5. Religion, Science, and Music: An Augustinian Trinity

Bennett Zon

Although, as Sir John Templeton claims, ‘god is revealing himself … through the astonishingly productive research of modern scientists’,1 it is fair to say that religion and science have not always seen eye to eye, particularly since the late nineteenth-century. Indeed, a culture of suspicion continues to haunt their relationship today despite valiant efforts, like Templeton’s, to resolve their differences. Music can help. Music can bring religion and science together, and not simply because of its capacity to reveal spiritual realities, but because—as this chapter argues—music is intrinsically unifying. Music not only brings people together, it also brings ideas together, and it does so because it is itself unified by the very features of its own design. In this sense, music not only helps us discover spiritual realities; music is, as Augustine (354–430) suggests, those spiritual realities themselves; it is, as Templeton suggests, God revealing himself. This essay responds to those suggestions in two ways: firstly, by hypothesising a relationship between religion, science, and music today; and secondly, by testing that hypothesis against Augustine’s theo-psychological understanding of music. The conclusion summarises my findings, and points to future plans, of which the present chapter may serve as a type of pilot.

I. Religion, Science, and Music

II. Augustine

Yet if I have the experience of being moved more by the singing than by the subject matter, I admit that I am sinning and deserve punishment and then would prefer not to listen to the singer. Just look at the state I am in! Weep with me and weep for me … O Lord my God, listen! Look and see and have mercy and heal me; before your eyes I have become a puzzle to myself, and this itself is my weakness.48

So Augustine anguishes over the effect music has on his life. For Augustine that effect occurs through two forms of music: through the ordinary music we perform, compose, listen to, and dance to—the music that makes us weep; and through the extraordinary music that regulates the world—harmony, you might say: a sense of attunement with the world, or moving well—being ‘groovy’, if you will. The two forms of music are interrelated. Ordinary music is created by human beings, themselves created by God, and extraordinary music is directly created by God to reflect and embody the perfection of his unity. Augustine’s musical project is to explain how they can be brought together—how the ordinary helps us to understand the extraordinary—the earthly, the spiritual—and how, in fact, we can ascend from one to the other, from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Current research on their relationship is wide-ranging, if arguably inconclusive. Giosuè Ghisalberti, for instance, focuses on Augustine’s tears as an expression of mourning in Book 9 of his Confessions, but merely rehearses Platonic reservations over music’s capacity to suppress reason’s ability to control emotion.49 James Jirtle and Brian Brennan, conversely, read Augustine through virtue ethics and the ability to positively harness musical emotion, rather than negatively subordinate it;50 and Carol Harrison’s recent work is in much this same vein, using ‘affective cognition’ to reassess the nature of Augustine’s musical experience and its theoretical import.51 But altogether this research omits a crucial element in our understanding of Augustine’s notion of musical ascent: music brings us closer to the Trinity, and the Trinity brings us closer to God.

(a) The Trinity

Augustine traces this effect mainly in two correspondingly Trinitarian works, the Confessions and De Musica. The Confessions comprise thirteen books: the first nine are autobiographical; the remaining four, philosophical. According to Colin Starnes, books 1 to 9 represent the Father; book 10, the Son; and books 11 to 13, the Holy Spirit, ‘while each of the bigger sections can be seen as consisting of three smaller sections, each in turn devoted to one of the three persons of the Trinity’.52 Some theologians allocate Trinitarian structure differently; some perceive the structure as representing a form of Christian-Platonic spiritual ascent, from autobiography to metaphysical and theological issues, while others, still, see in its two-part division a structure based loosely around philosophical questions over God’s omnipresence and transcendence.53 In many ways De Musica is the intellectual yin to the Confessions’ emotional yang. Trenchantly metaphysical (many would say, incomprehensible), De Musica mirrors, in part, the spiritual ascent of the Confessions but without much of its breezy human accessibility. Written not long after Augustine’s conversion in 386 AD (sometime between 387 and 391 AD),54 as part of a projected set of works on the liberal arts, De Musica comprises six books, of which the first five discuss the technicalities of rhythm, metre, and verse; the last, sixth book—the vaguely comprehensible one—addresses the ascent of the soul through music.

Amongst other things, the Confessions is renowned for Augustine’s legendary ambivalence towards ordinary music: ‘The pleasures of the ear’, he cries, ‘had a more tenacious hold on me, and had subjugated me; but you [God] set me free and liberated me … my physical delight, which has to be checked from enervating the mind, often deceives me when the perception of the senses is unaccompanied by reason, and is not patiently content to be in a subordinate place … I have sometimes gone so far as to wish to banish all the melodies and sweet chants commonly used for David’s psalter from my ears and from the Church as well’.55 That tension is never really resolved, and theories explaining his predicament abound. One of the more compelling theories concerns the evolutionary ‘selfishness’ of language. According to Marica Colish, Augustine felt that, as human beings, we are congenitally predisposed to use language to exert control over our environment.56 Augustine certainly gives that impression throughout the Confessions—‘By groans and various sounds and various movements of parts of my body I would endeavour to express the intentions of my heart to persuade people to bow to my will’57—but his mistrust of language goes further. Fuelled by a pervasive mistrust of the seemingly truthless emptiness of rhetorical logic (i.e., form over content), he rails against his former self for allowing his education to be ‘aimed more at teaching eloquence than morality’.58 The link to music is obvious because music and rhetoric are both linguistic. Both have the capacity for abuse, and both have the power to exert control over reason without authority; both, more concerningly, appear doubly entwined in vocal music. The problem for Augustine is moral, as much as it is psychological—when the music is loved more than the meaning its message conveys, and more especially when the message is itself considered to be morally unsupportable: ‘woe to you’, Augustine opines, ‘if you have loved the creatures and abandoned the Creator!’59 In many respects, Augustine’s understandable fear is entirely unextraordinary, and it is easy to stop there at any explanation, but there is more to it than meets the eye, or ear, and it has to do with Augustine’s notion of divine simplicity—and the way it unites his theology and psychological science.

(b) Simplicity

When Augustine worries over our sometimes-misguided love for creatures over their Creator, he invokes a relationship borne of divine simplicity; in other words, the hypostatic relationship of the Trinity, and the Trinity’s relationship to God’s creation. For Augustine , creation and the substance of God are one: ‘God is simple, that is, in God all qualities are identical with God’s essence’.60 For Scott Dunham, that means that human participation in creation—being, in as many words—occurs only through our participation in God.61 Dunham raises an interesting point with implications for Augustine’s musical predicament. For Augustine there is a potentially threatening spiritual disconnect, when we allow ourselves to separate the music from the meaning of its messenger—the ordinary from the extraordinary; the created from the Creator—because it breaks the bonds of God’s divine simplicity. If the Trinity is itself meant to have created the world, it also subverts the principle of the Trinity: ‘at the core of Augustine’s analogical practice are two basic foci: the created order as a reflection of its threefold Creator; the threefold structure of the process by which the mind is reformed towards God … [This is already] implicit in this earliest material, but only drawn out more fully in the Confessiones’.62 What this suggests is that Augustine’s anxiety over music is in fact representative of a much broader concern to epitomise creation as divine simplicity, and divine simplicity as the only tenable means of interpreting a Trinitarian Godhead. Music, in other words, is a metaphor, and one with uniquely transformative—even redemptive—spiritual powers: as we read elsewhere in the Confessions, ‘the musical metaphor enables him [Augustine] to encapsulate how a will transformed over time is and remains a fundamentally unified life. It is one song, the “new song” of Christ’.63

(c) Simplification

‘Why’, then, as Harrison asks, ‘did Augustine Sing ?’, if not to become one with the new song: the answer is that, according to Augustine, the soul is ‘all too often distracted, fragmented and weighed down by its necessary involvement in sense perception … the soul should direct its focus towards eternal and immutable rhythms whilst unconsciously attending to the temporal, mutable rhythms of sense perception; it should engage with sense perception—in this case, listening to the line of a hymn being sung—as it were, without noticing it and without allowing it to evoke any reaction from it’.64 That prescription for simplification does make Augustine sound like a therapist, a psychologist, or even a ‘scientist’ in the broadest sense;65 after all, he does define music as the science of modulating, or moving, well, and he does, as Harrison reveals, provide us with extraordinary insight into Patristic thinking on sense, emotion, memory, and mind, and many other things to do with ‘affective cognition’. Those things, in themselves, do not necessarily make his opinion scientific, according to our modern understanding of the term, however. Controversially, philosopher Alvin Plantinga nevertheless calls for an ‘Augustinian science’ that accepts the non-neutrality of science; in other words, a science used ‘in the service of a broadly religious vision of the world’66 and from ‘an explicitly theistic or Christian point of view’.67 Others are more sceptical, and Josh Reeves even argues that Augustine would himself be suspicious of ‘Augustinian science’.68 While ‘of its time’, however, Augustine’s own view on the utility and objectivity of empirical observation was largely favourable.69 Augustine himself claims that ‘Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances … and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture’.70

Augustine’s contempt for that kind of position is palpable because he sees no fundamental contradiction between the material and spiritual world, or indeed between what we would call today theology and science. For Augustine, the created and the Creator, the ordinary and the extraordinary, cannot be anything but simple, and simple in the clearest possible Trinitarian and incarnational terms. So when, in the course of spiritual ascent, Augustine gives the impression of ‘escaping reality’ (i.e., the temptations of the physical world—like ordinary music) in pursuit of higher spiritual communion with God, in fact he does quite the opposite. His is, arguably, an incarnational approach in which the created and the Creator—the ordinary and the extraordinary—are fused as one—they are effectively ‘creatored’: ‘Augustine sees the Incarnation as the primary model for signification, for this path from the physical to the spiritual, from signum to the res’.71 Some of his language is perhaps unhelpful, portraying spiritual ascent as linear—as a path from A to B—when in fact the linearly vertical imagery of the ladder of ascent is more complex than that. Inherited from his Platonic days, Augustine’s ladders of ascent ascended, or evolved, from the contemplative self-sufficiency of the philosopher to the loving grace of the Christian. According to Martha Nussbaum, at the same time ‘it situates ascent within humanity and renounces the wish to depart from our human condition’.72 In other words, ascent is actually marked not by progression but expansion: by loving God we love his creation; by loving God in humanity we see all humans as equal; and by seeing humans as equal we seek their equality.73

Nussbaum focuses on emotion in much the same way Harrison focuses on affect—as something Augustine sees as intrinsically good (because it is part of creation) but potentially bad if it becomes an end in itself. If something becomes an end in itself it tries to separate itself from God’s creation and its Creator, and if something tries to separate itself from God it, ipso facto, creates complexity, or compositeness; i.e., the opposite of simplicity. Augustine hints at this when he fears ‘the experience of being moved more by the singing than by the subject matter’.74 Augustine considers it a sin: ‘I admit that I am sinning’, he opines, ‘and deserve punishment and then would prefer not to listen to the singer’.75 However defined,⁷⁶ it is universally agreed that sin creates separation from God; for Augustine it is ‘any transgression in deed, or word, or desire, of the eternal law. And the eternal law is the divine order or will of God, which requires the preservation of natural order, and forbids the breach of it’.77 Augustine’s sin is a sin against divine simplicity, and that makes music dangerous. When music ceases to ‘harmonise’ with, and like, the Trinity, or to move well, it also breaks the relational bond of sense and meaning; for Augustine, ‘whatever has pleasing sound, that it is which pleases and entices the hearing itself. What is really signified by that sound is what is borne to the mind through the messenger of our hearing … our praise of the meter is one thing, but our praise of the meaning is something else’.78 When music does move well, however—when it moves well itself, and when it moves us well—it can heal the sinful disconnect between sense and meaning, between created and Creator. By healing us, music, for Augustine, also simplifies us so that we can, incarnationally like Christ, become music itself—the ‘new song’. Music unifies us, not just within ourselves individually and with one another, but with our cosmic creator and the Trinity.

Augustine begins and ends book 6 of De Musica with a discussion of Ambrose’s famous hymn Deus Creator Omnium—God Creates All. Why choose that hymn; why there, and in those places? Many have asked that question, often focusing on Augustine’s emotional, psychological reason. His mother Monica had just died, and the hymn was a consolation.79 But there are, of course, other reasons. In extended discussions of the hymn, Harrison and Guthrie make much the same claim. Both describe Augustine’s variable (five-, sometimes six-stage) process of spiritual ascent as psychologies of perception,80 engaging both the physical and spiritual (i.e., mental) resources of our soul. Guthrie helpfully summarises them in five concise questions: is music (1) in the sound—latent in the vibrations of the string itself; (2) in the hearer’s sense—passively sensed; (3) in the act of the reciter—given the norms of performance; (4) in the memory because we have learnt it—a conditioned response to sound; or (5) in the judgment—actively constructed by the listener?81 Augustine himself writes that ‘When this verse . . . is sung [(1) in the sound] . . . We both hear [(2) in the hearer’s sense] it with occurring rhythms [(2) in the hearer’s sense/(3) in the act of the reciter], and recognize it [(3) in the act of the reciter/(4) in the memory because we have learnt it] with the memorized rhythms [(4) in the memory because we have learnt it], and enjoy it with these judicial rhythms [(5) in the judgment], and evaluate it with some others [(5) in the judgment]’.82 Both Guthrie and Harrison also advocate a holistic interpretation of Augustine’s spiritual ascent. For Guthrie, ‘Augustine advances a polyphonic account of music: music perception is presented as a unified whole, composed of differentiated parts’;83 for Harrison, ‘His [Augustine’s] point is that this cosmic harmony—what he here [De Musica] calls “equality” (aequalitas)—owes its existence to God, the Deus Creator Omnium, the Creator of All … it is through equality that we are able to apprehend Him, for He is perfect equality’.84 Harrison and Guthrie both make an important point: Deus Creator Omnium is not just an illustration of music; it is music, and it represents it as well. It is the creation, and it represents it as well; it is God, and it represents him as well—because God the Creator is indivisible from his creation: it is ‘a statement of the complete dependence of created reality upon the Creator of All, the Deus Creator Omnium’.85

(d) Simplification Today

Harrison ends where Augustine ends, with reference to Deus Creator Omnium and his concluding statement on the Trinity. But neither she nor other theologians invoke the term ‘simplicity’ to describe De Musica, or the Confessions, or other musical references for that matter. If musical ascent is indeed equivalent to a process of spiritual ‘simplification’, what does that mean exactly, and does it make Augustine any more ‘scientific’ in his approach?

That Augustine presents a psycho-scientific model of perception is fairly indisputable. Harrison describes it through modern emotion theory—‘affective cognition’—but, as she herself admits, there are plenty of other ways to theorise it, and many other ‘scientific’ angles we could take on Augustine more generally (some of which have already been discussed). Admittedly, neither theology nor science has arrived at any consensus on Augustine’s modern scientific credentials, least of all his seemingly ‘scientific’, if impenetrable, approach to music. So let me throw my hat in the ring. I think Augustine is concerned about simplicity—divine simplicity—and the relationship of God and his creation. Music is a part of creation, both in its ordinary and extraordinary forms. In all its forms music represents cosmic harmony—it moves well—but only while we, as created human beings, remain united to God our Creator. Being united to God our Creator means being united to more than the cosmos, however; it also means being united to God the Trinity and through the Trinity to the Incarnation of the Son. This makes Augustine’s process of musical ascent an almost cyclical process of simplification, not just a spiritual elevation, in which we progress (or rather, expand) from our own human complexity to the simplicity of our own creation in God. The simpler we become, the more musical we become, and the more musical we become, the more unified (i.e. harmonised) with our God and His creation.

Simplification comes in many forms, scientifically, as James B. Glattfelder observes:

Here on Earth, complexity is found everywhere. However, only recently has the human mind deciphered the simple rules behind complex phenomena. This insight came hand in hand with the emergence of information technology, allowing this new domain to be algorithmically charted. The prototypical complex system is biological. However, the vast complex systems we humans have created, especially in finance and economics, require a detailed and in-depth discussion. Today, they affect every aspect of life on Earth.86

Glattfelder’s comments apply equally well to theology. According to Wil Derske, simplicity has as much to do ‘with the ordering of the complex’, as it does with beauty and transcendence of some kind.87 Scientists, for example, often refer to their discoveries or experiments in terms of beauty; for Thomas Dubay, it is where science and theology meet.88 Science and theology also meet in Augustine’s musical simplicity because music has the capacity to simplify our lives by focussing on less and less complexity. Decluttering, mindfulness, stress-reduction—these, whether religious or not, are all science-based, empirically-based movements designed to simplify our lives and return it to a more meaningful, essentialised, unified state of existence—to remove the noise and help us concentrate on the true meaning of life. Does Augustine help us declutter? Anita Higman and Hillary McMullan think so.89 Is Augustine mindful? Jim Highland thinks so, as do others.90 What about stress-reduction? Bob Stahl and Elisha Goldstein believe that too.⁹¹ What all these people have in common is the basic belief that Augustine teaches simplification, be it theological, scientific, or just plain self-help. If Augustine’s psychology of music perception—his ‘science’ of the science of moving well—is about anything, it is about helping to re-unite us with ourselves, even as a first step in the spiritual healing process, because we, too, are music when both it and we move well together.