Print This Post
Begbie on Music as an Outpouring of Love
Published by Cynthia R. Nielsen June 14th, 2008 in Aesthetics, Jeremy Begbie, Love, Theological Aesthetics, Worship
Jeremy Begbie continues to impress me with his creativity and theological astuteness. Listen to the following passage on the Christian God who freely creates and freely loves.
“We have seen that for the Christian, the world we inhabit can never be seens as just there, a naked fact, to be treated as a neutral boundary or (worse) as something that is basically an impediment to a fulfilling life. The cosmos did not have to be. It is made freely, without any prior constaint or necessity superior to God’s nature or will. It is given, and given in the rich sense: as an expression of divine love, the love that is God’s own trinitarian life (Resounding Truth, p. 212).”
Begbie then discusses by way of a passage from Leo Spitzer’s work, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, the differences between a Pythagorean and a Christian view of music. As Spitzer explains, the Pythagoreans identified “the cosmic order” with music, whereas Christian philosophers identified this order with love. (Or in the case of St. Augustine, combined and tranformed the conception into “loving order” (ordo amoris). Finishing out the passage, Begbie writes, “[t]here is a huge difference betwen regarding the harmony in which musical sounds are grounded simply as a bare fact or as an outpouring of love” (Ibid., p. 213).
Sorry I’m just now responding to this, but I find the consonance between aesthetics, cosmic order, and love to be fascinating. It’s an area of Balthasar that is really fecund. Adrian Walker in one article on this theme characterizes Balthasar’s understanding of Love as the “source-architectonic” of all being. Just some musings….