Heavenly Harmonies

My Music Humanities class is launching its survey of Western musical history with an examination of the Church’s earliest chant. I confess: I love old things. The very knowledge that I am listening to something that has echoed down to me through fifteen centuries strikes awe into my heart.

Sacred music’s ethereal beauty has a personal, spiritual power to it. It is not just aesthetically pleasing but actually good for the soul. St. Basil the Great wrote,

[The Holy Spirit] devised for us these harmonious melodies of the psalms, that they who are children in age or even those who are youthful in disposition might to all appearances chant but, in reality, become trained in soul.

I think many of us might make different choices about our Spotify playlists if we really considered that we were training our souls, for good or for ill.

And Christian music also has a public role. St. Basil continues,

A psalm forms friendships, unites those separated, conciliates those at enmity. Who, indeed, can still consider him an enemy with whom he has uttered the same prayer to God?

The pagan Cicero also saw music as tightly bound up with the personal and common good. His The Dream of Scipio climaxes in a sublime vision of the “music of the spheres,” the sublime harmonies of the planets that sound forth sweet strains to each other. Theirs is the perfect music that our souls have always longed for, unknowingly. For we are so caught up in our strivings and our passions that we have made ourselves deaf to the exquisite beauty of the eternal realm.

And, Cicero says, once we have glimpsed that wonder beyond our ken, we are sent back to our dusty earthly callings, here to keep our post and follow duty’s stern commands, serving our homelands until death. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.