Augustine’s De Musica in the 21st Century Music Classroom
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2015, Vol 6, Issue 1
Abstract
Augustine’s De musica is all that remains of his ambitious plan to write a cycle of works describing each of the liberal arts in terms of Christian faith and is actually unfinished; whereas the six books extant today primarily examine rhythm, Augustine intended to write about melody also. The sixth book of De musica was better known in late Antiquity and the Middle Ages than the first five, and it takes up philosophical questions of aesthetics related to the proportionate ordering discernable throughout creation. After a brief introduction summarizing De musica’s content and its importance in subsequent Christian writings, my presentation outlines and explains how I have used this document in my own music classes. For example, my students learn that a vital notion in Augustine’s writings, and in Neoplatonism more broadly, is the spiritual benefit of academic study. That is, through study of music, one gains insight into the created order, but, more importantly, one’s soul is strengthened and trained to perceive higher realities of the cosmos such as the ordering of the planetary spheres and the progression of celestial hierarchies, which span the spiritual distance from God to humanity.
Authors and Affiliations
John MacInnis
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25423
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel6010211
- Views 338
- Downloads 10
Religious Coping, Social Support and Subjective Severity as Predictors of Posttraumatic Growth in People Affected by the Earthquake in Chile on 27/2/2010
The aim of this research is to study the impact of religious coping, social support and subjective severity on Posttraumatic Growth (PTG) in people who lost their homes after the earthquake in Chile in 2010 and who now...
Cultivating an Academy We Can Live With: The Humanities and Education for Sustainability
Many facets of the university system in North America are fundamentally unsustainable, developing and perpetuating knowledge practices that not only do not sustain the biospheric conditions in which our species evolved...
Planetary Consciousness, Witnessing the Inhuman, and Transformative Learning: Insights from Peace Pilgrimage Oral Histories and Autoethnographies
This article describes insights and consciousness transformations reported in several contemporary peace pilgrimage oral histories and autoethnographies, including my own. Autoethnography is a form of autobiographical...
Qohelet and the Marks of Modernity: Reading Ecclesiastes with Matthew Arnold and Charles Taylor
The biblical book of Ecclesiastes is often claimed as a harbinger of modernity. In this essay, I compare Ecclesiastes with two overlapping constructions of modernity, taken from Matthew Arnold and Charles Taylor, focus...
The Religious and Spiritual Beliefs and Practices among Practitioners across Five Helping Professions
Helping professionals’ religious and spiritual beliefs and practices have been reported as important components in the consideration of clients’ religion/spirituality (RS) in mental and behavioral health treatment. How...