Canon Ellis: Vaughan Williams was a spiritual composer whose faith was not solid

His compositions include works from the operatic to chamber to orchestral to religious to even film scores. He was influenced by English folk music, such as in his ‘Fantasia on Greensleeves’.

Vaughan Williams’ experience of life naturally had a fundamental bearing on his music. Having served in the First World War he saw its traumatic course first-hand as an ambulance driver in France and Greece and later in the Royal Artillery. He witnessed the suffering of many as well as losing personal friends and his Pastoral Symphony No. 3 is disturbingly evocative of that wartime experience.

During World War II, in his sixties, he was active as a civilian in a number of war-related good causes, including the welfare of refugees from Germany.

One of his major works was an anthem composed for the Dedication Service of the Battle of Britain Chapel in Westminster Abbey in 1947, entitled ‘The Souls of the Righteous’.

While solemn it is also uplifting because of the anthem’s rendering of the opening scriptural assurance of freedom from suffering in the heavenly places: “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them.” That chapter in the Wisdom of Solomon reflects on how, from a mortal perspective, the passing of the righteous is lamented as loss, yet also asserts that they are “in peace”. It is a profoundly consoling message, bringing hope and comfort to those who mourn.

Vaughan Williams, who was musical editor of the English Hymnal of 1906, also composed the tunes of the hymns, ‘Come down, O love divine’ and ‘For all the saints’. He named the former tune ‘Down Ampney’, after the Cotswold village where his father was vicar and where he was born.

Given his considerable religious involvement and output, quite apart from everything else, it is somewhat surprising that Vaughan Williams’ actual personal faith does not seem to have been as solid as it might appear.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was his great uncle and Darwin’s famous work, ‘On the Origin of Species’, disturbed conventional Christian thinking.

Vaughan Williams’ widow, Ursula, wrote in her 1964 biography of her husband that when he had asked his reportedly evangelically minded mother about Darwin’s writing, she told him: “The Bible says that God made the world in six days. Great Uncle Charles thinks it took longer: but we need not worry about it, for it is equally wonderful either way.”

However, while his widow observed that this had satisfied the young Ralph, she went on to write in her biography of him: “He was an atheist during his later years at Charterhouse and at Cambridge, though he later drifted into a cheerful agnosticism: he was never a professing Christian.”

It is difficult to question what Ursula Vaughan Williams wrote about her husband. Yet, commenting on the depth of the spiritual quality of the sacred music written by Vaughan Williams, the writer, broadcaster and composer, Stephen Johnson, has ventured the view that she was more inclined to build up the agnostic side of her husband’s spirituality.

Speaking last year on BBC Radio 4’s Faith in Music series, Johnson added that for Vaughan Williams religious music conveys something of serious import and is more than simply aesthetic pleasure.

It is clear that Vaughan Williams was a spiritual man, if not a conventional or actually orthodox believer.

In his music, he movingly expresses the contrasts of darkness and light, doubt and faith, even horror and joy. There are intimations of both solemnity and genuine hope. Like so many who experienced World War I, or indeed any war, for Vaughan Williams faith was not easy and involved both sincere and profound inner struggle.

It is therefore not surprising that John Bunyon’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ was not only important to him but was also the subject of an opera he composed, seeing Bunyon’s idea of spiritual progress as applicable to any person striving for spiritual growth.

In our day there is a growing awareness of the spiritual as distinct from the religious. It is not particularly clear what ‘spiritual’ actually means nowadays or how it is to be defined, but it is surely fair to say that it is not seen as primarily dogmatic.

In that sense, Vaughan Williams presents as belonging to this modern outlook ahead of his time. He expresses a deep inner striving but does not jettison traditional religious concepts or language. Indeed, he had a deep love of the Authorised Version of the Bible.

Some see faith in black and white terms yet for others the life of faith is a struggle between doubt and faith, a spiritual journey in which the individual experiences highs and lows, times of questioning but also times of inward confidence and reassurance. This is the spiritual journey deeper and deeper into communion with the eternal God whose being we, with our words or music or art, can never fully capture.

l Canon Ian Ellis is a former editor of The Church of Ireland Gazette