The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen's Breakthrough Toward the Beyond

By Sander van Maas

On the basis of a careful analysis of Olivier Messiaen's work, this book argues for a renewal of our thinking about religious music. Addressing his notion of a "hyper-religious" music of sounds and colors, it aims to show that Messiaen has broken new ground. His reinvention of religious music makes us again aware of the fact that religious music, if taken in its proper radical sense, belongs to the foremost of musical adventures.

The work of Olivier Messiaen is well known for its inclusion of religious themes and gestures. These alone, however, do not seem enough to account for the religious status of the work. Arguing for a "breakthrough toward the beyond" on the basis of the synaesthetic experience of music, Messiaen invites a confrontation with contemporary theologians and post-secular thinkers. How to account for a religious breakthrough that is produced by a work of art?

Starting from an analysis of his 1960s oratorio La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ, this book arranges a moderated dialogue between Messiaen and the music theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar, the phenomenology of revelation of Jean-Luc Marion, the rethinking of religion and technics in Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, and the Augustinian ruminations of Søren Kierkegaard and Jean-François Lyotard. Ultimately, this confrontation underscores the challenging yet deeply affirmative nature of Messiaen's music.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Aug 25, 2009
• ISBN: 9780823230594

Sander van Maas

Sander van Maas teaches philosophy and music at Utrecht University College, the University of Amsterdam, and the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. His publications include The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen’s Breakthrough Toward the Beyond (Fordham University Press, 2012), Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space (Fordham University Press, 2015), and Contemporary Music and Spirituality (Routledge, 2016).

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THE REINVENTION OF RELIGIOUS MUSIC

THE REINVENTION OF RELIGIOUS MUSIC

Olivier Messiaen’s Breakthrough Toward the Beyond

Sander van Maas

Copyright © 2009 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Maas, Sander van, 1968–

The reinvention of religious music : Olivier Messiaen’s breakthrough

toward the beyond / Sander van Maas.

     p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8232-3057-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Messiaen, Olivier, 1908–1992—Criticism and interpretation.

2. Music—Religious aspects.—Christianity. I. Title.

ML410.M595M34    2009

781.70092—dc22

                                                                   2008047148

Printed in the United States of America

11  10  09     5  4  3  2  1

First edition

To Jan Dijkstra,

Earwitness

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. It Is a Glistening Music We Seek

2. Five Times Breakthrough

3. Balthasar and the Religion of Music

4. The Gift of Dazzlement

5. The Technics of Breakthrough

6. The Circumcision of the Ear

Epilogue: On Affirmation

Notes

Bibliography

Preface

At a time when culture has increasingly become the field of play where the opposing forces of secularization and religion meet, the question of the position of art is acquiring new meaning. Today, the secular status that art has held since the Enlightenment, and that was almost immediately contested by the adversaries of this revolution, has come increasingly under pressure. A development comes into view, not only in the visual arts but also and especially in music, that actualizes the question of the religious meaning of music or of listening to music. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the work of a number of composers with an explicit religious thematics has reached the West, and it seems that, within the canon of Western European and North American traditions, there is less diffidence in publicly touching upon religious and spiritual themes. Such developments once again make clear that involving religious perspectives in the practice of creating and (to a lesser extent) performing music has never fully disappeared; that even those moments in the history of twentieth-century music that were, ostentatiously, among the most antireligious or areligious were accompanied by a certain religious-spiritual discourse all the same.

Academic thought on the relation between music and religion, however, appears to be seriously anemic. Musicology—whether historical, formalist, or new—seems to have lost the sense for studying music as a phenomenon with a certain penchant for religion. The social process of secularization and the diminished significance of religious practice and theology entailed by this have created circumstances in which publicly testifying to the possibility of a musica sacra has become increasingly less acceptable. Musicography (both inside and outside academia) has followed this dual trend, discarding religious music as the subject for critical and systematic study. As a phenomenon with a relation (frequently either underestimated or overestimated) to the religious, music forms no subject for debate, unless it be either in circles of all too credulous music lovers who, wholly in the spirit of the Enlightenment, are guided by their own individual opinions, or with those who, steering by the beacon of dogma, adhere to theological and practical orthodoxy—each group, in other words, having particular reasons for shunning a critical distance in broaching the subject. Such approaches have become outdated, because of both the return of the religious in the public intellectual debate and far-reaching transformations of orthodox forms of religion in the contemporary world.

This new momentum, which appeared to have found an ideal vehicle in the music and discourse of Olivier Messiaen, is precisely the impulse for writing this book. Many agree that, as a child of the twentieth century and thoroughly aware of contemporary developments in art, religion, and society, Messiaen paved the way for a new, open form of musical religiosity. The public has discovered his music by now, and many are attracted by it, searching in one way or another for more than just the notes and constructive principles that Messiaen so gladly elucidated. Without doubt, his music is "bien harmonisée," but at the same time there is something in listening to his music that requires an analysis not just in technical terms. As I discovered in the early stages of research, neither aesthetics nor theology dispose of the adequate means to this end—and, in this respect, musicology or theory of music do not appear to be very fruitful, either. An attempt to counter the risks, in contemporary thought, of a facile rejection of the strange yet familiar talent of music to relate in one way or another to the religious, this book is most of all concerned with the question of offering a different perspective on a modern dilemma, by freshly exploring the possibilities for continuing to think through precisely the disconcerting dream that was fostered by the lore of ancient, naïve, but possibly so wise philosophy of music: a music that escapes the constitutive coordinates of the aesthetic object.

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been written if I did not have the support of many people. Foremost, I wish to thank Hent de Vries, who over the years has inspired my writing and enriched my mind with his overwhelming erudition and grand-scale approach to matters philosophical and theological. I feel privileged that I could always rely on his warm support and encouragement for this wildly interdisciplinary project. My other supervisor, Rokus de Groot, deserves an equal share of my gratitude for his infinite patience and his preparedness to let me go into any direction I wanted. In our many sessions he showed me how the ear is the organ of curiosity and that, ultimately, to think well is to listen well. Of all the others who have contributed to this book—and there are many more than I can mention here—Kiene Brillenburg Wurth should be mentioned as the true savior of the project. Although we have had more beautiful things to share since the birth of Titus, I cherish the days in Amsterdam and Paris when it seemed that every stone in the pavement hid a crucial insight for the argument of the manuscript. Her love for nineteenth-century theories of art opened my eyes for what was really at stake, and surely I am not alone in this respect. However, all this could have led to the present book only through the support of one incredible person, whose career spans the publication of many books cited in the pages that follow: Fordham University Press editor Helen Tartar. It was she who inspired and supported unwaveringly the translation and reworking of the original Dutch book. I thank Aleid Fokkema for translating the wide-ranging and sometimes technically difficult manuscript so skillfully, and the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for their financial support. I thank Andrew Shenton and the anonymous reviewer for their support for and critical comments on earlier versions of the manuscript and, last but not least, editors Gregory McNamee and Eric Newman for their diligent work in the final stages. Needless to say, all remaining flaws are mine.

And it came to pass, when the minstrel played, that the hand of the Lord came upon him.

—2 Kings 3:15

Auris prima mortis ianua, prima aperiatur et vitae.

The ear was death’s first gateway; let it be the first to open up to life.

—Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs 28:5

Introduction

Is what is convincing also true? This classic question often preoccupied me when leaving the concert hall or church where, just before, a work by the French composer Olivier Messiaen (Avignon, December 10, 1908–Paris, April 27, 1992) had been performed. The question seems naïve, because the occasion is so evidently about experiencing a work of art that is manufactured, shaped by human hands, not a religious, sacramental ritual. Nonetheless, the great power of some of Messiaen’s work still forces this question on the listener—and I am not alone in this respect. The euphoric ovations or reverent testimony of the audience of, for example, performances of Messi-aen’s oratory La Transfiguration in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw in 1991, or the concert performance of his opera Saint François d’Assise in 2000 (in the same venue), might point to an experience of something other, something that cannot simply be ascribed to musical persuasion.¹

The question, then, is whether the musical experience of the work of Messiaen merely results from ingenious rhetorical techniques, or whether something else—or something more—is the matter, and, if indeed something more is the matter, whether this surplus should be understood in terms of Messiaen’s religious program (which the audience is presumably aware of, if not through the music then by means of the program notes), or rather in terms of a surplus in the aesthetic experience, an excess that can no longer be described in terms of beautiful persuasion. In this respect, the words of the (probably) first-century author Longinus provide food for thought. In his tract on the sublime, Peri hypsous, he points to an alternative for persuasion:

The effect of elevated language is not to persuade the hearers, but to entrance them; and at all times, and in every way, what transports us with wonder is more telling than what merely persuades or gratifies us. The extent to which we can be persuaded is usually under our own control, but these sublime passages exert an irresistible force and mastery, and get the upper hand with every hearer. Inventive skill and the proper order and disposition of material are not manifested in a good touch here and there, but reveal themselves by slow degrees as they run through the whole composition; on the other hand, a well-timed stroke of sublimity scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt, and in a flash reveals the full power of the speaker.²

With this structure of overwhelming, the sublime seems to show the way to describing the intense experience in listening to Messiaen’s work. Because it is a phenomenon that has always been closely connected to religion, the question of the truth of this experience is easy to understand. The last words in the quotation, however, yet again point to the problematics of answering the question of truth, and now in a more disconcerting and ambivalent way. The conclusion that the whole spectacle reveals the power of the speaker, and perhaps not of (divine) truth, indicates an aporia, because if the force of persuasion still could be reduced to (musical-rhetorical) argumentation, here we have a phenomenon that appears as an enigma, a flash, a thunderbolt. It becomes manifest in the manner of an irrational, (pseudo-) religious revelation; it presents itself as coming from the beyond, but it is, according to Longinus, also at once a sign of the force of genius, the speaker, the deft illusionist. The notion of the sublime, which as such seems to be such an apt concept for the music of Messiaen, entails the question of the boundary between truth and technique, between revelation and construction; and between religion, philosophy, and art. How to decide on the overwhelming of La Transfiguration or Saint François d’Assise as the event of truth, on the one hand, but on the other as a sublime truth effect, the apparent event of truth in the manner of as if?

The question of this distinction is central to this book. Is what is musically overwhelming also true? The starting point in elaborating this question is formed by a lecture that Messiaen delivered in Paris, in 1977. Here, he states that a breakthrough toward the beyond is possible in music, and in his music particularly. This would be related to seeing colors inwardly when hearing certain chords and clusters (synesthesia), and to the experience of an inner dazzlement (éblouissemeni) that might be evoked by this. In the eyes of Messiaen, this concerns a religious experience, which in a lecture of 1985 he related to meticulously specified passages from La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ (1965–69). This brings, however, the latent contradictions in his Notre-Dame lecture to a head; namely, that the absolute, no matter how tentative, cannot only be experienced, but can moreover be experienced in the context of art and can even—in a paradox that borders on blasphemy—be evoked by art. In his later work, Messiaen emphasizes the idea that truth is connected with manifestation, with a dazzling, overwhelming manifestation. This implies that the question of the relation between rhetorical overwhelming and truth should be phrased more accurately as the question of the relation between manifestation and truth. Is what cannot become more manifest (that is, a music that dazzles its listener) also true?³

Messiaen’s critics signaled and named the paradox early on. Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone reconstruct the history of the so-called Case of Messiaen in their recent biography of the composer.⁴ The phrase refers to the critical debate on the work of the composer that arose early in 1945. The cause lay in the premiere of the piano cycle Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (Twenty Adorations of the Child Jesus) in Paris in March 1945. In response to this premiere, Bernard Gavoty, the reviewer of the Figaro who probably can be credited with launching the debate, makes short shrift of the music and commentaries of Messiaen. He mocks the abysmal language used by the composer in commenting for this occasion on the music—in person and before each of the twenty parts. The music itself did not meet with his approval, either. Gavoty describes Messiaen as an erudite composer who is a prisoner of his own system, attempting to translate the sublime utterances of the Apocalypse through muddled literature and music, smelling of the hair shirt, in which it is impossible to detect either any usefulness or any pleasure. Such trenchant criticism prepares for the paradox that is at the center of Gavoty’s objections against Messiaen: There is a persistent contradiction here: like a lunatic curator of a vanished museum, the composer announces marvels when he speaks, but which the piano immediately refutes.

Despite colorful language and keen observations, however, the result of the debate between supporters and critics of Messiaen was disappointing. His critics can be granted with a fine sense of the scandal in Messiaen’s music: the fact that, in the eyes of some, his music breathes a whiff of sulfur, signals that apparently a line has been crossed. Such a transgression, however, might also have been read in light of Messiaen’s entering a new territory, and a closer examination of the alleged incongruences in his work would have been more fitting. But this did not happen. At the close of the debate a year later (although Messiaen felt that the denouncement lasted for at least a decade), it was clear that the majority of Messiaen’s critics saw the composer as a very great musician of our time, and that the majority are also in agreement about rejecting all the literature and commentaries which the composer or certain bumbling exegetes place around his works, and concur that these do the music a disservice. Keeping notes and commentary apart, separating religion from music: this has largely been the state of affairs ever since. The new territory broached by Messiaen has disappeared from view. All we know is that, yes, Messiaen is an excellent composer, a craftsman, a musical genius perhaps, and whatever else he appended to his musical music notes is secondary and in essence a private matter.

With respect to aesthetics, something comparable occurs. The notion of musica sacra, pertinent to Messiaen in this respect and particularly in his discourse on breakthrough toward the beyond, is highly problematic in our modern age, and so is, by extension, the radical possibility in music that he points out. The phenomenon of a musicosacral blinding or overwhelming (éblouissement or dazzlement) has become—both in Messiaen’s discourse and outside it—stuck between, on one hand, the modern view on art, which is mainly determined by its humanist, aesthetic, and technological coordinates; and, on the other hand, a theology of the glory of God, which seeks to understand beauty in art as a reflection of nonmanufactured (that is, nonhumanistic, nonaesthetical, and nontechnological) divine splendor. This book ventures to overcome the split between these respective musicological and theological approaches to Messiaen’s music, and, in the wake of this, to give an impulse to the thought on the musicosacral or the sacromusical. To this end, the question of the interface between the musical and the religious is at the core of this study, and in particular the issue of criteria for distinguishing éblouissement as a religious experience with the paradigmatic trope of breakthrough toward the beyond, and éblouissement as a nonreligious experience.⁵ Because this latter experience would imply, theologically speaking, an adoration of music as such, which means that it is removed from all theological transcendence, I will use the notion of musicolatry—a term coined by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe—to refer to the logical reverse of breakthrough. If the split outlined here is not to remain the false fundamental for thinking about the relation between religion and music, then this relation will have to be thought all over again from the start—in other words, the whole idea of what musica sacra is needs to be reconsidered, with no prior guarantee, by the way, of (re)discovering a simple, healing harmony between the constitutive parts of this term.

The question of the distinction, in musical experience, between breakthrough and musical idolatry, first calls for a debate on the notion of orthodoxy, which traditionally hovers over the background of Messiaen discussions. The pretence, however, that there is a priori clarity about what does or does not belong to the domain of faith, a distinction that subsequently enables determining what is Christian, let alone Catholic, about Messiaen’s music, must be abandoned. In order to be able to attain a reflection on the Christian in Messiaen’s music, the singularity of his music needs to be considered. A theology that is restricted to the aim of reaffirming doctrines that have already been confirmed will never be able to think about religious music as such. It is not the interpretation of music as a representation of faith that will lead us to the musically Christian, but the interpretation of the structure of the actual experience of music. As I will further clarify, therefore, my approach is removed from the hermeneutical reflexes in theology. Conversely, art scholarship that intends to think only in secular terms about its object will never be able to approach the singularity of religious music as such. Thinking on music and its musicological representations therefore needs to be pried open, too. As will become clear in the following chapters, the distance between musicology and theology is much less wide than is usually assumed, and the difference between the two is, in some respects, undecidable.

Thinking about the boundary between music and religion and considering the relation between them inevitably brings, apart from the concept of religious music, its possible reversal to the fore in the form of a (pseudo-) religious cult of music. An exemplary historical expression of such a move is found in nineteenth-century Kunstreligion, religion of art, in which music not only surpassed all other art forms but also eventually vied with religion itself in revealing mystery. In this book, the concept of musicolatry does not so much concern this historical attempt at substituting religion by music as the systematic problem of this reversal and the structural possibilities it entails.⁶ My question about criteria for the distinction between breakthrough and musicolatry can thus be reformulated as a question of the distinction between theological aesthetics and aesthetical theology, that is to say, between a discourse on beauty as an element of a more encompassing theology on one hand and the absorption of theology by the discourse on beauty on the other.⁷ Ludwig Tieck’s famous remark that music is the ultimate mystery of faith, the mystique, the completely revealed religion constitutes an example of the latter.⁸ It is tempting but dangerous to discard such a substitution of religion as sheer idolatry, because the assumption of knowing what idolatry is, or musicolatry for that matter, implicitly involves the presumption of knowing mystery. Therefore, this book is not oriented toward observing the work of Messiaen within the pure limits of orthodox theological aesthetics, as has so frequently been done, or toward portraying it as a twentieth-century variant on heterodox religion of music. Instead, it intends to explore precisely what constitutes the quiddity of demarcating religious music. What does it mean to draw a line between inside and outside, between orthodoxy on one hand and heterodoxy or idolatry (or musicolatry) on the other? In its tow, the question arises what Messiaen, homme de foi, may have meant when he asserted that there is no such thing as sacred or profane music. This book is driven by the conviction that one can aspire to come close to the (possible) phenomenon of the musicosacral or the sacromusical only by positing this demarcation question continuously and persistently.

In elaborating on this question, it is foremost important to resist the temptation of reducing Messiaen’s testimony regarding the breakthrough toward the beyond to little more than a certain desire on the part of the composer, or to a symbolic, metaphorical, or perhaps allegorical representation of the content of faith. The latter is truly tempting, because the Thomistic conception of music, namely that religious music is subservient to the Word and to the liturgy, invites such a move in interpreting the self-declared Thomist, Messiaen.⁹ It is the route of escape for music, however, inasmuch as the focus is no longer on what or how music is, but only on what it means in a religious context. The majority of theological interpretations of Messiaen rely on the skeptical attitude with respect to the religious force of music. The composer’s remarks about a breakthrough cannot easily be accommodated to this framework; they testify to an uncommon faith in music that usually is not found in these circles. The Platonic (or Neoplatonic) character of the images that Messiaen uses in his discourse, together with the description of dazzlement (éblouissemeni) and the great sensitivity to the theological possibilities of beauty, rather appear to require an Augustinian reading of breakthrough with Messiaen, who equally was a self-declared Franciscan as well.¹⁰ This reading, which is examined in the present study, involves an important reorientation: away from the contents of his music (so generously suggested and commented upon by Messiaen himself) and toward the structure of musical experience. The formal approach that this move requires is not characterized by its focus on formal musical structure (departing from the available and all too privileged formal representations such as scores) for describing the source of this experience, but on the manifestation of music in the phenomenal sense. The ritual character of Messiaen’s music has often been signaled, but in this book I will argue that the Christianness of his music is not about understanding musical-religious content, let alone about the event or sense of religion, but instead about the structure of musical-religious experience as such. An orientation to this structure is necessary for clarifying breakthrough and, more generally, Christianness (in Heidegger’s terms) in Messiaen’s music.¹¹ As will become clear, especially in Chapter 2 and Chapter 4, musical forms of kenosis play an important part in this.

The method used for this study is syncretistic, for reasons born of both practical necessity and strategy. Although the literature on Messiaen is extensive, it is limited with respect to the problematic outlined here. I have cherished the most important examples of critical and theological approaches to Messiaen, and they are given ample attention here. The lack of specifically relevant literature might have been compensated for by a plethora of literature on music and religion in general, but the field is rather barren here, too. In 2000 Jeremy Begbie, who has done much since to fill the gaps, arrived at the same conclusion in his study on the theology of musical time. The list of mostly English-language references that he supplies is modest. The most remarkable title in the field is Jon Michael Spencer’s Theomusicology, which has named a new discipline to be developed further.¹² The collection of essays edited by Joyce Irwin, Sacred Sound, remains somewhat of an early classic.¹³ Of great importance but often overlooked is Albert Blackwell’s The Sacred in Music)¹⁴ Outside the English language, it is most of all German publications that call for attention. These include the impressive but now slightly outdated compendium of Oskar Söhngen, Theologie der Musik, and the important volume edited by Helga de la Motte-Haber, Musik und Religion.¹⁵ I have attempted to draw as much as I could from these and other sources, but the phenomenological character of my question required roaming the fields of more remote literatures.¹⁶

The strategic motive for maintaining a certain distance with respect to the methods used, and for admitting a certain methodological heterogeneity, is contained in the role of the deconstructive logic of iterability in this study. This logic controls to a large extent—although often only in the background—the argument in the second half of this book. It paves the way for thinking together singularity and repetition, two tropes that guide the argument in the twin forms of miracle and technique, or breakthrough and musicolatry. The argument in this book throughout will continuously work toward effectuating this logic of iterability, in respect to which the more traditional analytical methods used will be treated with some reservation. This methodical disbelief has prompted a certain aloofness from a strictly formalist analytical tradition in discussing Messiaen’s music in Chapter 2, but also from the phenomenological approach in Chapter 4. My uses of phenomenological methods or perspectives deviates, in this respect, from the way Thomas Clifton (Music as Heard) famously applied phenomenology to the purpose of musical analysis, or from the work of Mikel Dufrenne, where phenomenological premises as such are less the subject of debate.¹⁷ Apart from that, the logic of iterability bridges the gap between Augustinian thought on musical experience and contemporary critical thinking, especially in the French tradition.¹⁸ As I will attempt to show, this logic offers the possibility of discussing formally marginalized problems in the actual context that concerns the relation between music and religion. Finally, methodic disbelief also suits the methodic atheism that acts as an underlying principle for the possibility of addressing the question of religious music (or musical religion—that will be the persistent question) again. An ironical or critical distance, an epochè, is maintained with regard to theological problematics, in order to create room for thinking through the arguments and practices of composers and thinkers regarding the sacrality of music. In this respect, the present study takes part of a wider interdisciplinary discussion about the boundaries of philosophy and theology—a discussion that, as far as I am concerned, will be extended to, and will have consequences for exploring the relation between music and relation, or musicology and theology.¹⁹

My starting point in Chapter 1 is the question of what Messiaen exactly had in mind with his compositions. Messiaen here appears to be a musician who presumes of an orthodox, unshakeable faith, emphatically marked by hope, that has always, directly or indirectly, been oriented to the Revelation of John. As I will demonstrate, there was a gradual shift with Messiaen in the musical localization of religion. Where, in his earlier works, he emphasizes the sincerity of feelings, his later sayings on the objective in composing create the impression that this subjective dimension has faded into the background or indeed has disappeared from view. This is especially true for the 1960s, the period of composing La Transfiguration. The second part of this chapter is devoted to the question of Messiaen’s conception of the relation between music and religion—a relation that has been decisive for a composer who believed that it was his primary and most important mission to illuminate the truths of faith. It will become apparent that Messiaen was ambivalent both about the idea of pure music, whose formalistic core he wished to retain, and about the idea of expression. The rejection of programmatic music here leads to the question whether there is a case of musical mysticism in Messiaen. The chapter ends with an inventory of the theoretical figures that provided Messiaen with the possibility, in his view, for realizing his project. It turns out that for Messiaen, music can approach, beyond the level of liturgy and religion, the proximity of the beyond when synesthetic means are employed. It is here that the key passage of this study, on the thematics of dazzlement, makes an entry.

The compositional side of the music of dazzlement will receive closer attention in Chapter 2, inasmuch as the idea of aiming for theological music and the search for theoretical openings represent only part of the story. Messiaen gave concrete examples of the music of dazzlement in one of his lectures. These concern five passages from La Transfiguration (and besides a part from the final act of Saint François d’Assise, Messiaen’s opera and magnum opus) that he describes in detail. In the concise consecutive analysis of these passages, it becomes apparent that there are great mutual differences between them, but also a number of tendencies that they have in common. It can be established, for instance, that, at