Chapter
Nine: The Music of the Spheres
“Modern
physics has definitely decided in favour of Plato. In fact the
smallest units of matter are not physical objects in the ordinary
sense; they are forms and ideas which can be expressed unambiguously
only in mathematical language.” Werner Heisenberg
“Beethoven
tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what
it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the
universe.” Douglas Adams
“Music
is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible
delights of the soul.” JS Bach
You [God] have arranged
all things by measure and number and weight. (Wisdom of Solomon
11)
Without music there can
be no perfect knowledge, for there is nothing without it. For even
the universe itself is said to have been put together with a certain
harmony of sounds, and the very heavens revolve under the guidance of
harmony. - Isidore of Seville.
It has been our intention, in the
procession of the Quadrivium, to discern whatsoever was possible of
the unseen world that lies around us, accessible to us (if at all)
only to man's mind and spirit and body together, in our human
condition. In both chapters on arithmetic & geometry, we have
attempted to thoroughly unveil the modern bias, & to understand
why it must force itself to attack, deface, and bury all traces of
the Quadrivium, which is the standardized medieval protocol for
investigating a sacramental & orderly world, in tandem with
Faith. As we turn our inward gaze to music, it would be fitting to
cease to give negative proofs for the Quadrivium's truth, & to
move towards a more positive, beautiful and orderly defense of the
living Wisdom1.
The usual prejudice of scientific
thought for beauty in a mathematical equation, even when there is
conflicting data, clues us in that the "Music of the Spheres"
is a real force and entity which can take precedence over the
appearances. As Paul Dirac once said, "It is more important to
have beauty in one's equations than to have a fitting experiment"2.
This expresses the emphasis and preference, which insists that
appearances do not have to “saved”, but can be suspended until
harmonized with what the equation seems to want to say. This Musica
Mundana (Boethius' term for it)3
became a very important emphasis of the Medieval Period, beginning
with Saint Augustine, who only composed one book of his projected
seven on the liberal arts - the one on Music4.
If the antique pagan world of
Greece & Rome gave proper expression to their budding genius in
the discipline of arithmetic and geometry (summed up on Euclid's
Elements), the Medieval period made these geometric
proportions sing, & longed to listen to them. We know next to
nothing (and almost less than nothing has been preserved) of Roman
and Greek music. The ancient polis, like one of Euclid's
defined points, circumscribed from itself lines of influence and
power, de-limiting itself and limiting Nature, making it
rational and well ordered. But it required the Medieval period to
bequeath an emphasis and heritage of music, which eventually
culminated in classical music. If the modern world can be
characterized as Arithmetical logic gone berserk, the ancient world
can be viewed as frozen geometrical Arithmetic: it does not
sing, although it does recognize (unlike our day) the depth-dimension
of meaning and spirituality behind politics, groups, and states (the
world of the polis)5.
This is entirely in keeping with
the rotational genius of each Age: the ancient world was one of
Philosophy, the medieval world was one of Religion, & the modern
world is one of Science. The next rotation, in this movement, is that
of Art. We can say with certainty that these great "Ages"
correspond to the progression Arithmetic-Geometry-Music-Cosmology. It
could be said this way: the ancient world is Arithmetic, the Medieval
world is Music, the modern world is Geometry, and the future world to
come is one of Art (Cosmology)6.
While the "mode" of
knowing in the modern world is Arithmetical logic, the expression of
that is in the form of Geometry, which inter-relates all things by
axiom and definition, but without the "depth" or philosophy
of the ancient world. The "mode" of knowing in the ancient
world is geometrical Arithmetic, with a corresponding expression and
delight in pure Arithmetic, without either the quantitative
elaboration or reductionism of the modern world. The "mode"
of knowing in the Middle Ages is musical Cosmology or "Faith",
because its expression of Music seeks the harmony of various levels
of Being and the dance which moves them all. It is difficult to see
in detail what the future may bring, but the emphasis will be in Art.
The mode of knowing of that future could very well be either musical
logic as a middle form between excesses, or a return to a cosmology
that gives precedence to Logic over Music, or recognizes the inherent
music of logic and logic of music. This mode of knowing would take
all previous history as a kind of grammar-arithmetic, and then would
begin to reconcile the other portions of the Quadrivium. It would
concern itself with the proportions of the whole of human history.
Why did the medieval world turn to
Music? The prime progenitors of the Middle Ages can be regarded as
Plato (especially in The Timaeus), Saint Augustine, and
Boethius. Augustine and Boethius were both especially devoted and
concerned with the theory of music, and this concern was deliberately
inherited by the Dark Ages7.
At the same time, the contribution of the Middle Ages to mathematics
was considerable. By the end of the twelfth century, following
translation of the Greco-Arabic learning, the best math came from
Europe.8
The
progress in mathematics was important because it shows the omnivorous
scope of Medieval learning, which embraced practically all
disciplines. How was this explosion of exploration coordinated? I
maintain that it was the “music” of the Faith which
gave Christian Europe the drive and confidence to unravel the
mysteries mathematical of the physical world, just as the confidence
to colonize the Western hemisphere can (in part) be related to the
confidence of the Christian laity9.
If we take the sign of the Middle Ages to be a Rhetoric (or even
Logic) of Music that expressed Faith, we can set up a useful analogy
between Faith and Music on the one hand, and the Middle Ages' piety
and their omnivorous delight in cataloging all known knowledge on the
other10.
We suspect that the balance of Freedom and Form in the Middle Ages
was very similar to that found in Mozart, for instance.
A closer look at the discipline of
Music will help us understand why this must be so. Music and
cosmology are the proper fruit or ending points of a mature
worldview. While every culture has a music suited to its outlook, not
every culture pursues that development to a simultaneously beautiful
and logical apex. And not every culture has the ability to see what
it is doing self consciously.
Daniel P Goldman puts it this way:
In De
Musica, Augustine presents a hierarchy of
rhythm that begins with “sounding numbers”—the rhythm we
actually hear—followed by “memorized rhythms,” that is, the
mind’s recognition and remembrance of a pattern. Rising above all
such numbers is what Augustine calls “consideration,” the numeri
iudiciales. These “numbers of judgment”
bridge eternity and mortal time; they are eternal in character and
lie outside of rhythm itself but act as an ordering principle for all
other rhythms. Only they are immortal, for the others pass away
instantly as they sound, or fade gradually from our memory.11.
This higher number is not identical with our sense perception
(John Locke) or even with our memory. They are not reducible to our
Pavlovian responses to sense stimulation. In some sense which is not
clearly understood, we “hear” the music of the spheres all the
time, and the origin of this harmony is from the bosom of the
Absolute, identified by Saint Augustine as the personal God of
revelation who is closer to us than we are to ourselves. Saint
Bonaventura wrote an entire treatise called Itinerarium Mentis ad
Deum that endeavored to describe the steps the Mind make take to
unite itself to God. Goldman links Augustine's ideas with Bonaventura
as follows:Some are abstracted from these and received into our senses, and these he calls “heard.” Some proceed from the soul into the body, as appears in gestures and bodily movements, and these he calls “uttered.” Some are in the pleasures of the senses which arise from attending to the species which have been received, and these he calls “sensual.” Some are retained in the memory, and these he calls “remembered.” Some are the bases of our judgments about all these, and these he calls “judicial,” which, as has been said above, necessarily transcend our minds because they are infallible and incontrovertible. These imprint on our minds the “numbers of artifice,” which Augustine had not included in this classification because “they are connected with the judicial number from which flow the uttered numbers out of which are created the numerical forms of those things made by art. Hence, from the highest through the middle to the lowest, there is an ordered descent. Thence do we ascend step by step from the sonorous numbers by means of the uttered, the sensual, and the remembered.”Here we see the enormous importance of distinctions made on the basis of intuition, or introspection of the human consciousness, when we “include the knower with the known”. The entire enterprise of objective Science excludes the consciousness from what is knowable12, although it tends to re-include it perversely when it concludes that consciousness is “just” this or that. On the contrary, consciousness is fundamental to what “is there”.13 It cannot be excluded from the knowing process, without thereby limiting what is “known” to something that is incomplete. This is what we meant by stating that the physical can unmask the spiritual, yet the spiritual can shape the physical. Another way to say this is that “the subtle rules the dense”.
Contrary to the picture painted by Andrew Dickson White in his Warfare of Science & Religion14, the Medieval Era was (especially after the reintroduction of Latin-Greek texts via Arabic civilization) preeminent in both musical innovation & mathematics: once Europe emerged and stabilized from the Dark Ages, it easily overtook its cultural competition in the Near and Far East15. Part of this celerity and comprehensiveness can be attributed to the harmonic balance of the Quadrivium – the people of the Middle Ages were culturally attentive to the “Numbers of Judgment”: they were listening to God, however imperfectly. With the caveats noted in the opening essays, the Middle Ages instituted and defended more of the Quadrivium than any other period, including the Renaissance. This original purity did not last long at a perfect height or zenith, but quickly gave way to compromise:
But by the 14th century the
spirit of Liberal Arts had been lost to the letter of the
prescriptive instrumentalism of Scholastic compendia.
These were opposed in the Renaissance by Petrarch and others, and a
new humanistic form of Liberal Arts emerged which included the whole
range of the arts16.
Yet the Renaissance did not
shatter the brittle Medieval heritage in the areas of music &
mathematics – instead, it built solidly upon them, in the polyphony
that would eventually culminate in the explosion of classical Western
music – Augustine's judicial Numbers writ large and played
for all of the universe to hear. It is easy to contrast Scholastic
philosophy with the Enlightenment; it is more difficult to argue that
Medieval music is irrelevant to Renaissance polyphony or the
Classical flowering in Germany: rhetoric allows stronger claims to be
made in a purely linguistic discipline, whereas Music resists the
tendency to divide things into armed camps – the unity of the whole
is the more easily seen, because the subject matter is invisible,
auditory. Greco-Roman music very likely is preserved, partially,
within the Gregorian chants, although that is not something we can
conclusively prove, empirically.
The Renaissance & Reformation
together destroyed the scholastic synthesis in religion (this
reaction was particularly acute against the compendia of
Logic, like Peter of Spain's), opened up humanism as a permanent
resting place and possibility for man's knowledge, destroyed the
cosmology of the Medieval period absolutely, embraced the plastic &
fine arts as a vehicle for sensual exploration, & in general
exploited various disconnected possibilities available to it, all of
this unchained from the concerns of the official ecclesiastical
clerisy17.
The continuity remained very large in all disciplines18,
despite the attack on Scholasticism, particularly so in mathematics
and in music. Even the Quadrivium and Trivium were re-attempted in
revival, as it was perceived that the Church had subordinated these
to practical Church matters, reducing Grammar to “Latin” &
Arithmetic to the calculation of Easter (or the design of church
architecture). Yet as we have noted, the Seven Liberal Arts were
engulfed in the humanistic explosion – the pendulum swung too far
in the other direction19.
It was not well understood that there was an actual theory and
architecture behind the seven Liberal Arts, even by the Renaissance,
and they tended to supplement or supplant medieval rigor with
humanistic studies, without bothering with the theory. In the case of
the Quadrivium, this was disruptive of the entire purpose behind its
existence, which was lead the student through an orderly succession
out in the final synthesis of Cosmology.
The bifurcation of the Middle Ages
into scholastic compendia20
and then (as a reaction) Renaissance humanism destroyed the inner
meaning of arithmetic, the outer cogency of logic, the purpose of
rhetoric, and the rational coherency of a cosmology, which was split
into secular and speculative. In the realm of Music, however, Freedom
and Form remained balanced, & neither the sensualism of the
Renaissance nor the violence of the Enlightenment (or the Scientific
Revolution or the Reformation) could stop the inevitable progression
of musical genius in the West: Bach and Mozart were the end result
and flower of the Gregorian chantings21.
The renowned Haydn was often moved to tears at listening to the children of the London charity schools sing the psalms together in unison according to the Gregorian style; and the great master of musicians and composers, Mozart, went so far as to say that he would rather be the author of the Preface and Pater Noster, according to the same style, than of anything he had ever written. These are but a few of the numerous encomiums passed upon this sacred chant by men who were so eminently qualified to constitute themselves judges.22
Another author goes even farther:
In
fact, the Gregorian chant does not cure, it saves. We can cure thanks
to some therapeutic methods, but to save requires the concourse of an
inspiration directly given by the creation. A soul attuned to the
chant starts to vibrate to the first and essential rhythms. Gregorian
chant allows us to perceive this vibration of the soul when it
reaches the register of serenity. Then, man is involved in a timeless
communication and regains his natural breathing, that is, unstressed
and without gasping. Through the Gregorian modulations, he discovers
a privileged space where his being momentarily can rest, aloof from
the daily trials. To tell the truth, Gregorian chant gives a glimpse
of paradise to those who wish it. 23
This
is a very strong claim for music, but it is also made for
mathematics, although lately, we are seeing it made for the
conclusions of physical science in its agnostic form. This is a
confusion of style over method, and of content over substance.
Nevertheless, what is not true for materialistic, reductionist modern
Science is certainly the case for both music and mathematics – it
is not too much to assert and defend the idea that the universality
inherent in Gregorian chanting and medieval music would eventually
lead to its elaboration in the same universality, found in Bach and
Handel and Mozart. Bernard Chazelle had this to say of Bach:
...the
only way to understand him is to listen to him, and there is no need
to understand him – you can just listen to him, over and over
again, and it will come... Ode
to Joy
if Beethoven didn't tell us it was about joy, could be about
hamburgers, for all we know, it's just music...but there is another
dimension to Bach. Bach the most human of composers, gets to your
soul through your body..It's not like I'm not gifted enough (to
understand it), but it's another dimension...it's a paradox, because
he is the most human of composers...Bach viewed himself as a
discoverer, not a maker, of music...these are pre-Enlightenment
dispositions. Bach saw himself as a discoverer of the laws of the
musical universe, of aesthetics. He had no interest that his cantatas
and passions survived, because God will know. He had no interest in
posterity.24
I have defended the idea that the Middle Ages was inherently focused on musical Cosmology – the last two steps of the Trivium. Of course, we have seen that the enormous Logical endeavors (Scholasticism) engaged in by its clerisy were the ostensible cause of a break with Tradition by the Renaissance. How do we square this circle? I have paired Rhetoric with Music, and therefore, Cosmology with Faith, since the seven Liberal Arts are the anteroom of the Temple of living Wisdom.
Let
us try to say it in this way- if
the ancient world was the world of the beasts, and the modern world
is the world of the machine, the Middle Ages were the world of men:
Middle Earth. The Middle Ages was the last time period, known to man,
in which a proper balancing point was reached (however imperfect)
which situated Man in the middle of a vast cosmos, attentive to the
heavenly spheres' music, logically alert and discriminating, and
focused on a grammar which employed the doctrine of signatures to
draw out the meaning of natural analogies.
We
(too) are seeking analogies here, in order to make fruitful
intellectual connections. The concern of the Middle Ages with Logic
was to set up, identify, and pursue proper analogies which were
logical (and therefore valid), as a prelude to defining the
signatures of the Holy, leading to praise in Rhetoric and expression
in Music, and out into the Cosmology of the Faith. It was not that
Arithmetic or Grammar did not interest them, & yet I certainly
would admit that the modern world is more copious in arithmetical
style and more geometrical in logical method than the Medieval world,
just as the ancient world was perhaps more original in its collection
of topoi
or discussion topics (a fact recognized by the Medieval worship of
Aristotle).
If
the Middle Ages swept from barbarism to the Rhetoric-Music of the
Faith-Cosmology “too swiftly”, the Modern World has taken the
liberty of stepping back to the Geometry-Logic of the Scholastics,
and emphasizing it in such a way as to destroy Faith-Cosmology. This
movement from the arithmetic topoi
of the ancients (eg., what is a human soul?), skipping over Logic
into Rhetoric-Music, and then going back to Logic as a pendulum
swings too far to “correct” itself, shows the cycle of Epochs:
Philosophy, Faith, Science. In the Future, it will be seen that
philosophy is consummated by Art, science is perfected in Art, and
religion is sublimated in Art: the future Era will be one of Art.
This “Art” or “Harmony” reflects the Cosmology of the
universe, which is One and Infinite, created in the image of God. The
chiasm, or “two steps forward, one back” will be completed in the
final step towards Art – four intervals which make a cross over the
world. All
of human knowledge will be summed and balanced and perfected in the
Musica
Mundana,
judged by the Numbers of God.
It
should be needless to point out that there are seven notes in a
musical scale, seven visible planets, and seven chakras
in the human nervous system. The ancient Tradition affirmed the
principle “as above, so below” - the Microcosm and the Macrocosm
were analogs of each other. Even the medieval obsession with
scholastic Logic was based on the understanding that the various
“signatures” found in Creation (This is to That, as That is to
This) could be reversed and exploited for insights, if the Logic was
sound enough. If (for instance), the herb comfrey was to tooth decay
what foxglove was to heart trouble, then someone who was clever and
subtle enough (eg., wise) could see a relation between tooth decay
and heart trouble, then a third analogy could be built between the
plant-herb comfrey and the flower foxglove based upon the first two
analogies. This strange preoccupation is the reason behind all the
medieval bestiaries and herbals which seem so alien today to us –
they were following the signatures of God.25
Was
the Rhetoric-Music of the Middle Ages fully conscious? It is hard to
see how they could not have known a great deal of what they were
doing. F. Dorminique Bourmand thought that subconscious respiration
and cardiac rhythm effect each other, & are also affected by
music.
For
the masters of "Solesmes," Gregorian chant is the very
expression of the movements of the soul. It is permanently sustained
and controlled by a specific attitude. In fact, every cadence, every
rhythm is the translation of a response corresponding to the
capabilities of the entire nervous system. 26
The
Middle Ages would have immediately set up an analogy: Music is to the
nervous system as The Music of the Spheres is to the Whole Man –
what Beethoven's Moonlight
Sonata does to our pulse is
what certain celestial harmonies (mediated through angels and
planets) do to our soul. If we listen closely, perhaps all four items
in the analogy begin to reveal their common “signature”. Modern
Science (of course) would shove all four terms to one side of the
balance sheet, reduce them to the lowest common denominator, and go
hunting for another analogy (which would then be liquidated in the
same fashion). Scott Buchanan goes so far as to claim that this
hatred and fear of rationality was the essence of the “the black
arts”.
Medieval
civilization was a vast “therapy of the soul”, conducted by
consensual agreement and popular consent (at various levels27),
aimed at restoring the image
of God in man. Heir to
Greece, Rome, and the Northern civilizations, it simply could not
envision a private “faith”-space which was segregated from the
public sphere. The Reformational emphasis on conscience and the
Renaissance emphasis on genius were ultimately too individualistic
for the civilized and public-spirited Middle Ages; their deep
religious awe and reverence did not permit either unfettered
conscience or unbridled genius to operate without check upon either
the public sphere, or within the religious or personal spheres. This
itself is an embodiment of the “Classical” principle that the
“whole needs to be more than the sum of its parts”.
It
is in the realm of classical music (and close behind that, of
mathematics) where the civilizing, unifying, and universal impulse of
the Middle Ages found a permanent spiritual home. The grand cycles of
operas with Northern atmosphere and stories nonetheless were cast
into the Latin and Greek forms of dramatic plays, set to stylized
music. The German super generation of composers, Protestant more
often than not, enshrined the Numbers
of Judgement in works which
(frankly) will be remembered longer than Joyce's Ulysses
or the art of Jackson Pollock28.
If
a soul is life able express itself, we cannot but attribute to it a
complete tonal language. In long connected stretches of sound – as
in larger, smaller, or even the smallest fragments – his music
became the vowels, syllables, words and phrases of a language in
which something hitherto unheard,
unspeakable, could find voice. Every letter of this language was of
infinite intensity, and in the joining of these elements there was
unlimited freedom of judgement...”29
Huessy
estimated the number of German Protestant hymns at one hundred
thousand, one thousand of which he thought could be regarded as
immortal. The German Reformation was in large measure the protest of
Northern Europe against the excesses of a Latin and Baroque
Christianity – there were legitimate aspirations and differences in
the Teutonic regions of Europe which unfortunately were allowed to
split the Church. The yearning of the “Norther spirit”, its
individualized yet orderly striving after perfection, finds solace in
that which comes so close to capturing that perfection – classical
Music. The inner world of classical music has by no means been
exhausted – there are (for instance) very subtle differences
between the various composers – Beethoven is for someone already
trained to listen, whereas Mozart teaches a non-listener how to
listen. Mozart's prattling is actually so talented that he is doing
something which Bach had to learn, painstakingly, to build as an
ordered structure. Mozart teaches the uninitiated that the music of
the spheres lies latent within him, and awakens his nervous system in
such a way as to accommodate it.30
A
subtle problem arises in trying to sort through the classical
“canon”, and we may as well address it here. If we are holding up
Classical Music as the apex of spiritual “Western” civilization,
the question may well confront even the most intrepid defender: which
composer? In quoting extensively from these works, I realize that I
am highlighting a perennial problem with addressing a subject as
large as the Canon or the Seven Liberal Arts. If I was a medieval
writer, I would defend that by saying that I was “letting authority
speak for itself” on the subject, and that this explained the
extensive quotations and long excerpts in this chapter. I might also
add that the best defense of Bach's Messe B Moll would simply
be to listen to it.
Since
I am also a “modern man”, I will add my own two cents worth of
thought on the subject of “which composer?” or “what is 'the
Canon'?”. I have labored through a good deal of Goethe's Faust
in the German original, and I have also read Imre Madach's The
Tragedy of Man (although not in Hungarian). Academic specialists
like Matthew Arnold or practicing poets such as Ezra Pound will
always debate (and often disagree) about how worthwhile the poetry of
someone like John Milton really is.31
I do not believe that it really matters to the questing intellect or
searching soul or lover of beauty whether they read Madach's version
of the Faust legend, or Goethe's. If either or both were destroyed,
the story and legend of Faust would remain in the memory of man. What
seems incomparably more important than distinctions at that level
(which are valid) is the necessity for man to avail himself of the
intellectual, emotional, and spiritual resources which he finds at
hand, and to begin to perceive them as something resembling a “Path”.
If Beethoven moves you more than Bach, well and good, so long as one
understands why that it is so, in the deepest recesses of your being,
and why the one or other is still needed by the self, and if
possible, to overcome that need, to sublimate it to something higher.
“The
Canon” (therefore) is flexible: it is a heavenly city, in which not
everyone knows everyone else. There will be minor authors who assume
a major importance in the life of a single person, and perhaps for
whom that author could be said to have written at all. Some
“heavy-hitters” will simply leave certain people as cold as ice.32
Some may prefer Vergil over Homer, others may simply read Louis
L'Amour their whole life, and nothing else33.
One very fine church lady who loved literature simply could not read
anything done by a Russian – too gloomy. The edifice of the Canon
is a living structure, whose existence and account is settled and
measured in not merely centuries, but millenia – the Bible as a
work of literature is proof of that. While we can definitely judge of
certain “works of art” almost immediately that they are either 1)
vulgar, 2) ephemeral, 3) specialized or 4) “pop” (to name a few
categories off hand), it is not always at first glance apparent what
sort of category or status a “classic” ought to enjoy. In fact,
that might be one of the defining characteristics of that which is
classic – an inability to immediately judge of its worth, or a
continual revelation of spiritual “depth” within the work,
depending on time and context and place. Classics do not have a
milieu identical to the one they sprang from.
This
(too) points us towards the study of Music as of profound importance
within the Quadrivium. If you are doing Arithmetic, you have great
choice of subject matter, but little of how to quantify it: you may
study sea shells or ceiling wax, but eventually, someone will want to
know what the statistics of the said group is. When one moves to
Logic-Geometry, there is a tightening of rigor as to method –
affirming the consequent is always a logical fallacy, period, with a
corresponding freedom of using the Logic, or the designs, to support
this or that cause or movement, or to arrange novel logical patterns
or analogies. Karl Marx was a rigorous analytical thinker in some
regards, but his basic assumptions were bleedingly erroneous.
Nevertheless, he still passes muster with vast groups as “logical”.
When one reaches Rhetoric-Music, the balance between Form &
Freedom is almost perfect – ideally, one should be oriented towards
what is Good, and striving with powerful tools to reach that Good,
moving heaven and earth (if need be) to reach the summit.
Within
Music at its peak, as in Rhetoric at its most sublime, there is
experienced the final balancing of the freedom of arithmetic-grammar
and the form of logic-geometry: the thinker knows where he is headed,
& has no inner doubt or grave flaws which would ruin the
composition. Therefore, I would affirm that the most perfect kind of
Music is one that achieves the most total identification of a higher
object worthy of worship with the listener. In fact, this is
recognized perversely in our culture today – one is not to dispute
the taste buds or the inner cochlea of someone else. This is because
food, like Music, is capable of transforming the one who “partakes”
of it into something or someone else, at least temporarily, and
exercises an amazing formative capacity on the imbiber. We literally
“become” what we eat, and what we “listen” to. Logic is more
objective, and “facts” are objective (albeit in a different way).
Music has the potential to be most supremely objective, but only if
it fulfills the requirements of the first two stages of the
Quadrivial discipline. If it does not, it becomes passionate,
overwhelming, powerful, and remains transformative, but not in a
necessarily good sense.
Music
points (more than the other disciplines) towards the ancient Greek
requirement to Know Thyself: Gnothi
seauton or
Nosce
te ipsum.
This was the Delphic injunction, whose esoteric meaning was taken
over, assimilated, and baptized by the young Christian religion –
as a church father said, he who can “see himself” is greater than
him who can “see angels”. Jesus Himself argued that the “Kingdom
is within you”, and Saint Paul is filled with warnings against
“thinking more highly of one's self than one ought”. The spirit
is made flesh, and the flesh can become spirit, in the rhythms and
forms of music.
The
listener of music may become aware, therefore, that what he is
hearing (and practicing) upon himself, is literally a picture of what
occurs in the higher realm of Cosmology: the creation of the true
self (the self without lies) and the real I (the united personality)
and the absolute will (oriented solely towards an objectively
perceived Good) is the actual work of Creation on the cosmic level in
the Musica
Mundana,
or harmony of the spheres. Christianity offers the possibility of
speeding up this process, of cooperating in synergy with that
objective Logos-Pattern, through the sacrifice of Christ. It is in
the work of the man-God Christ that the higher worlds (of which this
world is a pale shadow) is incarnated into the processes at work in
the besieged and darkened earth, the realm of the Cross. Through the
impregnation of that impulse into the darkness and deep void of the
earth, mankind has received the possibility of reversing the effects
of the Fall, individually & even collectively. Such a process
safeguards the objective work of the Cosmos, which has always served
the Lord in seeking to deliver earth, slowly and fitfully and over
painstaking aeons, from the spiritual bondage into which we had
fallen.
This
music, then, is a heavy and joyful choice. The end result, we know
from Revelation, is complete and total union with the energies of
God, and the re-assimilation of man's soul to the Divine. As
we debate or choose our own Canon, leaning here or there on
Auctoritas
when we cannot see, and finding Truth, Beauty, & Goodness
wherever we may, treasuring it up and contemplating it in the heart,
we should keep before our soul's eyes the fact that we are (in a
sense) re-creating ourselves, and that our poor choices or wrongful
goals are likely to have consequences which outlast our ability to
pay for them.
Music stands
ready at hand to help us, offering us her finest treasures of harmony
and beauty and even concrete higher Truth. Even a very passing
interest in music, chosen along sound lines, can contribute to the
physical health, emotional soundness, and spiritual insight of a
human being. Someone who enjoys bluegrass or Celtic modal music may
find that, after a long journey and faithfulness, they begin to
perceive the spiritual idea behind that class of music, and what it
means for their own soul. I cannot speak for Rock and Roll – it
seems, to me, at best, a music suited for children, or for a child's
mood. Has anyone else ever noticed that so many Rock songs have an
electric beginning and a passe ending? Or is it just my
imagination that not even Def Leppard or AC/DC seem able to pull that
off? All of the joy is at the start, but the music does not satisfy
or deliver. It simply enraptures or cocoons the listener, insulating
a certain mood or feeling. Rap music is based upon a kind of
Assyrian, brazen Titanism34
which does not, and cannot, appeal to someone who has ever tasted
deeply of something like Arvo Part's Te Deum. New South
Country music songs all sound the same, happy or sad. A lot of “old
time Church music” sounds like a German drinking songs. Modern
Christian music is virtually indistinguishable from pop culture35.
People ought to be aware, if they embrace that destiny through music,
programming their soul over and over again with the music that has
the most immediate access and appeal, that they may be shaping
themselves into something that has eternal ramifications, whatever
that means for them. I am not against pop music, only for seeing it
for what it is, and valuing it accordingly.
Music chords and
harmonies can, by a process of analogical signature or
correspondence, resonate with the spinning of the soul inside of us,
affecting us for good or ill. Our souls have a particular density or
gravity or “weight”, according to their content, and particular
“frequencies”. These metaphors should not be dismissed entirely
as mere similitudes, not to be taken literally. At the higher levels
of Truth, where mystery enshrouds what is “really there”, the
language of Music is both mathematical and also artistic, thereby
uniting both the analytical Quadrivium and the linguistic Trivium
into a kind of super-human or angelic balance. Indeed, at the deepest
moments of crisis in human history, it is music which most accurately
conveys the most of what humans experience.
As the Russians took Berlin in the waning weeks of World War II, the Nazi glitterati gathered for a performance of Wagner's opera, with helpful ushers passing out suicide pills in the aisles. The trumpets brought down the walls of Jericho on a single note. The shepherd David drove an evil demon from the heart of Saul by playing upon his harp. In the Silmarillion, Tolkien had the All Creator sing the worlds into existence. I am sure many other instances of the power of music, historical or personal, could be adduced. Michael Card, a modern Christian singer, notes that
Socrates
once said, "' the soul hears music, it drops its' best guard.'
That, for me, is one of the best descriptions of the power that music
has. With music it is possible to open a door in the heart of the
listener. Once inside, the musician can either beautify the interior
of that soul, or desecrate that most holy of places. Often if you can
get someone to sing something, you can get them to believe it. This
has been used both for good as well evil throughout history. All this
is to say that music is a powerful key36.
Perhaps the inability of Logic and arithmetical-facts to sway people from their passions leaves, as the most powerful argument, sacred Music, which appeals to the soul before its last passage out into the iron clad universe of Cosmological reality, where God's Law inexorably separates wheat from chaff. In the temple of Music, we are given the final and greatest argument for choosing the reality of God over the lies of the world: hearing is the last sense to depart the body, if common testimony is to be believed, and music is heavily emphasized in the rites of the dead, the world over. Classical music was the bringing into self-consciousness what was experienced subconsciously.
Webster Young argues that“Classicism” requires the use of all of its principles in unity, because the integration is more important than the “parts”. But this one principle is not enough, because the subject matter has to be beautiful as well. Anything too shocking or clashing stuns the spectator and throws him back on himself, and on his own perceptions. This alienates the beholder from the work of art.37
Before we depart the temple of Music, to enter the last precinct of the Holy – the wide open spaces of the Cosmos where the Universe mightily enforces the holy and eternal plan of the Name which can not be uttered by angels – we might consider what it is that holds us back from seeing, or at least, hearing, the Musica Mundana38 and the harmony of the spheres which is said to emanate from the living organism that comprises the Universe, which is destined to be the bride and body of God. Why is it so difficult for man to become unified in his being and to achieve one will and to find his deeper self? What good is the Quadrivium, if it cannot help us do this? And has this been invented as a means to socially control those who don't understand puffery & and the subtleties of the wise?39
We have mentioned the Cartesian spirit of thought in man, which places an emphasis on that which is empirically detectable at the lowest level of quantity – this is a formidable barrier for many people, particularly those who are “thinkers”. There is, of course, the added confusion of Christianity, which has degenerated to a lower and lower level, along with the ebb and flow of the intellectual culture. Very few people have the opportunity in Church to experience the Traditional teaching that the Cosmos is a vast, unified living Temple, & that scientific discovery is beneath & integral to a mystery which is older than the Universe, or that the Son of Man and God recapitulated all things, heaven and earth, within His Being. Instead, the Church defends a moralistic and sentimental version of attenuated private Faith, with no connection to the real world or the Logos. If History were a movie, our time would be the nadir, or low ebb, of the story of man: the heroes would be bedraggled, beaten, and in despair, with sad melodies playing softly in the background. Another obstacle is that Quantity itself floods the world, to the detriment of Quantity – Information drowns Wisdom, Style trumps Substance, and Appearances rule Reality.
Now, more than ever, the spadework of the seven Liberal Arts actually makes sense, if and only if it is done with a (I do not say rigid) but rigorous exclusivity which tests every spirit, probes every piece of ground, and investigates every question mark. It is precisely in the darkest hour, with the most odds, which is the right time to revive that which (in any case) was ideal, but had received only a partial adherence. It is not a matter of reviving something which “didn't work” : as Gandhi famously said when asked about “Western civilization”, he said “I think it's a good idea, they should try it.” Nor is it a matter of looking to a system for salvation, as it is quite clear that a living, active path has to be followed for it to “work” to begin with.
Men will follow the categories of thought outlined in the seven Liberal Arts – the only question is, will it be done unconsciously to very unintended ends, or consciously, for rational ones? It is hard not to notice that an entire “Liberal Arts” has grown up today, which is the precise inversion of its own professed goals and outcomes. Grammar today means political correctness; this is free speech, to be constrained to tell lies. Freedom from Truth, compulsion to Lies: this is what modern grammar entails. In other disciplines, the story is equally dismal, although not so grossly outrageous. For a modern artist, even in music, to be revolutionary is the highest aspiration, and they have taken as their rhetorical motto that of Sigmund Freud, taken from the Aeneid: Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo (If I cannot bend heaven, then I will move Hades).
The recondite esoteric teaching of Christianity, hidden within the Orthodox and Catholic and even Protestant faiths40, is that Cosmic Law is supreme, and that man can either serve it willingly or unwillingly: if willingly, then his “soul” may be saved – an excess is left over, his talents, which the Master will then use to make the servant a true son; if unwillingly, then his “soul” will lost, and man will be forced into a servitude following his earthly life, a servitude which is embodied in the lower regions, those same lower regions which (ironically enough) modern man's art delights to “move”.
This Cosmic Law was fulfilled, every jot and tittle in it, by the Logos Incarnate, and since Grace perfects rather than abolishing Nature, man is now called to avail himself of that Supreme Gift. Even the Puritans, no slighters of God's free gift, were known to write “if our disease cannot be remedied by God's Son, it is incurable, and cannot be saved”. This service starts as a duty or labor, and ends with the fullness of adoption, with variations in intensity, pace, and how much of the final goal is glimpsed in the early stages. The anti-nomian and revolutionary position that God permanently abandoned the Logos pattern with the death of Christ is really a theology or wish of Satan: maybe God really did die on that cross – maybe there is no such thing as as a Cosmos, a divine Law, or a Logos-pattern which was vindicated – maybe man can stop worrying so much about becoming more than merely potentially divine – maybe God's image really is obliterated.
Paradoxically, those who are in the greatest need or despair are often the ones who end up seeing most clearly that the first step of a thousand mile journey is the hardest – it is the ex-atheists, the ex-communists, the ex-secularists who experience a crisis or moral collapse who often end up defending the orthodox and deeply Christian truths, and expressing them in modern language. Them, and the mysterious “just”, who seem to stay close to the Lord as if by instinct. From them, we can learn that the spadework of the seven Liberal Arts are a spiritual journey and labor, in which no task is too small or menial, if it helps to polish the mirror of the soul.
The first step of a journey, any journey, and Music reminds us of this, is the ability to stop and look up and to truly see or listen, to become perceptively aware of our situation, and how dire and desperate it truly is. This is what is meant by “he who sees himself is greater than he who sees angels”. Rock and roll, for all its faults, did perverse damage to the Iron Curtain during the years of the Cold War41. Music draw us out of the playing around in the environment which arithmetic and even logic are prone to – it even corrects and heals rhetoric twisted by the human tongue. Through the ear, man can see what is hidden to the organ of the eye, at least the possibility. If this Beauty can exist, then I am “other” to it, for I am not yet like it, but yet, I can hear it.
Music, like poetry and literature (which is a “music” in print), statue and painting (which is music in shape and color), opens up and activates immediate links to parts of us which are normally inaccessible, and which are usually believed to be unimportant or actually lower than they truly are.42 Some of these things are attributed to the subconscious, but actually have a higher source.43 It is by attunement to these, and regularization with the external harmony of the Cosmos, that man saves enough energy to have something left over of his talents, something which is “worthy of his hire”, enabling him to begin to transform into a “true son”.44
There is an allusion
in a Christian hymn to this Celestial Harmony (which corresponds to a
human harmony within the human being):
This is
my Father's world,
And to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me ringsThe music of the spheres.
And to my listening ears
All nature sings, and round me ringsThe music of the spheres.
Normally we are
accustomed (or programmed) to believe that this is a pure metaphor.45
Yet since consciousness itself is a metaphor46,
as well as the “I”, or a great many other things we think very
concrete or factual, we turn to examine this Music. In fact, during
the early Scientific era, there was a sharp controversy between
Johannes Kepler and Robert Fludd over this very issue – in what did
the Harmony of the Spheres
consist? Kepler was no stranger to mysticism or religion.
Accordingly
you won’t wonder any more that a very excellent order of sounds or
pitches in a musical system or scale has been set up by men, since
you see that they are doing nothing else in this business except to
play the apes of God the Creator and to act out, as it were, a
certain drama of the ordination of the celestial movements.
(Harmonice Mundi, Book V)
In
this work, Harmonices Mundi,
Kepler made the claim that the earth has an actual soul, because it
is subjected to astrological harmony – the various planets sing
notes based on the ratios of their orbits and their tilt. Yet Kepler
and Fludd had a very bitter quarrel, which interests us here
(chiefly) because of the commentary made upon that quarrel, in our
own day, by a pioneer quantum physicist, Wolfgang Pauli47.
You might have expected a scientist to side with the more empirical
and mathematical Kepler, rather than the mystic Fludd48,
who (frankly) disdained empirical and mathematical proofs. Instead,
these are the comments which Pauli makes:
To
us, unlike Kepler and Fludd, the only acceptable pont of view appears
to be the one that recognizes both sides of reality – the
quantitative and qualitative, the physical and the psychical – as
compatible with each other, and can embrace them simultaneously.
Since the discovery of the quantum of action, physics has been
gradually forced to relinquish its proud claim to understand the
whole world.49
This
is not the version of modern science which atheistic propagandizers
like to put forward. Nor, should it be said, is it the version of
modern science which most Christians accept – most Christians are
content to let science have “fact”, and God lay claim to
“belief”. Modern scientific atheists wish to cleanse science of
all mystical residue, but there have been a startling number of great
men in Science who were either religious, mystical, or both. Modern
Christians want to immediately concede the superiority of Science in
the realm of “fact”, but seem oblivious to new developments in
Science which demonstrate measurably that the world cannot be
measured in a metaphysical sense, and that measurement itself raises
(on its own terms) metaphysical questions.
But we are
getting ahead of ourselves. It is time to leave a pure consideration
of music, & taking with us the harmony we have gained, progress
to the final step of the Quadrivium, that of sacred Cosmology.
1
We have to clearly state that the medieval world at least suspected
and investigated the possibility that there was a path to God which
was mental, in a higher sense, that one could literally approach and
touch God with the higher Mind. This idea lies behind works like
Bonaventura's Journey of the Mind Into God. Modern
Christianity calls this Platonism, but it is actually the Tradition,
of which Plato is the spokesperson and transmitter into the Western
cultures. To be clear, the lower discursive reason cannot reach God:
it cannot “think” God. However, the higher Mind is not bound by
such constraints, nor is it opposed to the “heart”, as the lower
mind always is.
2
(quoted in The Liberal Arts Tradition, Clark and Jain, Camp
Hill PA Classical Tradition Press, 2013. p. 78.
3
The world is harmochthe - harmoniously composed. -
Philolaus
4
John Martineau makes this point in his lecture on the Quadrivium: it
is in music that the significance of the Number 7 is most clearly
seen, as all tunings in the world tend to default to a seven note
scale, which the ear wishes to hear.
http://www.triviumeducation.com/interviews/john-martineau-interview-quadrivium-number-geometry-music-cosmology-103/
5
It was the task of the Greco-Roman period, unique in human history,
to establish the concept of civitas, cives, and the idea of
the polis: the political community which had a duty to orient
itself collectively to the Good. See Oswald Spengler's The
Decline of the West, also, for how the polis shaped the
forms of knowledge in the antique period.
6
The patter is 1:3:2:4, a chiasm, or Cross. This pattern expresses
the rotation of spiritual influence over the earth in the form of
epochs, and causes the realization that the Medieval and the Modern
world are deeply inter-related, as there is a very hidden “Logic”
implicit in medieval Scholasticism, and a very hidden “Rhetoric”
obeyed by modern Science. When these two periods are reconciled in a
way consistent with the beginning in the ancient world (Philosophy),
the progression towards the age of Art will be complete, and the
Cross will be finished. This also reconciles Buchanan's insight that
Logic and Rhetoric often switch places in the progression of the
Trivium.
7
It is a question of emphasis, not fact, for in Werner Herzog’s
documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a paleontologist
toots “The Star-Spangled Banner” on a reproduction of a
35,000-year-old flute carved from vulture bone, unearthed in 2009 in
a South German cave. (cited by Daniel P Goldman).
9
What is regarded as “imperialism” still constitutes one of the
most amazing migratory movements of all time – the reduplication
of an entire civilization across the sea on a large scale. It would
not have been possible had not Christianity thoroughly percolated
through the entire fabric of social society. Before America could be
founded, the idea had to exist in the minds and hearts of the
culture at a very broad level.
10
The drive towards the universal is not unique to the Middle Ages –
what is unique, however, is the degree of success and the endurance
behind that drive. It is still not certain that it will be destroyed
as totally or degenerated as finally as Greco-Roman or Magian-Arabic
culture was. The totality of the synthesis was carried much further
in the West.
12
This is entirely proper as a “mode”, within its proper limits.
But how else would we judge what is proper, if we leave out
consciousness? It is not appreciated how dependent humanity is upon
ideas which come to them sub-consciously, from either higher or
lower sources, and simply “arise” or appear as “self-evident”.
13
Only a science of the Spirit could do justice to both religion and
Science at the same time, by transcending either. I hate to agree
with Deepak Chopra, but he is right that consciousness is the
starting point. Even corrupted consciousness has determining power
to affect our life and knowledge, in this world and the next.
14
He is right that there has been “warfare”, but White thinks this
is an unequivocally good thing, which is obviously absurd, and that
it is necessary, which is even more absurd, if possible.
15
Christian culture gained in complexity and power, at the same time
Islamic culture was losing complexity and power: the peak of Islamic
civilization was in the Baghdad of Haroun Al Raschid, who reigned in
in the 700s, roughly contemporaneous with Charlemagne. The first
“Renaissance” was lead by Charlemagne.
17
To use Coleridge's term clerisy, the Renaissance was far less
“radical” than we suppose: it was actually more of a break with
the official clergy, & the creation (or annointing) of a new
“clergy” - the term clerisy denotes whatever dominant
elite controls the terms of debate. After the Renaissance &
Reformation, it was no longer the ecclesiastics.
18
The Enlightenment philosophes owe more to the traveling
medieval scholars (like Abelard) than they would care to admit.
19
Admittedly, this is a shorthand way of viewing the problem: counter
examples would also be abundant. However, in general, it is fair to
say that neither Scholasticism nor the Renaissance were entirely
fair, or entirely complete, in their exploration of the elements of
the seven Liberal Arts which they emphasized and understood. It is
unfortunate that such a conflict between them ever ensued. We can,
however, take the partial aspect each saw clearly, and begin to
reconstruct the possibilities between them.
20
It must never be forgotten that Scholasticism gave us the
University. “In 1300 there were only 23 universities in Europe.
During the fourteenth century, an additional 22 were founded, and in
the fifteenth century 34 new institutions appeared. This growth was
strongest in Germany, Eastern Europe, and Spain. As new universities
appeared throughout the continent, the number of individual colleges
within these institutions also grew, as nobles, wealthy burghers,
kings, and princes moved to endow new schools within the framework
of existing universities. Medieval universities also specialized, as
universities do today, in particular areas of expertise. Until the
sixteenth century, Paris remained Europe's premier theological
university, while Bologna in Italy was known for its legal studies.
It trained many of the lawyers who practiced in the church's courts.
Salerno, in Sicily, was Europe's first medical school.” From the
online Gale database, “Scholasticism in the Later Middle Ages
Arts and Humanities Through the Eras, 2005 From World History in
Context. Scholasticism's potential was not exhausted, but instead,
broken up – in fact, the entire rhetoric against Scholasticism may
have been a partly legitimate but elaborate cover for a rebellion
against Tradition and the Faith.
21
It is quite fair to say that the “purity” of music in both the
Middle Ages, the Renaissance, & the Reformation remained much
truer to the naked possibility of Form than did the other
disciplines of each period. Or perhaps, the evidence presented by
music to the ear is easier to recognize and harder to deny.
22
from O’Brien, J. (1881). A
History of the Mass and Its Ceremonies in the Eastern and Western
Church (p. 80). New York: The Catholic Publication Society
Co.
25
Digoxin is still extracted from the live root of foxglove today.
Scott Buchanan's Doctrine of Signatures correctly points out
that the “black arts” of Science today (a black art is an
science without Reason) consistently refuse to set up analogies –
when they find one, they always push the analogies to the same side,
and start looking for new ones, new ones which will also be pushed
aside into a conglomeration of unrelated “facts”, and so on, ad
infinitum. The medieval genius lay in precisely the opposite
direction: they reveled (to a fault perhaps) in analogies and their
implications. Hence, medieval science always had a “magical”
feel to it.
26
https://www.olrl.org/misc/mozart.shtml
27
Obviously, the “folk cultures” retained their own music, herbal
lore, and to some extent, religious practice, but all of the
medieval “castes” shared an orderly, hierarchical view of the
Cosmos, as a whole.
28
Although it is nice to know that Marc Chagall did a “Jesse Tree”
stained glass window for a church in Switzerland. Even modern art
has mental reservations.
29
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution. Argo Books, Providence
RI : 1993. 417, 419.
30
https://www.olrl.org/misc/mozart.shtml
31
Pound, no hater of Tradition, regarded Milton's poetry as an
“abominable dog's biscuit”. Arnold thought Milton was second
only to Shakespeare or perhaps Wordsworth in the English tongue. And
both Pound and Arnold are worth reading. You will always find things
to disagree with in what you read or discuss with others; the point
is to reach a knowledge of the self about which there can be no
doubt.
32
Dante springs to mind as a possible example, here. I have a good
friend who is very well read who claims he simply cannot read Dante.
33
CS Lewis, in an essay from An Experiment in Criticism,
defends life long readers of “genre” works by appealing to the
1. act of reading itself 2. the possible need which is being
unconsciously sought or fulfilled in certain pronounced cases.
34
The kind of masculine over reaction to corruption in Lunar or
Matriarchal civilizations, which Rap engages in, ought to be seen
clearly for what it is: please see Julius Evola's foreword to Revolt
Against the Modern World.
35
The music of unbelief and despair has been very popular
lately; it is the ineluctable outcome of a grammar and logic rooted
in “the downward integration into the void”, for man must sing,
even if it be of his sorrow and his fear and his hunger and his
passion. The decline of Christian art form is a species of despair:
when the Newsboys sing Shine,
it is a protest against that despair, filled with talent and
legitimate art – the problem is that the despair is to some extent
deepened, since the song can only engage certain levels of our
being, & the entire work does not so much end as just “fade
out”. The song begins really well, and is very catchy, but it has
nowhere to “go”: it is shallow, repetitive, breathless, and
sentimental. It has nothing like the emotional integrity and power
as (for example) the opening march from Aida,
or the overture of the Makropoulous Affair,
or even a Hans Zimmer soundtrack. If AC/DC's Thunderstruck
is more exciting and electric than Shine,
then isn't the Christianity of the Newsboys optional? At best,
something added on to the main course?
36
http://www.ivpress.com/michaelcard/fromthestudy/fts018.pdf
37
https://isistatic.org/journal-archive/ir/43_01/young.pdf
This (of course) is the very hermeneutic of the modern, in which
shock and assault is used to induce a kind of inner transformation,
supposedly, or at least lucidity. Classicism regards this as a sign
that the artist himself does not understand what he is doing.
Therefore, his “art” cannot be self conscious, and at the
highest level of art. A self conscious artist knows precisely what
his piece means, and seeks to impress it upon the world. Modern art
has sophisticated theories of “levels” of meaning and
unintentional meaning, but one has to wonder if these are actually
covers for simple confusion on the part of the “artist”.
38
The twentieth century will go down as the century where no one was
listening to the conductor.
39
There is no doubt that the Seven Liberal Arts can be used for
coercive means: anything good can be perverted. That is beside the
point. But many condemn them on that basis.
40
The Protestant Church has its quiet share of mystics : Luther
himself consulted a work called Theologica Germanica, which
contains some of them. Jacob Boehme is an example that springs to
mind.
41
The Paul McCartney concert in Red Square after 1989's events were of
immense symbolic significance, not all of it healthy.
42
This is not always true: sometimes, Music (and Art) can be used to
actually seduce and draw down the human being into what is beneath
them.
43
Things that flow from the subconscious are often misinterpreted: it
may be that what is regarded as “lower” or accidental is
actually higher, and vice versa. The old patristic emphasis on
ceaseless watchlessness was designed to discriminate within the
subconscious.
44
This is consistent with many of the stranger parables of Jesus,
which indicate that God has invested in man's development, and seeks
fruit from the trees which he has planted, or talents for talents,
or waiting virgins with trimmed lamps.
45
After reading Buchanan's Doctrine of Signatures, I am not
sure there is any such thing as a pure metaphor – there is always
some actual connection which suggests the metaphor.
46
Julian Jaynes notes this in his The Breakdown of the Bicameral
Consciousness: we say that the mind “sees” or the
consciousness “grasps it”, but these are physical metaphors. We
don't actually know what the mind or consciousness does – we are
using a metaphor to describe something we don't “see” clearly.
47
Incidentally, Wolfgang Pauli died in a hospital room numbered 137:
“In 1958, Pauli was awarded the Max
Planck medal. In that same year, he fell ill with pancreatic
cancer. When his last assistant, Charles Enz, visited him at the
Rotkreuz hospital in Zurich, Pauli asked him: "Did you see the
room number?" It was number 137. Throughout his life, Pauli had
been preoccupied with the question of why the fine
structure constant, a dimensionless
fundamental constant, has a value nearly equal to 1/137. Pauli died
in that room on 15 December 1958.” Pauli was enough of a mystic to
have appreciated this coincidence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Pauli
48
Robert Fludd was a very interesting figure – a Renaissance
Neo-Platonic Christian alchemist, much like Marsilio Ficino. We will
discuss Fludd and Ficino in the next chapter.
49
Robert Fludd: The Scientific Theories of Kepler. Wolfgang Pauli.
Page 129. North Atlantic Books – Berkely CA 1001.
No comments:
Post a Comment