On Mystery, Ineffability, Silence and Musical Symbolism

Laurence Wuidar

• Editore: Bloomsbury Academic
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350228801
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Philosophy
• Categoria: Philosophy of Religion

Collecting together numerous examples of Augustine's musical imagery in action, Laurence Wuidar reconstructs the linguistic laboratory and the hermeneutics in which he worked. Sensitive and poetical, this volume is a reminder that the metaphor of music can give access not only to human interiority, but allow the human mind to achieve proximity to the divine mind. Composed by one of Europe's leading musicologists now engaging an English-speaking audience for the first time, this book is a candid exploration of Wuidar's expertise. Drawing on her long knowledge of music and the occult, from antiquity to modernity, Wuidar particularly focuses upon Augustine's working methods while refusing to be distracted by questions of faith or morality. The result is an open and at times frightening vista on the powers that be, and our complex need to commune with them.

1

The Christian

In Christian thought, man is made in the image of God.¹ But this image has been discoloured by sin. Christ came to earth to ‘re-form man after the image of God’² and it is the task of man at the same time not to deform any further the divine image which he carries about within him, and which furnishes him with such basic graces as the lights of conscience; notwithstanding his fallen nature. ‘The image of God is found inside us, there where the intellect is, the mind, the reason that seeks after truth; there where faith is and hope and love.’³ Every time that man truly understands, that he truly seeks after the truth, that he believes and hopes and loves, the image of God within him is coloured anew. From this principle, eminently visible, comes a trove of hidden musical allegories and analogies of sound.

For the image is completed in its sonorous dimension, with the union of The Word with the word of man. The creation is a discursive act. God spoke, and the things were made.⁴ He pronounced a word, and created man.⁵ He did not paint, he did not imagine (he did not theorise!), but he spoke; and by speaking, he conferred to man The Word. And correspondingly, when he wishes to put his finger down on what characterizes man, Augustine passes over our linguistic faculty qua discourse, and over our spoken voice qua denoting and signifying, and comes down instead on music. Yes, to Augustine, man has been created in the sonorous image of The Word, so that fallen, and held here in the Earthly City, he sings and sounds in the hope of being transformed back into the resonant musical instrument he was made.

The sacrifice of song

One of the starting points in reconstructing this Augustinian image of the musical man is to pursue the theme of praise. For in praising God, man comes close to his Creator and revives the image otherwise discoloured by sin. The question of praise, joined as it is to the questions of words and song, comes to be thought of in analogy with musical instruments, and then finally, when a point and pitch of praise are reached when words and song and sound will no longer suffice, this praise is consumed in silence.

To the performative voice of God is joined – then – the performative song of man. We see in this the circularity of the speculative voice in its movement between the Divine and man. God speaks continuously through an unlimited variety of means. From the angels to the true words of men, ‘It is always him who everywhere makes heard his voice, touching, encouraging, inspiring.’⁶ The Divine Voice touches lovingly like the Son, loves encouragingly like the Father, inspires like the Spirit – we say that it does all of this after the manner of music, when music transforms he who follows it and hears it.

According to this theme of praise – set within a vision of divine performativity – Augustine investigates the source of song and of song’s words, as well as the nature of song and of its effects. In order to be performed in the first place, the song must respect certain criteria. And so Augustine theorizes the internal and external conditions, looking at and defining the interior attitude of the singer and the external manifestations of his song.

‘In cantico amantis affectio’ (In song, there is the affection of one loving)

For Augustine, the song of praise amounts to the forging of a ‘new alliance’. To the supreme sacrifice of the God-man, glorious in its humility, responds the sacrifice of praise that glorifies God and benefits man. The praise is the sonorous sign of the offering made in the heart.⁷ Christ is given to men with the word and with the kiss of Grace – freely – to whom man responds by rendering Grace.⁸

The encomiastic song is therefore joined with the transforming power of the advent of Christ as the new man and contains within itself, therefore, a free and freely moving power. The old hymn, the old man and the Old Testament are taken over by the new hymn – Christ – by the renovated song and The Renovator, gifted by God to men that they might sing and know how to praise.⁹ And this song acts, then, as though God had conferred to men his very power-to-act. ‘We speak a hymn to our God, and this same hymn frees us.’¹⁰ In these words, we see indicated not only the object of worship but the action of the song; plus, Augustine also makes clear in them that invocation is to be considered synonymous with singing. Namely, ‘invoke by praising, sing the hymn to your God’.¹¹ Augustine means that the hymn of praise departs from God precisely in order to return to him (through us).

The question of the source of music of praise is theological before it is musical: the song does not have its providence in man, but is a gift of God. Recognition of the goods received from God – a motif of Augustine’s thought and a gloss of 1 Cor 4, 7: ‘What do you have that you did not receive?’ – holds true also, then, for the new song. If all goods come from God, then man receives them for himself, for his benefit. That is to say, the song is not given because it is useful to God but because it is useful to man. Which makes it therefore that it is inseparable from hearing, from hearing God – a central theme of Christian and Augustinian thought. Man receives in order to give (back to God). Therefore, in order to know how to receive, he must know how to listen. On earth, man cannot be the perfect image of God; however, it is possible for him to come into accord with the Divine Will and to listen to it. By listening to it, man hears what he should sing in return.

God instils the words of the song, inspiring him who listens in silence, in quiet.¹² Augustine intends this to speak to composers and poets and to all artists who wish to question their creativity from the theological point of view. For example, various expressions can translate the formula: ‘Praise your words in God’. Here, we are choosing to see the source of musical and poetic inspiration, according to Augustine; viz., that such words are in the artist because they are put there by God, yet are truly enough said to be from the artist insofar as the artist has duly accepted their provenance: ‘They have reached me, they have become mine’.¹³

On the way to all of this, Augustine distinguishes between the (mere) physical act of listening and listening-with-understanding, his idea being that the latter incorporates the enjoyment of what is being heard plus intuitions as to what is intended in the words. He distinguishes, then, between the roles of sense and intellect in listening (to the Divine Will) and in the words eventually sung (in response). Verses 6 and 7 of Psalm 25 – ‘I wash my hands in innocence, and go about your altar, O Lord, proclaiming aloud your praise and telling of all your wonderful deeds.’ – give Augustine the opportunity to develop these various concepts inherent in the song of praise. The voice of praise is first apprehended by the interior ear that divines its intention: ‘He who has ears, let him hear.’¹⁴ Then, in order to sing it out properly and well as his own song, man has first to listen to the voice, and then to listen to it again with understanding. Only then can he put it into the song it deserves and calls for. Many hear but they do not, in this sense, listen. They have ears, but they remain dead to the truth. Listening, in its full Augustinian meaning, means comprehension.¹⁵

‘To listen is to comprehend interiorly;’¹⁶ it is to open oneself to the interiority of being and intention. Intelligent listening plus the heart that welcomes the sensible sound or the Divine Voice is the point of departure of praise. He who does not have the capacity for this may neither pronounce on it nor sing of it. From him, the truth of the word flees to another (where it can be received); as does the Divine Word then flee, as well as all that was Divine in the Word (nothing remains!). In order not to tarnish the image of God, Augustine is calling on men to work with the intelligence that differentiates them from the beasts, or from the non-rational creation. ‘Do not be like the horse or the mule, which have no understanding.’¹⁷ Every time that man listens by his interior ear to the words spoken, the image is rendered clear again.

This interior comprehension, being vital to the singing of the Psalms and indeed having stimulated them originally, should not and cannot be severed from the love that realizes the law and which has been left in heredity to all men. Commentating on the closing of Psalm 71 – ‘This concludes the prayers of David son of Jesse’ – Augustine talks of song and of affection and delineates a question essential to music, and which has worked its way across the history of music. Namely, the indissociability of word and sentiment in a saying or phrase that, in music, can never (otherwise) betray the affective content enclosed in the words (alone). That is to say, the role of the listener, and how music must calculate on it and figure on it; and the role of partiality and inclination and love in that listener. Looking at Psalm 71, Augustine spies an opportunity to latch on for his readers to this organic relationship between words and music, as it occurs in the definition – in his definition – of hymns. Thus, hymns are, ‘praises to God united in song.’ If one of these components is missing – ‘if there is praise, but not in honour of God, or if there is praise in honour of God but it is not sung’ – we are not speaking of a hymn. Augustine is not the only one to define the hymn in its relationship to song, but he goes furthest in underlining the affective element contained within the song and carried by it: ‘whoever sings their praise not only then praises but praises with joy’. The song is praise’s joyous expression and contains always, also – within the bosom of that joy – the love with which it was sung: ‘whoever sings in praise, not only sings but loves him of whom he sings’ (in cantico amantis affectio).¹⁸ In this way, as will be done again, for example, in his commentary on Psalm 76, Augustine weaves together and inseparably singing, joy and love. Whoever sings, loves. And whoever loves, cannot but be joyful.¹⁹

These properties of the song of praise and the hymn are turned immediately by Augustine, to the ‘new song’: ‘The song is a thing of joy, and if we consider the matter with due diligence, also a thing of love. Therefore, whosoever knows how to love the new life, knows how to sing the new song.’²⁰ The joy that is synonymous with love is united in the coupling, to sing/to love: the song is the manifestation of joy and therefore of love, and because love is, like music, totally involving, the new man sings with all his person: ‘they sing with their voices and their hearts; they sing with their lips and with their mores.’²¹ The new musical man sings out the object of his love. He does not want to sing of anything else and, filled with joy, he cannot stop.²² He sings what he loves, and therefore he is himself transformed in song. ‘The praise supplies the song as well as the singer’: there, resplendent, is the image of that which, though invisible, is loved – the love itself.

So … a man falls in love with a beautiful woman. We do not deny that the motive in this case is the beauty of her body. Yet that which is sought by the man, and by the woman if she responds, is the exchange proper to love … She looks at him, he looks at her, but outside of this (exchange), love itself is not seen.²³

Love is seen only in the form of lovers who look at each other, and looking at each other, sing the new song, transforming themselves in the singing of its praise, and reformed to the image of the source of every love: ‘Do you wish to send up praises to God? Then be the praise … Do you wish to know where God might be? Then look to yourselves!’²⁴ In this way, the deification of man takes place through his transformation in sung praise.

In addition to listening (to the Divine Will) as the condition of song, we have added most emphatically, then, love. As we have seen, that the song might be real, there too must be love: and so the song understood as the effect of love becomes confounded with the affect of love conveyed by the song. Love, the first theological virtue, is absolutely necessary for sacred song, ecclesial or private, exterior or interior, during the liturgy or in front of the altar of the heart. This first virtue and only law of the new man sustains and animates him as he sings; and while he sings, it conveys the love that is invading him. Thus is closed the affective circle of music. With love now placed at the opening and at the end of music, music becomes an act of contemplation. And this, of course, was how Thomas Aquinas was to describe contemplation. Like a circle, it is born from love and returns therein to be reborn again only more enriched by that same love.²⁵ And the middle term that unites contemplation and music is delight: the delight that in music carries one up to contemplation, and in contemplation, closes in on the object of love.

For Augustine, song becomes the moment in which joyous love is manifested. It contains and declares the affection of those who love. ‘In song there is the affection of the lover,’²⁶ writes Augustine, expressing in this short phrase, in a manner emblematic, the nexus between love and sacred song. The theme will recur in various discourses of his: one cannot sing if one is not first animated by love. And this absolute condition – this impossibility of song without love – Augustine will encourage us to think of both allegorically and practically.

‘Cantate cordibus’ (To sing from the heart): From the hymns of David to spiritual praise

To better understand this impossibility of singing without love, it will be convenient for us to return to the theological exposition of Psalm 72. There, we read that David’s population ceased to sing their hymns after they saw the material riches coming to those who did not so bother to sing to God. They watched as the wicked were ‘rewarded’ with good things and their faith faltered. It became difficult to praise a God whom they suspected now to be unjust. From this, Augustine draws out the fact that the song is a signification of love, tied tightly to the faith of the lover.²⁷ If one does not, or cannot believe in whom one loves, or does not or cannot love the one in whom one believes, any song forthcoming can exhibit only an external formalism. That is, it can bear only the mechanical form of a song, but empty of heart. Here, Augustine has brought in the personal responsibility pertaining to the faithful, but also to the Church in her song. He has underlined that the sacred song can never be something merely practised or ‘carried out’, an empty vestige of sound, but rather must be filled with affection in order to meet its very condition of being as a sign.

In this way, Augustine makes clear what for him are the conditions of the sacred song in terms of listening and affect. The sacred song thus defined should also be thought of in terms of its relationship to the new law. The kingdom of King David stood for the time when the New Testament w...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Translator’s Note
• Preface, by Paolo Gozza
• Premiss
• Abbreviations
• Introduction, or first steps in to the text(s)
• 1 The Christian
• 2 The Prophet and the Saint
• 3 Christ
• 4 The Father
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint