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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.

 Aristotle’s Prime Mover…

 Divine Love…Gravitational Attraction…

 The Circle of Love…in Dante, Boethius…

The Music of the Spheres as the Planetary Intelligences’ Hymn of Love to God…

God as Music-Love-Light…

     As Aristotle had explained in his famous doctrine of the Unmoved Mover, God does not cause the universe to move by communicating to it his own motion, for then He himself would be mobile and therefore changeable.  Rather, writes Aristotle in his Metaphysics, “He moves us as beloved”.  He moves other things, that is, as an object of desire moves those who desire it.

The love of the heavenly bodies for God functions as a kind of gravitational pull or “attraction”, to use the word in its ancient and modern connotation, that keeps them in their proper orbits:  “in check” as Boethius puts it, else they would “stray” from their “true path” and fly off centrifugally into oblivion, destroying the stable order of things.

This, too, is originally an ancient pagan theme, of which the Neoplatonists Plotinus, Prophyry, and Proclus rarely tired; and in due course, it matured into an enduring Christian topos:  one that envisages Love as flowing in a circuit, first emanating outward from its Centre and into the cosmos.  The superfluity of God’s Love and Goodness is the proximate reason that He must create:  so as to have an object for his Love.  That Love, still flowing outward, sustains creation in order and harmony; finally, in the form of the reciprocal love of creatures for their Creator, it loops backward toward and into its Source.

It is this yearning for reunion with the First Cause and Source of their being that the mystic experiences; and on the plane of cosmology, it is the same force that, in the end time, will bring about the ingathering and absorption of the world back into the divine womb from which it first emerged.

 

Now to speak of love “moving” the cosmos is, of course, to anthropomorphize (in the same way in which the mythic poets  anthropomorphize when they imagine stones and rivers responding to Orpheus’ music of the spheres).  In order for them to be moved by “love” for God, the planetary spheres must be conscious and intellectual beings, which they are, whether conceived as Intelligences (by Plato) or as Angels (by Christians).

The identification of the biblical Angels with the Platonic Intelligences that inhabited the heavenly bodies, in fact, plausibly led Christian theologians to argue that the music of the spheres was in fact the hymn of praise that the angelic choirs sang to God, as we’ll see in due course.  In any case, the indwelling spiritual personalities with which the planets are said to love God can only be understood as emanations of his own Being, as immanent particles of his own Intelligence and Love, whence that Love which flows outward from Him flows backward and inwards into Him again as an apocatastasis of his own substance.

Once again, that is, Love is another God-image–like Justice, Logos, Immanent Mind, Light, Musical Harmony, or whatever imagery happens to be favoured by poet, philosopher, or theologian–, another metaphor for the Divine Being that animates and ensouls the entire universe, from the music-loving rocks on the lowest rung of the ladder of existence, through the music-loving plants, the beasts, men, to the choiring angels and the planets in which they sing.  Suffused and sustained by his Love, all circle around God as around their Centre; all begin and end in Him.

 

The yearning love for the Divine Centre is the motive power that propels Dante’s ascent from Purgatory into Heaven, at the beginning of the Paradiso (as it propels all mystics upward to the vision of God and the mystic union into which they are blissfully absorbed).  While still in the Earthly Paradise atop the Mountain of Purgatory, Dante prays to the Divine Light to fill him with its music (another paradoxical conflation of the imagery of light and sound):

The glory of Him who moves all things so-ever
Impenetrates the universe, and bright
Thy splendor burns…
Within that heav’n which most receives His light
Was I…
O power divine, grant me in song to show
The blest realm’s image…

His prayer answered, Dante then feels himself “trans-humanized”, as he writes:  transformed or apotheosized, that is, into Paul’s new man; and having mystically ascended into Heaven, he credits the attractive power of God’s Love-Light:

…O Love that rul’st the height…
….that didst uplift me by Thy light.

Thereupon, predictably enough, he hears the harmony of the spheres, which, along with the Light, he says, has kindled his yearning to know the Source and Cause of All:

The wheel Thou mak’st eternal through innate
Desire of Thee, no sooner took mine ear
With strains which Thou dost tune and modulate…
The unwonted sound, the bright and burning beams,
Kindled my eagerness to know their cause
Beyond the yearning of my dearest dreams…

 

In the Commedia in general, and for his ascent to Heaven in particular, Dante was influenced above all by Boethius, and at the risk of repeating myself—but then, as I have said, the early poets and thinkers delighted avidly in repeating themselves–, I draw your attention to one final example from theConsolation, the magnificent hymn (metre 9) in book III that unites all of these images:

   Oh God, Maker of heaven and earth, Who govern the world with eternal reason, at your command time passes from the beginning.  You place all things in motion, though You are yourself without change.  No external causes impelled You to make this work from chaotic matter.  Rather it was the form of the highest Good, existing within You without envy, which caused You to fashion all things according to the eternal exemplar.  You who are most beautiful produce the beautiful world from your divine mind, and forming it in your image, You order the perfect parts in a perfect whole.

You bind the elements in harmony so that cold and heat, dry and wet are joined, and the purer fire does not fly up through the air, nor the earth sink beneath the weight of water.

You release the world-soul throughout the harmonious parts of the universe as your surrogate…to give motion to all things.  That soul…pursues its revolving course in two circles [i.e., outward and inward], and, returning to itself, embraces the profound Mind…

In like manner, You create souls…and, adapting them to their high flight in swift chariots, You scatter them through the earth and sky.  And when they have turned again toward You, by your gracious law of Love, You call them back like leaping flames…

…The sight of Thee is Beginning and End.

For Boethius, once again, Justice, Harmony, Fire, World-Soul, Eternal Reason, and Love are all cognate images of the Divine Mind or Soul that animates the universe, holds it together in order, and recalls all creatures back into Itself under the impulse of their own inborn yearning for God as their common Source.

Clement’s Orpheus-Christ…

The New Song as the Creator of Cosmic Order and Harmony…

Cosmogonic Love…

     Inevitably, as you won’t be surprised to learn, these ancient moral themes continued to be projected upon the cosmos throughout the Christian era.

Clement of Alexandria, for example, while reading all of the classical pagan motives we encounter in Ovid into the cosmogony in Genesis, writes that it is the New Song of Christ that fashions the world out of chaos.

The passage in question, not coincidentally, follows hard upon Clement’s comparison between Orpheus and David, and between Orpheus and Christ (the New David), in the first chapter of his Protrepticus or Exhortation to the Greeks.  Orpheus’ song, writes Clement, charmed the beasts, uprooted trees, and inspired even stocks and stones to follow him; but Christ has “tamed the most intractable of all wild beasts, man”, transforming his animal pleasures and passions into habits of self-mastery and gentleness, and raising up men of stony ignorance and hardened hearts “unto children of Abraham” (Matt. 3: 9).

In the usual way, then, Clement merely appropriates for the biblical Christ the whole Orphic mystique and power of music and poetry to temper the passions and ennoble the human soul.  And then, in the next paragraph, he inevitably modulates into cosmogony:

See how mighty is the New Song [i.e, of Christ].  It has made men out of stones and men out of wild beasts.  They who were otherwise dead, who had no share in the real and true life, revived when they but heard the song.  Furthermore, it is this which composed the entire creation into melodious order, and tuned into concert the discord of the elements, that the whole universe might be in harmony with it.  The ocean it left flowing, yet has prevented it from encroaching upon the land; whereas the land, which was being carried away, it made firm, and fixed as a boundary to the sea.  Aye, and it softened the rage of the fire by air, as one might blend the Dorian mode with the Lydian; and the biting coldness of air it tempered by the intermixture of fire, thus melodiously mingling these extreme [i.e., opposite] notes of the universe.  What is more, this pure song, the stay of the universe and the harmony of all things, stretching from the centre to the circumference and from the extremities to the centre, reduced this whole to harmony…The Word of God …by the power of the Holy Spirit arranged in harmonious order this great world, yes, and the little world of man too, body and soul together; and on this many-voiced instrument of the universe He makes music to God…

We see in this grand conceit nothing less than the grafting of the whole Hellenistic legacy onto the biblical root-stock.  The cosmogonic function of restraining the aggression of the elemental opposites, allocating them within their proper provinces, and thus ordering the universe in justice and harmony, which Ovid attributes to Nature, Clement now ascribes to the Spirit who brooded over the biblical abyss of Genesis 1 (duly identified with the Greek Chaos), and that Spirit is in turn identified with the Christian Logos.  The Logos is now the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres, the cosmic music that attunes the heavens, reconciles the opposites, and ensouls the world.  The mythological attributes and powers of Orpheus as the mythic incarnation of the harmonia mundi and the healer of men’s disordered spirits are also, once again, reinvested in the Christian Deity, and through Orpheus the biblical personality of Christ is not only enlarged but transformed beyond recognition.

 

The assimilation of this ancient imagery, begun in the Patristic period, is a major project of the Christian Middle Ages.  Here (at the beginning of the sixth century) is Boethius’ prayer in book I, meter 5 of The Consolation of Philosophy: 

Creator of the star-filled universe…, You move the heavens in their swift orbits.  You hold the stars in their assigned paths…When the cold of winter makes the trees bare, You shorten the days to a briefer span; but when warm summer comes, You make the night hours go swiftly. Your power governs the changing year:  in spring, Zephyrus renews the delicate leases that Boreas, the wind of winter had destroyed; and Sirius burns the high corn in autumn that Arcturus had seen in seed.  Nothing escapes Your ancient law; nothing can avoid the work of its proper station.  You govern all things, each according to its destined purpose.  Human acts alone, O Ruler of All, You refuse to restrain within just bounds…

O God, whoever you are who joins all things in perfect harmony, look down upon this miserable earth!…Ruler of all things, calm the roiling waves and, as You rule the immense heavens, rule also the earth in stable concord.

In book II, meter eight, we have another statement of the theme, in which the cosmic justice that binds the warring opposites together in concord and harmony is identified ultimately with Divine Love:

That the universe carries out its changing process in concord and with stable faith, that the conflicting seeds [semina = “elements”] of things are held by everlasting law, that Phoebus in his golden chariot brings in the shining day, that the night, led by Hesperus, is ruled by Phoebe, that the greedy sea holds back his waves within lawful bounds, for they are not permitted to push back the unsettled earth—all this harmonious order of things is achieved by love which rules the earth and the seas, and commands the heavens.  But if love should slack the reins, all that is now joined in mutual love would wage continual war, and strive to tear apart the world which is now sustained in friendly concord by beautiful motion.  Love binds together people joined by a sacred bond; love binds sacred marriages by chaste affections; love makes the laws which join true friends.  O how happy the human race would be, if that love which rules the heavens rule also your souls.

     In Edmund Spenser’s statement of the topos in his Hymn of Love, Love does not merely maintain the universe in order and harmony, but is in fact the Creator-God that plays the role of Ovid’s Nature in pacifying the aggression of the elemental opposites in the primordial Chaos.

The earth, the air, the water, and the fire
Then gan to range themselves in huge array
And with contrary forces to conspire
Each against other by all means they may,
Threat’ning their own confusion and decay:
Air hated earth and water hated fire,
Till Love relented their rebellious ire.

He then them took and, tempering goodly well
Their contrary dislikes with loved means,
Did place them all in order and compel
To keep themselves within their sundry reigns
Together linkt with adamantine chains:
Yet so as that in every living wight
They mix themselves and show their kindly might.

So ever since they firmly have remained
And duly well observed his behest,
Through which now all these things that are contained
Within this goodly cope, both most and least,
Their being have.

 

According to another, related commonplace, the divine Love that gave birth to the world, holds the warring opposites in its embrace, and regulates the harmonious succession of the days and seasons, also inflames that mystical yearning that draws back the entire creation into its Source.  Boethius, once again, provides a classic statement of the theme, in Consolation book IV, meter vi:

If you wish to discern the laws of the high and mighty God, the high thunderer, with an unclouded mind, look up to the roof of highest heaven.  There the stars, united by just agreement, keep the ancient peace.  The sun, driven by red fire, does not impede the cold circle of Phoebe.  Nor does the Great Bear driving its course at the world’s top, hide itself in the western ocean; it never wants to drown its flames [i.e., the elemental fire] in the sea [i.e., water]…The faithful Hesperus announces the approach of night at the assigned time; then, as Lucifer , it brings back the warming day.

Thus mutual love governs their eternal movement and the war of discord is excluded from the bounds of heaven.  Concord rules the elements with fair restraint; moist things yield place to dry, cold and hot combine in friendship; flickering fire rises on high, and gross earth sinks down.  Impelled by the same causes, the flowering year breathes out its odors in warm spring; hot summer dries the grain and autumn comes in burdened with fruit; then falling rain brings in wet winter.   This ordered change nourishes and sustains all that lives on earth…

Meanwhile the Creator sits on high, governing and guiding the course of things.  King and lord, source and origin, law and wise judge of right.  All things which He placed in motion, He draws back and holds in check; He makes firm whatever tends to stray.  If He did not recall them to their true paths and set them again on their circling courses, all things that the stable order now contains would be wrenched from their source and perish.

This is the common bond of love by which all things seek to be held to the goal of good. Only thus can things endure:  drawn by love they turn again to the Cause which gave them being.

The Image-Complex of Harmony, Justice, and Cosmic Order…

Shakespeare’s Ulysses on “Degree” …

Ovid’s Cosmogony…

Music as the Substance of the Cosmos…

Music as the Cosmogonic God…

     The “reparation” paid by the tragic hero for the crime of aspiring above his mortal station is only the most spectacular instance of that distinctly unmodern respect for hierarchy and decorum that is extolled thoughout the history of Western literature and thought, in which there is nothing more sacred than what Ulysses describes in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida as man’s obligation to observe “degree, priority, and place”.

     The man who fails to respect the social order commits an act of injustice that is as primordial as the elemental opposites’ overstepping of their bounds, and it has cosmic consequences for this reason:

The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre [i.e., earth]
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order.
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthroned and sphered
Amidst the other; whose med’cinable eye
Corrects the influence of evil planets,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad.  But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues, and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite apart from their fixture?  O, when degree is shaked,
Which is the ladder of all high designs,
The enterprise is sick.  How could communities,
Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenity and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, scepters, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And hark what discord follows.  Each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy.  The bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores
And make a sop of all this solid globe;
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead;
Force should be right, or rather right and wrong—
Between whose endless jar [i.e., discord] justice resides—
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then everything include itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey
And last eat up himself.  Great Agamemnon,
This chaos, when degree is suffocate,
Follows the choking.
(Troilus and Cressida, I.iii, 85ff.; my italics)

      As usual, Shakespeare manages to compact the entire tradition into the narrow scope of these lines.  The violation of “degree” in the macrocosm reverberates into the microcosm, and vice-versa.  Should the planets “in evil mixture to disorder wander”–should, that is, they stray out of their proper courses into the orbits of each other–, all of nature is discomposed, and nature’s commotion soon infects the “unity and married calm of states”.  Conversely, should the hierarchical order of human society be disturbed, the string of the universe itself is “untuned”:  the elemental opposites of sea and land transgress their boundaries and invade each other’s provinces “in mere oppugnancy”, and everything dissolves back into chaos.

     Here, again, needless to say, one sees the assimilation into a unitary image-complex of the ideas of music, justice, and cosmic order.

     In these lines, Shakespeare is rehearsing a topos that is already two thousand years old, according to which the creation of the world involves the Deity’s imposition of order upon an original chaos in which the elemental opposites are at each other’s throats–a state perennially described as “war”, “strife”, “discord”, “disharmony”, or “injustice”.

     We have discussed it already, I know, but I must draw your attention one more time to that text at the beginning of Ovid’s Metamorphoses that so perfectly inflects the theme.

Before the sea was, and the lands, and sky that hangs over all, the face of Nature showed alike in her whole round, which state have men called chaos:  a rough, unordered mass of things, nothing at all save lifeless bulk and warring seeds of ill-joined elements [discordia semina rerum] …No form of things remained the same; all objects were at odds, for within the one mass cold things fought [pugnabit] with hot, and moist with dry, soft things with hard, heavy things with weightless.  God—or kindlier Nature—composed all this strife by restoring everything within its limit; for he rent asunder land from sky, and sea from land, and separated the ethereal heavens from the dense atmosphere.  When thus he had released these elements and freed them from the blind heap of things, he set them each in its own place and bound them fast in harmony [concordia].

     For Ovid, as for most of the later poets, Anaximander’s The Infinite is identified with Hesiod’s Chaos, a state in which the elemental opposites are interfused in a formless, homogenous mass.  Ovid describes them as being at war, invading each other’s provinces, until God or “kindlier Nature” restrains their aggression, separates them out of the fray, and sets them within their proper jurisdictions in justice, order, and harmony.

      In the language of poetry, what this means, of course, is that Justice, Order, and or Harmony–whatever name the poet confers upon it–is the very divine agency that creates the world.  That is to say, it is not merely that the universe exhibits the quality of justice, or that the orderly revolution of the spheres intones a kind of harmony that metaphorically evokes the order and harmony of their movements; it is rather that Justice or Music is the actual cosmogonic agent that brings the world into being.

     So, the seventh-century encyclopedist and biblical exegete Isidore of Seville writes that

Nothing exists without music.  For the universe itself is said to have been framed by a kind of harmony of sounds, and the heaven revolves under the tones of that harmony. (Etymologiae)

     As late as 1687, Dryden gave the idea its best-known rendering in English poetry, while cleaving strictly to the ancient pagan cosmogonic tradition that begins with Anaximander and has its locus classicus in Ovid:

From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:
When nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay
And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high:
Arise, ye more than dead.
Then cold and hot and moist and dry
In order to their stations leap
And music’s power obey.
From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began;
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran
The diapason closing full in man.

     The world, then, is literally brought into existence by Music.  Music is the cosmogonic God, or at least an aspect of God the Creator, and in this, Dryden, once again, merely rehearses an ancient pagan tradition.

Music, Love, and Justice…

Justice as a Concors Discordiae…

The Law of Correspondence …

The “Justice” of the Cosmos:  Homer, Anaximander, Greek Tragedy…

Hybris and the Law of Compensation…

     The analogy between David and Orpheus as singers of cosmogony suggests the final and most symbolically resonant way in which the music of the spheres can reawaken the divine self that sleeps in the depths of the soul.

     To understand this we need to remind ourselves of the association of music with justice as we have encountered it so far.  Recall that the music of the spheres is invoked in Cicero’s Somnium in the context of a larger work, which like Plato’s Republic, sets itself the imaginative task of founding the Just City, and in the more specific context of a vision in which Scipio the Elder exhorts his grandson to dedicate himself to the just administration of the commonwealth, which he says is as one of the highest vocations of the wise man.  The just functioning of the commonwealth, says Scipio, depends upon the harmonious interaction of its various estates whose interests are often at odds.  It is, as such, as kind of concors discordiae—a harmony of discord.

     Remember too that in Lorenzo’s evocation of the theme, the contrast between the Justice of the Old Law and the Mercy of the New is obviously the central theme of Shakespeare’s play.  In the Christian dispensation, Justice and Love are opposites, while at the same time merely different aspects of the same quality; reconciled in the New Law, they produce, once again, a concors discordiae.

    For related reasons, Justice, Love, and the music of the spheres have always been symbolically assimilated.  The conflation of these concepts goes back, in fact, to the very beginning of Western thought.

     The music of the spheres is produced by the revolutions of the stars and planets, and as moderns we might wonder why these inanimate and impersonal bodies should behave as if they were living beings constrained by the same moral laws that regulate human society.  The short answer is that they areliving beings, celestial animals, as Plato calls them, whose spherical material bodies are animated by indwelling souls he calls Intelligences.  Indeed, the cosmos itself is, in Plato’s phrase, a divine animal, whose visible materia is God’s body, and whose invisible form is God’s soul–his “immanent Mind”, to use Virgil’s phrase.

     Such philosophical metaphors merely illustrate the habit of the primitive and mythogenic psyche to project itself into the material universe, finding there the fundamental human dichotomy between body and soul, and all the emotions, virtues and vices, qualities and conditions of ordinary human experience, including Justice, Love, and so on.  In later literature and philosophy, this reflex is rationalized as the law of correspondence, according to which everything in the great world (the macrocosm) exists in miniature in the little world of man (the microcosm).  The law of correspondence, therefore, suggests that the just, orderly, and harmonious operations of the human collective (the polis) and the human individual (the moral psyche) have their counterparts in the justice, order, and harmony that govern nature on a universal scale.  

     The idea of the “justice” of the cosmos also goes back to the very beginning of European thought.  Both Homer and Hesiod refer to the just and equal apportionment to Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus of the government of the four regions into which the universe is divided—the underworld allotted to Hades, the sea to Poseidon, and the heavens to Zeus, with the earth and Mt. Olympus shared amongst the brothers.

     This is the sacred decree that is alluded to in a famous passage–the subject of endless allegorical commentary–in Iliad XV, where Zeus, enraged at the meddling of Poseidon in the war between the Greeks and Trojans, sends a messenger to command him to withdraw from the Trojan plain.  To Zeus’ highhanded decree, Poseidon protests angrily:

No, no.  Great though he be, this that he has said is too much,
if he will force me against my will, me, who am his equal
in rank.  Since we are three brothers born by Rheia to Kronos,
Zeus, and I, and the third is Hades, lord of the dead men.
All was divided among us three ways, each given his domain.
I when the lots were shaken drew the grey sea to live in
forever; Hades drew the lot of the mists and the darkness,
and Zeus was allotted the wide sky, in the cloud and the bright air.
But earth and high Olympos are common to all three. Therefore
I am no part of the mind of Zeus.  Let him in tranquility
and powerful as he is stay satisfied with his third share.

The three brothers have been given their provinces by “lot”, that is, by Moira or Destiny, and therefore any encroachment upon the province of one by another is fiercely resisted as an injustice, insofar as it threatens the balance of power upon which the peaceful government of the cosmos depends.

     As you remember, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades were, from the very earliest stages of Greek philosophy, conventionally interpreted naturaliter as allegorical symbols of the elements fire, water, and earth, respectively.   But even if as a rational philosopher (as opposed to a “lying poet”) you conceive of these as “inanimate” elements, they are, all the same, as bound as any Olympian god by the same sacred law of justice not to encroach upon the province of the other elements.

     Here is the teaching of the sixth-century B.C. Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander of Miletus, as outlined in a late-antique commentary by Simplicius on Aristotle’s Physics:

Anaximander…asserted that the source and element of existing things is “The Infinite” [to Apeiron].  He was the first to introduce this name for the source of all.  He says that it is neither water nor any of the other so-called “elements”, but of another nature which is infinite and eternal, from which all the heavens and the world-orders in them arise…

…He says that all existing things come into being and pass away according to what must be; for “they make reparation to one another for their injustice according to the ordinance of time”, as he puts it in somewhat poetical language. (On Aristotle’s Physics [6^th A.D.])

 From other fragments preserved by later authors, we can piece together what this cryptic statement means.  According to Anaximander, before they are “separated out” of The Infinite into a world-order, the elemental opposites—hot and cold, wet and dry—are all mixed up together in a formless heap, a state of mutual aggression, in which they commit “injustice” by overstepping their bounds, invading each other’s provinces, for which they must eventually make “reparation” if the balance is to be restored.  The same principle governs the revolution of the seasonal year—the meaning of Anaximander’s phrase “according to the ordinance of time”–, in which the excessive heat of summer is forced to withdraw and “make reparation” to the advancing cold, and the excessive cold of winter must make reparation for the injustice it has done to the hot.  This is Anaximander’s moral “law of compensation”, and it governs the human microcosm as it does the macrocosm.

     In our first series of essays (Involuted Mysteries) on numbers, we discussed the law of compensation as it applies to the human body, which falls into disease whenever one of the opposites becomes dominant in the form of an excess of one of the humours, the health of the body depending upon the restoration of balance amongst all four. The same law of compensation governs human society.

     We see the dire consequences of its violation most dramatically in Greek tragedy, with its admonition against hybris, the tragic failure of the protagonist to recognize his proper place in the cosmos–to “think mortal thoughts”, as the Apollonian aphorism goes–, the inevitable consequence of which is his payment of reparation in being cast down even lower than the position from which he originally aspired.  As the Chorus admonishes at the end of Sophocles’ Antigone:

Above all, happiness depends
On wisdom.  It is never right
To sin against the gods.  Great blows
Repay great words of boasting men,
And teach us wisdom in old age.

      The fall of the tragic hero is just payment for his overweening pride, especially his lack of regard for the rights of the gods.  So Oedipus and Jocasta who once scoffed at the oracle are repaid; so Agamemnon, who destroyed the altars of the gods at Troy, pays the penalty at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra.

The Analogy between Orpheus and David…

Christianity as a Syncretistic Religion…

     Before we quite leave the orbit of his mythology, I need to mention one other narrative tradition about a legendary musician to whom Orpheus was habitually compared.

In his important early-sixth-century treatise The Institutes, Cassiodorus draws the analogy between the power of Orpheus’ lyre to soothe the breasts of wild beasts and that of David’s harp to “deliver Saul from the unclean spirit by means of his redeeming melody”.   In the Middle Ages, the identification of Orpheus with David, and with Christ (the New David), was one of a number of analogies between pagan mythology and biblical history that evolved into literary commonplaces:  image clusters or complexes that tended to promote a vision of the archetypal provenance and universal amplitude of the Christian story and its God, and at the same time to blur the edges of the heavily bibliocentric theology of early Christian polemic, in which the Truth of the Bible was seen in triumphant and disqualifying contrast to the falsity of pagan myth.

 

The origin of the David-Orpheus analogy is in fact pre-Christian, having been first brewed up in late Hellenistic times when pagan philosophy and mystery religion, esoteric Jewish theosophy, and nascent Christianity were in fertile contact with one another, giving birth in turn to any number of strange offspring, including Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and the Kabbala.

In an Essenian manuscript discovered at Qumran, for example, a poem is placed in the mouth of David that is fecund with Orphic initiatory formulas and detailed allusions to the myth of the Greek musician, in which the Israelite King was shown to be entirely fluent.  Knowing as we do (after the disinterment of Qumran’s treasures) how completely suffused with Orphic and Pythagorean ideas was the Judaism of the Essenes, we may appreciate that the author of this poem was ventilating a sort of theological joke.

According to the conventional Deuteronomic theology of kingship of which David was the embodied ideal, the supreme vocation of the Israelite monarch was to immunize the Hebrew faith against contamination from neighbouring pagan cults. But far from purifying the high places, David himself is here imagined to be a sort of Orphic priest or sage.  This early “Orphic David” seems to testify to that sinful Jewish habit of syncretism that was abominated by the Prophets and Kings of Israel throughout Old Testament history.   But since Christianity is nothing if not a syncretistic phenomenon, it is not surprising that the mind of the Christian Middle Ages was struck by and avid to rehearse the many parallels and points of contact between the legends of Orpheus and David.

Just as David had exorcised the malignant demon from Saul’s spirit, according to the Byzantine theologian John Tzetzes, Orpheus’ music drew the snake-venom from the body, and the moral poison from the soul, of Eurydice.  “Just as Orpheus played his lyre in hell”, wrote Bernard of Utrecht (an eleventh-century commentator on the school text, the Eclogue of Theodulus), “so David played before Saul; and just as Orpheus mollified the gods of the underworld with his lyre, so David pacified Saul’s evil spirit.”

In both the Eclogue of Theodulus and the voluminous fourteenth-century allegorical commentary on the Metamorphoses known as the Ovide moralise, the Davidic harp that delivers Saul from his demonic rage is said to have been the very lyre of Orpheus that had once uprooted trees, halted rivers in their course, set rocks to dancing, and civilized the wildness of ferocious beasts.

 

Finally, both Orpheus, in his hymns, and David in his Psalms, were celebrated as divinely inspired singers of the creation of the world, and so in his commentary on the six days of creation in Genesis, the seventh-century exegete George of Pisidia, drew the comparison, “For however much Orpheus smote his divinely tuned lyre, so too David, seeing the glory of the heavens as they stretched from the height to the depths of creation, sang out about them”.

And in the fifteenth century, testifying to the continuity of this tradition, the Middle English poet John Lydgate equates “The harpis most melodious/Of David and of Orpheous”, whose

melodye was in all
So hevenly and celestiall
That there nys hert, I dar expresse,
Oppressed so with hevynesse,
Nor in sorwe so y-bounde,
That he sholde ther ha founde
Comfort hys sorowe to apese…

 

The “melodye” of David and Orpheus is not merely figuratively but literally “heavenly and celestial”, of course; it is, that is, the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres, with which Orpheus’ lyre, and now David’s harp, reverberate.  Indeed, that Lydgate’s poem is entitled Resoun and Sensualite tells us, once again, that the doctrine of the harmony of spheres, along with its entire Orpheo-Pythagoreo-Platonic ethos, has long since been read into Christian biblical narrative and theology.

The Myth of Orpheus, continued…

Orphic Mythology in Medieval Christian Commentary:

Boethius; William of Conches; Bernardus Silvestris…

     If Orpheus’ music could pacify the breasts of wild beasts, and cause even rocks to follow him, it must have been because these beings, like all things, were, as Virgil says, filled with soul.

This was the conviction of the Orphics, who taught a form of pantheism or hylozoism, according to which the entire material world was enlivened and alive with the One Soul-Substance, that of the Godhead itself, which underwent an endless series of transmigrations or reincarnations and yet remained the same.

Music, moreover, was the most potent way of reawakening the indwelling divine soul to an awareness of its celestial origins, nature, and unbroken connection with the Godhead, since, in its celestial pre-existence, the otherworldly harmony of the spheres was its birthsong.  Because the sensual din of the world and the physical senses inevitably drowns out this transcendental harmony, the duty of the Orphic is to stop up his outer ears, to mortify and anesthetize his physical senses, and cultivate instead the inner senses with which alone the heavenly music can be heard.

The Orphic way of the salvation of the soul is thus (as Socrates describes the life of the philosopher in the Phaedo) a withdrawing of the soul from the world and the body into the stillness of the divine world that resides in its own depths.  The Orphic becomes an immortal god because he has lived the Orphic life, the life of one who is aware of the celestial origins and essentially divine nature of his soul– his “self”, as both the Orphics and later the Gnostics called it–, an entity that therefore utterly transcends the mortal world.

It is this fundamental Orphic doctrine of man’s essential divinity that resonates in Scipio Africanus’ advice to his grandson at the end of the Somnium: 

Strive on indeed, and be sure that it is not you that is mortal, but only your body.  For that man whom your outward form reveals is not yourself; the spirit is the true self, not that physical figure which can be pointed out by the finger.  Know, then, that you are a god, if a god is that which…rules, governs, and moves the body over which it is set, just as the supreme God above us rules this universe.  And just as the eternal God moves the universe, which is partly mortal, so an immortal spirit moves the frail body.

The Orphic myth was, like all the myths of classical antiquity, the subject of a long and rich tradition of allegorical commentary in the Christian Middle Ages and the Renaissance.  Here, once again, its principal moral message of withdrawing the rational soul from the contaminating influence of the physical senses, the carnal passions, and the temporal things of this world was assimilated, more or less unaltered, into orthodox Christian soteriology.

In the twelfth meter of Book III of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, Lady Philosophy begins,

Happy is he who can look into the shining spring of good: happy is he who can break the heavy chains of earth…,

and then, after She narrates the myth of Orpheus in detail, the meter concludes:

The fable applies to all of you who seek to raise your minds to sovereign day.  For whoever is conquered and turns his eyes back to the pit of hell, looking into the inferno, loses all the excellence he has gained.

In the eleventh century, William of Conches (Christian Platonist and commentator on Macrobius’ commentary on the Somnium) explains:

Orpheus is used to designate any wise and eloquent man, and hence the name Orpheus is as if to say orea phone, or “best voice”.  His wife is Eurydice, or, that is, natural concupiscence which is joined to everyone…But this natural concupiscence is well named “Eurydice”, or “judgment of the good”, for whatever anyone judges to be good, whether rightly or wrongly, he desires.  This concupiscence while it wandered in the meadow was loved by Aristaeus. Aristaeus is used to represent virtue, for ares means “virtue”.  But this virtue loved that Eurydice, or natural concupiscence, as it wondered through the meadow, or through terrestrial things, which like a meadow now flourish and now dry up.  That is, virtue follows concupiscence always, because it needs to take it away from earthly things.  But Eurydice fled from Aristaeus, for natural concupiscence contradicts virtue, since it desires its own pleasure, which virtue forbids.  But then it dies and descends to Hell, or, that is, to delight in terrestrial things.  When his wife dies, Orpheus sorrows, because when a wise man sees his effort and delight residing in temporal things, he is displeased.  But even though he may overcome everything else with his wise music, he cannot overcome the sorrow for his lost wife, because even if a wise man with his eloquence and wisdom can overcome the vices of others, he cannot take away his own concupiscence from temporal things.  Hence he sorrows greatly. But Orpheus descends to Hell to remove his wife as a wise man descends to a knowledge of terrestrial things so that, having seen that there is no good in them, he may withdraw his concupiscence from them.  But a law is given to him that he must not look back, for “No man putting his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.” [Luke 9:62]

The imagery of this text should by now be familiar.  I draw your attention to three interesting points, however:

First, the incidental analogy to Jesus’ admonition to the plowman not to look behind him (i.e., not to shirk the duties of the Christian life), was indeed regularly linked to the myth of Orpheus looking back at Eurydice–both exemplifying the Orpheo-Platonic imperative, now identified with the Christian, to keep the eye of the soul trained upward upon the heavenly invisibilia.   With these two loci, moreover, the biblical narrative of Lot’s wife looking back at the burning city of Sodom and in punishment changed by God into a pillar of salt, was also often included as another admonitory tale about the perils of the same errant earthly attitude.

Secondly, one can see again (as we saw when discussing medieval marriage) that the mythical pairs Aristaeus and Eurydice, and Orpheus and Eurydice, are pre-eminently allegorical symbols of the male reason and female sensuality, whose hierarchical relationship is turned “upso-doun”, as Chaucer would say, when Eurydice flees Aristaeus-virtue and goes hankering after terrestrial things, from which Orpheus-reason must then rescue her.

The final point to note is the equation implicitly drawn by William between Orpheus’ reason/virtue/wisdom and his “wise music”, all of which are merely images for the same essential divine “self” which must assert itself against the downward gravitational pull of the world.

Another important allegorical interpretation of the Orpheus myth comes from the commentary on theAeneid of the great twelfth-century poet and doctor of the cathedral school of Chartres, Bernardus Silvestris—a text whose Platonic and Orphic afflatus is unmistakable:

The descent into Hell is quadriform:  there is a descent of nature, another of virtue, another of vice, and another of artifice.  The natural descent is the birth of man, for in that event the soul naturally begins to be in this fallen region and thus to descend to Hell, to recede from its divinity, and soon to bend toward vices and to consent to sensual pleasures.  But this way is common to all.  There is another descent of virtue which is made when a wise man descends to worldly things to consider them, not so that he may place his intention in them, but so that their fragility being known, he may cast them aside and hastily return to the realm of invisible things and know the Creator more clearly through a knowledge of the creatures [cf. Rom. 1:20].  In this way Orpheus and Hercules, who were called wise men, descended.  There is a third descent of vice, which is common, in which one is brought to temporal things in such a way that the whole intention is placed in them and they are served with the whole mind, nor is the soul moved from them any more.  In this way we read that Eurydice descended to Hell. Moreover, from this descent there is no return…

With the myth and its allegorical tradition in mind, one can see, as I said before, that Shakespeare’s allusion to the Orphic motives of music’s ability to tranquilize the passions of wild horses and mobilize trees and rocks is hardly merely decorative. As a symbol of the Old Law of Justice, the implacable Shylock would have been impervious to the efficacy of Orpheus’ music, though it moved even the vengeful fiends of Hell to mercy and love.  As Lorenzo implies, “he hath no music” in his immortal soul.  In Orphic terms, his soul is vacant of the divine music that is innate and immanent in all men–or ought to be–, and as such, his whole “intention” (to use Bernard’s noun) is upon worldly wealth.

Orphism…Its Origins and Continuing Influence…

Orpheus, Founder of Music…

His Myth…Orpheus and Eurydice…

Death at the Hands of  Dionysius’ Maenads…

     The reference to Orpheus in The Merchant of Venice, in the context of Lorenzo’s disquisition on the harmony of the spheres, is also conventional, but not merely so, since with it Shakespeare transports the reader back to the original religious matrix of all of these symbols and ideas.

The Orphic cult was centered in southern Italy in the sixth century B.C., where and when Pythagoras taught.  It is probable that Pythagoras was an initiate of the Orphic mysteries, and there is no doubt that he, his fellow philosophers Empedocles, Heraclitus, and Plato, as well as the poets Pindar, Aeschylus, Euripides, Apollonius of Rhodes (the author of the Argonautica), and Ovid (whose motive of “metamorphosis” is a literary conceit inspired by the Orphic doctrine of transmigration of souls), just to name a few of the ancients, were profoundly indebted to Orphic ideas.

We have already encountered, in our texts from Cicero and Virgil, direct evidence of that widespread indebtedness.  Orphic ideas continued to influence the Neoplatonists Plotinus, Porphyry, Macrobius, and Proclus in pagan late antiquity. And, indeed, they profoundly shaped Christian thought from the time of Clement and Origen in second-century Alexandria, through the Cappadocian Fathers of the third and fourth, the moral philosophy of Boethius and the mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius in the early sixth, the Platonist revival of twelfth-century Chartres (especially the poetry and theology of Alan of Lisle and Bernardus Silvestris), and the overtly Orphic geography of the underworld and conception of the purgation of sins in Dante’s Commedia.

In the late-fifteenth century, the Florentine Christian Neoplatonists Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola expressly identified themselves as adherents of the so-called Orphic theology.  And in the early seventeenth century, the eminently sensible Mr. Shakespeare makes his King Lear an Orphic when he laments to Cordelia:

You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave:
Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound
Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears
Do scald like molten lead.

 

In all references to the original corpus of Orphic texts (of which, of course, little survives), the same complex of doctrines and beliefs is always assumed:  the idea of the pre-existence of souls in a pure, disembodied state in the celestial aether; the doctrine succinctly expressed by the Greek formula sema soma (body tomb)–that is, the idea of birth in the world and the body as a fall, death, burial or imprisonment of the soul–; the necessity therefore of the soul to purify itself of the contaminating taints of the body and the senses both in this world and the next if it is to be saved; its expectation of a retributive afterlife in which the just will be rewarded with bliss and the unjust punished; the belief in transmigration of souls or metempsychosis, according to which the soul must undergo a series of incarnations in this world and purgations in the next before it may escape the “wheel of fire” and fly back into the pure aether whence it came.  This, of course, is the complex of ideas assumed and promulgated in Plato, in Cicero’s Somnium, as in Virgil’s sixth Aeneid.  And given that Pythagoras was a disciple of the Orphic cult, it is hardly, then, a coincidence that music played such a central role in his philosophy.

 

Orpheus is by tradition the original master of the humane art of music, and music is, accordingly, one of the leitmotives of Orphic myth.  In the usual manner of Greek myth, Orpheus is a demigod, half mortal and half divine, the son of a Thracian King and his queen Calliope (not coincidentally the Muse of epic song).  As his parentage would suggest, he was a great musician:  the culture hero, in fact, who was the first to bring the civilizing arts of both poetry and music to the rude Greeks of the pre-historic age.

Orpheus, we are assured, lived in the age of other heroes and demigods–in the generation before Odysseus and the Trojan War, to be precise.   He was not, of course, the originator of music—the gods were.  Athena had invented the flute, although she refused to play it lest in doing so her face should become unpleasantly contorted.  Pan is credited with the manufacture of the reed-pipe, and Hermes the shepherd’s pipe.  Hermes also invented the seven-stringed lyre (one string for each tone of the major scale), and presented it to Apollo, who drew from its strings sounds so entrancing that when he played, the gods of Olympus forgot all else; indeed, even Zeus paused from his philandering for a time.

But, among mortals, Orpheus was the greatest musician, and for good reason. Apollo himself presented him with a lyre, his Muse mother and her sisters instructed him in its use, and his fortuitous upbringing in Thrace (home of Dionysus) inevitably nurtured his young musical talent.

So accomplished did it become that it was said that when Orpheus played his lyre on the Thracian mountainsides, its sweet sound uprooted trees, caused rocks to move, deflected the courses of rivers, and pacified the wild beasts, all of which left their wonted habitats to follow him.  All of nature, animate and inanimate, sensate and insensate, seemed to be affected by his celestial melody.

 

After a visit to Egypt, Orpheus joined Jason’s Argonauts, and on several occasions saved the expedition from imminent disaster.  When the sailors became weary, he would strike his lyre and inspire them to row with renewed zeal.  If a quarrel threatened, he would play so tenderly that the most aggrieved spirits would be tranquilized and forget their anger.  Orpheus saved the Argonauts, too, from the Sirens.  Knowing that the sailors would be tempted to listen to their enthralling song, Orpheus took up his lyre and played a melody so beautiful and clear that it drowned out the sound of the Sirens’ fatal voices.  Thus the Argo was set back on course and the winds sped her away from that most dangerous of places.

 

On his return, Orpheus met and married Eurydice, but their joy was brief.  After the wedding, while walking with her bridesmaids and picking flowers in a pleasant vernal meadow, Eurydice was accosted by one of the guests, Aristaeus, who tried to force her; fleeing, she trod on a serpent and died of its bite.

Overwhelmed with grief, Orpheus determined to go down to the world of death and bring Eurydice back.  To enter where no mortal may, he struck his lyre and charmed both the ferryman Charon and the ferocious canine guardian of hell’s gates, the three-headed dog Cerberus.

As he passed through Tartarus, his music gave temporary respite to the suffering sinners:  for a moment, Ixion’s wheel ceased to revolve, Sisyphus sat peacefully upon his stone, and Tantalus listened, forgetting his hunger and thirst.  For the first time, the faces of the dread Furies were wet with tears, and even Hades and Persephone, king and queen of the underworld, were moved to pity.  With unwonted tears flowing down his cheeks, the implacable King of the Dead could not refuse Orpheus’ request, which he granted on only one condition:  that he not look back at Eurydice as she followed him, until they both reached the upper world.

The condition accepted, Orpheus re-ascended with Eurydice following close behind, guided through the darkness by the sound of his music. But he was all the while desperate for some assurance that she had not wandered into danger, and when, upon reaching the sunlight, he looked anxiously backwards, she was still in the cavern.  Thus, he lost her forever.

Orpheus tried to rush back into Tartarus after her, but he was prevented.  Though the exemption had been granted on a few occasions–to Hercules, Theseus, and now Orpheus himself–, no more than one descent into the underworld could be allotted to living mortals.

 

In utter desolation, Orpheus returned to earth alone.  In his bereavement, he forsook the company of men, and in fidelity to the memory of his dead wife, he brusquely rebuffed the advances of the women who hoped to replace her.  Comfortless save for his lyre, Orpheus wandered through the wild solitudes of Thrace,  playing for the rocks, rivers, trees, and beasts which were his only companions.

One day, when the jubilant mysteries of Dionsysus were being celebrated, Orpheus, in his grief and anger, neglected to honour the god.  Indeed, some say that he taught other sacred mysteries to the inhabitants of Thrace.  Thus, every morning he would rise to greet the dawn on the summit of Mt. Pangaeum, preaching that Apollo, the sun, was the greatest of gods.

Affronted, Dionysus set the Maenads upon him.  Offended not only by Orpheus’ insult to their god but his general rebuff to womankind, the Maenads waited until their husbands had entered the temple of Apollo where Orpheus served as priest; then they murdered them and tore Orpheus limb from limb.

Orpheus’ head was unceremoniously thrown into the river Hebrus; but it floated, still singing, down to the sea, whose waves carried it to the isle of Lesbos.  Eventually it was found by the Muses, and along with his limbs which they tearfully collected, it was buried at the foot of Mount Olympus, where to this day the nightingales sing sweeter than anywhere else in the world.