The Planets by Gustav Holst. Is it okay to play?

[Londoner]

Somebody mentioned ‘O God beyond all praising’ (which I’d actually never heard of before), but in fact the hymn tune Thaxted, which is based on part of Jupiter, has been used for a lot of hymns. Surely by far the most famous one is ‘I vow to thee, my country’.

In general, there is no reason to reject something just because it comes from a non-Christian or pre-Christian culture. Taken to its extreme, people end up protesting against Karl Jenkins’s The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace.

I have an evangelical friend who used to refuse to shop in what was then our local Chinese supermarket on the grounds that the proprietors displayed a religious statue (I guess it was the Buddha) and she believed that shopping in their supermarket entailed worshipping what she called ‘a god’ and could end up getting her involved with demons. Mind you, she also wouldn’t set foot in a Catholic church on the grounds that merely being in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament was a kind of idolatry and could involve making an alliance with the Antichrist.

 

[DaveBj]

Somebody mentioned ‘O God beyond all praising’ (which I’d actually never heard of before), but in fact the hymn tune Thaxted, which is based on part of Jupiter, has been used for a lot of hymns.

In our parish we’ve sung that hymn twice in the last 3-4 weeks. I was like, I know that tune!

D

 

[Le_Cracquere]

It has some “astrological” influences, but no more than Dante’s Paradiso did. By all means avoid getting your horoscope cast, etc. … but eschewing Holst is probably erring on the side of scrupulosity.

 

[ASC]

It’s okay for the same reason that reading Greek or Norse mythology is okay. Polytheism is wrong, but reading the stories does not mean you believe them. They can be entertaining and exciting, just like any other story. They same applies to Gustav Holst’s “The Planets.”

 

[tomarin]

Oh, yeah. Carmina Burana, too.