The truth is that I did not discover Monk. Monk discovered me. Monk’s music helped me find myself by revealing an aesthetic mode of thinking that functions to isolate what Karl Barth might designate as a “secular parable” or James Cone might identify as a “secular spiritual.” To discover such phenomena, which I style as “spiritual seculars,” it is helpful to see how Monk’s performance practices, especially his engagement in dance, suggest a way to reorient uncritical discursive categories in theology, and ultimately his musical aesthetic opens the way to a more radically inclusive mode of being in the world.⁵ In the rest of this essay I will improvise to some degree on this tripartite framework and, hopefully, contribute to our common (re)envisioning of the current deformation in theological and religious thinking . . . I hope.

Establishing the Dance

What precisely does Monk’s emphasis on the melody and rhythmic sense offer to theology? Referencing the incarnation of Christ, the theologian Willie Jennings places his finger on the key, stating that “when God’s feet touched the soil, God was in rhythm, the very rhythm God created with the creation itself. This means that God birthed musicality.”⁶ In God’s musicality there is not a question of which came first, the rhythm or the dance, for the movement (or dance) of the divine is music to those who hear it. The musicality and synchronicity of the divine furnish meaning to the whole of creation and fire the imagination to embrace not only the multidimensional nature of humankind but even the musicality of “otherkind,” that is, what Andrew Greeley, the Catholic priest and professor of sociology, identified as “otherness in everything,” including the mountains, oceans, lakes, and rivers of rhythm that flow from our human productions—and, yes, the Cambridge turkeys.⁷ Indigenous theologies have long witnessed to this reality.

Although Monk did not have divine musicality in mind when he regularly advised musicians to “improvise on the melody,” this does not stop his music from being parabolically suggestive for those who can, in the words of Monk, “hear the light.” Monk, in fact, was often mystified by those who tried to improvise or create solos (or even songs) by leaving the melody, stating “You can make a better solo if you know the tune.”⁸ It was the keynote to everything else. Ian Carr concurs, stating that “this predilection for improvising on the melody is fundamental to his whole conception of jazz.”⁹ The remaining elements of the sequencing of the song, including the rhythms and harmonies and even spaces/silences, were determined by their relationship to the melody, or what might be called the cantus firmus (lit., “fixed melody”).¹⁰ Monk’s music, as a result of his aesthetic approach, can function then as a handy and instructive metaphor for theologians who think through what it means to hear the melody of the divine in the midst of the world. This melody of course finds its center in the mystery of Jesus Christ, who in the assumptio carnis expresses a radical openness toward the polyphony of voices within the world and encourages us to improvise and dance to the divine melody. In essence, the incarnation takes on an aesthetic form in Monk’s music and Monk’s music takes on a theological form through the incarnation—even while remaining what it is.

Monk’s playing, then, represents a medium or portal of insight into the kaleidoscopic witness of the whole creation. In his aesthetic one can parabolically encounter the whole religious world and arguably come to terms with a new form of theology that takes seriously our theological and religious differences, our continuities and discontinuities. Indeed, Monk’s music celebrates all of the vox humana, which is noted in Karl Barth’s Mozart, including the creation’s distortions, its contradictions and, yes, of course, its “brilliant corners.”¹¹ These multiple ways of being in the world testify to the functionality of his music for me, but even more so to his music as a parable of the possibilities that creation holds in its versatile and joyful witness to the divine. In sum, Monk’s aesthetic celebrates, on one hand, the rising light that Barth saw in Mozart’s music, but on the other hand, it revels in the falling shadow, the dissonance of human life, and even finds meaning in its corresponding profane actions. Of course, the freedom to improvise on the melody is the quintessential key to this witness; for the melody functions as the anchor of Monk’s freedom.

This preoccupation with creating his music “on the standard” parallels the sage theological advice of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who surmised that “where the cantus firmus is clear and plain, the counterpoint can be developed to its limits.” Bonhoeffer extended this view, contending that “[the cantus firmus] is the only way to a full and perfect sound, when the counterpoint has a firm support and can’t come adrift or get out of tune, while remaining a distinct whole in its own right.”¹² Of course, Bonhoeffer’s classical training as a pianist does not breach the heart of Monk’s revolutionary aesthetic; yet when Monk’s musical aesthetic is transposed into such theological language, we are spurred on to imagine the cantus firmus as the divine melody, and a radical dynamism, movement, and inclusivity become imaginable.

If a melodic center is privileged, spiritual, intellectual, and pragmatic possibilities can be developed more robustly—perhaps most appropriately in that sequence—and this more comprehensive view of the divine unfolds in possibilities that accompany the complex nature of human life. As a matter of course, the beauty in such a proposal first resists any kind of ideologically hegemonic approach to the divine that might come from a narrow form of confessionalism, precisely because the mystery of divine life has a dimension of depth that opens up to a variety of possibilities. Second, as Charles Long may argue, extra-church realities are set in relief more clearly. Folklore, spirituals, blues, hip hop and other modes of being or styles of life become consequential for the analogical imagination.¹³ This, I believe, would relativize the role of religious leaders to some degree, since we will attune and attend to the insights of artists, poets, novelists, and other creatives. Third, and somewhat ironically, tradition itself—not traditionalism—can be (re)engaged in light of a melodic center and mined for a kind of healthy structuring power. Monk’s jazz aesthetic to be sure has nurtured my insight into various theological traditions, enhancing my ecumenical imagination. This analogical insight into theology encourages me to continue scrutinizing Monk’s creative and performative practices and his musical thinking in general; and even now it is opening up a range of data I heretofore overlooked.¹⁴

This brings me back to Monk’s dancing. Thelonious used melody as the basis for everything he did in jazz—even his dancing.¹⁵ As I have noted, the melody provided a central framework for composing. The rhythms of a tune were designed to complement and correspond to the melody—and, as we noted above, he ultimately wanted it to swing. As Gunther Schuller notes, the melodic and rhythmic elements are “inseparable.”¹⁶ Based on Monk’s performance practices, I am therefore convinced that one of the greatest compliments we could pay to Monk, even today, is to make his thematic arrangements “swing.” For when music truly embodies rhythmic drive, in much the same way P-Funk’s “Flashlight” did for me on that porch with my mother, it elicits an expressiveness, a kind of joyful counterpoint that can be observed in the polyphony of human responses. Thus, when thinking in “Monk mode,” the lesson for theologians is clear. The divine melody calls us into the rhythm of a joyful correspondence between God and humanity and the world.¹⁷

As we stand at what I believe is a new threshold moment in America, we are invited to reorient ourselves in relation to “God-birthed musicality.” To do otherwise is to reject the embrace of God’s “yes” to creation and reduce the polyphony of life to the flat correspondence in human reciprocity. We will thus miss the joyful rhythms of grace heard in the cadences of the creatorial sphere. In essence, we will pass on the joyful part of the dance and take the hand of self-righteousness and suspicion. Cynicism will then lead us, and the rhythm of our steps will be determined and regulated by patriotic songs and military anthems, rather than by music made for dancing. However, if we embrace the comprehensive nature of divine musicality and improvise on that melody, then the dancing Christ will take the lead and establish us in a rhythm that arises out of a playful encounter with God. But how do we accomplish this? How can we break with the preestablished theological rhythms of our day? How can we generate new categories? And how can we nurture new forms of human freedom that participate in the rhythm of divine life?

New Theological Categories for the Religious Imagination

We must first recognize Monk’s musical aesthetic as a gift to the analogical imagination. To spotlight the music of Thelonious Monk in this way is to acknowledge the brilliance of an artist whose aesthetic, if functionalized, offers a useful analogy for reframing the way we encounter the limitations of theological thinking. He breaks with musical arrangements, playing the piano with a creative dexterity that pushes the instrument beyond the limits of conventional pianism; he remains free in relation to the revolutionary moment of bebop itself; and he refuses to accommodate to a form of commercialism that would diminish his aesthetic freedom. Such extraordinary fearlessness summons those of us who can “hear the light” to stretch beyond the ordinary—beyond even what we might designate as extraordinary. To be sure, it is not enough, for example, to simply challenge Christian forms of religion that have become wedded to and preoccupied with ordinary methodological approaches. Such an agenda aims too low and, in the end, still may sacrifice the imagination at the altar of provincial forms of rationality, i.e., those banal methods, categories, and techniques which impoverish the religious imagination. We should rather highlight the fearlessness of musicians like Monk and, taking our cue from them, resist the hegemony of a Western episteme.¹⁸

The existence of blues people has always connoted something about our inability to reduce life to modern constructs, categories, and conventional notions of piety. Monk, for example, may have broken with conventions (or shall we say categories, for the theologian) because his jazz emerged in the wake of the Harlem Renaissance, and the cultural zeitgeist funded a spirit of reconceptualization and recombination of previous aesthetic forms.¹⁹ His whole aesthetic may have echoed this spirit. From his brash fashion sense, accented by hats that on certain occasions reminded critics of a court jester, to his slashing feet and desiccated and crushed-sounding notes, he broke with tradition and affirmed his own personal stylistics and musical language. Even the arrangements of the other bebop jazz artists were not spared. So, to break with normative forms and create new content, it is important to admire how Monk’s stylistics stretched the form and provided unique insight into the world. It is also significant to hear how, along with other blues people, Monk created a world that broke with classical conventions and techniques. As a result, the phenomenon of his performances conjured a new mode of being and championed what Charles Long might call a “counter-creative signification and expressive deployment of new meanings expressed in styles and rhythms of dissimulation.”²⁰

Still, it was Monk’s dance, or as I describe it above, “the dancing Monk,” that sets him apart. Monk’s dancing parodied bourgeois conventions, especially in terms of his performance practices. Robin Kelley aptly distills this point: it is “the most unforgettable spectacle.”²¹ And perhaps most importantly for our purposes here, Monk’s dance not only establishes the rhythm for the music, but also redounds to the rhythm for our own dancing—in the common life of the world.

Hearing with Your Eyes and Seeing with Your Ears

While viewed as a breaking of social convention today, dancing during a jazz performance had a long history within performance practices of jazz artists. Jazz stands as “a music in which the line between composition and performance is blurred,” writes Hugh Roberts.²² According to Kelley, dancing is inseparable from the music, having a unique place within black performance practices. Monk’s dance consequently occurred within a long tradition of musicians who danced around their instrument—from blues to contemporary avant-garde jazz artists.²³ But Monk’s dance had a hidden side, a side that requires explanation and justifies my saying that it requires one to “hear the light” by hearing with the eyes. I will summarize it by saying that Monk danced to the music.

Gigi Gryce, in fact, tells the story that, on one occasion, his fellow musicians were watching Monk and “laughing as he danced without realizing that meanwhile, by following his rhythmic pulse, they were moving into the rhythm he wanted.”²⁴ His dancing revealed itself as a way of getting what he wanted from his artists, and he harbored a desire for expected outcomes for the performance.²⁵ Ironically, they saw what they needed to hear. Correspondingly, Monk used dance to refine and discipline the rhythm of his group while modeling at the same time a kind of rhythmic displacement in his music. His “rhythmic pulse,” according to Nat Hentoff, indicates metaphorically that the dance for Monk was the proper key to establishing the rhythm.²⁶ Stated differently, it is not always the rhythm that establishes the dance. On some occasions it is the dance that establishes the rhythm. As a result, Monk’s accompanying bandmates learned to “hear with their eyes.”

Monk, however, did not simply dance to conduct. He also danced to the music. He danced because he enjoyed the music. And if he danced, according to Charlie Rouse, his long-term saxophone player, “it meant that the thing was swinging.”²⁷ This also means that to understand Monk we must be privy to his spontaneous response to the groove of his own creations—by which the audience is subtly introduced to a dialectic between the rhythm and the dancer, the composer of the music and the one playing in the music. Monk’s dialectic, then, is not merely a negative dialectic that oscillates from one side to the other. It is a dialogical participation, a correspondence that permits him to freely respond in the joy of being a witness to the central act of music making. He becomes a participant in the groove. To summarize: As he improvised spontaneously on the melody, Monk established new ground and troubled structural boundaries and intellectual categories. Moreover, as noted above, Monk established the rhythm through his dance, and after establishing the rhythm through the dance, he participated (danced) in the established rhythm. But, surprisingly, Monk’s dance has even deeper roots.

The historian Sterling Stuckey argues that Monk’s dance extends back into pre-blues practices and traditions, proposing that his dance mirrored the ring-shout, a religious ritual practiced by African slaves in America and the West Indies, a ritual later practiced in black churches even into the twentieth century.²⁸ In a rhythmic counterclockwise direction, women and men participated in the musicality of the divine, engaging in a circular dance, shuffling and clapping and stomping and embodying the rhythm of the music in the dance. This suggests that Monk conducted and established the rhythm as he danced, and he may have also been embodying the rhythms of each tune. He thus conducted, played the music, played in the music, and in some sense became the music. He participated comprehensively in musicality. This of course reminds me of James Cone, who argued the following:

Black history . . . is the stuff out of which the black spirituals was created. But the “stuff” of black history includes more than the bare historical facts of slavery. Black history is an experience, a soulful event. And to understand it is to know the being of a people who had to “feel their way along the course of American slavery,” enduring the stresses and strains of human servitude but not without a song. Black history is a spiritual.²⁹

Likewise, when the music and rhythms Monk established are heard as a parable, they eventually redound upon the history (Geschichte) of the dancer.³⁰ And just as one creates rhythm in a series of handclaps or uses a walking rhythm to create a pace or puts a hand on the chest to create a breathing rhythm, Monk demonstrates that the rhythm in music, as occasionally established by the dancer, can become the very modality in which the dancer participates in a radical musicality.³¹ This raises perplexing questions about the puzzling nature of rhythm itself. It suggests that Monk’s dance becomes an analogy, not merely for the rhythm of the music, but for the rhythm of the dancer(s)—and, I would argue, for our dancing in life itself. Monk’s mode of conducting provides an analogy of human participation in the divine rhythm and the musicality that occurs between the grand conductor, the human creature, and all living things. Monk’s mode of participating in the music therefore stands as a model for the dance of humanity in creation.

If we channel new modes of being and embrace the spirit of Monk’s rhythmic impulse, we can hear in his aesthetic a witness to the restoration of all things. His music can not only expand the possibilities of musical language—making harmonic dissonance, rhythmic displacement, and melodic interventions all part of his jazz—but it can be perceived as voicing the beauty and diversity found in creation itself. Even silence finds its voice (and space a joyful dislocation), to such an extent that his playing, as a form of parabolic suggestiveness, represents a distant echo of all earthly harmonies. And just as the divine light is witnessed to by all the little lights in the world, divine musicality can be heard in the witness of the creation’s soundings.

If we can estrange the relationship between a theology of revelation, the natural world, and religion; if we can cultivate eyes to hear and ears to see in light of the rhythm of God, then an aural aesthetic can help us (re)enchant creation by (re)imagining aesthetic space in light of the musicality of God. This peculiar turn (or way of seeing and hearing) would also involve encouraging a theological dialectics, or shall I say a theopoetic(s), that understand the created world in light of the divine musicality in the incarnation. It would be a world where the dancing Monk—or some other freely chosen analogy—can help us grasp the relationship between creators of music and players in the music, between the rhythms and the dancers, and, yes, between the great conductor and the rhythms of religious existence. Perhaps even, a theologia religionum (theology of religion) can arise, one that takes into account the fullness of religious life, embracing the rhythm of all of our complex differences and orientations—one that truly “hears the light” of truth in “The New Gods.”³²

Conclusion

Yes . . . we stand on the threshold of a new age and, despite our knowing and reveling in eternal promises, the rhythmic correspondence we desire appears illusive. The freedom we seek is not necessarily lost, however. It simply exists beyond the range of our categories and comfort zones. It resides in those spaces where unexpected silences throw us off our rhythm. It situates itself in the constancy of so-called strange performative practices that reside in life’s continuum: it may be in between the sacred and the secular, in between the performer and the performance, in between the rhythm and the dancer. It is a freedom for creation that responds to midnight in the social order by living according to a different circadian rhythm, a rhythm found in makeshift shrines and storefronts akin to Minton’s Playhouse and the Five Spot in Harlem where Monk would often jump up from his piano and blur the line between composing and conducting, between improvising and dancing—in order to establish new rhythms. It is there where those who have cultivated eyes to hear and ears to see that the dancing Monk witnesses to the center of creation by improvising on the melody. When one encounters the way such establishments signify, one is left to wonder whether the taste of glory we seek is actually found on earth rather than in heaven . . . and left to wonder whether what we see is the dancing Monk or, perhaps, the dancing Christ:

Jesus, he must dance the lead,
And the Virgin Mary;
All must pay his rhythm heed
To reach God’s sanctuary.³³

Raymond Carr is a theologian and author of the forthcoming book trilogy Theology in the Mode of Monk: An Aesthetics of Barth and Cone on Revelation and Freedom (Cascade Books, 2024). He is currently a visiting professor at Harvard Divinity School, where he is working as the director of the Codex Charles H. Long Papers Project at the Moses Mesoamerican Archive, and president-elect of the Society for the Study of Black Religion.