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 The Iconography of the Vulgar Venus in Medieval Commentary…

and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale…

     When Chaucer finally comes to the description of the Temple image of the vulgar Venus, he follows an iconographical schema that had remained more or less constant since antiquity:

The statue of Venus, glorious for to se,
Was naked, fletynge in the large see,
And fro the navele doun al covered was
With wawes grene, and brighte as any glas.
A citole in hir right hand hadde she,
And on hir heed, ful seemly for to se,
A rose garland, fresh and wel smellynge;
Above hir heed hir dowves flikerynge.
Biforn her stood hir sone Cupido;
Upon his shuldres wynges hadde he two,
And blynd he was, as it is often seene;
A bowe he bar and arwes brighte and kene. (Knight’s Tale, 1955 ff.)

Venus’ attributes, as enumerated here, are entirely conventional, as are the allegorical significations that are immediately implied by them.  The goddess is depicted floating in the sea because she was born from the foam caused by the impact, appropriately enough, of the severed membrum virile of Uranus, where it fell into the Mediterranean near the island of Cythera (hence, her epithet, the Cytherean, and her Greek name Aphrodite, from aphros, foam or spray).  Moraliter, as the sixth-century Bishop Fulgentius writes in his Mythologiae, the meaning is that the “sailor of Venus” loses all his possessions and suffers shipwreck; or as Petrus Berchorius, the author of a fourteenth-century commentary on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, observes, it is “because she wishes to be immersed in delights”.  She is naked because, as the Third Vatican Mythographer explains, “the crime of libido is hard to conceal”, and lust “denudes its victim of reason”.

Venus’ roses were another commonplace, and the explanation offered by Fulgentius is traditional: they blush and prick with their thorns just as lust blushes with shame and pricks with the sting of sin. Like lust, moreover, and the fleeting pleasures it confers, roses quickly fade of a season.  Chaucer’s Venus is also accompanied by doves, since these birds (as the Third Vatican Mythographer forthrightly puts it) are “especially fervent in coitus”.

But our poet departs from the conventional iconography in one instructive detail:  instead of carrying a conch shell, Venus holds a “citole”, a kind of medieval harp.  Chaucer’s authority for this substitution may be a passage from the aforementioned Ovidius moralizatus of Berchorius:

She is said to carry a conch shell in her hand into which she is forever singing and full of light airs…whence the nude whore is seen to say in the Scriptures [Isa. 23: 10, 16]:  “Pass thy land as a river, O daughter of the sea, thou hast a girdle no more….Take a harp, go about the city, thou harlot that hast been forgotten:  sing well, sing many a song, that thou mayst be remembered.”

The vulgar Venus’ music is thus the song of a prostitute; and as a “daughter of the sea”, it was natural enough to identify her with the Whore of Babylon, “the mother of all fornication” who in the Apocalypse rides upon the beast that rises out of the sea at the end-time.  Wishing to emphasize the connection that Berchorius draws between the vulgar Venus and the kind of music performed by her harlot-devotees, Chaucer presumably substituted the “citole” for the traditional shell.

The Two Venuses in Medieval Commentary…

 The Vulgar Venus and the Lover’s Malady in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale…

     The classical theme of the two Venuses–and the two antithetical loves they separately inspire–was one that continued to be rehearsed, with no alteration of meaning, through the Christian Middle Ages (and, indeed, well into the eighteenth century).  Thus, in a ninth-century commentary on the pagan poet Statius’ Thebaid (first-century A.D.),  Remigius of Auxerre writes, “There are two Venuses, one the mother of sensuality and lust…, the other chaste, who rules over honest and chaste loves.”  An anonymous eleventh-century commentary on Ovid’s Fasti makes the two Venuses responsible for “virtuous love” and “unlawful passion” respectively.  And in his brilliant commentary on the Aeneid,Bernardus Silvestris explicitly calls the heavenly Venus “mundana musica”, that is, the music that composes the world in order, proportion, and harmony:

We read that there are two Venuses, a legitimate goddess and a goddess of lechery.  We say that the legitimate goddess is mundana musica, that is, equal proportion of the parts of the world, which some call “Astraea” [goddess of Justice] and others “natural justice”.  For she is in the elements, in the stars, in times, in inanimate things.  But the shameful Venus, the goddess of sensuality, we call concupiscence of the flesh, which is the mother of all fornication.

For Bernard, then, the “legitimate” Venus presides over the entire providential order, as it had been identified, since time immemorial, with the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres.  His “shameful” Venus, on the other hand, incites the sins of lust, sensuality, and the whole range of carnal and worldly appetites.

 

Like her celestial counterpart, the vulgar Venus was frequently associated with music in medieval and Renaissance literature and iconography, so that whenever a character is said or shown (in Chaucer’s aforementioned phrase) to “maken melodye”, we are obliged to ask which of the two opposing kinds of music and love his or her actions exhibit:  whether Bernard’s mundana musica–the music of the spirit in harmony with God and the natural order–, or that of the “shameful Venus”–the music, that is, of the flesh, as it seeks inferior goods and pleasures for the satisfaction of its own concupiscence.

The close relation between music and love, and the contrast between their two species, is one of Chaucer’s favourite themes, and he invariably employs it to great comic, which is to say also, moral effect.

At the conclusion of the Knight’s Tale, for instance, the wise Duke Theseus (King of Athens, and therefore symbol and embodiment of reason) prefaces his decree that a marriage should take place with this famous philosophical oration:

“The Firste Movere of the cause above,
When he first made the faire cheyne of love,
Wel wiste he why, and what thereof he mente,
For with that faire cheyne of love he bond
The fyr, the eyr, the water, and the lond
In certeyn boundes, that they may nat flee.
That same Prince and that Movere”, quod he,
“Hath stablished this wrecched world adoun
Certeyne days and duracioun
To al that is engendred in this place,
Over the whiche day they may nat pace…
Then may men by this ordre wel discerne
That thilke Movere stable is and eterne.
Wel may men know…
That every part derryveth from his hool,
For nature hath nat taken his bigynnyng
Of no partie or cantel [portion] of a thyng,
But of a thyng that parfit is and stable,
Descendynge so til it be corrumpable.
And therefore, of his wise purveiaunce,
He hath so wel biset his ordinaunce
That speces of thynges and progressiouns
Shullen enduren by successiouns…

Theseus is about to set in order the murderous strife that has torn apart his kingdom by declaring a marriage, the social institution in which nature’s orderly regeneration and succession occur amongst men.  He appeals, accordingly, to the cosmic harmony that binds the warring opposites and disposes the entire universe in a hierarchical “chain of love”, from the eternal at the top, “descending to the corruptible” at the bottom, of God’s creation.  He invokes, that is, the divine principle of order that is mythologized alternatively as mundana musica or the heavenly Venus.

The cause of all the discord that has destroyed the peace of his kingdom has been the love of two Theban cousins and once-fast friends, Palamon and Arcite, for the same woman, Emily, whom they first glimpse, framed, as usual, by a pululant spring garden, through the bars of their prison of war —a prison that is an objective correlative of their own self-imprisonment to the vulgar Venus.  Without even so much as saying hello to the object of their affections, they are stricken by what Chaucer, following the medical practitioners of his day, calls the “lover’s malady”.

Here is how the poet describes Arcite, in the moments after he has been released from his Athenian cell and banished to his native Thebes:

Whan that Arcite to Thebes comen was,
Ful ofte a day he swelte [grew faint] and seyde, “Allas!”
For seen his lady shal he nevere mo.
And shortly to concluden al his wo,
So much sorwe hadde nevere creature
That is, or shal, whil that the world may dure.
His slep, his mete, his drynke, is hym biraft,
That lene he wex and drye as a shaft;
His eyen holwe and grisly to beholde,
His hewe falow and pale as asshen colde,
And solitarie he was and evere allone,
And awaillynge al the nyght, makynge his mone;
And if he herde song or instrument,
Thane wolde he wepe, he myghte nat be stent.
So feble eek were his spiritz, and so lowe,
And changed so, that no man koude knowe
His speche nor his voys, though men it herde.
And in al his geere [behaviour] for al the world he ferde [behaved]
Nat only lik the loveris maladye
Of Heros, but rather lik manye [mania]
Engendred of humour malencolik
Biforen, in his celle fantastic [a pun:  his physical prison; his imprisoning imagination—the fantasizing part of the brain].
And shortly, turned was al up so doun
Bothe habit and eek disposicioun
Of hym, this woful lovere daun Arcite.

 

The lover’s malady is yet another enduring literary topos of which we have already seen one example in Lucretius, and will encounter many more along the way; like Lucretius, I trust that you can see that this is hardly behavior that Chaucer invites his readers to emulate.  It is foolish and sinful, and therefore supremely funny.  Arcite is not only a grown man, but a soldier; his dissolving into tears whenever he hears “song or instrument” is amusing in the same way that Robert De Niro’s character in Analyze Thisis amusing when he weeps at a financial planning commercial on late-night television that shows a son and his elderly father out fishing together.  De Niro is a Mafia boss and killer, so his familial tenderness is rank sentimentality; Arcite’s weeping is similarly based on no genuine feeling of love, since he still has not uttered a word to its object.  It is merely the ludicrous behaviour of one who has been driven insane by a maniacal fixation on the image of the physical beauty of his beloved, which has become lodged in his “celle fantastik”.

 

In due course, the jealous rivalry between Palamon and Arcite destroys their ancient friendship and sets them on a path of mutual distrust and hatred that inevitably leads to a joust in which one dies by the hand of the other.  Lest there be any doubt about the cause of this tragedy, Chaucer has them both first make pilgrimages to the temple of Venus in supplication of the goddess’ help in the prosecution of their rival suits.  The poet’s description makes it clear enough that this is definitively not the Venus invoked by Theseus in his hymn on the “fair chain of love”.

Notably, the immediate source of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale is Boccaccio’s Teseide (i.e., “story of Theseus”), in a commentary whereon Boccaccio himself writes:

To make these things clear it is necessary to know first of all that just as Mars is said above to represent the irascible appetite, so Venus represents the concupiscible appetite.  And this Venus is double.  The first one should be understood as the one through whom arises every honest and legitimate desire, like the desire to have a wife in order to have children, and other desires like this one.  This Venus is not relevant here.  The second Venus is the one through whom every lascivious thing is desired, and who is commonly called the goddess of love.  And it is this one for whom the author [i.e., Boccaccio himself] describes the temple and the things connected with it, as the text shows.  (My italics)

Painted on the walls of Chaucer’s Temple of Venus, the reader confronts images of the natural results of the “concupiscible appetite” that Boccaccio’s vulgar Venus inspires:  broken sleeps, sighs, tears, lamenting, fiery flushes of desire—all the unfortunate symptoms of the lover’s malady.  Thereafter follow

Festes, instrumenz, caroles, daunces,
Lust and array, and all the circumstaunces
Of love.

As Boccaccio explains, feasts, music, and dance incite the lascivious appetite and are fitting occasions for the act of Venus.

But Chaucer goes beyond Boccaccio by placing the Temple in a garden whose porter, he says, is Idleness, and one of whose inhabitants is the unfortunate Narcissus.  Venus’ temple garden is, in other words, the same Garden of Delights as that described by Guillaume de Lorris in his Roman de la Rose.

     Idleness (Oiseuse) is the porter of that garden, as she is of the garden of Venus, because, as Ovid had written in his Ars Amatorica, “if you take away idleness, you take away the arrows from Cupid’s bow”.  According to the moral commentators, idleness, along with drunkenness,  is one of those perilous moral conditions that is especially conducive to the act of Venus.  Finally, in medieval mythographyNarcissus is the signal victim of the lover’s malady, having died for a “love”, so called, that amounted to nothing more than a maniacal fixation upon a visual image indeed.

 The Two Venuses and the Two Loves, continued…

The Vulgar Venus and the Lover’s Malady in Lucretius’ De natura rerum…

 The Vulgar Venus and “Courtly Love”…

     Chaucer’s moral satire–as we will see, in rather greater detail, in future installments–is founded on the fundamental disjunction between the Two Loves.  Even while they are on the road to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury (on the road, figuratively, to the Heavenly Jerusalem), his pilgrim-lovers regularly indict themselves as fervent adherents of the vulgar Venus.

This is the Venus, once again, whom Lucretius describes in the fourth book of his De rerum natura–by such obvious contrast, that is, to the sacred goddess he too had invoked at the very beginning of his poem.   The passage is long one, but it is too important—and too much a comic masterpiece–to abridge, insofar as it anticipates in such clinical detail the risible trials and tribulations of the medieval and Renaissance “courtly lover”, and the unnatural madness of the “lover’s malady” from which he suffers.

Lucretius’ gratuitous sermon on the dangers of the vulgar Venus arrives in the context of what purports to be a matter-of-fact description of the organs and function of human reproduction.  But in pre-modern thought, scientific objectivity quickly modulates into moral didacticism:

     In this last case, as I have explained, the thing in us that responds to the stimulus is the seed that comes with ripening years and strengthening limbs.  For different things respond to different stimuli or provocations.  The one stimulus that evokes human seed from the human body is a human form.  As soon as this seed is dislodged from its resting-place, it travels through every member of the body, concentrating at certain reservoirs in the limbs, and promptly acts upon the generative organs.  These organs are stimulated and swollen by the seed.  Hence follows the will to eject it in the direction in which tyrannical lust is tugging.  The body makes for the source from which the mind is pierced by love.  For the wounded normally fall in the direction of their wound; the blood spurts out toward the source of the blow; and the enemy who delivered it, if he is fighting at close quarters, is be-spattered by the crimson stream.  So, when a man is pierced by the shafts of Venus, whether they are launched by a lad with womanish limbs or a woman radiating love from her whole body, he strives towards the source of the wound and craves to be united with it and to transmit something of his own substance from body to body.  His speechless yearning is a presentiment of bliss.

This, then, is what we term Venus.  This is the origin of the thing called love—that drop of Venus’ honey that first drips in our heart, to be followed by numbing heart-ache.  Though the object of your love may be absent, images of it still haunt you and the beloved name chimes sweetly in your ears.  If you find yourself thus passionate enamoured of an individual, you should keep well away from such images.  Thrust from you anything that might feed your passion, and turn your mind elsewhere.   Vent the seed of love upon other objects.  By clinging to it you assure yourself the certainty of heart-sickness and pain.  With nourishment, the festering sore quickens and strengthens.  Day by day the frenzy heightens and the grief deepens.  Your only remedy is to lance the first wound with new incisions; to salve it, while it is still fresh…; to guide the motions of your mind into some new channel.

Do not think that by avoiding grand passions you are missing the delights of Venus. Rather, you are reaping such profits as carry with them no penalty.  Rest assured that this pleasure is enjoyed in a purer form by the healthy than the love-sick.  Lovers’ passion is storm-tossed, even in the moment of fruition, by waves of delusion and incertitude.  They cannot make up their mind what to enjoy first with eye or hand.  They clasp the object of their longing so tightly that the embrace is painful.  They kiss so fiercely that the teeth are driven into lips.  All this because their pleasure is not pure, but they are goaded by an underlying impulse to hurt the thing, whatever it may be, that gives rise to these shoots of madness.

In the actual presence of love, Venus lightens the penalties she imposes, and her sting is assuaged by an admixture of alluring pleasure.  For in love, there is the vain hope that the flame of passion may be quenched by the same body that kindled it.  But this runs counter to the course of nature.  This is the one thing of which the more we have, the more our breast burns with the evil lust of having.  Food and fluid are taken into our body; since they can fill their allotted places, the desire for meat and drink is thus easily appeased.  But a pretty face or a pleasing complexion gives the body nothing to enjoy but insubstantial images, which all too often fond hope scatters to the winds.

When a thirsty man tries to drink in his dreams but is given no drop to quench the fire in his limbs, he clutches at images of water with fruitless effort and while he laps up a rushing stream, he remains thirst in the midst.  Just so in the midst of of love Venus teases lovers with images.  They cannot glut their eyes by gazing on the beloved form, however closely.  Their hands glean nothing from those dainty limbs in their aimless roving over all the body.  Then comes the moment when with limbs entwined they pluck the flower of youth.  Their bodies thrill to the presentiment of joy, and it is seed-time in the fields of Venus.  Body clings greedily to body; moist lips are pressed on lips, and deep breaths are drawn through clenched teeth.  But all to no purpose.  One can glean nothing from the other, nor enter in and be wholly absorbed, body in body; for sometimes it seems that that is what they are craving and striving to do, so hungrily do they cling together in Venus’ fetters, while their limbs are unnerved and liquefied by the intensity of rapture.  At length, when the spate of lust is spent, there comes a slight intermission in the raging fever.  But not for long.  Soon the same frenzy returns.  The fit is upon them once more.  They ask themselves what it is they are craving for, but find no device that will master their malady.  In aimless bewilderment they waste away, stricken by an unseen wound.

Add to this that they spend their strength and fail under the strain.  Their days are passed at the mercy of another’s whim.  Their wealth  slips from them, transmuted to Babylonian brocades.  Their duties are neglected.  Their reputation totters and goes into decline….A hard-won patrimony is metamorphosed into bonnets and tiaras or, it may be, into Grecians robes, masterpieces from the looms of Elis or of Ceos.  No matter how lavish the décor and the cuisine—drinking parties (with no lack of drinks), entertainments, perfumes, garlands, festoons and all—they are still to no purpose.  From the very heart of the fountain of delight there rises a jet of bitterness that poisons the fragrance of the flowers.  Perhaps the unforgetting mind frets itself remorsefully with the thought of life’s best years squandered in sloth and debauchery.  Perhaps the beloved has let fly some two-edged word, which lodges in the impassioned heart and flows there like a living flame.  Perhaps he thinks she is rolling her eyes too freely and turning them upon another, or he catches in her face a hint of mockery.

And these are the evils inherent in the love that prospers and fulfills its hopes.  In starved and thwarted love the evils you can see plainly without even opening your eyes are past all counting.  How much better to be on your guard beforehand, as I have advised, and take care that you are not enmeshed!

To avoid enticement into the snares of love is not so difficult as, once entrapped, to escape out of the toils and snap the tenacious knots of Venus.  And yet, be you never so tightly entangled and embrangled, you can still free yourself from the curse unless you stand in the way of your own freedom.  Fist you should concentrate on all the faults of mind or body of her whom you covet and sigh for.  For men often behave as though blinded by love and credit the beloved with charms to which she has no valid title.  How often do we see blemished and unsightly women basking in a lover’s adoration!…A sallow wench is acclaimed as a nut-brown maid.  A sluttish slattern is admired for her “sweet disorder”.  Her eyes are never green, but grey as Athene’s.   If she is stringy and woody, she is lithe as a gazelle.  A stunted runt is a sprite, a sheer delight from top to toe.  A clumsy giantess is “a daughter of the gods divinely tall”.  She has an impediment in her speech—a charming lisp, of course.  She’s as mute as a stockfish—what modesty!  A waspish, fiery-tempered scold—she “burns with a gem-like flame”.  She becomes “svelte” and “willow” when she is almost too skinny to live; “delicate” when she is half-dead with coughing.  Her breasts are swollen and protuberant:  she is “Ceres suckling Bacchus”.  Her nose is snub—“a Faun”, then, or “a child of the Satyrs”.  Her lips bulge:  she is “all kiss”….

 

I remind you that Lucretius is a disciple of Epicurus, popularly (although wrongly) understood to be antiquity’s first exponent of the Playboy Philosophy.  But if an Epicurean can be so repelled by the sin of lust, and so contemptuous of those who allow themselves to be caught in its snare, the idea that an antique Platonist, Stoic, or medieval Christian could extol it in the form of a courtly “religion of Cupid” is absurd on its face.

As we will see presently, the classical source of the medieval courtly love tradition is Ovid, whose mocking and ironic encouragement (in his Ars amatorica) of the sort of vulgar venereal behaviour that Lucretius clearly ridicules, was taken at face value by nineteenth-century literary critics, who imagined that love poets such as Chaucer or the author of the Roman de la Rose were, in spite of the Christian morality they affected to profess, somehow sympathetic to adulterous lust.

But this is a subject we’ll return to in a moment; I mention it here only because Ovid in his Fasti also plainly refers to Venus as the mother of “twin loves”, and he does so while jokingly brushing aside the notion that he is there setting out to describe the same disreputable mother of the vulgar love he treats of in the Ars amatorica.

The Celestial Venus in Lucretius’ De rerum natura…

Lucretian Echoes in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales…

The Earthly Pilgrimage and the Choice of Love…

     Inevitably, we meet the two Aphrodites again and again throughout the history of philosophy, literature, and art.

The Venus who is invoked by Lucretius, for example, at the beginning of his first-century B.C. philosophical poem, De rerum natura, and the Venus we meet later on in the fourth book, symbolize two very different cosmological influences and functions.

The goddess upon whom Lucretius calls for inspiration in his invocation is the

 Mother of Aeneas and his race, delight of men and gods, life-giving Venus,

whose doing it is

that under the wheeling constellations of the sky all nature teems with life…Through you all living creatures are conceived and come forth to look upon the sunlight.  Before you the winds flee, and at your coming the clouds forsake the sky.  For you the inventive earth flings up sweet flowers.  For you the ocean smiles, the sky is calmed and glows with diffused radiance. When first the day puts on the aspect of spring, when in all its force the fertilizing breath of Zephyr is unleashed, then, great goddess, the birds of air give the first intimation of your entry; for yours is the power that has pierced them to the heart.  Next the cattle run wild, frisk through the rough lush pastures and swim the swift flowing streams…So throughout seas and uplands, rising torrents, verdurous meadows and the leafy shelters of the birds, into the breasts of one and all you instill alluring love, so that with passionate longing they reproduce their several kinds.  Since you alone are the guiding power of the universe…, yours is the partnership I seek in striving to compose these lines…

The goddess who pacifies the commotions of sky and sea, orders the courses of the “wheeling constellations”, and modulates the seasons, ensures thereby that, during that great annual vernal festival of rebirth in which she is celebrated, the seasonal vegetation revives, and all of God’s creatures breed according to their kind.

We might well wonder how it is that the rutting of bulls might be included under the influence of this divine and heavenly force.  But inasmuch as it belongs to the universal natural order of things, this too is a reflection of the Creator’s guiding love for his creation, and is thus the result of the benignant influence of the celestial, rather than the vulgar, Venus.

 

With the passage from Lucretius in mind, and before we look at his description of the other Venus in book four of the De rerum natura, let me might skip ahead some fourteen centuries to the famous opening lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which the ancient Lucretian echoes are palpable and deliberate:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of Mach hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heath
The tender croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smalle fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages…

I’ve rendered some of the explicit echoes of Lucretius in italics; but, more important, everything in the passage makes it clear once again that it is the heavenly Venus who is being hymned, and that the contrast with her earthly counterpart is everywhere implied and crucially present.

      It is April, which is the month of Venus, the mother of the god of Love; the sun is in the constellation of Taurus, which is Venus’ house; the world is reviving from its winter sleep; the tender shoots of the new crops are pushing upward; the birds, stimulated by primordial instincts, like all animals at this time of year, are seeking their mates, singing and doing those other things which Chaucer habitually implies by the phrase “maken melodye”.

But, at this point in the proem, there is a magnificently ironic anticlimax:  “Thanne”, says the poet, “longen folk to goon on pilgrimages”.

In the spring, our conventional expectation is that (as the proverb has it) a young man’s fancy turns to love; indeed, all of the first eleven lines of the Canterbury Tales seem to lead inexorably to some human romantic culmination.  Going on a religious pilgrimage is about the last thing the reader expects.

But again, the sacred pilgrimage is all about love, albeit not of the romantic kind.  The love of God and the invisibilia dei, which temporarily detaches the Christian adherent from the gravity of the world and puts him on the road to Canterbury or St. James of Compostella (to architectural loci, as we have seen, that are earthly symbols of the Heavenly Jerusalem) is the same love as that which holds the planets and the seasons in their courses and inspires the fecundity of all nature.

Of course, that this is not always the love that motivates Chaucer’s pilgrims is the source of his satire.  The Canterbury Tales thereby poses the fundamental moral problem of the choice that every earthly pilgrim has to make as to which of the two loves he will prosecute:  whether his thoughts are fixed on the vulgar Venus’ carnal delights or on a love of a higher kind; whether he sees in all this vernal rebirth and fecundity the regeneration and rebirth of the soul, as betokened by Christ’s springtime resurrection, or the re-invigoration of his merely biological energies; whether he recognizes in the resurgent spring vegetation an image of the celestial paradise or an invitation to create paradise on earth (as the followers of Sir Pleasure try to do in his Garden of Earthly Delights in the early 13^th centuryRoman de la Rose, or as January affects to do with May in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale).

This choice of love will determine if the pilgrim’s progress is toward the earthly City of Babylon or the Heavenly Jerusalem:  whether his destination–symbolically speaking, once again–is this world or the next; and whether the melodye he makes is that of the harmony of the spheres or the sort of beautiful music that the world’s most romantic skunk, Pepe le Pew, yearns to make with his Looney Tune paramours.

 

The springtime imagery with which the Canterbury Tales so famously opens is thus neither merely decorative and conventional, as some critics have insisted, nor merely ironic.  It declares the moral beginning and end-points between which the pilgrims’ journey will be undertaken.  As Petrus Berchorius (fourteenth-century commentator on Ovid’s Metamorphoses) explains, spring is the season of Lent, and thus the “time of penitence for sin”.  Accordingly, the Parson’s sermon on penance with which the Tales close is of the greatest relevance to Chaucer’s introductory proem; the Parson’s Tale reminds the pilgrims of the proper spirit in which they ought to have embarked on their journey.

Two Kinds of Music and the Two Aphrodites in Plato’s Symposium…

The Celestial and the Vulgar Aphrodite…

Medicine as Music…

A Healthy Climate…

     The theme of the two kinds of music, to which we shall return in due course, was regularly conjoined with that of the “two loves”.  The latter was commonly mythologized as the opposition between the two Aphrodites and Eroi, and was another enduring literary and philosophical topos.

Like just about everything in classical antiquity that does not go back to Homer, it originates, once again, in Plato.  The locus classicus is Plato’s Symposium, the Banquet, that is, set at the house of Agathon in celebration of his winning of the laurel for dramatic poetry.

A banquet being, comme d’habitude, the prelude for some diverting post-prandial conversation, one of the guests proposes that each should rise in turn and offer a speech in praise of Eros, the great god of love.  The first to so oblige is Phaedrus, to whose speech the next speaker, Pausanias, objects, however, that “we should not be called upon to praise love in such an indiscriminate manner”.  Rather, as he continues:

If there were only one Love [Eros; here, the common noun as well as the god], then what you said would be well enough; but since there are more Loves than one, you should have begun by determining which of them was to be the theme of our praises.  I will try to amend this defect; and first of all I will tell you which Love is deserving of praise, and then try to hymn the praiseworthy one in a manner worthy of him.  For we all know that Love is inseparable from Aphrodite [a pun:  allegorically; biologically], and if there were only one Aphrodite there would be only one Love; but as there are two goddesses there must be two Loves.  And am I not right in asserting that there are two goddesses?  The elder one, having no mother, who is called the heavenly Aphrodite–she is the daughter of Uranus; the younger who is daughter of Zeus and Dione—her we call common; and the Love who is her fellow-worker is rightly called common, as the other Love is called heavenly. (Symposium 180c f.)

Pausanias then goes on to explain the moral implications of the parentage of the two goddesses:

The goddess who is the mother of this [the vulgar] Love is far younger than the other, and she was born of the union of the male and female, and partakes of both.  But the offspring of the heavenly Aphrodite is derived from a mother in whose birth the female has no part—she is from the male only;…and the goddess being older, there is no wantonness in her.

Having been born of a father but no biological mother—like Athena from the head of Zeus, and indeed like most of the redeemer-gods of antiquity, including Jesus—the heavenly Aphrodite has no taint of feminine sensuality about her, and neither does the Love that she engenders.  That love, accordingly, is itself “masculine” and of the “masculine”:  of the promising youths who are befriended by elder sages so as to inculcate within them virtue, wisdom, and a love for philosophy, but more generally of “the masculine” as a symbol of reason and its spiritual kin in the invisible world of ideas.

By contrast, “the Love who is the offspring of the common Aphrodite is essentially common”, as Pausanias scoffs, tautologically.  “His is the love of the body rather than the soul”, of “money or political power”, and other “seductions”, that being in themselves impermanent, can hardly inspire an amity that is other than fleeting and self-interested.

 

The next encomiast of love in the dialogue is Euryximachus, a physician who (in accordance with a psychological type that was long ago diagnosed by Jung) is utterly incapable of distinguishing himself from his professional persona.  After applauding Pausanias’ observation that there are two kinds of love, Euryximachus thus addresses them while at the same time “honouring his own art of medicine”:

In the body there are by its nature these two kinds of love; the state of bodily health and the state of sickness are confessedly different and unlike, and being unlike, they have loves which are unlike; so the desire of the healthy is one, and the desire of the diseased is another.  As Pausanias was just saying, to indulge good men is honourable, and bad men dishonourable; so it is with the body.  In each body it is right and proper to favour the good and healthy elements (and that is what is called the practice of medicine), and the bad elements and the elements of disease are not to be indulged but discouraged.  That is what the physician has to do, and in this the art of medicine consists:  for medicine may be briefly [!] described as the knowledge of the loves and desires of the body, and how to satisfy them or mortify them; and the best physician is he who is able to separate fair love from foul, or to convert one into the other; and he who knows how to eradicate and how to implant love, whichever is required, and….

Euryximachus, as you can see, is a man of titanic pomposity, so absorbed with the importance of what he does, that he finds in everything that is worthy in the world an analogy to it, and he draws that analogy in such obvious, exhaustive, and excruciating detail as to induce drowsiness.  We’ve all met his type at parties.  I quote this passage at length for no other reason than to give you an example of Plato’s comic art, a feature of his dialogues that is too often overlooked.

In any case, even Euryximachus must eventually get to a point that Plato wants his readers to ponder.  As he continues, he notes that he who

can reconcile the most hostile elements in the constitution and make them loving friends, is a skillful practitioner.  Now the most hostile are the most opposite such as hot and cold, bitter and sweet, moist and dry, and the like.  And our father Aesculapius [legendary founder of medicine], knowing how to implant friendship and accord in these elements, was the creator of our art…Anyone who pays the least attention to the subject will also perceive that in music there is the same reconciliation of opposites; and I suppose that this must have been the meaning of Heracleitus…for he has it that the One is united by disunion, like the harmony of the bow and the lyre…What he probably meant was that harmony is attained through the art of music by the reconciliation of differing notes of higher or lower pitch which once disagreed…For harmony is a symphony [in Greek, literally “a coming together of sounds”], and symphony is a kind of agreement…In like manner, rhythm is compounded of elements short and long, once differing and now in accord; which accordance, as in the former instance of medicine, so in all these other cases music implants, making love and concord to grow among them; and thus music, too, is a science of the phenomenon of love in their application to harmony and rhythm…

This salubrious harmony shows the heavenly Aphrodite at work, whereas the state of sickness, the body’s inordinate love for one extreme or another, is the handiwork of the bad physician, the earthly Aphrodite.

 

Here we can observe well enough how the foundational mytho-philosophical topoi of antiquity develop and attract originally unrelated ideas into their orbit. We should remember (inasmuch as we have encountered it so many times) the primordial cosmogonic mythos, according to which the creation of the world consists in the ordering of an original state of “chaos” in which the elements earth, water, air, and fire, as well as the contraries cold and hot, wet and dry, were in a state of “war” or mutual aggression, invading each others provinces.  The rational allocation of the elements to their proper jurisdictions and the pacification of their hostilities is a state that was conventionally described as “Justice”, “Love”, or “Harmony”.

Euryximachus now merely applies to the health of the body the same musical metaphor.  Just as the elements of which everything material in the cosmos is constituted were originally in a state of chaotic opposition before being disposed by the cosmogonic Logos in symphonic harmony, so the elements of which the human body is composed (the four “humours”, as they came to be called) transgress each others boundaries when the body is in a state of disease, until the Physician (whom the self-congratulatory Euryximachus thus compares to the Creator) composes its morbid strife.

Euryximachus cannot fail, of course, to expand upon the analogy:

…Whence I infer that in music, in medicine, and in all other things human as well as divine, both loves ought to be watched as far as may be, for they are both present.  The course of the seasons is also full of both these principles, and when, as I was saying the elements of hot and cold, moist and dry, attain the temperate love of one another and blend in chastened harmony, they bring to men, animals, and plants health and plenty, and do them no harm; whereas the wanton love [i.e., of the “vulgar Aphrodite”], getting the upper hand and affecting the seasons of the year, is very destructive and injurious, being the source of pestilence, and bringing many different kinds of diseases on animals and plants; and also hoar-frost and hail and blight are wont to spring from the mutual disproportions and disorders caused by this love, which to know in relation to the revolutions of the heavenly bodies and the seasons of the year is termed astronomy.

Here, then, we see the cosmogonic mythos extended to meteorology and beyond, to the health of nature in general:  like the pre-cosmic state of chaos, like the diseases of the human body, the extremes of climate (tempest, flood, frost, famine) and the pestilences they cause are the consequence of the disharmonies caused by the vulgar Aphrodite.  (As you can see, the impulse to rationalize climatic anomalies long antedates our modern myth of “global warming”.)

Being a self-absorbed windbag, Euryximachus is the perfect character to put into whose mouth a statement of universal correspondence, since for him, everything must correspond to his own profession of medicine.  And indeed it does:  the whole health of the cosmos is dependent upon the harmonizing of the seasonal extremes, which harmony is carefully sustained by ministrations of the right sort of love from the Arch Physician, the celestial Aphrodite.  But if the vulgar Aphrodite should sneak into the universal consulting room or relieve her on her cosmic rounds, the world develops symptoms of hoar frost or drought, and everything in it sickens with pestilence, blight, and disease.

The “Tuned” and “Cosmic” Soul…

The Cosmic and Psychic War of Opposites…

 Music = Philosophy…

Two Kinds of Hearing and Sight…

The “Courses” of the Heavens and the Soul…

     In trying to understand what the early writers meant by the music of the microcosm, let me begin with a passage from Alan of Lisle (12^th century) that, as usual, invokes the whole Orphic and cosmological afflatus of the topos.  Here is Alan’s iconographical description of Musica herself, in the treatise on the Seven Liberal Arts that occupies the middle books of his brilliant mythological allegory, Anticlaudianus:

One hand holds a cithara [he writes of the goddess], the other plucks its chords and produces a sweet delight of sound that is a feast for the ears and a prelude to slumber for the eyes. With such music did the Thracian bard [Orpheus] bid the stones become tractable, the woods to run, the rivers to stop, the wild beasts to grow tame, disputes to cease.  By his laments he overcame the inflexibility of the Eumenides…, made Dis show a fatherly kindness and the Furies forget their fury….Dressed in a striking cloak, the maiden shows that she is the foster-child of peace and seeks not the thunderbolts of war.  There a gay and smiling picture disports itself, showing under various forms:  what music can do, what are its bonds, with what ties it joins all things together…, which music joins the parts of the day together, separates the months, establishes the seasons of the years, restricts their vagaries, unites the elements, links the planets, gives the stars motion…which music sets in order the parts of the body of man, that little cosmos, and so adorns him with the form of the greater cosmos…, the smaller to be represented as an image of the greater; which music harmonizes the faculties of the soul, allies the soul with the body…[my italics]

As in the passage we have already discussed from Clement, the music that regulates the orderly processions of the days and seasons and harmonizes the discordant energies of the elemental opposites in the macrocosm, when it resonates in the microcosm, tunes the untuned mind of man.   In the formulation of the Pythagoreans, it renders the soul kosmios—cosmic—and, as the Stoics expressed it, tonos:   composed and harmonious, that is, within itself, and at the same time “attuned” to that rational harmony in which the cosmos is disposed by the Universal Logos, which the Logos-inseminated soul should emulate and echo within.  Like the cosmos, the soul is otherwise in a state of discord, as the violent extremes of the passions—of foolish joy over the transient and illusory gifts of Fortune, or equally foolish repining over their loss–destroy its equanimity.

As the second-century Middle Platonist Maximus of Tyre explains, music moderates those emotional extremes just as the music of the spheres composes the universal opposites in order and harmony:

If we believe Pythagoras, as we ought, the heavens make music too.  They are not struck like the lyre or blown like the pipe; instead the revolutions of the divine and musical bodies they contain, in their symmetry and balance, produce a supernatural sound…As for the human form of music that revolves about the soul, what else can it be but a means of training the soul’s emotions, soothing its violent and impulsive element,…tempering grief and calming anger and restraining passion,…chastening desire and healing pain and moderating infatuation and alleviating misfortune… (Oration XVII, 5)

Once again, then, music is a synonym for, as well as an active component of, the philosophical regime by which the wise man attains that state of apathe (passionlessness) or equanimity in which the salvation of the soul consists.  This is why music plays such an important role in the education of the philosopher king and the guardians in Plato’s Republic, and no doubt why Socrates, in the Phaedo, says that he has had recurrent dreams instructing him to learn that art:

In the course of my life I have often had intimations in dreams “that I should make music”.  The same dream came to me sometimes in one form, and sometimes in another, but always saying the same or nearly the same words:  “Set to work and make music”, said the dream. And hitherto I had imagined that this was only intended to exhort and encourage me in the study of philosophy, which has been the pursuit of my life, and is the noblest and best of music.  The dream was bidding me do what I was already doing…

Music and philosophy are really the same discipline, as Socrates insists, for all the reasons we have already noted.

 

Of course, just as there is a philosophical music that, like the celestial harmony of the spheres, tempers the passions and composes the soul, so, another kind of music, earthly and vulgar, does the opposite.   As Timaeus explains in the Platonic dialogue named after him, God has given us two kinds of hearing and two kinds of music, just as he has given us the ordinary physical organs of sight with which we perceive corporeal existences but also another, higher kind of sight with which we may penetrate beyond their sensible surfaces of things to the apprehension of the intellectual conceptions that underlie them:

The sight of day and night, and the months, and the revolutions of the years, have created number, and have given us a conception of time, and the power of inquiring about the nature of the universe; and from this source we have derived philosophy, than which no greater good ever was or will be given by the gods to mortal man.  This is the greatest boon of sight:  and of the lesser benefits why should I speak?…Thus much let me say however:  God invented and gave us sight to the end that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heaven, and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence which are akin to them, the unperturbed to the perturbed; and that we, learning them and partaking of the natural truth of reason, might imitate the absolutely unerring courses of God and regulate our own vagaries… [my italics]

Like the higher faculty of hearing, the higher sight is a modus philosophiae and a vehicle for the assimilation of the soul to God.  By seeing into the rational divine principle that orders the unerring revolutions of the universe (the orderly rotation of day and night, the seasons, the heavenly bodies), we may partake of its “natural reason”, imitate it, and with it regulate our own moral “vagaries” (<vago, vagare, to wander).  There are, as the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm demands, motions and processes within the soul that, like the planets, need to be kept in a regular orbit, lest they fly off errantly into space.

Similarly, the higher faculty of hearing has, according to Plato, the same psychotherapeutic function:

…the sense of hearing is granted to us for the sake of harmony; and harmony, which has motions akin to the revolutions of our souls, is not regarded by the intelligent votary of the Muses as given by them with a view to irrational pleasure, which is deemed to be the purpose of it in our day, but is meant to correct any discord which may have arisen in the courses of the soul, and to be our ally in bringing her into harmony and agreement with herself; and rhythm too was given by them for the same reason, on account of the irregular and graceless ways which prevail among mankind generally, and to help us against them. (Phaedo 47b f.)

As a human art, music, then, can be put to two antithetical uses:  to excite “irrational pleasures”, as Plato complains is the common wont “among mankind generally” (as it has been ever thus down to our own age of sex, drugs, and rock and roll);  or to regulate and harmonize the discordant and irregular “revolutions” or “courses” of our souls–to encourage them to emulate the regular and orderly “revolutions” and “courses” of the heavens to which the motions of our souls are by birth and nature “akin”.

Abbot Suger of St. Denis

     The most famous exponent of architectural Pythagoreanism—what might also be called, with equal appositeness, musical architecture or architectural music—is the Abbot Suger of St. Denis, who designed and supervised the construction of the great abbey church just north of Paris that is deemed by art historians to have been the first purely Gothic structure in Europe.   To our great fortune, Suger set down the metaphysical principles according to which St. Denis was to be built and appreciated in a little booklet that has been the subject of study by such eminent scholars as Erwin Panofsky (vid. hisAbbot Suger and St. Denis).

Throughout his treatise, one is struck consistently by the architect Suger’s overriding preoccupation with music, and its potency as an image by which the mind can be uplifted to the visio dei.  It begins:

The admirable power of one unique and supreme Reason equalizes by proper composition the disparity between things human and divine; and what seems mutually to conflict by inferiority of origin or contrariety of nature is conjoined by the single, delightful concordance of one superior, well-tempered harmony.

As Augustine had explained in a passage quoted previously, the diversity and contrariety of nature, as observed by the physical senses, occults, and at the same time, reveals a single universal concordance or harmony:  the One who transcends and yet unites the many.

Suger’s language is once again self-consciously musical— like that of the Platonists of Chartres who,not coincidentally, were teaching and writing at the precisely the time in which St. Denis and the other early Gothic Cathedrals were rising from their foundations.  Like them, too, Suger conceives of the universe as an edifice constructed according to the rational laws of musical consonance; and he understands God’s universally harmonious Reason as the archetype of the building he is about to erect.

Then Suger modulates, with remarkable ease, from the language of architecture to that of soteriology:

Those who seek to be glorified by a participation in this supreme and eternal Reason…strive continuously to accord the similar with the dissimilar and to render justice between conflicting things.  With the aid of charity they draw from the source of eternal Reason the means by which they may withstand internal strife and inner sedition:  preferring the spiritual to the corporeal and the eternal to the perishable.  They set aside the vexations and grievous anxieties caused by sensuality and the exterior senses; emancipating themselves from their oppression and focusing the undivided vision of their minds upon the hope of eternal reward, they seek jealously only that which is enduring.  They forget carnal desires rapt in the admiration of other sights; and they rejoice to be united one day, through the merit of a glorious consciousness, to supreme Reason and everlasting bliss.

If the reader may now be growing tired of encountering one expression after another of mystical yearning, let him rest assured that it is that yearning (along with the spiritual practice through which it is canalized and satisfied) that directs and is the interpretive key to practically everything in pre-modern art and thought.

If we look at this passage closely, it becomes unmistakable that, for Suger, promoting the mystic union through the inmerging of the human with the Eternal Reason is the express goal and purpose of his design.  In placing this meditation at the beginning of his treatise on the building of St. Denis, Suger emphasizes the significance of the architectural harmony of his church as an analogy to the harmony of the cosmos and the soul, of both of which it is a reflection and symbol.

Properly understood, the musical principles of Suger’s Gothic building are intended to lead the rational mind to the contemplation of the Eternal Reason who is the supreme composer and architect of the music of the cosmos.  As a microcosm, the human mind must strive continuously, Suger says, to internalize that cosmic music:  to harmonize or “render justice” to dissimilar or conflicting things, in emulation of the Creator who has done the same in the harmonious composition of the world.

What are these dissimilar and conflicting things?  Suger describes them as things of “contrariety of nature and origin”:  they are, that is, the ontological opposites as anciently defined by Socrates and Paul(the human and divine, created and uncreated, the temporal and eternal, the visible and invisible), which must be conjoined and united.

Yet Suger admonishes us to “prefer the spiritual to the corporeal and the eternal to the perishable”  How, then, does one “harmonize” these obviously unequal ontological and moral opposites?

The traditional way is to conceive the “temporal things that are seen” as symbols and images of the “invisible things of God” (in Paul’s formulation); and this is certainly how Suger enjoins us to understand his own building.  This requires the exercise of reason, which in turn requires the mortification of the senses, which otherwise, as Socrates explains in the Phaedo, would be apt to take the mere (visible)symbolum for the reality it symbolizes.

Finally, there are the interior, psychic oppositions–the passions and carnal desires that cause “internal strife and inner sedition”.  These cleavages, says Suger, can be healed by charity as it is drawn from its source in Eternal Reason (the traditional Physician of Souls).  This is the rational Love that draws the creation back into the Creator, and, immanent in the human soul, disposes it too in justice, order, and harmony.

We are returned, then, to the subject of the music in the “little world of man”, as Clement had anciently described it, and about which there is rather more to say.

Boethius’ De musica…“Geometrical harmony”…

The Platonists of Chartres…Timaeus…

God the Architect…God the Geometer …

  Architecture as the image of the Heavenly City…

Musical Architecture…

     A century after Augustine, his pupil Boethius quickly eclipsed him as the supreme authority for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance on both music and mathematics, on which he wrote separate and seminal treatises.  In his own De musica, Boethius explains how to visualize the perfect consonances of music in explicitly geometrical terms.  He points out that the proportions of double and half, triple and third—the perfect consonances of the Pythagorean monochord—are as easily perceived visually as they are acoustically, since, as he continues, “the ear is affected by sounds in quite the same way as the eye is by optical impressions”.

Applying this doctrine of synesthesia not only to proportions in a line but also to three-dimensional geometry, Boethius discovers “geometrical harmony” in the cube, since the number of its surfaces, angles, and edges, 6, 8, and 12, respectively, includes the ratios of octave, fifth, and fourth.

Though in the centuries that followed Boethius, there was no lack of “musical mysticism”–as expounded, for instance, by the Pseudo-Dionysius and John Scotus Eriugena,–it was the Platonism of the cathedral school at Chartres that produced the blueprint, if you’ll forgive the pun, by which musical harmonies were translated into the stone of the Gothic cathedral.

 

The poets, theologians, and philosophers who gathered at Chartres beginning in the second quarter of the twelfth century were even more avidly dedicated than their patristic forerunners, if that is possible, to effecting a grand synthesis of Platonic and Christian ideas.   Their principal interest was Platonic cosmology, and thus their thinking was almost entirely based on the Timaeus.

     Of that dialogue, only a fragment was available in the original Greek, but the Chartrains had, and were happy to depend upon, the translations and commentaries by Chalcidius (late-fourth century) and Macrobius (c. 400) (whose commentary on Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis we have alluded to so often). Both, of course, were pagan Platonists who, as indicative of the success of the harmonistic project, were nonetheless assumed from the outset to have been Christians.  In any case, the original fragment of the Timaeus and the two commentaries were the Chartrain Bible, held by the theologians there in no less reverence—probably greater, if they had dared to admit it—than the Book of Genesis.

In the Timaeus, as Thierry of Chartres (the younger brother of Bernard, and second Magister at the School) points out, Plato described the division of the World-Soul according to the ratios of the Pythagorean tetractys (1:2, 2:3, 3:4).  That is to say that for Plato, according to Thierry, musical proportion and harmony were the organizing principles of cosmogony and cosmology.

The conjunction of these themes–music and cosmogony–was hardly the invention of Chartres, of course.  From the very nascency of the Church, God’s creation of the world (as we noted in a passage quoted from Clement’s Protrepticus) appears as a symphonic composition.  Both Chalcidius and Macrobius had insisted that by dividing the World-Soul into the ratios of the tetractys, the Demiurge established a world-order based on musical intervals.   The same argument is rehearsed in the ninth century by the Christian Platonist and biblical exegete John the Scot, and inevitably the idea was seized upon by the School of Chartres.

But the masters at Chartres go further in representing the harmony of the cosmos as a work not merely of musical composition, but of architecture, and God as the Master Architect.  For example, in his late-twelfth century mythological allegory, The Complaint of Nature, Alan of Lisle (doctor universal and perhaps the greatest exponent of the Platonism of Chartres) describes God the Creator as the “artful architect” who builds the cosmos as his “regal palace”, composing and harmonizing the diversity of created things by means of the “subtle chains” of musical concord.

As you will hardly be surprised to learn, the conceit of God the Creator as Master Architect of the cosmos was already by the twelfth century a longstanding topos.  It went right back to Plato’s description in the Timaeus of the Father and Maker of the universe as a “Demiurge”, a “Craftsman”.   Of course, for Plato the Demiurge was no ordinary artisan; his techne or praxis as builder expressed the most eruditetheoria, and in conceiving the plan of his cosmic house, he depended upon the highest and most perfect theoretical knowledge of all, that of mathematics and geometry.  Accordingly, in Gothic sculpture and painting, and especially on the facades of the Cathedrals, we encounter the ubiquitous image of God the Geometer standing astride the globe with his compass and rule in hand.

 

The idea that the building of the edifice of the world involved the application of the geometrical and arithmetical laws of proportion was, as we have seen, originally Platonic, but it soon found a happy biblical home in the verse from Proverbs (8:27):  “When he prepared the heavens, I was there:  when he set a compass upon of the face of the deep”.

With this joint Platonic and scriptural sanction, the architect of the early Christian basilica, the Gothic cathedral,  the Renaissance church, or even great house, saw himself quite self-consciously in the divine role as creator, imitating the Master Architect in disposing his buildings in accordance with the same laws of geometrical proportion and harmony.  Early buildings, especially churches, were indeed regarded as visible images or models of God’s cosmic creation, which itself was regarded pre-eminently as an image and symbolic expression of the Ideas in the Divine Mind, including and above all that ineffable principle of order according to which the world was made and is governed.

That order is most especially manifest in the harmony of the heavenly spheres, which in turn, as in Dante, for example, becomes identified with the celestial habitations of the blessed: the eternal Heaven of God.  This explains why the medieval cathedrals, while modeling the cosmos as a whole, were above all conceived by the bishops and abbots who designed them as images of the Heavenly City.  If the medieval architect designed his church according to the laws of harmonious proportion, he did so that is,in imitation not only of the order and harmony of the visible world of creation, but especially as an intimation of the world to come.

 

The symbolic resonances that linked the created cosmos, the Celestial City, and the earthly sanctuary are dilated upon in a famous passage in Abelard’s Theologia Christiana.  Abelard identifies the World-Soul of Plato’s Timaeus with the harmony of the spheres, which he then in turn connects with the heavenly habitations in which angels and saints “in the ineffable sweetness of harmonic modulation render eternal praise to God”.  (That the harmony of the spheres is in fact the hymn of praise that the angelic choirs intone in God’s presence was a natural enough inference, since, as I mentioned earlier, the biblical angels were identified with the Platonic Intelligences as the indwelling souls of the planets who revolved, held in their orbits by love, around God.)

Abelard then transposes his musical analogy into an architectural one.  The Celestial Jerusalem, he says, is the archetype of the historical Jerusalem of ancient Judea, and more specifically, of the Temple erected there by Solomon.

As Von Simson observes, “No medieval reader could have failed to notice with what emphasis biblical description of a sacred edifice, particular those of Solomon’s Temple, of the Heavenly Jerusalem, and of the vision of Ezekiel, dwells on the measurements of these buildings”.  To these measurements, Abelard gives an explicitly Pythagorean significance.  Solomon’s Temple, he says, is reverberant with the same divine harmonies as produced by the heavenly spheres; moreover, its length, width, and height of 60, 20, and 30 cubits respectively, as recorded in I Kings 6, yield the proportion of the perfect musical consonances of third, fourth, and octave.

In Christian biblical commentary, the dimensions of Solomon’s Temple were regarded as ideal, in both the vernacular and Platonic sense of that word, and indeed practising architects felt obliged to heed them.  The famous Renaissance architect Philibert Delorme thus recommends the proportions not only of Solomon’s Temple, but of Noah’s Ark and Moses’ Tabernacle, as having been prescribed by “the great architect of the universe”.

Augustine’s “Musical Mysticism” (von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral)…

Augustine on Proportion and Number in Music and Architecture…

 On Christian Redemption and the Octave…

     In medieval and Renaissance art, architecture, and music, a conscious effort was made to incorporate proportions and intervals reflective of the “divine harmonies” of which the universe is composed.  In his magisterial study, The Gothic Cathedral:  Origins of Gothic Architecture and the Medieval Conception of Order, Otto von Simson argues that “the symbolic aspect of medieval architecture”—its conception as “an image of supernatural reality”—overshadows all other considerations for those who designed the cathedrals.

Von Simson traces this architectural imperative back to Augustine’s definition of music as the “science of good modulation”, which is identical with the science of mathematical or geometrical proportion, as first expounded by Plato and Pythagoras:

   The science of good modulation is concerned with the relating of several musical units according to a module, a measure, in such a way that the relation can be expressed in simple arithmetical ratios.  The most admirable ratio, according to Augustine, is that of equality or symmetry, the ratio 1:1, since here the union or consonance between the two parts is most intimate.  Next in rank are the rations 1:2, 2:3, and 3:4—the intervals of the perfect consonances, octave, fifth, and fourth.  It is to be noticed that the pre-eminence of these intervals, for Augustine, is not derived from their aesthetic or acoustic qualities.  These, rather, are audible echoes of the metaphysical perfection that Pythagorean mysticism ascribes to number, especially to the four numbers of the first tetractys.  Without the principate of number, as Augustine calls it, the cosmos would return to chaos.  Taking up the Biblical passage, “thou hast ordered all things in measure and number and weight [Wisdom 11:20], the Bishop of Hippo applied Pythagorean and Neoplatonic number mysticism to the interpretation of the Christian universe, thus establishing the cosmology that remained in force until the triumph of Aristotelianism.  Augustine shares with Plato both distrust of the world of images and belief in the absolute validity of mathematical relationships.  Those views form the basis of Augustines philosophy of art.  His postulates about the function of the arts in the Christian commonwealth, and even, one may say, their style, left their imprint on Christian art for a thousand years.  This influence may be formulated as follows:

The principles of good musical modulation and its appreciation that Augustine established inDe musica are mathematical principles and therefore apply, in his opinion at least, to the visual arts as they do to music.  On the monochord, the musical intervals are marked of by divisions on a string; the arithmetical ratios of the perfect consonances thus appear as the proportions between different parts of a line.  And since Augustine deduces the musical value of the perfect consonances from the metaphysical dignity of the ratios on which they are based, it was natural for him to conclude that the beauty of certain visual proportions derives from their being based on the simple rations of the first tetractys.  The place Augustine assigns to geometry among the liberal arts, like the place he assigns to music, is caused by what the Middle Ages called the “anagogical” function of geometry, that is, its ability to lead the mind from the world of appearances to the contemplation of the divine order.  In the second book of his treatise On Order, Augustine describes how reason, in her quest for the blissful contemplation of things divine, turns to music and from music to what lies within the range of vision:  beholding earth and heaven, she realizes that only beauty can ever satisfy her, in beauty figures, in figures proportion, and in proportion number.

The aesthetic implications are clear.  Augustine was nearly as sensitive to architecture as he was to music.  They are the only arts he seems to have fully enjoyed; and he recognized them even after his conversion, since he experienced the transcendental element in both.  For him, music and architecture are sisters, since both are children of number; they have equal dignity, inasmuch as architecture mirrors eternal harmony, as music echoes it…

[I]t was precisely this philosophy that invested Christian art with an extraordinary dignity. True beauty, according to Augustine, is anchored in metaphysical reality.  Visible and audible harmonies are actually intimations of the ultimate harmony which the blessed will enjoy in the world to come…

 

“Musical mysticism”, as von Simson evocatively calls it, not only informed Augustine’s cosmological and aesthetic doctrine but “reached to the core of his theological experience”.  In the De Trinitate (4.3),for example, Augustine meditates upon the mystery of redemption by which the death of Christ on the Cross atones for man’s double death of body and soul:  whereby the first Adam’s sin is canceled by the second Adam’s sinlessness, the first Adam’s hateful disobedience by the second’s filial love, the first’s punishment of eternal mortality by the second’s gift of eternal life.  In the same way, we undergo two resurrections:  one at baptism and a final resurrection at the end time.

Augustine ponders these conventional paradoxes and characterizes them as a wonderful “correspondence”, a “consonance” of one and two; and as he does, the symbolism of music takes hold on his imagination until he suddenly intuits, almost ecstatically, that harmony is the proper term for Christ’s work of reconciliation.  Is not the ratio of 1:2 representative of the concord made possible by Christ between Himself and the inferior nature of man?  Is this not the octave, he goes on to wonder like an early Christian Jung, that is so deeply implanted in our psyche by the Creator that even the musically and mathematically untutored instinctively respond to it?

In the order of time, as Augustine notes, Sunday is not only the first day of the week, but also the last; and being the day on which Christ rose from the dead, it expresses the same idea of rebirth as the musical scale in which the octave is the last tone that is also the first.  This meaning is said by Augustine to have been typologically adumbrated in the Old Law by circumcision, which took place on the eighth day.  If we look at the order of time in history, moreover, we see that the eighth age of the world is eternity, inasmuch as seven, which is generally representative of temporal things, is followed by the eternal eighth.  For Augustine, then, the interval of the octave, the musical expression of the mathematical ratio of 1:2, functions above all to convey to human ears the meaning of certain theological ideas and mysteries, especially of the transcendent mystery of redemption.

 

We have already discussed the octave in relation to the number eight (see the series Involuted Mysteries), so I need comment only briefly on Augustine’s schema here.  As the eighth tone in the scale that repeats the first, the octave completes the musical circle, the same circle traced by the planets, in marking the time that is the “mobile image of eternity”.  In returning via the octave to the beginning, the movement of the scale, like the apparent movement of the circle, is in reality a kind of eternal stasis.

The eighth sphere is, not coincidentally, the stellatum, the region of the fixed stars that lies hieratically outside the temporal dance of the seven planets, the markers of time.  The eighth age of the world ushers in the eternal Kingdom of God, just as the eighth day of the week, which repeats the first, once again closes the circle and brings us back to an immutable Beginning.  That day is Sunday, the day on which Christ rose from the dead, caused to be reborn the entire creation, and conferred upon it eternal life.

The baptismal font is accordingly an octagon, in token of Christ’s death and rebirth, insofar as they are re-actualized by the baptismal candidate.  In being identified with the dying and resurgent Christ in the font, the baptismal candidate effects the conjunction of the numbers 1 and 2, and thus the ratio 1:2—the ratio of the octave—insofar as unity is the symbol of the divine, duality of the human.

 

As an architectural artifact, the baptismal font is thus a prime example of the expression in the plastic arts of musical mysticism–or musical geometry, as we might also call it–, which along with the other musical intervals informed the design of sacred and secular art and architecture down to the eighteenth century, as we will see in due course.  Whether the eight sides of the font, or the eight sides of a typical medieval tower or lantern, for that matter, were more appealing to the eye than some other number is of no relevance.

What was important was that a number be suggested that led the mind to the contemplation of a harmony established by the Master Artisan whose sacred handiwork is thus the pattern of all human art.

Medieval Aesthetics…

Earthly Beauty as the Reflection of an Otherworldly Archetype…

Plato’s Timaeus…

Earthly Music as a Reflection of the Music of the Spheres…

Temporal and Spatial Order and Harmony as Reflections of Heavenly…

Aesthetics and Morality in St. Augustine…

Architectural Proportion…

     In Consolation book III, metre 9 (quoted in the previous installment of this series), the temporal order and harmony of the created world are merely the reflection and image of the order and harmony of the Divine Mind, the “eternal examplar”, as Boethius calls it (using the language of Christian Platonism), of whatever beauty or decorum the world derivatively possesses.

In the pre-modern imagination, it is for this reason that all human arts (including music) are conceived–insofar as they are capable of producing beauty–as reflecting some otherworldly paradigm or archetype. Thus in his summary of the narrative of Cicero’s Somnium at the beginning of the Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer describes the “melodye”

That cometh of thilke spere thryes thre

as

That welle…of music and melodye
In this world here, and cause of harmonye

All harmonious earthly music echoes the divine music of the spheres, insofar as all earthly beauty and order are images and reflections of the beauty and order of Boethius’ “eternal exemplar”.

 

The idea that the beauty of the world is a reflection or copy of an otherworldly paradigm or exemplar of beauty was also, of course, originally Platonic, its locus classicus Plato’s Timaeus, in which Socrates explains that for the world to be “the fairest possible of creations”, it must have been made in the image of a perfect, unitary, eternal, and immutable pattern or archetype.  Every rational and orderly process in nature is thus but a reflection of that paradigmatic ideal of order resident in the Divine Mind; the process of time itself, and the circular revolutions of the heavens by which it is marked, are but, as Socrates calls them, the “mobile images of eternity”:

When the father and creator saw the creature [i.e., the world] which he had made moving and living, the created image of the eternal God, he rejoiced, and in his joy determined to make the copy still more like the original; and as this [the original] was an eternal living being, he sought to make the universe eternal, so far as might be…Wherefore he resolved to have a moving image of eternity, and when he set in order and harmony the heaven, he made this image eternal but moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity; and this image we call time.  For there were no days and nights and months and years before the heaven was created, but when he constructed the heaven he created them also….

Both the original creation and the subsequent processes of nature are thus envisaged by Plato, and thereafter by the Christian Fathers, as harmonious developments governed by and reflective of a pre-existent divine principle of order and harmony.  As St. Augustine expresses what was to become a fundamental principle of pre-modern aesthetics in his De Musica:

What then are the things above [i.e., in God’s eternal heaven], except those in which resides the supreme, unshaken, immutable, eternal equality?  With them there is no time, no mutability; and from them proceed times constructed and ordered and modified in such a way as to imitate eternity, so that the revolution of the heavens returns to the same point and calls back the celestial bodies to the same point, and obeys in days and in months and in years and in lustres and in other sidereal cycles the laws of equality and unity and order.  Since earthly things are joined to celestial things, the cycles of their times join together in an harmonious succession as if in universal song [my italics].

The idea that the temporal cycles are by their very nature reflections of an eternal archetype of harmonious succession and circularity occurs throughout Patristic literature, and in its later development it was responsible for the habitual use of cyclical and seasonal images such as the signs of the Zodiac or the procession of the months in architectural ornament and painting.

But creation is not only beautiful insofar as its temporal intervals reflect the beauty of eternity; there is also a “frozen music” in its spatial relationships.  As Augustine relates elsewhere in his De Musica, it is not the mere magnitude of the cosmos that confers upon it its beauty, but the proportions amongst its parts:

If all its parts are diminished in proportion, it remains magnificent.  If the parts are augmented, it remains equally so.  For in the intervals of time and space, nothing is beautiful in itself, but only as it is compared to something else.

Our ability to perceive the beauty of this proportionate whole is limited, says Augustine, not only by the inability of our sensory faculties to embrace its vastness, but above all by our tendency to see it only through our outer eyes, to see it “literalistically”, that is, rather than “spiritually”, with our inner intellectual faculties.  (For proportion is a mathematical concept that only our incorporeal intelligence can comprehend.)  When the world is perceived only by the outer senses, as Augustine goes on to explain, it may appear “inordinata et perturbata”—disordered and chaotic—but this is a misperception caused by the failure of the rational intelligence to assert its sovereignty over the senses.

Of course, Augustine is making both an aesthetic and a theological statement here.  It is not only that through the exercise of reason we may penetrate beneath the apparent chaos of the sensible surface of the universe to the hidden, underlying divine principle of order of which it is a symbol; but also that moral or theodical disorder is ultimately superficial.  The misery that accompanies sin, for example, is in itself ugly and indecorous, as Augustine explains in his De Doctrina Christiana; but it is also necessary for the soul’s contrition, just as sin itself is necessary for the whole Christian economy of redemption.  (Adam’s fall, to recall another paradoxical Christian topos, is “felix”—happy—because it occasioned the outpouring of God’s loving grace in the Incarnation.)  Misfortune, too, is hardly pleasant, but, as Lady Philosophy argues in Boethius’ Consolation, it is necessary to teach its sufferer the truth about the transience and mutability of earthly goods and pleasures.

 

It follows, then, as a general principle of aesthetics, that beauty arises from the rational perception of an ordered and proportionate whole, and that the pattern of such beautiful intervals and proportions is first, that of the Divine Mind itself, and second, the universe which is its reflected image.  It is in fact such theoretical considerations, rooted in the conception of a universe disposed in mathematical number and musical harmony, that are the foundation for the characteristic insistence on symmetry and proportion in pre-modern architecture and the visual arts.

In his De Ordine, for example, Augustine illustrates the universal principle of proportionality by explaining that a door placed slightly off-centre in a building offends the eye, as does a series of three windows in which the second is not precisely equidistant from those that flank it.  In his De vera religione, Augustine gives another architectural example:  in a grouping of three unequal windows, the largest should exceed the next largest by the same measure as that one exceeds the smallest.

Ultimately, says Augustine, the ratio (i.e. “proportion” and also “reason”) in architecture, like the technique of the musician, is based on the artist’s intuition–Plato would have used the term “recollection”–of the “divine numbers” that govern the operations of the heavens.