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The Relationship between
Neoplatonic Aesthetics and Early Medieval Music Theory: The Ascent to the One
(Part 1)
by
Glen Wegge
The writing of the Neoplatonists of the third
through the ninth centuries, C.E. is one of the most important founts of western
aesthetic inquiry. Many issues that concerned the philosophers and music
theorists of this time were still of special significance in nineteenth-century
Germany and even concern some today. Therefore, I will discuss aesthetics from
the perspective of the writings of western philosophers and music theorists,
occasionally referring to philosophers such a Plato in order to help clarify
certain aspects of this survey.
The main non-musical sources that I will use in this discussion are Edgar
de Bruyne's The Esthetics of the Middle
Ages,
Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz's History of
Aesthetics,
vol. 2, and Umberto Eco's Art and Beauty
in the Middle Ages.
Most of the sources I studied quoted de Bruyne, Tatarkiewicz, and Eco as
authorities. My objective in this study of medieval aesthetics is to pull
together sources that illustrate the impact of the notion of the ascent to the
One—the ascent of the soul to an ideal state. A brief background of the origin
of medieval aesthetics will be presented, then topics will be discussed in the
following order: a definition of Neoplatonism; the origin of beauty as it
relates to the One; the ascent of the soul; the role of music in this ascent;
the ideas of harmony, number, and proportion; and mimesis, ethos, paideia, and
the artist's role in helping facilitate the ascent to the One.
De Bruyne claims that there are four main sources for medieval
aesthetics: the Bible, the writings of philosophers, technical handbooks, and
the writings of the Fathers both Greek and Latin. Tatarkiewicz claims five main
categories of influence: the Bible, the writings of the Greek Fathers (i.e. John
Chrysostom, Athenagoras, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Eusebius to name a
few), the writings of Dionysius, Byzantine aesthetics, and the writings of
Augustine. Broadly speaking, the two main cultural sources that contributed to
the development of medieval aesthetics were Ancient Greek philosophers and
medieval Christian theologians. Tatarkiewicz suggests that medieval Christian
theologians acted as mediators to meld Greek and Hebrew concepts of beauty, thus
creating medieval aesthetics.
Both de Bruyne and Tatarkiewicz claim that the main philosophical influence on
the aesthetics of the Middle Ages was the philosophy of Plato in the form of
Neoplatonism.
The interaction of Ancient Greek and Christian sources may be explained
in at least two ways. De Bruyne suggests that technical handbooks were a means
for the communication of ideas that helped to form Medieval aesthetics.
These handbooks show music as a part of the Quadrivium, that is, arithmetic,
music, geometry, and astronomy, and that the Quadrivium was a particularly
important structure for education in the Middle Ages.
Neoplatonism modified and systematized Platonism in later antiquity to
accord with Aristotelianism, post-Aristotelianism, and Oriental conceptions of
the world as emanation of the One, with which the soul can be reunited in a
trance or ecstasy after much intellectual reflection. Neoplatonism particularly
modified the Platonist concept of Forms. Plato held that the visible world is a
reflection of a higher, non-physical, perfect realm of Forms. Neoplatonists
proclaimed that one Form predominates, referring to it as the One. For
Neoplatonists, the One is the origin of everything. All things are derived from
the One by a series of emanations or outpourings. These emanations are seen as a
series of descents, departing from the One to the world. The One emanates Nous, or Intellect, which in turn emanates Logos, or Universal Soul. Logos,
then emanates the visible world. The One, Nous,
and Logos are referred to as the Three
Hypostases. A soul may reascend toward the One by means of morality and
philosophy, and mystic union with the One occurs in a "leap" after a
climax of thought. These important notions of Neoplatonism provide the basis for
a discussion of the Neoplatonic view of the origin of beauty.
Many medieval authors believe that Beauty is found in the One. Dionysius
exemplifies this view.
But
the Superessential Beautiful is called "Beauty" because of that
quality which It imparts to all things severally according to their nature,
and because It is the Cause of the harmony and splendour in all things,
flashing forth upon them all, like light, the beautifying communications of
Its originating ray; and because It summons all things to fare [sic] unto
Itself (from whence It hath the name "Fairness"), and because It
draws all things together in a state of mutual interpenetration.
Numerous similar quotations can be found in the writings of the
Neoplatonists. My experience derived from an exhaustive reading of the sources
indicates that virtually every philosopher and music theorist writing between
the third and the ninth centuries addressed this issue. Where Dionysius used
"Superessential Beautiful" and "Beauty", other Neoplatonists
used other names—One, God, etc.—depending on the point of view they were
trying to assert.
Medieval theorists believed that Beauty was in the One, but they also
believed that the Beauty of the One was equated with "moral harmony"
or Goodness.
Eco states that "the beauty and the goodness of a thing are the same,
because they are both grounded in form…."
Lippman goes further, positing that Beauty, Truth, and Goodness are perceived at
once and vary in accordance with a fixed mathematical relationship. He also
demonstrates a connection between Beauty and Love (Eros);
thus Beauty, Truth, Goodness, and Love are tightly related.
In the Middle Ages, there were two other aspects of the ideal of beauty:
the concept of usefulness, and the concept that all things contain the Beauty of
the One. Both concepts are illustrated in the following statement by Basil of
Caesarea.
"And
God saw that his work was beautiful." This does not mean that the work
pleased his sight and that its beauty affected him as it affects us; but that is
beautiful which, in accordance with the principles of art, is completed and
serves its purpose well.
While Dionysius
states that the One is Beauty, Basil implies that beauty comes from One; and
thus, all beauty may be viewed as a theophany.
Furthermore, the early writers believed that there were two kinds of beauty—one
human, the other divine. Human beauty is superficial and subjective, while
divine beauty is real and objective.
Early writers maintain that human beauty emanates from the divine, and this
emanation is suggested in the Dionysius quotation. Neoplatonists believed that
beauty was the same in all things--the body, health, nature, the soul, and the
universe because everything was on the same "chain of being."
Beauty is the same in all things because all beauty reflects the One.
The Church was very important in the development of the concept of beauty
in the Middle Ages. Because of its influence, spiritual and eternal beauty
predominated over temporal and physical beauty, and moral beauty over any other
good.
As a result "the criterion of value of art no longer consisted in
conformity with nature. It became internal: conformity with the idea of a
perfect, suprasensual and spiritual beauty." Because of the preoccupation of the Church with spiritual and
eternal beauty, art could not concern itself only with physical beauty; it also
had to concern itself with what the physical beauty represented, namely Goodness
and Truth. Accordingly, the expectation that art should consist of
representations of spirituality and eternality compelled medieval art to become
illustrative and didactic.
De Bruyne perceives that
The
medieval esthetic system conforms to certain invariable principles which are
repeated in the works of almost every medieval author: to wit, symbolism,
allegory, and the cult of proportion and brilliance of color.
This study will address elements of symbolism, allegory, and proportion
typical of medieval music, although brilliance of color will not be specifically
addressed because of its more tenuous connection with music. However, an aspect
of the brilliance of color—light—plays an important role in this paper and
will be addressed later.
Having discussed Neoplatonism and medieval aesthetics (the Beauty found
in the One), it is necessary to describe the ascent of the soul. In order to
explore the topic of the ascent of the soul, it is necessary to discuss a few
Neoplatonic assumptions about the nature of the soul. Lippman notes that
Pythagoras brought to Greek philosophy and ultimately European thought, "a
lasting prejudice that tied music to the cosmos, to rational order, and to
ethical value as well, and these ties dominated the musical outlook of both
antiquity and the Middle Ages."
Of more immediate importance, however, are the Pythagorean theories of the
immortality of the soul, and transmigration, both of which held lasting
influence on the western view of the soul.
These two theories work together. To Pythagoreans, the soul is immortal. When a
body dies, the soul ascends to the One. After a judgment period, the soul is
allowed to descend and enter into another body and reside. This movement is
circular, and Neoplatonists therefore conceptualized all souls as on a wheel of
life. When a soul enters into a body, this is its transmigration. Before a soul
is reassigned and while it is in the heavenly state, it is once again cognizant
of heavenly knowledge, music, and so on. Because of the shock of birth, when a
soul reenters a body, it forgets what it knew in that heavenly state, and
experiences madness or a disorder of harmony. The task of philosophy, then, is
to help a soul remember and reascend to what it knew before birth in the
heavenly state. A Neoplatonist refers to this act of remembrance as an ascent to
mystic union with the One.
As explained earlier, a soul may reascend toward the One by means of
morality and philosophy, and mystic union with the One occurs in a
"leap" after a climax of thought. This mystic union with the One must
be achieved in a certain order: 1) catharsis—the purification of the soul
through morality (while in contact with Logos);
2) dialectics—the practice of the discipline of philosophy (while in contact
with Nous); and 3) illumination or enlightenment in a state of ecstasy
(when the soul comes in direct contact with the One). Catharsis and morality
occur in three stages: a) purification of a soul's thoughts; b) positive
benefaction; and c) the freeing of the soul from bodily desires, pointing the
soul towards Nous. Dialectics presents
a type of analysis leading to introspection, which compels the soul to see
itself as mind, resulting in an ascent from the Universal Soul to Nous.
A soul must then get beyond this to a divine grasping by means of a trance or
ecstasy towards the One. When this occurs, the soul ceases to know itself and
knows only the One.
Aristides Quintilianus alludes to the "former nature" (hinting
at the wheel of life) and "foreknowledge" (what a soul knows before
birth) in the following quotation.
Therefore,
we ourselves, when we are addicted to the disorder and confusion of the things
in this world, gain some little and necessary aid from the almighty through the
union and commonality of the universe; but when, knowing ourselves and learning
whence our beginning, we turn our impulse and mode of life to more valuable
things, then we accept the innocence and highest perfection of the whole
foreknowledge because our own former nature contributes to a condition adapted
to likeness to the most beautiful.
Aristides Quintilianus also addresses the mystic union with the One in
his reference to "the union and commonality of the universe." In
Aristides Quintilianus's use of the phrase "we turn our impulse and mode of
life to more valuable things," he is referring to the use of philosophy to
help in this ascent (Aristides discusses this especially in Book 3, section 27).
While we have just discussed the ascent of the soul, Plotinus, by way of
contrast, writes of the descent of the soul before birth.
We
may know this also by the concordance of the souls with the ordered scheme of
the Cosmos; they are not dependent, but, by their descent, they have put
themselves in contact, and they stand henceforth in harmonious association with
the cosmic circuit—to the extent that their fortunes, their life-experiences,
their choosing and refusing, are announced by the patterns of the stars—and
out of this concordance rises as it were one musical utterance: the music, the
harmony, by which all is described, is the best witness to this truth.
Plotinus explores here why a soul can ascend to the One: both the soul
and the One are on the same "cosmic circuit." Moreover, Plotinus
suggests that all of reality utters unity by means of harmony. This will be
discussed later in the paper. So souls descend and ascend, but what does this
have to do with musical aesthetics?
(Article
continued in the Electronic Journal of Music Theory and Analysis Volume 1,
Number 3, November 2000.)
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