HOPE OF BEAUTY IN AN AGE OF UGLINESS AND DEATH, THE

Theology Today, Jul 2004 by Moore, T M

Boethius

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c.480-524) was a Christian intellectual and bureaucrat in the Roman court of Theodoric, with whom he ultimately fell out. He was thrown into prison in 523 and, a year later, executed. He left us two important works, one of which, Fundamentals of Music, gives us a clear picture of how ancient thinkers arrived at their understanding of what music is and how it works.

Boethius was a devout Christian and a serious student of classical philosophy. He believed that, in all matters, the best a person could hope to do was to bring his own mind into submission before the mind of God-to think and reason like God does: "But if we, who now share in reason, could possess the discernment of the divine mind, we would judge that just as sense and imagination should accede to reason, so it is most reasonable for human reason to submit itself to the divine mind."20 We can perhaps see the relevance of such thinking for the question we are exploring. If God is the author of all things beautiful, then we who would imitate the Deity in our own work in the arts could do no better than to try to think as God does about such matters. Boethius believed that the ancient Greeks, who discovered the principles on which musical theory is founded, had done precisely that, albeit without realizing that they were doing so. And they had done it by careful observation of the natural world, listening to the sounds around them, constructing ways of replicating those sounds to produce music, and reasoning about what they had accomplished according to principles drawn from observations in other areas. His book, Fundamentals of Music, is a thorough introduction to ancient musical theory. It is more a mathematical treatise than a guide to easy listening. Nevertheless, it is an exploration of the role of sense observation and reason in discerning principles related to the question of what is beautiful in the arts.

Boethius did not believe that we should leave all judgment to the senses, to what we might hear in the world around us, for example. Not everything one might hear should be considered music, he would have said. Hearing is the starting-point in thinking about musical matters; however, hearing must be tempered by sound reason in making judgments about music: "the sense of hearing holds the origin in a particular way, and, as it were, serves as an exhortation; the ultimate perfection and the faculty of recognition consists of reason, which, holding itself to fixed rules, does not falter by any error" (1.9).21 We need to listen, but we also need to judge what we are hearing by "fixed rales" of reason, which have been derived through other disciplines. Boethius was referring to the principles of mathematics and philosophical reasoning, on the one hand, and musical ideas such as pitch, harmony, consonance, and dissonance on the other. These principles had been discerned by the ancient Greeks through keen observation of the world, over which-as Boethius knew-God, as its Creator, exercises absolute sovereign care. The Greeks had somehow managed to penetrate the divine mind concerning these matters, and Boethius merely reviewed and passed on their work for subsequent generations. Here is an example of how Boethius would have us apply reason to observation when listening to music (1.28):