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January 5, 2008

the unwritten theology

Music and the metaphysical, in the root sense of that term, music and religious feeling, have been virtually inseparable. It is in and through music that we are most immediately in the presence of the logically, of the verbally inexpressible but wholly palpable energy in being that communicates to our senses and to our reflection what little we can grasp of the naked wonder of life. I take music to be the naming of the naming of life. This is, beyond any liturgical or theological specificity, a sacramental motion. Or, as Leibniz put it: ”music is a secret arithmetic of the soul unknowing of the fact that it is counting.”

What every human being whom music moves, to whom it is a life-giving energy, can say of it is platitudinous. Music means. It is brimful of meanings which will not translate into logical structures or verbal expression. In music form is content, content form.

Music brings to our daily lives an immediate encounter with a logic of sense other than that of reason. It is, precisely, the truest name we have for the logic at work in the springs of being that generate vital forms. Music has celebrated the mystery of intuitions of transcendence from the songs of Orpheus, counter-creative to death, to the Missa Solemnis, from Sschubert’s late piano sonatas to Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron and Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps. Countless times, this celebration has had manifest relations to religion. But the core-relation far exceeds any specific religious motive or occasion. In ways so obvious as to make any statement a tired cliché, yet of a undefinable and tremendous nature, music puts our being as men and women in touch with that which transcends the sayable, which outstrips the analyzable. The meanings of the meaning of music transcend. It has long been, it continues to be, the unwritten theology of those who lack or reject any formal creed. Or to put it reciprocally: for many human beings, religion has been the music which they believe in.


George Steiner - Real Presences

Posted by amin at January 5, 2008 2:37 AM