2. Music and Soul. Metaphysical interpretations of
music were vastly enriched and broadened by Platonic
ideas (not all of which originated with Plato) that
carried over into Christian thought. In the Timaeus
especially, the concept of music was extended to mean
harmoniousness and concord in the broadest sense.
Numbers, in themselves, had significance only as they
represented abstract Ideas. They took on philosophical
and ethical implication. Furthermore, the whole world,
Plato taught, was animated by soul.
According to the Timaeus (29E-42E), the Demiurge
(later called God), good and rational (in the Symposium
motivated by love), brought the conflicting elements
of Chaos into a harmony, proportion, and unity
modeled on His own Idea of perfection, an ever-
existent Idea intelligible only to reason, of which the
sensible world is an imperfect copy. Into this body,
circular in form and motion, He set a Soul, also circular
in motion and numerically proportioned, but invisible,
partaking of reason and harmony. Stars, planets, ele-
ments, all had souls or gods to move them—beings later
designated as angels or demons, which could descend
to earth in order to aid mankind. A bit of World Soul
passed from the stars, whose gods added lower parts
to the rational, to become the souls of men. The soul
of man is tripartite, Plato continued (69C-70A), and
the Renaissance thinkers, on the whole, agreed. Im-
mortal and rational soul in the brain is distinct from
mortal soul, located in the thorax, which is filled with
passions and dominated by irrational sensations, and
which is further divided by the midriff to form still
another soul that is concerned with wants of the body.
Even animals were granted an inferior soul. Living man
was a part of a living universe and shared its harmony.
Following this tradition, Renaissance Platonists
imagined the soul to be endowed, as was music itself,
with an innate harmony derived from that of the uni-
verse, a harmony too often broken by sin or intemper-
ance, but restorable by dominance of Reason or by
withdrawal from material things to contemplation of
the divine. This harmony was described with varying
metaphor: concord between intellect and desire
sounded music like that of angel's song; reason played
on lower faculties of the soul and those of the body,
as a lutenist on his instrument, to produce the “music”
of Virtue; the soul's “tune” was transposed by prayer
to make the “music” of Love.
Because the soul was by nature harmonious, it was
thought to respond instinctively to the similar harmony
in audible music. It might take intellectual delight in
viewing this image of the divine, but it was moved
“naturally,” too, on both an infra-rational and a super-
rational level. Renaissance meanings of “nature” and
“natural” were varied and require a brief digression.
Nature meant, first, all things made by God in contrast
to those made by man; but it was also a force or energy,
which, acting as an agent of God, dominated natural
things. By Nature, each existing thing was endowed
with an essential property that determined its behavior.
By immutable Laws of Nature, order was imposed and
reactions controlled. The eternal substance of number
in the universe was established by a Law of Nature—
that “Numb'ry Law” remarked on by Du Bartas in his
Divine Weekes and Workes (1621, p. 301), “which did
accompany/ Th'Almighty-most” in the world's crea-
tion. Another law decreed that “every kindred sub-
stance” move inevitably “toward its kind,” as iron
moves toward the lodestone, or move with it in sym-
pathy, as an idle instrument sounds when one similarly
tuned is struck. It seemed “natural,” then, that the soul
of man, to the extent that it retains its original har-
mony, should respond or be attracted to music even
without conscious thought.
Man need not be intellectual to be so affected. The
most barbarous peoples, it was said for centuries, are
inevitably charmed by harmonious sound, an opinion
repeated by John Case in his Praise of Musicke (1586,
p. 42): the infant, destitute of reason, is stilled by the
songs of his nurse; ploughmen and carters “are by the
instinct of their harmonicall soules compelled to frame
their breath into a whistle,” which delights not man
alone but the oxen and horses. And the cause of this
“delectation,” Case concluded (pp. 53-54), is “the
convenience and agreement which musicke hath with
our nature.”
The lowliest souls, even those of animals, experi-
enced irrational pleasure in musical sounds, but the
soul could be moved on a higher instinctive level. It
could, by sympathetic response to the harmonious
motions of music, be brought back to its original har-
mony. “Music... in so far as it uses audible sounds,”
Plato had written in the Timaeus (47C-D), “was be-
stowed for the sake of harmony. And harmony, which
has motions akin to the revolutions of the Soul within
us, was given... not as an aid to irrational pleasure,
... but as an auxiliary to the inner revolution of the
Soul, when it has lost its harmony, to assist in restoring
it to order and concord with itself.” “The very harmony
of sounds... carried from the ear to the spiritual
faculties of our souls,” echoed the Elizabethan church-
man, Richard Hooker, in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical
Polity ([1597], Book V, sec. XXXVIII [1]), “is by a
native puissance and efficacy greatly available to bring
to a perfect temper whatsoever is there troubled.” By
sympathetic response like that of “Brethren strings,”
wrote Abraham Cowley in Davideis (Book I, secs.
39-40), “Davids lyre did Sauls wild rage controul,/ And
tun'd the harsh disorders of his Soul.”
Music was credited with even greater powers. By
virtue of its harmoniousness, it could, by an “occult
magnetism,” draw the soul from body in ecstasy; the
soul returned with delight to its divine origins. Poets
made a commonplace of the image of soul being liter-
ally drawn from the body through the ear. “Heavenly
sounds,... with Division (of a choice device),/ The
Hearers soules out at their ears intice,” Sylvester trans-
lated from Du Bartas' Divine Weekes and Workes
(1621, p. 25). Crashaw's lutenist, in “Musick's Duell”
(1646, lines 145-50), is ravished by the music he makes,
his soul “snatcht out at his Eares/ By a strong Extasy”
to ascend “through all the sphaeares of Musicks
heaven” to the “Empyraeum of pure Harmony.”
Shakespeare transformed oddity to magic in The Mer-
chant of Venice (V. i. 67-68), when musicians are told
to “pierce your mistress' ear/ And draw her home with
music,” or to humor in Much Ado About Nothing (II.
iii. 60-63), when Benedick remarks on the strangeness
of the fact that “sheeps' guts should hale souls out of
men's bodies.”
Poets described, also, a less passive inner rapture or
ecstasy in which soul did not leave the body com-
pletely, but in which, through contemplation of the
universal in the particular, of World Harmony revealed
in audible sounds, mind could separate itself from sense
and rise even above reason to an understanding or
vision of the divine—an idea that has deep roots in
philosophies of love as they had come down from Plato
through Plotinus to Renaissance Neo-Platonists. This
is the ecstasy desired by the contemplative man of
Milton's “Il Penseroso” (lines 161-66), where “pealing
Organ” and “full voic'd Quire.../ In Service high,
and Anthems cleer,” dissolve the listener “into ex-
tasies,/ And bring all Heav'n before... [his] eyes.”
In “At a Solemn Musick,” “divine sounds” of “Voice,
and Vers” present to the “high-rais'd phantasie” a
vision (not here called ecstasy) of heavenly singing,
from which phantasy rises still higher to understanding
of inaudible music made by God among men, which
sounded “In perfect Diapason” until broken by “dis-
proportion'd sin.”
These ideas of the power of music to draw soul from
body or to free it from earthly ties merged in an
unexpected context. They became basic argument for
defenders of church music, who, in answer to the
opposition's denial of music's power to touch the soul,
stated their belief that there is a virtue naturally in
music to give spiritual joy and to elevate the soul to
oneness with heaven, a power that can “knit & joyne
us unto God.” These men avoided outright commit-
ment to the “fancie” that the soul is, or possesses,
harmony; claims that music could create ecstasy were
qualified. But no better image could be found, ap-
parently, hyperbolic as it was, to explain the efficacy
of music to move affections of the soul and to lift man's
“cogitations above himself.” “So pleasing” are the
effects of musical harmony, wrote Richard Hooker, in
Of the Laws... (op. cit.), “that some have been in-
duced to think that the soul itself by nature is or hath
in it harmony... there is also that carrieth as it were
into ecstasies, filling the mind with an heavenly joy
and for the time in a manner severing it from the
body.” George Wither emphasized, more than had
Hooker, the soul's ascent through contemplation, when
he wrote, in A Preparation to the Psalter (1619, p. 83),
of the “divine raptures” of church music “that allure
and dispose the soule unto heavenly meditations, and
to the high supernaturall apprehension of spiritual
things.” “Spiritual song,” agreed Charles Butler, in his
Principles of Musik (1636, p. 1), “ravisheth the minde
with a kinde of ecstasi, lifting it up from the regarde
of earthly things, unto the desire of celestiall joyz.”
Champions of music in divine service returned,
throughout the century, to these notions of a universal
harmony in music and its power to elevate the soul.
