Sermon 12, 2016 — The Divine Character of Music

Sermon 12, 2016 — The Divine Character of Music

Today, in honor of my dear student Cami, I am reprising sections of a few previous sermons on the subject of music, and the larger subject of divine forms in human expression; in addition I will recite a number of aphorisms about music by well-known authors. 

I begin with the premise that music is the expression of Divine Truth in a very special or should I say “specialized” sense

In 2015 I wrote:

“It is too bad that the word "muse" has come to have such lightweight connotations. Nowadays the "muse" is thought of as the offhand, faraway smile of a supine loiterer, lightly skimming the surface of his subconscious, dreaming, a blade of grass between his lips. The purpose of this article is to promote and underline the idea that the "muse" in music, far from being the mere tickling of the subconscious fancy, is the very voice of God whispering bright secrets in our ears. Music is power from on high; as such, music can advance the spiritual progress of all those involved in it, and create change in the physical world. 

Like any great and powerful truth, music is generally vulgarized by the mundane consciousness into a sonic bubblebath; sound waves that help us block out city sounds, massage our jangled nerves, entertain our houseplants, and make our cows give more milk. This physical aspect of music is also a potent tool of Satan as he uses it to elicit low-vibration responses from our defenseless, ignorant youngsters.

The misuse of something good, however, does not make it bad. Music is essentially good (even though many of its linguistic derivatives are very bad indeed) for a very particular reason: music, more than any other art, is heaven sent. Music is divine reality manifested in our physical world for the purpose of raising consciousness to a higher-than-mundane level. The goodness of music is good in ways we cannot understand or predict. If music is symbolic, or representational in any way, it is symbolic of itself, God's truth seeking to change us from children of the earth to children of God.

The truths expressed in painting, poetry, and dance, almost universally refer to physical realities. Pictures (even imaginary pictures, if they are seen with physical eyes), and words (even abstract words like soul and God, if they are understood with the lower, literal mind), must have material referents or they would not exist. The referential sources of the literal and graphic arts necessarily objectify our experience of those arts at a basic level. Since the referential source of music is not of this world, there is nothing to objectify; thus, music, at the outset is subjective, a quantum leap closer to the language of the soul than anything it is possible for the referential arts to express. 

This is not to say that divine inspiration does not enter into the work of great painters, or that divine instruction transmitted through the scriptures does not influence us toward right action; but true divine understanding is not literal, it cannot be understood in words, and cannot be expressed in words. Understanding of divine knowledge comes through direct experience. Any other type of understanding is by analogy only, and is therefore a pale reflection of the reality. Hence, the main subject of this presentation is the experience of music; not what it says to us, but what it does to us.

Armstrong treats metaphor as "the being of the work of art; through metaphor it exists as the actual, incarnated being of . . . non-verbal affective life" (1971:xxi). He argues that affecting presences, as works or events witnessed, are "constituted, in a primordial and intransigent fashion, of basic cultural psychic conditions--not symbols of those conditions but specific enactments--presentations--of those very conditions . . . the affecting presence is not a 'semblance' but an actuality . . . in cultural terms it presents rather than represents" (1975:24). The media of such affecting presences are the minima of this presentational state, and metaphor is the mode of affecting existence, "a process by means of which the artist creates in various spatial and temporal media states of affective being" (1975:62).”

From a sermon given in 2012 I said:

“My life's deepest energies have been spent finding ways to transcend the problem of the abstract in art, to reveal high-level abstract concepts in the process of enlivening flesh and blood vessels, such that every note of musico/mathematical sense is also dignified by the transforming energy of the divine, raising it from a noisy, vainglorious cry of egotistical territoriality, into an incarnation of the Christ Consciousness; thus, music transduces spirit, through the flesh, into human form. It is the humanity of music that is truly spiritual, because it is the human that is illuminated with heavenly light. To be a great artist, it was necessary for me to learn that: it is my own humanity that dignifies my music, not the dignity of art that makes it human. Every piece is an anomaly, every person who hears it is an unique undying soul. . . .

The path of spirituality is a path toward the Eternal Moment. The miracle of music is the brand of eternal moment that I prefer. Music puts me in touch (I SAY TOUCH) with supernatural realities every day. Music is an alchemy of transformation, a process by which abstract ideas appearing, on the mental plane, are given form in the material world. Remember, I didn't always think this--I used to think music REPRESENTED something. I no longer think this; I now know that music is a channel through which divine intelligence manifests itself, and touches us, and moves us. . . .

The language of music and the language of prayer are quintessentially the same.”

In 2015 I contemplated the idea of divine forms in nature and in art. From Wikipedia I found some material on divine form:

Aristotelian forms

“Aristotle was the first to distinguish between matter (hyle) and form (morphe). For Aristotle, matter is the undifferentiated primal element: it is rather that from which things develop than a thing in itself. The development of particular things from this germinal matter consists in differentiation, the acquiring of particular forms of which the knowable universe consists (cf. Formal cause). The perfection of the form of a thing is its entelechy in virtue of which it attains its fullest realization of function (De anima, ii. 2). Thus the entelechy of the body is the soul. The origin of the differentiation process is to be sought in a prime mover, i.e. pure form entirely separate from all matter, eternal, unchangeable, operating not by its own activity but by the impulse which its own absolute existence excites in matter.”

Thus, natural forms come into existence through the impulse of the prime mover acting upon matter; so much more, then, must a work of art created consciously to the glory of God, act upon the soul. I love the sentence:

“pure form entirely separate from all matter, eternal, unchangeable, operating not by its own activity but by the impulse which its own absolute existence excites in matter.”

The idea of an "absolute existence" exciting activity in matter, is such vivid and resonant language, it makes me feel the impulse of the Father radiating through the very muscles of my body.

Commenting on this principle, Boethius, in his The Consolation of Philosophy (520-562 A.D), has improved the language of Aristotle by labeling this undifferentiated primal element, “the unchanging mind of God”:

“The engendering of all things, the whole advance of all changing natures, and every motion and progress in the world, draw their causes, their order, and their forms from the allotment of the unchanging mind of God, which lays manifold restrictions on all action from the calm fortress of its own directness. Such restrictions are called Providence when they can be seen to lie in the very simplicity of divine understanding; but they were called Fate in old times when they were viewed with reference to the objects which they moved or arranged. It will easily be understood that these two are very different if the mind examines the force of each. 

For Providence is the very divine reason which arranges all things, and rests with the supreme disposer of all; while Fate is that ordering which is a part of all changeable things, and by means of which Providence binds all things together in their own order. Providence embraces all things equally, however different they may be, even however infinite: when they are assigned to their own places, forms, and times, Fate sets them in an orderly motion; so that this development of the temporal order, unified in the intelligence of the mind of God, is Providence."

I find this to be a piercingly brilliant analysis of the surface quality of artworks we call “style”; Providence is the eternal voice, the angel tongue, and the sequential character of time, Fate, is the blood and brawn of a work of art. The true and the Not-True in the same package.

It’s interesting that the description of the dualistic nature of human reality has so many variously articulated opposites; we have “body and soul” “finite and infinite”, Aristotole gives us “matter and form”, Boethius gives us “fate and providence”, and, Martin Luther says, "essence implies a condition, while its expression implies action". How many ways are there to express this dualism, which seems to be deeply embedded in the PROCESS of human consciousness? Notice how our consciousness oscillates between two opposite states, just like the wave/particle behavior of photons described by the new particle physics. Notice, also, that the unchanging mind of God imposes “manifold restrictions on all action”. Here is made the first mention of form as a finite component present in an infinite process of becoming. 

I have read, many times, the following quote from C.S. Lewis’ Perelandra: 

"To those high creatures whose activity builds what we call nature, nothing is "natural." From their stations the essential arbitrariness (so to call it) of every actual creation is ceaselessly visible; for them there are no basic assumptions: all springs with the willful beauty of a jest or a tune from that miraculous moment of self-limitation wherein the Infinite, rejecting a myriad possibilities, throws out of Himself the positive elected invention."

So, no matter how much we focus on NATURAL FORMS, we always we come back to the idea of the infinite, incarnate in a finite material package. It must be that the INTERPLAY of divine forms and natural forms creates human expression. Indeed, it may well turn out that: CONSCIOUSNESS itself is a bi-product of the COMBINATION of corporeal and incorporeal elements. Perhaps this synthesis is not Pure Consciousness, but is responsible, merely, for EGO CONSCIOUSNESS. Then again, how we separate the Infinite Father, the Prime Mover, the God with No Name, from the Father of Creation, He who not only IS but DOES?

The discussion of Divine Forms yielded the following observations about the idiom in which Nature expresses Herself:

“(1) nature readily arranges itself into radiant polarities of compressed and rarefied components, and  

(2) organization into groups of like members is a very basic feature of material reality.

(1) natural systems like to arrange themselves into discrete levels of structure, thereby affirming that there is a vibratory threshold for each consciousness state, and that

(2) the acceleration of psychic events in changing dimensional frequencies is quite like the acceleration of an electron achieving escape velocity.”

Indeed, achieving escape velocity is the the name of the game when it comes to describing and experiencing the aesthetic response, or, as we have sometimes said, the “epiphany”. In my Doctoral Thesis I referred to this psychic reaction as “Recentering”, the moment when psychic material radically and instantaneously reorganizes itself to achieve a projected end condition. The moment of re-centering may be accompanied by a rush of wind, like electrons seeking a new pattern on the surface of the deep.

On this subject we read in Ezekial 3:12-14:

12 Then the spirit took me up, and I heard a voice of a great rushing, saying Blessed be the glory of the Lord from this place.

13 I heard also the noise of the wings of living creatures that touched one another, and the noise of wheels over against them, and a noise of a great rushing.

14 So the spirit lifted me up and took me away. . .

We read in Hebrews 4:12:

“For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”

Not to abandon a train of thought, but I now wish to read you some quotes about the spiritual dimension of music:

     

― Ludwig van Beethoven

“Music is ... A higher revelation than all Wisdom & Philosophy” 

― Johann Sebastian Bach

“Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.” 

—Boethius

“I who once wrote songs with keen delight am now by sorrow driven to take up melancholy measures. Wounded Muses tell me what I must write, and elegiac verses bathe my face with real tears. Not even terror could drive from me these faithful companions of my long journey. Poetry, which was once the glory of my happy and flourishing youth, is still my comfort in this misery of my old age.”

On St Thomas Aquinas—by Basil Cole

“Aquinas used the notion of beauty to help understand that the creation of the world is shot through with beauty. [1] Looking at his commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius we discover that the reason for God's creative act is reduced to his beauty. [2] God wanted to make things like to himself who is Beauty per se. Hence the beauty of creation is spoken of in the following manner: "The beauty of the creature is nothing else than the likeness of the divine beauty participated in things"; [3] ". . . whence it is evident that from the divine beauty is derived the existence of all things." [4] So, it follows that each thing is beautiful in its own way. [5] Aquinas also says that this divine beauty gives unity, mutual adaptations, agreements in ideas and friendship. [6]

From another point of view, beauty of spirit consists in conversations and actions which are well formed and suffused with intelligence. [7] Therefore, from the point of view of morals and spirituality, the beauty of an entire life is founded upon the virtuous life which consists in the co-ordination of many human acts and emotions according to reason. [8] Because the instincts and emotions are brought under the order of reason, this inner activity of the human person, like a musician's, harmonizes, and sets in proportion the human life of the person. [9] On the other hand, immoderate pleasure sought for its own sake" . . . dulls the light of reason, from which comes all clarity and beauty of virtue." [10] 

But the life of virtue is not only suggested by good music, it also helps one for contemplation. What is contemplation? For Aquinas, it means many things from the point of view of thinking about and loving God. But looked at entirely from a natural perspective, it is "a simple gaze upon the truth." [11] In the same citation, he relies on Richard of St. Victor's notion that "contemplation is the soul's penetrating and easy gaze on things perceived." This definition is easily transferable from philosophy to all the arts of the beautiful including music. To listen to music is to contemplate something beautiful which is a structured truth of a made thing itself and may also (if allied with poetry) contain extra-musical truth either from faith or reason.”

― Martin Luther

"I, Doctor Martin Luther, wish all lovers of the unshackled art of music grace and peace from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ!

I truly desire that all Christians would love and regard as worthy the lovely gift of music, which is a precious, worthy, and costly treasure given to mankind by God.

The riches of music are so excellent and so precious that words fail me whenever I attempt to discuss and describe them.... In summa, next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world. It controls our thoughts, minds, hearts, and spirits...

The devil, the originator of sorrowful anxieties and restless troubles, flees before the sound of music almost as much as before the Word of God....Music is a gift and grace of God, not an invention of men. Thus it drives out the devil and makes people cheerful. Then one forgets all wrath, impurity, and other devices.” 

― Henry David Thoreau

“When I hear music, I fear no danger. I am invulnerable. I see no foe. I am related to the earliest times, and to the latest.” 

― Friedrich Nietzsche

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” 

― Langston Hughes

“Life is for the living.

Death is for the dead.

Let life be like music. 

And death a note unsaid.” 

Joseph Campbell on The Grateful Dead:

“Rock music has never seemed that interesting to me,” he commented in a lecture shortly after the concert. But what the Dead did was profoundly inspiring: “when you see 8,000 kids all going up in the air together … Listen, this is powerful stuff!” What he saw reminded him of the Dionysian festivals, palpable proof of his theory that the ancient myths and rituals he studied still echoed today. “This is more than music,” he told his audience. “It turns something on in here [the heart]. And what it turns on is life energy. This is Dionysus talking through these kids.” Campbell's understanding of Dionysus was far deeper and more nuanced than the popular caricature of the happy, wine-soaked god, but his point was not to rehabilitate that older understanding. “It doesn't matter what the name of the god is, or whether it's a rock group or a clergy,” he concluded. “It's somehow hitting that chord of realization of the unity of God in you all.”

Rudolf Steiner—from Speech and Song:

“If we study the human organism as it stands before us here on earth, we know that it is through and through an image of the spiritual. Everything here — not only what man bears in himself, but also what surrounds him in external nature — is an image of the spiritual. Now when man expresses himself in speech or in song, he is really manifesting his whole nature — body, soul and spirit — not only outwardly but inwardly. In all that he brings forth by way of sound — whether the articulate sounds of speech or the musical notes of song — the full human being is in fact contained.”

― Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays

“From pure sensation to the intuition of beauty, from pleasure and pain to love and the mystical ecstasy and death — all the things that are fundamental, all the things that, to the human spirit, are most profoundly significant, can only be experienced, not expressed. The rest is always and everywhere silence.

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

In a different mode, or another plane of being, music is the equivalent of some of man’s most significant and most inexpressible experiences. By mysterious analogy it evokes in the mind of the listener, sometimes the phantom of these experiences, sometimes even the experiences themselves in their full force of life — it is a question of intensity; the phantom is dim, the reality, near and burning. Music may call up either; it is chance or providence which decides. The intermittences of the heart are subject to no known law.”

—William James

“We do, it is true, when we study the connection between a musical note and its outward cause, find the note simple and continuous while the cause is multiple and discrete. Somewhere, then, there is a transformation, reduction, or fusion. The question is, Where – in the nerve-world or in the mind-world?”

― Robert Browning

“Who hears music, feels his solitude

Peopled at once.” 

― John Keats

“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on.” 

― Leopold Stokowski

“A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.” 

― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

“The music is not in the notes,

but in the silence between.” 

“The only truth is music.” 

― Jack Kerouac

― Elvis Costello

“Can a mere song change a people's minds? I doubt that it is so. But a song can infiltrate your heart and the heart may change your mind.” 

― Frank Zappa

“Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.” 

― Albert Schweitzer

“There are two means of refuge from the misery of life — music and cats.” 

The preceding presentation is meant to sensitize us to the potentials for spiritual experience through music—to emphasize the possibility of achieving a higher-dimensional consciousness through music.

I have contacted this higher dimension, routinely, through my music, and it is my music that I have always depended on to carry me to the end. The message I am getting in prayer lately is that I need to energize my spiritual organs of perception with a new and different kind of sensitivity. 

I cannot describe the actual technique of this energizing other than to say it involves opening my eyes and bolstering my faith through an act of will--of desire. But the bottom line is always Jesus--Jesus is the cavalry coming to the rescue, every single time. When I forget to call Him, or out of pride refuse to call Him, I fall into misery, doubt, and panic. When I just open my heart to Him, trust Him, adore Him, I am safe, serene, and free. There, in the meeting place between me and Jesus, is my joy. And this joy flows out of me in waves of song.

Let us pray: Jesus, we adore you in our petty ways, and fancy that we approach the mountaintop. To me the mountain seems still distant, but each day draws me closer, and with Your deliverance I sing out, with the angels, that one day this knowledge will be mine. Amen