"As God is Trinity, in whom all difference is possessed as perfect peace and unity, the divine life might be described as infinite music, and creation too might be described as a music whose intervals, transitions, and phrases are embraced within God's eternal, triune polyphony."
David Bentley Hart explains his above musical ontology in The Beauty of The Infinite in the following passages :
Acording to Gregory of Nyssa, creation is a wonderfully wrought hymn to the power of the Almighty: the order of the universe is a kind of musical harmony, richly and multifariously toned, guided by an inward rhythm and accord, pervaded by an essential "symphony"; the melody and cadence of the cosmic elements in their intermingling sing of God's glory, as does the interrelation of motion and rest within created things; and in this sympathy of all things one with the other, music in its truest and most perfect form is bodied forth (IIP i.3: 30-33).
The idea of a musica mundana or harmonia mundi is an ancient one, found in pagan philosophy, from Pythagoreanism to Neoplatonism, and in numerous patristic sources. It exercised a rare fascination for Renaissance and ba- roque theology, philosophy, and art (as evidenced in, for example, Luis de Le6n's great ode to God's harmony in creation). There are abundant biblical reasons, quite apart from the influences of pagan philosophy, for Christians to speak of the harmonia mundi: in Scripture creation rejoices in God, proclaims his glory, sings before him; the pleasing conceits of pagan cosmology aside, theology has all the warrant it needs for speaking of creation as a divine composition, a magnificent music, whose measures and refrains rise up to the pleasure and the glory of God.132 Augustine, reflecting on the transience of created things, suggests that the beauty of the world, like that of a poem (declaimed, of course, by a rhapsode), lies in its transitions(Devera religione 21.40-43); and at one point he argues that the beauty of the cosmos can no more be grasped by creatures than can the beauty of a poem by the discrete syllables that must pass away in order to bring it about (De musica 6.11.30).
The truly interesting feature of Augustine's thought on the matter, though, is his way of relating the soul - as a rhythmic sequence, a repetition that retains the memory of what has gone before - to the rhythms of creation: virtue is, he argues (very like Gregory), the establishment of the soul's proper rhythm (De quantitate animae 55); and the soul that is virtuous is one that turns its rhythms (or numbers, numeri) not to the domination of others, but to their benefit (De musica 6.14-45).
As Leo Spitzer, in his magisterial Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, remarks, "According to the Pythagoreans, it was cosmic order which was identifiable with music; according to the Christian philosophers, it was love. And in the ordo amoris of Augustine we have evidently a blend of the Pagan and the Christian themes: henceforth 'order' is love." Such a change in emphasis was natural: for Christian dogma all beauty and order belong eminently to the order of the trinitarian relations, and so have no basis profounder than love.
Creation is not, that is, a music that explicates some prior and undifferentiated content within the divine, nor the composite order that is, of necessity, imposed upon some intractable substrate so as to bring it into imperfect conformity with an ideal harmony; it is simply another expression or inflection of the music that eternally belongs to God, to the dance and difference, address and response, of the Trinity.
Dionysian rhythm, that is to say, embraced within the incessant drumbeat of being's unica vox as it repeats itself endlessly, from whose beat difference erupts as a perpetual divergence; and even if Dionysus allows the odd irenic caesura in his dance - the occasional beautiful sequence - it constitutes only a slacken- ing of a tempo, a momentary paralysis o fhis limbs, a reflective interval that still never arrests the underlying beat of difference. Theology, though, starting from the Christian narrative of creation out of nothingness, effected by the power and love of the God who is Trinity, might well inquire whether rhythm could not be the prior truth of things, and chaos only an illusion, the effect of a certain convulsive or discordant beat, the repetition of a sinful series.
It may well be that each and every "essence" subsists upon its own interior repetition, like the return - always varied, stated with a new beat and a different harmony - of the phrase from Monsieur Vinteuil's sonata that haunts the narrator of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu for many years, and equally true that difference and repetition are the only forces of essence; but does the distribution of difference occur always in the stress between a formless chaos and the invariable beat of the dance of Dionysus, or is the rhythm or music of being already sufficiently various in itself, already differentiated into analogical complexities, and already sufficiently flexible to liberate difference endlessly? Is the music of being that of Dionysus, or is it something more like infinite counterpoint, a music like Bach's?
If the trinitarian life is always already one of infinite musical richness, "heard" by God in its fullness, in the inexhaustible variety of its phrasings and harmonies, and if creation is a complementary music, an end- less sequence of variations upon the theme of God's eternal love, then there is no aboriginal sublime that surpasses the moment of the beautiful; rather, the sublime appears as a particularly intense serial display of beauty, a particularly weighty manifestation of God's glory (but all terror may be turned into praise).
Or there is the fabricated sublimity of evil, the immense discords of sin that disrupt charity's unfolding, derange every series, and resist every analogical path of recovery of the divine· theme. Being as God gives it, though, is originally nothing but degrees of splendor, hierarchies of beauty; creation is divine glory, told anew, and so its aesthetic variety is nothing but the differing modes and degrees with which participated being is imparted.
Creation's rhythm is analogical, not the interminable monotony of the "univocal" event, and so becomes ever more actual as its complexity and beauty increase in intensity- as, that is, it participates more fully in the richness of God's infinite “form”.
Can there be real difference that does not arise within a thematic motion? Can there be a theme that is not also al- ready a changing, disseminative diversity? And is the language of the sublime that postmodernism often adopts not then a new version of romantic Sturm und Drang, indeed the last gasp of romanticism?
Honestly, it is difficult to be convinced by a discourse of difference and distance that attempts at the same time to be a discourse of Heracleitean flux, because there is no distance in the flux: all dimensions are consumed before they arise. This is the "totality" in the aleatory: every moment of repetition is a singularity that entirely (or, if one prefers, virtually) contains the shape of the whole, a Leibnizian monad that is no longer in any meaningful sense a "perspective" on the whole, because the whole is a sublime, unmediated, absolute presence.
For Christian thought, on the other hand, true distance is given in an event, a motion, that is transcendent: a pure prolation in which all patterns are "anticipated," in an infinitely fulfilled way that allows for every possibility; it even makes space for the possibilities of discord, while also always providing, out of its analogical bounty, ways of return, of unwinding the coils of sin, of healing the wounds of violence (the Holy Spirit is a supremely inventive composer).
It is transcendence, the divine distance, with its analogical scope, that prevents presence from being totality, and this distance is the original "thematism" - the transcendent act of music - that makes real difference possible: repetition can occur only within a thematism that differentiates repe- tition from what it repeats, and yet allows it to be, quite precisely, repetition.
This "first difference" is the ontological difference, the primordial analogical disproportion between God's infinite transcendence and finite becoming that is the act of creation. This difference is itself the theme, present in every moment of the ontic, that inaugurates all the variations of finitude; and as this difference is a movement of grace within the triune act of divine being, all the variations that follow from it testify to the Trinity (in their being, form, and particular splendor).
If for Lyotard the sublime (conceived as the unpresentable) must be the starting point of modern aesthetics, beauty remains the still more original point of departure for a Christian aesthetics, because the sheer interminability of beauty's serial display can always overtake every invariable sublimity, and submit it to the analogy of beauty. The beautiful surpasses the sublime because beauty is capable of endless intricacy, and so is able to "present" anything; and the sublime, whether as an effect of immensity or disorder, still never ceases to belong to an infinite display that, from another vantage, may be grasped in its beauty (and, within this display, other perspectives are never wanting).
The quantity of beauty always appears in a distance that is the distance of God, and seen thus, it appears as glory, weight, splendor. And the ordering of desire toward the infinite God allows creatures to see all the differ- ences of creation not only as proximate mediations of divine glory, but also as mediated goods in and of themselves: for it is God who differentiates, places, and discloses, God who, as Dionysius says, keeps all elements in their separate- ness and their harmony (Divine Names 8.7). An infinite gravity- an infinite kabod, an infinitely determinate beauty - embraces and gives weight to the rhythms of creation. In God, then, lies the infinite horizon of the beautiful, its always greater spaciousness, the splendor of a boundless freedom that shows it...
One might best characterize the properly Christian understanding of being as polyphony or counterpoint: having received its theme of divine love from God, the true measure of being is expressed in the restoration of that theme, in the response that submits that theme to variation and offers it back in an indefinitely prolonged and varied response (guided by the Spirit's power of modulation).
There is no substance to creation apart from these variations on God's outpourings of infinite love; all the themes of creation depart from the first theme that is mysteriously unfolded in the Trinity, forever complete and forever calling forth new intonations, new styles of accompaniment and response.
The circular, "synthetic;' and pleromatic grandeur of the Hegelian infinite and the chaotic, univocal, and unharmonizable flux of the postmodern infinite are equally dreary; but the Christian infinite, free of the mechanical hypotaxis of the one and the boring boisterousness of the other, yields a profuse and irreducible parataxis, a boundless flood of beauties, beyond synthesis, but utterly open to analogy, complexity, variations, and refrains.
Within such an infinite, the Spirit's power to redeem discordant lines is one not of higher resolution but of reorientation, a restoration of each line's scope of harmonic openness to every other line.
It is the promise of Christian faith that, eschatologically, the music of all creation will be restored not as a totality in which all the discords of evil necessarily participated, but as an accomplished harmony from which all such discords, along with their false profundities, have been exorcised by way of innumerable "tonal" (or pneumatological) reconciliations. This is the sense in which theology should continue to speak of the world in terms of a harmonia mundi, a musica mundana, or the song of creation.
....let me stipulate that creation can never be understood, in Christian thought, simply as a text that conceals a more fundamental set of abstract meanings, to which all its particularities can be reduced; when I use the word "theme" here, I mean it in its strictly musical sense, to indicate a phrase or motif, a point of departure, which is neither more true nor less complex than the series of variations to which it gives rise. The "theme" of creation is the gift of the whole, committed to limitless possibilities, open to immeasurable ranges of divergence and convergence, consonance and dissonance (which always allows for the possibility of discord), and unpredictable modulations that at once restore and restate that theme.
The truly interesting feature of Augustine's thought on the matter, though, is his way of relating the soul - as a rhythmic sequence, a repetition that retains the memory of what has gone before - to the rhythms of creation: virtue is, he argues (very like Gregory), the establishment of the soul's proper rhythm (De quantitate animae 55); and the soul that is virtuous is one that turns its rhythms (or numbers, numeri) not to the domination of others, but to their benefit (De musica 6.14-45).
As Leo Spitzer, in his magisterial Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, remarks, "According to the Pythagoreans, it was cosmic order which was identifiable with music; according to the Christian philosophers, it was love. And in the ordo amoris of Augustine we have evidently a blend of the Pagan and the Christian themes: henceforth 'order' is love." Such a change in emphasis was natural: for Christian dogma all beauty and order belong eminently to the order of the trinitarian relations, and so have no basis profounder than love.
Creation is not, that is, a music that explicates some prior and undifferentiated content within the divine, nor the composite order that is, of necessity, imposed upon some intractable substrate so as to bring it into imperfect conformity with an ideal harmony; it is simply another expression or inflection of the music that eternally belongs to God, to the dance and difference, address and response, of the Trinity.
Dionysian rhythm, that is to say, embraced within the incessant drumbeat of being's unica vox as it repeats itself endlessly, from whose beat difference erupts as a perpetual divergence; and even if Dionysus allows the odd irenic caesura in his dance - the occasional beautiful sequence - it constitutes only a slacken- ing of a tempo, a momentary paralysis o fhis limbs, a reflective interval that still never arrests the underlying beat of difference. Theology, though, starting from the Christian narrative of creation out of nothingness, effected by the power and love of the God who is Trinity, might well inquire whether rhythm could not be the prior truth of things, and chaos only an illusion, the effect of a certain convulsive or discordant beat, the repetition of a sinful series.
It may well be that each and every "essence" subsists upon its own interior repetition, like the return - always varied, stated with a new beat and a different harmony - of the phrase from Monsieur Vinteuil's sonata that haunts the narrator of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu for many years, and equally true that difference and repetition are the only forces of essence; but does the distribution of difference occur always in the stress between a formless chaos and the invariable beat of the dance of Dionysus, or is the rhythm or music of being already sufficiently various in itself, already differentiated into analogical complexities, and already sufficiently flexible to liberate difference endlessly? Is the music of being that of Dionysus, or is it something more like infinite counterpoint, a music like Bach's?
If the trinitarian life is always already one of infinite musical richness, "heard" by God in its fullness, in the inexhaustible variety of its phrasings and harmonies, and if creation is a complementary music, an end- less sequence of variations upon the theme of God's eternal love, then there is no aboriginal sublime that surpasses the moment of the beautiful; rather, the sublime appears as a particularly intense serial display of beauty, a particularly weighty manifestation of God's glory (but all terror may be turned into praise).
Or there is the fabricated sublimity of evil, the immense discords of sin that disrupt charity's unfolding, derange every series, and resist every analogical path of recovery of the divine· theme. Being as God gives it, though, is originally nothing but degrees of splendor, hierarchies of beauty; creation is divine glory, told anew, and so its aesthetic variety is nothing but the differing modes and degrees with which participated being is imparted.
Creation's rhythm is analogical, not the interminable monotony of the "univocal" event, and so becomes ever more actual as its complexity and beauty increase in intensity- as, that is, it participates more fully in the richness of God's infinite “form”.
Can there be real difference that does not arise within a thematic motion? Can there be a theme that is not also al- ready a changing, disseminative diversity? And is the language of the sublime that postmodernism often adopts not then a new version of romantic Sturm und Drang, indeed the last gasp of romanticism?
Honestly, it is difficult to be convinced by a discourse of difference and distance that attempts at the same time to be a discourse of Heracleitean flux, because there is no distance in the flux: all dimensions are consumed before they arise. This is the "totality" in the aleatory: every moment of repetition is a singularity that entirely (or, if one prefers, virtually) contains the shape of the whole, a Leibnizian monad that is no longer in any meaningful sense a "perspective" on the whole, because the whole is a sublime, unmediated, absolute presence.
For Christian thought, on the other hand, true distance is given in an event, a motion, that is transcendent: a pure prolation in which all patterns are "anticipated," in an infinitely fulfilled way that allows for every possibility; it even makes space for the possibilities of discord, while also always providing, out of its analogical bounty, ways of return, of unwinding the coils of sin, of healing the wounds of violence (the Holy Spirit is a supremely inventive composer).
It is transcendence, the divine distance, with its analogical scope, that prevents presence from being totality, and this distance is the original "thematism" - the transcendent act of music - that makes real difference possible: repetition can occur only within a thematism that differentiates repe- tition from what it repeats, and yet allows it to be, quite precisely, repetition.
This "first difference" is the ontological difference, the primordial analogical disproportion between God's infinite transcendence and finite becoming that is the act of creation. This difference is itself the theme, present in every moment of the ontic, that inaugurates all the variations of finitude; and as this difference is a movement of grace within the triune act of divine being, all the variations that follow from it testify to the Trinity (in their being, form, and particular splendor).
If for Lyotard the sublime (conceived as the unpresentable) must be the starting point of modern aesthetics, beauty remains the still more original point of departure for a Christian aesthetics, because the sheer interminability of beauty's serial display can always overtake every invariable sublimity, and submit it to the analogy of beauty. The beautiful surpasses the sublime because beauty is capable of endless intricacy, and so is able to "present" anything; and the sublime, whether as an effect of immensity or disorder, still never ceases to belong to an infinite display that, from another vantage, may be grasped in its beauty (and, within this display, other perspectives are never wanting).
The quantity of beauty always appears in a distance that is the distance of God, and seen thus, it appears as glory, weight, splendor. And the ordering of desire toward the infinite God allows creatures to see all the differ- ences of creation not only as proximate mediations of divine glory, but also as mediated goods in and of themselves: for it is God who differentiates, places, and discloses, God who, as Dionysius says, keeps all elements in their separate- ness and their harmony (Divine Names 8.7). An infinite gravity- an infinite kabod, an infinitely determinate beauty - embraces and gives weight to the rhythms of creation. In God, then, lies the infinite horizon of the beautiful, its always greater spaciousness, the splendor of a boundless freedom that shows it...
One might best characterize the properly Christian understanding of being as polyphony or counterpoint: having received its theme of divine love from God, the true measure of being is expressed in the restoration of that theme, in the response that submits that theme to variation and offers it back in an indefinitely prolonged and varied response (guided by the Spirit's power of modulation).
There is no substance to creation apart from these variations on God's outpourings of infinite love; all the themes of creation depart from the first theme that is mysteriously unfolded in the Trinity, forever complete and forever calling forth new intonations, new styles of accompaniment and response.
The circular, "synthetic;' and pleromatic grandeur of the Hegelian infinite and the chaotic, univocal, and unharmonizable flux of the postmodern infinite are equally dreary; but the Christian infinite, free of the mechanical hypotaxis of the one and the boring boisterousness of the other, yields a profuse and irreducible parataxis, a boundless flood of beauties, beyond synthesis, but utterly open to analogy, complexity, variations, and refrains.
Within such an infinite, the Spirit's power to redeem discordant lines is one not of higher resolution but of reorientation, a restoration of each line's scope of harmonic openness to every other line.
It is the promise of Christian faith that, eschatologically, the music of all creation will be restored not as a totality in which all the discords of evil necessarily participated, but as an accomplished harmony from which all such discords, along with their false profundities, have been exorcised by way of innumerable "tonal" (or pneumatological) reconciliations. This is the sense in which theology should continue to speak of the world in terms of a harmonia mundi, a musica mundana, or the song of creation.
....let me stipulate that creation can never be understood, in Christian thought, simply as a text that conceals a more fundamental set of abstract meanings, to which all its particularities can be reduced; when I use the word "theme" here, I mean it in its strictly musical sense, to indicate a phrase or motif, a point of departure, which is neither more true nor less complex than the series of variations to which it gives rise. The "theme" of creation is the gift of the whole, committed to limitless possibilities, open to immeasurable ranges of divergence and convergence, consonance and dissonance (which always allows for the possibility of discord), and unpredictable modulations that at once restore and restate that theme.
The theme is present in all its modifications, for once it is given it is recuperated throughout, not as a return of the Same but as gratitude, as a new giving of the gift, as what is remembered and as what, consequently, is invented. The truth of the theme is found in its unfolding, forever. God's glory is an infinite "thematism" whose beauty and variety can never be exhausted, and as the richness of creation traverses the distance of God's infmite music, the theme is always being given back. Because God imparts the theme, it is not simply unitary and epic but obeys a trinitarian logic: it yields to a contrapuntal multiplicity allowing for the unfolding of endlessly many differing phrases, new accords, "explicating" the "complication" of divine music. The theme is not an idea but a concrete figural substance, an insistence and recurrence, a contour of joy, a donation.
In short, it is a "thematism of the surface;' not a thematic "content" more essential than created difference: a style of articulation, a way of ordering desire and apprehending the "shape" of being, its proportions, dimensions, and rhythms. Being is a surface of supplementarity, an expressive fabric forever filling itself out into ever greater adornments of the divine love, a porrection of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, to creation and, thereby, to the Father."
In short, it is a "thematism of the surface;' not a thematic "content" more essential than created difference: a style of articulation, a way of ordering desire and apprehending the "shape" of being, its proportions, dimensions, and rhythms. Being is a surface of supplementarity, an expressive fabric forever filling itself out into ever greater adornments of the divine love, a porrection of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, to creation and, thereby, to the Father."
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