Tag: grammar-of-symbols-and-ideas-ii

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.

 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.