Light, music and theology

Extracted from my programme notes

It was inevitable that Dante would describe his journey through Paradise to a vision of the Trinity in terms of light and harmony. Classical philosophy had been interpreted from a Christian point of view in increasing detail for hundreds of years by the fifteenth century, most significantly by the teaching of Boethius and St Augustine. It was a commonplace understanding that heavenly perfection was characterised by the purity of mathematical proportion and luminosity. So Dante’s Paradise is flooded with light, the light that emanates from the highest heaven, is dimly perceptible even on earth, and gains intensity the nearer it is to its source. "La luce divina e penetrante per l’universo secundo ch’e degno" (Paradise XXXI:22) - the divine light penetrates the universe according to degree.

Light was therefore seen as the most noble of natural phenomena because it gave an insight into the perfection of the cosmos. Similarly, proportion, or concordance, was considered to be the loftiest aesthetic principle in the arts and architecture. And in music, the beauty (or the truth) of a work was determined by its use of the mathematically purest intervals - the octave, the fifth and the fourth. Thus, in his De Musica, St Augustine argues that music properly understood is a science, as opposed to the "art" of unintellectual, vulgar performances.

Hence also the enthusiasm Medieval thinkers had for the Pythagorean idea of the music of the spheres. Consonance in music signified perfection, the celestial harmony, and each of the planetary spheres sung its own note as it revolved around the earth. Light and the unison in music were the essence of true beauty, as they fulfilled man’s longing for the ultimate concord, the reconciliation of the multiple into one.