4. An Adorative Posture towards Music and Spiritual Realities

©2024 Férdia J. Stone-Davis, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0403.04

In the preface to the Proslogion, Anselm (d. 1109) notes that he wrote the work ‘from the point of view of one trying to raise his mind to the contemplation of God and seeking to understand what he believes’.1 This idea of ‘faith seeking understanding’ is a complex one. However, if we take our cue from accounts that suggest that reason and faith do not have to be separated but are, at their foundation, inseparable, we may find a fruitful way into the connection between music and spiritual realities, and perceptions thereof. How so? In the first instance, the connection between faith and understanding indicates the positionality of any assertion that music might be theological, religious, or spiritual, thereby delimiting the kind of ‘demonstration’ that might be possible.2 Indeed, ‘faith seeking understanding’ may intimate that attention to how we approach the question of the relationship between music and such realities may be more productive than ‘demonstration’ of that relationship per se. In the second instance, the connection between faith and understanding might suggest a particular relationship between music’s materiality and our imaginative engagement with it, one that transforms sound into music and more broadly instantiates (or exemplifies) faith in ‘something more’. Finally, and in the third instance, this relationship may usefully be unpacked in terms of a movement that ultimately marks a shift towards the ‘adorative’ (one that proceeds in and through the material), that is, our elevation towards God.

In relation to the first point—the recognition embedded within the claim ‘faith seeking understanding’ that any assertion of theological, religious, or spiritual meaning in music is always and already embedded in a prior set of commitments—it is helpful to recall the intimate relationship between music and transcendence. In some sense music has transcendence built into its very structure, since its meaning is irreducible, resisting paraphrase or concise explication. Whilst this is true of all artforms to an extent—with linguistic paraphrase only scratching the surface of how and in what way a particular artform means—the case seems to be more pronounced in the instance of music, with questions of ‘ineffability’ coming more readily to the fore.3 The nature of the ineffability remains in question, however, since there is ambiguity as to whether the resistance characteristic of music relates to an epistemological transcendence (that is, the recognition that access to ‘reality’ broadly conceived is limited and incomplete) or an ontological transcendence (which entails the idea that there is an entity or realm that is inaccessible to human reason).4

Not only is music’s structure bound up with the idea of transcendence, but music enables humans to ‘transcend’ in diverse ways that are differently conceived across time, in distinct contexts and according to individual and social perspectives.5 In this sense there is no one understanding of music’s transcendence that outdoes another. This is especially the case given our present concern. If the category of ‘spiritual’ is incorporated into the remit of the kinds of reality that music affords,6 the notion of transcendence ought to remain purposively fluid as a category. This is because spirituality itself is multifaceted and broad in scope, and so too the conceptions of transcendence connected to it. For, understandings of transcendence differ according to what individuals take to be the ultimate value or end of their spirituality.7

The open scope of music’s meanings is also bound up with the idea of transcendence itself. To transcend is to go beyond. Understood as such, the term has a wide application to a variety of phenomena and across a range of disciplines.8 Within the domains of theology and philosophy (and discussions between the two) the idea of transcendence has acquired particular relevance, as it has also in discussions of music and sense-making. Within such discussions, two understandings tend to prevail: transcendence is either conceived in vertical terms, situated in relation to an ‘absolute’ that lies beyond the material, or is unpacked in horizontal terms, remaining situated within the ‘immanent’ and the material. Mark Johnson helpfully conceptualises the vertical and horizontal forms of transcendence thus: vertical transcendence is the ‘alleged capacity to rise above and shed our finite form and to “plug into the infinite”’. Horizontal transcendence ‘recognises the inescapability of human finitude and is compatible with the embodiment of meaning, and personal identity. From this human perspective, transcendence consists in our happy ability to sometimes “go beyond” our present situation in transformative acts that change both our world and ourselves’.9 All this is to say that music can accrue significance by lifting us out of certain situations, charging and changing certain frames of meaning and transforming our perspective—although it does not necessarily do so, or do so uniformly or universally—and this process can be understood and elaborated in various ways, theological, religious, and spiritual (as well as ways that are not thus classed).

Given the backdrop of the dictum ‘faith seeking understanding’ and the fluid nature of musical meaning (which, as has been suggested, it may differ from person to person and evolves over time), and the inchoate character of transcendence, it seems unreasonable to delimit a priori how and in what way music enables transcendence. Furthermore, making authoritative claims about the kind of transcendence that is entailed by any one experience seems unwarranted. If by demonstration we mean something akin to a certain scientific method that aims towards causal knowledge and general truths via an inductive and empirically grounded procedure, the very fluidity of music’s meaning suggests that ‘demonstration’ is not the most fruitful way of discussing music in relation to theological, religious, and spiritual realities.10 This is because the slipperiness of music and our experience of it prevents the possibility of ‘proving’ in any categorical sense that applies at a generic level to all music and/or all theological, religious, or spiritual realities (or any conflation of these) in all instances. The idea of demonstration may be more relevant if we take it to mean ‘pointing out’ and ‘drawing attention to’ features of a particular music experience that by virtue of certain characteristics can be tethered to theological, religious, or spiritual concepts and considerations (such that one can say, for example, ‘this is how I felt at this point in the music and this is how I understand this feeling’). If we construe the role of demonstrating thus, we can discuss music’s meanings, and identify potential points of convergence (even if differently elucidated).11 It may be, however, that speaking in terms of how we ‘approach’ the question of how music relates to theological, religious, and spiritual realities has a certain advantage over demonstration, one also that does not entail the conflict of horizontal and vertical senses of transcendence but allows their coexistence, as we shall see.

To the second point, ‘faith seeking understanding’ might suggest a particular relationship between music’s materiality and our imaginative engagement with it, one that is involved in transforming sound into music and that involves orienting us in a way that ‘looks through and beyond’ the physical. The thought of Roger Scruton on music is helpful in this regard. The relationship between music and sound is of a piece with the cognitive dualism Scruton upholds, that is, the recognition that the world can be understood in two incommensurable ways, ‘the way of science, and the way of inter-personal understanding’.12 He suggests that, although music is constituted within and through the physical realm it is not explicable solely by means of it, something a ‘resolutely physicalist approach’ would maintain.13 Rather, music emerges from sounds, becoming more than them. To explain: according to Scruton, sounds are not reducible to their causes and are therefore secondary objects. ‘They are produced by physical disturbances, but are not identical with those disturbances, and can be understood without reference to their physical causes’.14 It is on this basis that Scruton posits sounds as ‘pure events’.15 Sounds are ‘things that happen, but which don’t happen to anything’¹⁶ and it is this that enables humans to ‘impose upon them an order that is quite independent of any physical order in the world’.17 Moreover, it is their detachability (in this sense) which grounds music:

The ability of pure events to stand in perceived relations to each other independent of any perceived relations between their causes is a deep presupposition of music, in which note follows note according to the internal logic of the musical line, giving rise to a virtual causality that has nothing to do with the process whereby sounds are produced … music is an extreme case of something that we witness throughout the sound world, which is the internal organisation of sounds as pure events.18

On the basis of the detachability of sound from its source, Scruton maintains that our experience of music is ‘acousmatic’.19 In music, Scruton suggests, people focus on what can be heard in sounds: ‘[w]hat they then hear is not a succession of sounds, but a movement between tones, governed by a virtual causality that resides in the musical line’.20 Thus, ‘[t]he first note of the melody brings the second into being, even though the first sound is produced by someone blowing on a horn at one end of the orchestra, the second by someone pulling a bow across a cello string at the other’.21

Now, whilst the extent to which Scruton articulates the distinction between sounds and music is problematic (on the one hand, it undermines his own cognitive dualism such that it verges on ontological dualism and, on the other hand, it prioritises the acousmatic to such a degree that the acoustic becomes peripheral to music-making, a claim that obscures as much about the musical experience as it elucidates),22 what it valuably illuminates is the way in which we ‘read into’ or rather ‘hear into’ musical sounds, making sense of them.23 That is, musical sounds are never simply given but are imaginatively engaged with, and this engagement can take many different forms, bring many different frames of reference (religious and otherwise) to bear, and enable different kinds of participation and attention.

If musical listening thus involves ‘hearing into’ sound, it is possible that in certain instances it can entail ‘hearing beyond’, in this sense moving past an understanding of music as an object to understanding music as a subject. To suggest that art might be viewed as person-like is not new. In his book Seeing Things: Deepening Relations with Visual Artefacts (2007), Stephen Pattison suggests that art and artefacts are usefully considered as full of intention and emotion and that it is advantageous to take seriously our person-like relationships with them, as well as their interaction in personal ways. This is on the basis that such artefacts have been created by human persons who have filled them with intention, emotion, agency, and communication (although the artefact transcends these human origins), as well as the observation that we do in fact treat some objects as having person-like qualities.24 Pattison does not thereby suggest that every artefact is as important to the human moral community as every human being, nor hold that every artefact deserves the same respect and treatment as a sentient creature, but that they ought to be given due consideration.25

The person-like character of music has also been posited by Scruton, who suggests the fruitfulness of an analogy between musical understanding and interpersonal understanding. In each case, experience emerges in response to something that appears at the ‘brink’ of the empirical world. In the case of interpersonal understanding, I am addressed by another human person who, as such, is not only an object in the world but is also a subject. That is, like me, self-conscious. Within this interaction my awareness of the person extends beyond what is immediately evident, that is, beyond the observable, and grasps towards an intentionality that can neither be captured by, nor reduced to, purely empirical investigation and causal explanation. As Scruton puts it: ‘Each human object is also a subject, addressing us in looks, gestures and words, from the transcendental horizon of the “I”. Our responses to others aim towards that horizon, passing on beyond the body to the being it incarnates’.26

Similarly, within its acousmatic space, music exhibits intentionality, operating by means of the freedom and necessity implied by its virtual causality. That is, in ‘successful’ works of music, ‘there is a reason for each note, though not necessarily a reason that could be put into words. Each note is a response to the one preceding it and an invitation to its successor’.27 On this basis, Scruton affirms the analogy between musical intentionality and human intentionality:

It [music] moves as we move, with reasons for what it does and a sense of purpose (which might at any moment evaporate, like the purposes of people). It has the outward appearance of inner life, so to speak, and although it is heard and not seen, it is heard as the voice is heard, and understood like the face—as a revelation of free subjectivity.28

As we have seen, the idea of ‘something more’ is built into our engagement with the materiality of music in two ways. First, musical listening involves ‘hearing into’ sound, imaginatively creating a musical object that peels away from sound to create an intentional realm of musical movement. Second, musical listening facilitates ‘hearing beyond’ sound, attending to music as if it were a subject, a revelation of something beyond (but not detached from) what is presented to us. In both cases, one can understand how music might thus facilitate and cultivate an attention to, and trust of, that which resists and/or eludes definitive conceptualisation, and, in certain instances, how it might be associated with theological, religious, or spiritual realities.

‘Faith seeking understanding’ is also a fruitful way to envisage the connection between music and theological, religious, and spiritual realities by positing a movement towards the ‘adorative’ (one that proceeds in and through the material), that is, our elevation towards God. In adopting this language, I am taking my cue from Jacob Sherman’s account of Anselm,29 building on the account of ‘hearing in’ and ‘hearing beyond’ outlined above, and working from two contextual markers surrounding Anselm’s phrase. The first contextual marker concerns the relationship between faith and reason. In the pre-modern period, the two are not sharply divided. Grant Kaplan notes: ‘The understanding arrived at through the rational, cogitative activity takes place on the same graced continuum as faith. Understanding—intellectus—does not mean the rational pursuit that humans undertake on their own’.30 This ties in with the second contextual marker, which is the framing of Anselm’s ontological argument within the context of prayer: ‘You who give understanding to faith, grant me that I may understand, as much as You see fit, that You exist as we believe You to exist, and that You are what we believe You to be’.31 Indeed, as has been observed by Marilyn McCord Adams:

[T]he Proslogion alternates prayer exercises, designed to stir the emotions and will (in chapters 1, 14–18, and 24–26) so that the soul may seek by desiring and desire by seeking, with the hope of finding by loving and loving by finding, with sections of intellectual inquiry into the being of God (chapters 2–13 and 18–23) thereby focusing and refocusing the whole self as its investigation spirals upward toward increasingly inaccessible matters.32

What both of these contextual markers point towards is the fact that theological, religious and spiritual knowledge is not neutral and detached—a matter of ‘pure’ intellectual speculation—but involves an orientation, both in terms of predisposition, but also in terms of transformation.

In this sense, John Cottingham’s observation of the directional interrelation of praxis, faith, and truth is insightful: ‘religious truth can only be accessed via faith, and faith can only be acquired via a living tradition of religious praxis’.33 That is, knowledge arises from a way of being that is always and already anchored in a perspective on the world, an attitude towards it, and a practice within it. In his discussion of this, Cottingham reflects on Martha Nussbaum’s essay ‘Love’s Knowledge’34 and the idea she explores there of knowledge of love, which she does through the comparison of two contrasting stories, Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu and Ann Beattie’s ‘Learning to Fall’. As Cottingham glosses, Nussbaum suggests that ‘there are certain kinds of truth such that to try and grasp them purely intellectually is to avoid them’.35 Cottingham argues that religious knowledge is one such form of knowledge, drawing attention to a passage from Nussbaum’s text to indicate how this is so:

The attitude we have before a philosophical text can look, by contrast [to Ann Beattie’s story], retentive and unloving—asking for reasons, questioning and scrutinizing each claim, wresting clarity from the obscure … Before a literary work [of the kind described] we are humble, open, active yet porous. Before a philosophical work … we are active, controlling, aiming to leave no flank undefended and no mystery undispelled.36

There is something about the posture involved in attending to literary texts, and in relation to religious knowledge, that is distinct from the kind of knowledge that aims to comprehend in a clear, absolute, and final way. Cottingham notes that it is because the truths of religion are ‘beyond the direct comprehension of the human mind, that an attempt to grasp them head on via the tools of logical analysis is, in a certain sense, to evade them’.37 Importantly, as is apparent from Nussbaum’s account, the posture involved is not passive. It remains active, but is yielding, receptive, and open-ended. It involves a ‘porousness’ to what is encountered such that ‘interior change’ can take place. In the case of spiritual praxis, it is thus, for Cottingham, that the way is paved for ‘the operation of grace’.38

Influenced by Nussbaum, Cottingham’s account resonates strongly with two interrelated moments of Sherman’s account of Anselm on reason, which are of special importance. The first moment is the observation that for Anselm ‘[a]t its highest pitch, intellect is no longer domineering, but adorative. The intellect is itself suspended, but joyously so, by that which infinitely exceeds it and unceasingly gives it to itself’.39 The second moment is the identification of the difference between Anselm and the Fool as a difference not of conceptual clarity but of ‘orientation of heart’.40 It is a matter of faith. In a similar way to Cottingham, Sherman explains that for Anselm, and the entire Patristic and early medieval tradition, affective and cognitive powers existed without division in the heart, such that ‘[t]he soul can only will what it (at least inchoately) thinks, but what it thinks is governed by the propriety and energy of its loves and the history of its choices’.41 That is:

For Anselm, the adorative posture is the epistemological structure that prevents comprehension but enables knowledge. The adorative intellect avoids closure because it is not wholly determined by dialectical necessity but risks a sort of lyrical or artistic embellishment, a musement responsive to the lure of the Good.42

The affective and the cognitive are thus intertwined and propel one towards truth, as they draw on past experience but remain open to transformation. This conception suggests a certain modelling for our consideration of music experience and experience of theological, religious, and spiritual realities. In each case, the relationship is non- linear, since the adorative posture relies not only on the movement towards the object of our attention, but on its movement towards us. To illustrate this, Sherman reminds the reader of the parable of the prodigal son. He says: ‘it is not, finally, we the prodigals who return to the father, but the father who sees us while still far off, loves us, and runs to embrace us’.43 This is present in Anselm’s statement ‘Teach me to seek You, and reveal Yourself to me as I seek, because I can neither seek You if You do not teach me how, nor find You unless You reveal Yourself’.44 Just as there is our own ascent, there is first of all the divine descent.

In this chapter, I have suggested that there is a certain parallel between the way of being, or posture, that is instilled in and through music, and the way of being that gives life to the pursuit of divine truth, one that might be called adorative. In this sense, it is possible that music’s relationship to theological, religious, and spiritual realities operates at two levels. Music can cultivate an adorative attitude that involves seeing more, hearing more (and being more), and thereby offer a patterning that acts as a prolegomenon to the theological, religious, and spiritual enterprise. In opening out onto ‘something more’, music may also reveal the very same realities that it guides us towards and prepares us to receive. But this is not all. In practical terms, my account of the adorative posture may contribute to an understanding of the relationship between music and spiritual realities with three further considerations. First, it resonates with the caution against attempts to delimit the relationship to any conceptually conclusive and general forms or rules which, as noted above, tend to eradicate the differences entailed by different positionalities and by different music experiences. Second, and in so doing, it moves us away from the understanding’s tendency to control and dominate the object of its attention towards an attitude or mode of being that allows the object of attention to be, and embraces the inconclusive and the intractably open, thereby facilitating conversations about what is experienced in music, and how. Third, an emphasis upon the adorative allows a coexistence of immanent (horizontal) and absolute (vertical) forms of transcendence, since it encompasses within itself the materiality of music as well as its imaginative realms, and it does so open-endedly. As such, it indicates their situation along a vector that proceeds in and through the material and is driven by faith in ‘something more’ (and a way of being in the world), and suggests that discussions ought to include wider concerns with how music is embedded in practices and ways of life.