his words are freed and reset.  When I survey the wondrous cross, for instance, resonates to, The water is wide (e.g. listen here).  It becomes even more poignant when singers revert to the original first stanza’s second line, where the folk melody better accommodates the edgier scansion.

When I survey the wondrous cross

Where the young Prince of Glory died,

My richest gain I count but loss

And pour contempt on all my pride.

This quality of coming up fresh under new notes has hit me through the 12 Songs Challenge (12SC) that I joined recently. It’s an on-line community of Christian songwriters, from enthusiastic starters such as me to a few more widely known composers. July’s challenge was to mark this 350^th anniversary, so contributors have dug out old hymns and set them to new music. Their sources include the traditional (e.g.: Hymns Ancient and Modern ) as well as discarded hymnbooks from decades ago and on-line collections.

I’m still getting into composing and with a lack of fingers I’ve never played an instrument, so I use Sibelius (other packages are available).  Learning to put a score together with a decent right and left hand has been a fun journey on which a pair of Lay Clerks from St George’s Chapel, Windsor – first John Heighway and then David Manners – have been my guides.

Back to the plot: from what I can make out, most contemporary Christian songwriters produce chord-based compositions with the guitar as their main testbed. As a result, emotions are raw and to the fore.  Some of what I’ve been listening to from the 12SC is really beautiful and restores an aching wonder to words that had reached me in ponderous dirges. The ability to sparkle again after hundreds of years under the polish of fresh tunes illustrates the sharp and subtle genius of an author.

I ought to flag up that this dummies’ guide to composing has been written by the dummy, but a second impact – and here I’m revealing my prejudice – concerns scansion. If you are strumming along and you need a few extra syllables, you just add them in.  Up-beats and down-beats are flattened out as you power your message with a decent riff.  It’s a style.  One of the things I’ve noticed in the chatter on 12SC this month is the attention to tempo and the discussion of meter. Exactly where the fusion will go between the metrically-sensitive and the chord-sensitive, I’m not sure but the early results look exciting. I hope some of these will make it to the wider world, soon.

And, if I’ve given the idea that I don’t like the Psalms, I’m sorry.  I love the Psalms and am particularly interested in getting congregations back to singing Psalms, whole Psalms, in a new vernacular. It’s just that I like the wider vista that Isaac opened up, too.

Difficult days

Looking at Isaac’s life purely through the lens of his hymns, we may pigeonhole him as a scholar enjoying a detached life.  The reverse is truer, since he lived through revolutionary times and as a dissenter he was often on the wrong side of the law.  Until the government closed them under lockdown, churches had enjoyed centuries in which they had been left to sort out theology, hymnody and the rest, for themselves.  For centuries, that is, until we get back to Isaac’s time.

In a very modern scene, governments back then felt completely free to legislate on what happened in church.  Since Henry VIII, of course, there had been Protestant-Catholic rip tides, while the puritans under Oliver Cromwell tugged things in favour of some forms of dissent and then under the Restoration with Charles II the tides of tolerance reversed, so that a dissenting pastor, such as John Bunyan would start writing his classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress while in Bedford County Gaol. The whirlpool of legislation – where you could take communion and how often to remain eligible for public office – continued for decades and was in full swell when Isaac was born.

His father, Isaac senior, was imprisoned and his patrons were frequently fined.  As a dissenter, an education at Oxford or Cambridge was closed to him (Yale was about to be founded, so not really accessible, either). The same was true of any post in the public sector.  He did not enjoy good health, with a particularly dark spell – nobody knows quite why – that lasted several years.  Despite all this, he retained the chirpy optimism of his youthful rhyming and could inspire wit in others even at his own expense. The one woman he proposed to, the beautiful Miss Singer, turned him down, lamenting the fact that she could not, ‘admire the casket as much as I admire the jewel’ (see Graham Beynon’s, Isaac Watts: his Life and Thought, p 26).

Faith and reason

If English Christendom was in turmoil, the Enlightenment was polarising Europe by setting reason up in opposition to faith.  It’s not my area, and have used Beynon (cited above) as a readable and informed guide. I did wonder whether was just a little a little harsh on Isaac for yielding too much to reason.  The paradox, of course, is that we cannot grasp anything at all without reason and so setting bounds on how much to flex one’s reason is implicitly tricky.  Critically, Beynon notes that Isaac threw two further factors into the mix.

Isaac’s first seminal contribution was around the concept of mystery.  He took it as read that there were mysteries at the heart of Christianity – the Trinity, the Incarnation – that would never yield to reason, and rather than abandon faith on this count, made mystery a rallying point.  This was a most prescient contribution, since reason has also taken us down some very mysterious paths in the intervening centuries.

So long as people believed in a clockwork universe, they could expect faith and reason independently to lead in a similar direction, and all would be well with the world. Many thinking Christians would have followed this path. Where Christianity deviated from the clockwork predictions, it looked like reason was, well, a more reasonable explanation. The trouble is that every time we have gotten close to robust, mechanistic explanations, the springs have popped out.  For a century and a half after he died, it looked like physics could reveal ever more of the clockwork under the reasonable probing of experiment. Then the twentieth century ushered in two massively counterintuitive theories in physics – completely unreasonable and yet as completely evidenced by experiment as anything we have: quantum mechanics and relativity.

I’m not a biologist, but it looks like genomics is rewriting the life sciences in similar ways, and that even with the help of statistics – in infancy during Isaac’s lifetime – to jangle the keys, there are still very mysterious angles in how our heritage is locked up.

In Isaac’s time, it may have appeared that mystery was a point of division between faith and reason, but today it is more of a common feature, and much of our reasoning to understand reality would have looked like an extreme form of faith back then.

His other contribution was to endorse the validity of experience.  Again, this thinking is contemporary, as our lived experience may be held up against other forms of evidence. From Isaac’s perspective, what you feel as you sing or as you listen in church is your experience and is valid evidence, so it is perfectly legitimate for you to share that with others. If I have this right – and I may not – his ideas wouldn’t really hit the road again until the existentialism of the 20^th century or the woke wars of the 21^st.

I quite like the fact that even in areas where Christians today can feel uncomfortable – science, culture wars – there were Christians in at the start, experimenting with electromagnetism, digging up fossils or, in Isaac’s case, promoting mystery and experience as faith and reason learned to dance together.

Changing patterns of worship

What little I’ve done in haste to celebrate 350 years since Isaac was born has encouraged me to find out more about him.  He innovated, not just in the hymnody, but in connecting the hymns to the sermon. 

Clearly, if you’re writing the sermon and you write hymns it not too difficult to align the two.  In the nineteenth century, Moody and Sankey managed to bring sermons and singing together with a flexible fluidity that allowed them to respond in the moment. Towards the end of the twentieth century, Graham Kendrick, the widely sung songwriter, reports how writing music to fit with the teaching coming up, drove some of his early work. In our world of worship, where the music and the message are drifting ever further apart, Isaac has a message of reintegration for us.

He took his faith cheerfully into a world of divided ideas and built a few bridges, between denominations and between the sacred and the secular. Before we leave, let’s hear him again in radical mood (a verse omitted in many hymnals):

The sorrows of the mind
Be banished from the place;
Religion never was designed
To make our pleasures less.

And his most memorable legacy lies in the rhymes and rhythms that continue to shine as new generations rework the settings. I commend him to you.