The Immortality of the Soul; The Magnitude of the Soul; On

Music; The Advantage of Believing; On Faith in Things Unseen

(The Fathers of the Church, Volume 4)

Saint Augustine, Ludwig Schopp, John J. McMahon, S.J., Robert Catesby Taliaferro,
Luanne Meagher, O.S.B., Roy Joseph Deferrari

Published by The Catholic University of America Press

Augustine, Saint, et al.

The Immortality of the Soul; The Magnitude of the Soul; On Music; The Advantage of Believing; On Faith in Things
Unseen (The Fathers of the Church, Volume 4).
The Catholic University of America Press, 2010.
Project MUSE.muse.jhu.edu/book/20864.

For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/20864

Access provided at 15 Oct 2019 03:15 GMT from McGill University Libraries
 INTRODUCTION

D . .
.
HESE SIX BOOKS On Music were begun, before Au-
gustine's baptism, at Milan in 387 A.D., and finished
later in Africa, after the De magistro in 391. 1 While
they are, therefore, among the earliest work of his career, they
are not the earliest, but follow the four philosophical di-
alogues of Cassiciacum. They also straddle the period of the
De immortaLiate animae, the De quantitate animae and the
De Libero arbitrio. They are, however, only one of a series of
treatises on the liberal arts which Augustine started, but never
finished. He speaks of finishing one on Grammar and of start-
. ing one each on Dialectic, Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic,
and Philosophy.2 Treatises on Grammar, Rhetoric, and Di-
alectic which have come down to us under his name were not
accepted as genuine by the Benedictines. Recent scholars ac-
cept the last one as being a draft of the original done probably
by Augustine himself, and are doubtful about the first two. 3
But if these six books On Music are only a fragment of a
projected cycle on the liberal arts, they are, also, only a
fragment of a larger treatise on music. They are, in the words
of Augustine, 'only such as pertain to that part called
Rhythm.'4 Much later, in writing to Bishop Memorius, he
speaks of having written six books on Rhythm and of having
I See Retractatiolles, 1.6,l I, Migne 33, and PortaIie, 'Augustin: in DTC.
2 Retract. 1.6.
3 See Marrou, St. Augustin et fa fin de la cultlire antique 576-578, for
a discussion of the authenticity of De dialectica.
4 Retmct. 1.6.

153
154 SAINT AUGUSTINE

intended to write six more on Melody (de melo). 5 As we

shall see, this intended part would have been a treatise on·
Harmonics.
It is necessary, for the understanding of these books on
Rhythm, to know what the ancients meant by music, by
rhythm, and by melody. It is true St. Augustine tells us that,
of these six books, the first five on rhythm and meter are
trivial and childish,6 but this is a rhetorical statement to in-
troduce to us to the more serious business of the sixth book on
the hierarchy of numbers as constitutive of the soul, the
universe, and the angels. In the same letter to Memorius,
written about 408 or 409 A.D., he also distinguishes the first
five books from the sixth, considering them much inferior,
and sends him only the sixth. This has given Westphal the
opportunity to indulge in irony, to agree with Augustine,
and so to dismiss his treatment of rhythm and meter as some-
thing strange and foreign to the correct ancient theories. 7 But
Westphal, in his passion for everything Aristoxenian, did not
always have good judgment; in another case, that of Aristides
Quintilianus, he sacrificed a really excellent treatise on music,
the only complete one to come down to us from the ancient
world, as only a source of fragments of Aristoxenus. Schiifke,
in a recent book, 8 has tried to bring Aristides' work back to
its proper place.
It is usually dangerous procedure to ignore the technical
details a thinker uses to test or suggest his general and more
seductive theories. It is too easy to overlook the first five
books and to concentrate on the sixth. It would seem neces-
5 Epist. lOl (Paris 1836).
6 On Music, 6.1.
7 R. Westphal, Fragmente und Lehrsiitze der Griechischen Rhythllliker
(Leipzig 1861) 19.
8 R. Schafke, Aristeides Quintilianus von der Musik (Berlin-Schoneberg
1937) .
 ON MUSIC 155

sary, rather, to place these five technical books in the general

picture of the theory of ancient music, and to try and read
from the Augustinian variations on the ancient themes the
intentions of his mind and doctrine.
As we have said, the only complete treatise on music to
come down to us from the Greeks or Romans is that of
Aristides Quintilianus, a Greek of probably the first part of
the second century A.D. 9 There are a good many treatises on
harmonics, those written from the Pythagorean point of view
such as the Harmonics of Nicomachus, of Ptolemy, and of
Theo of Smyrna, and the Harmonics of Aristoxenus from a
less directly mathematical viewpoint. The treatise of Aristides
combines the two approaches.
The Pythagorean harmonics starts from the fact that two
strings of the same material and thickness, stretched by the
same weight, form the two fundamental consonances (for
the Greeks the only two) when they are in length in the ratio
of 2 to 3 (the perfect fifth) and 3 to 4 (the perfect fourth).
Thus, in moving from the lower to the higher pitch of the
perfect fourth, the ear rests and is satisfied,. and in passing
from the higher to the lower pitch of the perfect fifth it also
rests. For ancient music, no other ratios or intervals provided
such a rest. Further, if from the first pitch to the second is
a perfect fourth, and from the second to the third is a perfect
fifth, then from the first pitch to the third is an interval called
the octave, the ratio of the string lengths being 4/3 • 3/2 =
2/1. The characteristic of this interval is that the higher pitch
seems to repeat the lower pitch and vice-versa: the higher
pitch can replace the lower one (and vice-versa) in its rela-
tions with other pitches without changing the essential char-
acter of the relation. The octave, therefore, furnishes a cyclic
9 See Schiifke, op. cit., for full disclIssion of possible dates.
156 SAINT AUGUSTINE

pattern for the musical relations. 1o From the Pythagorean

point of view the problem of musical intervals is the problem
of whole-number ratios, the smallest possible numbers furnish-
ing the octave and the next smallest the consonances.
The further musical problem was to fill in this octave,
made up of the fourth and fifth, with other pitches to make a
systema or scale. The interval between the fourth and fifth,
called the tone, was taken as fundamental here, that is, in
ratios of string-lengths 3/2 divided by 2/3 = 9/8. The dia-
tonic scale is built by taking two pitches at intervals of a tone
from the lower pitch of the fourth. What is left over of the
fourth is called a leimma: 4/3 divided by (9/8 - 9/8) =
256/243, which is approximately a semitone. That is, two
such leimmas add up nearly to a tone (256/243 r
nearly
equals 9/8. This is the diatonic scheme of the fundamental
tetrachord. The scale can be completed by adding a tone and
then another such tetrachord to fill out the octave: (9/8r-
256/243 • (9/8)3 - 256/243 = 4/3 - 3/2 = 2/1. This is
one mathematical and one musical solution of the problem
of the octave.ll There were other solutions. It is also possible
to combine tetrachords in other ways: either by taking the
upper pitch of the fourth as the beginning of a new tetrachord
and so continuing, or by constantly jumping a tone before
beginning the new tetrachord. 12 But neither of these last two
ways solves the problem of the octave as the first one which
alternates the two.

10 For the reader interested in a more extended account of such rclatiom

there is the introduction to Lord Rayleigh's Tile Them'.\' of Sound.
11 See Plato, Timaeus 35·36, for a particularly fine derivation of this
solution. See also Theo of Smyrna. for a second·hand account.
12 Aristoxenus, Harmonica I 17, I II 59. See also introduction hy l\Iacran
to his edition, pp. 10·17.
 ON MUSIC 157

Such principles could not be confined by Greek con-

sonances. They could extend themselves to all kinds of rela-
tions, indeed to any relation. And although the purely Greek
restrictions could be given a mathematical rationale in con-
tradiction to what Aristoxenus and his modern supporters
have had to say, since the supply of mathematical relations
is seemingly inexhaustible and all plastic, yet Aristoxenus,
a pupil of Aristotle, preferred to build a system which, if
not totally unmathematical, preserving as it does a neces-
sarily ordinal character, is certainly non-arithmetical. 'The
science [of harmonics], says Aristoxenus, 'is reduced to two
things: hearing and reason. For by hearing we distinguish
the magnitudes of the intervals, and by reason we consider
the potentialities of the notes.'13 By potentialities of the notes,
he means their functions· within a system of notes, a system
which in turn obeys the fundamental restriction that the only
consonances are the fourth, fifth, and octave, perceived as
such by the ear. The tone is thl" interval which is the differ-
ence between the fourth and fifth as perceived by the ear.
The fourth is the invariant interval to be filled in by two
movable notes and only two. The movable notes can take
their places continuously within certain limits, and these
limits are further subdivided so that the positions of these
movable notes fall into three classes which define the three
kinds of scales: the diatonic, chromatic, and enharmonic.
It is not necessary for our purpose to discuss the~e in detail.
The tetrachords so formed can be added to each other (but
only those of the same kind) by disjunction, by conjunction,
or by a combination of both, as we have already explained
above, that is, with a tone between, no tone between, or first
one way, then the other.
13 Ibid. II 33A-9.
158 SAINT AUGUSTINE

The upper note of the lower tetrachord, that is, the upper
limit of the lower fourth, properly filled in with the two
movable notes, is called the mese and is the functional center
of the system of two tetrachords; the potentiality of every
note in the scale is with reference to this mese. 14 True, one
or more of the lower notes of the lower tetrachord might be
moved up an octave, or down an octave, and the pitch of the
mese relative to the other notes would be different. With the
survival of only the one method of combining teterachords,
by alternate conjunction and disjunction, the different rela-
tions of pitch of the mese gave rise to the tropoi or modes of
the one series of notes. 15 In these different modes the mese is
no longer the center by position, but it remains the musical
center.
Such, then, is the non-arithmetical Greek theory of harmon-
ics which confines itself to principles laid down within a
certain idiom of notes, abstractions from a certain ordered
experience, but not constitutive of that experience as in
the Pythagorean theory.
No strictly Pythagorean treatise on rhythm exists, and of the
Rhythmics of Aristoxenus we have only the fragments piously
and passionately collected by Westphal, first in Fragmente
und Lehrsiitze der griechischen Rhythmiker and last in Aris-
toxenos von Tarent, M elik und Rhythmik des Classischen
Hellenenthums. A fragment of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri is also
attributed to him. But the essential theses are repeated in
Aristides Quintilianus. In both of these writers a clear distinc-
H Ibid. " 33.32-3~.IO; ArislOtle. Problellls XIX 20: also I'tolenl\,
Harlllonica " 7, quoted 1)\· :\[acran in his Introdnction. .
15 This, at least. is the interpretation of :\/acran, II'hich certain" fih
the facts and the texts hetter than the opposini-\ thcorics of Westphal
and :\Ionro: see Introd. to Haf/lw/lica 21--10. See the salllc IUlrk also
for an accollnt of the extension of the octalc ami thc consc(]lIent
emergence of the modes as tOl/oj or ke~ s.
 ON MUSIC 159

tion is made between rhythmics and metrics, a distinction

not so clear in Augustine and other Latin writers.
For Aristides, music is divided into theoretical and prac-
tical. The theoretical, in tum, is divided into the technical
and natural, that which has to do with the art and that
which has to do with the nature. The technical is divided into
three parts: harmonics, rhythmics, and metrics. The natural
is divided into two parts: the arithmetical and the physical.
On the other hand, the practical is divided into the applied
and the expressive. The first of these is divided into melo-
poeia, rhythmopoeia, and poetry, and the second into instru-
mental, vocal, and declamatory.16
And so the first book of Aristides' treatise is devoted to the
discussion of the technical part of theoretic music: harmony,
rhythm, and meter; the second book to ends served by the
practical part of music: education and the State; the third
book to the discussion of the natural part of theoretic music:
whole-number ratios and cosmology. Thus, Aristides quite
rightly assigns the Aristoxenian theory its place within the
science of music as a technique, an art depending for its real
validity on the Pythagorean theory. And he might well have
a
added that it is only one of possible many, a restricted set
of rules, a particular idiom compared to the mathesis univer-
salis of the Pythagorean theory.
Let us, then, focus our attention on rhythm. 'Rhythm,'
say Aristides, 'is a scale of times collated in a certain order,
and their affects we call arsis and thesis, strong and weak.'17
'Rhythm is determined in speech by syllables, in melody by
the ratios of arsis and thesis, in movements by the figures and
their limits .... And there are five parts of the art of rhythm.
16 Aristides, op. cit., ed. Meihom, I 7,8.
17 Ibid. I, p. 49. We give only an outline here. Detailed discussion will
be found in our notes to the treatise..
160 SAINT AUGUSTINE

F or we divide it thus: (1) in primary times, (2) on kinds of

feet, (3) on rhythmical tempo, (4) on modulations, (5) on
rhythmopoeia.'H A rhythmical foot is a part of the whole
rhythm by means of which we comprehend the whole. And
it has two parts, arsis and thesis. I9 And there are three kinds
of rhythmical foot according to the ratio of arsis and thesis:
the one-one ratio, the one-two, the two-three, and sometimes
a fourth, the three-four. But the inner structure of these
ratios is conditioned by the order of long and short syllables
and, therefore, by the thing rhythmed.
'Metres,' says Aristides, 'are constructed of feet. Then meter
is a scale of feet collated of unlike syllables, commensurable in
length.'20 Some say meter is to rhythm as part to whole; some,
as matter to form; some say that the essence of rhythm is in
arsis and thesis, and the essence of meter is in syllables and
their unlikeness. And for this reason rhythm is constructed
of like syllables and antithetical feet, but meter never of syl-
lables all alike and rarely of antithetical feet. 21 Therefore,
rhythm is the repeated sam~ness of ratio of arsis and thesis,
which informs the syllables of speech, giving a variety of
meters according to the variety of syllable structures and the
variety of strong and weak.
If we compare Augustine's treatise with the traditional
ones and, in particular, with that of Aristides, it does not
appear as strange as some would make it out. The first five
books deal with rhythm and meter. The last book deals with
music in its cosmological and theological aspects, correspond-
IH Ibid. I, p. 32.
19 Ibid. I, p. 3~.
20 I bU. I. p. -19.
21 Ibid. I, pp. 49-50. See note to Book 2 p. 226, for discussion of mean-
ing' of 'anlithetital: In an) case, Aristides seems here to consider
rill lhl11n as only concerned Wilh the ratio of arsis and thesis. Strong
and weak as affects of the collated time of rhythm apparently belong
to meter rather than to rhythm.
 ON MUSIC 161

ing to the last book of Aristides and to the well known tradition
of the Timaeus. The six books which were never completed
would have dealt with harmony. All this is perfectly obvious
and perfectly usual. It is, therefore, a grave mistake to accuse
Augustine, along with Plato, of being unfortunately ignorant
of musical sensibility and of the theory of it so highly de-
veloped in the nineteenth century. It is obvious that, in the
case of both, the emphasis on music as a liberal art and
science is the result of their being so well aware of the dangers
of musical sensibility and of the consequent disorders arising
frarr the irresponsible independence of music as a fine art.
The mathematical theory of music has had a long and fruit-
ful career, taking in such names as Ptolemy and Kepler; it
has no apologies to make. The remarks of Laloy and Marrau
and others like them on this subject, therefore, are quite be-
side the point.
If Augustine's treatise as a whole is well within the tradition,
so also are the details of his treatment of rhythm and meter.
The emphasis is decidedly on rhythm in the meaning of Aris-
tides, and meter in any important sense is almost wholly
ignored. For Augustine, there are two principles of rhythm
which cannot be violated: the rhythmical feet must be equal
with respect to the number of primary times, and the ratio of
arsis and thesis within the rhythmical foot must be kept con-
stant. The metrical foot, then, is entirely subservient to these
two rhythmical principles and no deviation seems to be al-
lowed; this subservience goes so far as to allow the complete
dissolution of the molossus into its primary times for the sake of
rhythm. There is no mention in Augustine of the rhythmical
modulation found in Aristides, and, indeed, to some com-
mentators trained in the tradition of certain Latin gramma-
rians, it has seemed that Augustine tortures one line of poetry
after another to fit them into the mold of his rhythmical
162 SAINT AUGUSTINE

principles. Every pleasing appearance must be explained' by

them. And Augustine pushes his investigations much like a
physicist who must explain every phenomenon in the light
of his fundamental premises. The use of the musical rest is
one of his favorite devices in accomplishing this. But the
theory of the musical rest, without any application, appears in
Aristides' treatise, and there is evidence that the use was quite
in tradition, although in a tradition different from that of
the Latin grammarians such as Diomedes and Victorinus. 22
Yet the severity of Augustine's doctrine is remarkable, and,
as we suggest later in our notes, seems to be the result of a
deliberate attempt to restore a purely musical science of
rhythmics against the usages of a whole tribe of grammarians
and rhetoricians.
Given the Pythagorean themes of Augustine's dialectic in
Book VI, this is not a surprising attempt. If it is also remem-
bered that Augustine stands at the end of the classical
quantitative metric and at the beginning of the stress or
accentual metric, there may even be more point to it. In the
quantitative metric, the thing rhythmed is informed by the
rhythm through the pattern of primary times given by the
syllables; in the stress metric it is the stress that determines
the pattern primarily and the syllables only determine it sec-
ondarily. Since the stress is associated with each word as a
whole, the stress metric gives more prominence to the word
as a unit than does the quantitative metric. In the confused
situation of metrics, the Augustinian theory, although 'it takes
as its base the quantitative syllable with many protests at its
mere conventionality, arrives at a pure musical rhythmics
of whole-number ratios which can well apply to any system
22 The .iustification for these general remarks will be found in the notes
to the treatise itself.
 ON MUSIC 163

of metrics whatever. It stands above the metrical conflict of

the period, therefore, and is, as Augustine continually points
out, a purely musical discipline and not a grammatical one.
Questions of stress, of the relative position of arsis and thesis,
and even of syllabic quantity, are simply modes by which
rhythm is incarnated in the rhythmed; they are not of its
essence. And so Augustine gives the very innocuous definition
of meter as the measuring off of rhythms, but a definition
wholly traditional and mentioned by Aristides Quintilianus.
At first glance, we are tempted to consider the great concern
of Augustine with these details of rhythm and meter as some-
thing of a tragedy. If we think of the comparable math-
ematical concerns of Plato, those of Augustine seem trivial,
unworthy vehicles of the weighty dialectical truths they are
supposed to carry. We think of Augustine as the victim of a
period which had lost the profound mathematical insight of
the great Greek age and could offer little for those living in it
to reason on. There was not much a deep and sensitive soul
could avail itself of, to escape the all-pervading rhetoric. But
such a view is, perhaps, too simple, true in part though it
may be.
For anyone reading the treatise On Music and then Books
X and XI of the Confessions, the dovetailing of the themes
is striking. Augustine remains a rhetorician. But, from the
frivolous rhetorician that he was before his conversion, he
becomes the real rhetorician, he who wins the outer to the
inner man, the world to number, and the soul to its Redemp-
tion. Again and again he returns to the example of the
syllable as a strange arbitrary quantum of time and of motion.
And, properly, the locus of this rhetorical problem is the
problem of motion and time. For, if time is an irreversible
succession of before and after, then there is no Redemption
possible; what has been, has been. And if mind and sense
164 SAINT AUGUSTINE

are to have a common point, it must be in memory and time,

where motion as pure passage is caught in its numerableness
and unchangingness, and number in its immobility is incar-
nate in change.
The problem of motion and time is also the focus for the
problem of creation. Each moment of time, appearing ever
as something new from a relative non-being, is symbolic of
creation ex nihilo. If one is hypnotized as Aristotle by the
successiveness of time, then no creation ex nihilo seems pos-
sible. But Plato sees not only this aspect, but the aspect of
'jump,' of the discontinuous and abrupt instant, indicative of
the radical contingency of all temporal appearance. So, too,
Augustine is fascinated by these instants which are and are
not, and which are really understood only in so far as they
are held distinct and together in the memory, just as the
creation is only a whole and its parts as seen in Christ.
Memory, in the Confessions, is a principle of intellectual
mediation like Christ. 1 hrough it the past is and the future
is, and, therefore, through it repentance and salvation are
possible. It is a cry of intellectual triumph, the cry of Augus-
tine, 'In te, anime meus, tempora metior.' For now necessity
is overruled and the struggle with the implacable is won,
not by denying nor escaping it, but by mediation and
comprehension.
This is the train of thought begun in the treatise On Music,
where Augustine finds his attention strained to number at
the point where body meets soul and action meets passion, in
the rhythmical song and speech of man.
 ON MUSIC 165

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Texts of the treatise:
S. Augustinus, De musica, ed. J. P. Migne, Patrologiae wrsus com-
pletus: Series Latina 32 (Paris 1877),
-~-, editio Parisina altera (Paris 1836) .

Translations:
C. J. Perl, Augustins Musik. 'Erste deutsche Ube1·tmgung (Strass-
burg 1937).
R. Cardamone, S. Agostino Della musica libri sei traduti ed annotati
(Firenze 1878).
Secondary works:
F. Amerio, 'II "De musica" di S. Agostino,' Didaskaleion, Nuova
serie 8 (1929) 1-196.
Aristides Quintilianus, De musica libiri III (in Meibom, Antiquae
musicae auctores septem, Amsterdam 1652); also ed. A. Jahn
(Berlin 1882).
Aristoxenus, Harmonica, ed. H. Macran (Oxford 1902).
J. Bar(els, Aristoxeni Elemento1'U71l Rhythmicorum FragmentulII
(Bonn 1854).
H. Edelstein, Die Musikanschauung Augustins (Ohlau in Schesiell
1929) .
E. Graf, Rhythmus und Metrum (Marburg 1891) .
N. Hoffman, Philosophische lnterpretationen de Arte Musica (Marl-
burg 1931) .
J. Hure, St. Augustin, musicien (Paris 1924).
L. Laloy, Aristoxene de Tarente et la musique de l'antiquill! (Paris
1904) ,
Martiallus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae, ed. Meibom (Amsterdam
1652, as a'hove for Aristides Quintilianus) .
H. I. Marrou, St. Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (Biblio-
theque des Eco1es d'Athenes et de Rome 145, Paris 193/l).
M. G. Nico1au, L'origine du 'curs us' rhythmique.et les debuts de l'ac-
cent d'intensill! en latin (Paris 1930).
R. Sch1lflke, Aristeides Quintilianus von der Musik (Berlin-Schone-
berg 1937).
W. Scherer, 'Des hI. Augustins 6 Bucher De musica: Kirchenmusik-
alisches Jahrbuch 22 (1909) 63-69. Not consulted.
K. Svoboda, L'Esthetique de St. Augustin et ses sources (Bmo 1)133) .
Victorinus,Ars grammatica, ed. H. Keil, grammatici Latini 6 (Leip-
zig 1874) .
H. Vincente, Analyse du traite de metrique et de rh),thmique de St.
Augustin intituitf: De 11lusica (Paris 1849). Not consulted.
166 SAINT AUGUSTINE

H. B. Vroom, Le psaume abecedaire tie St. Augustin et la pol<i/!

latine rhythmique (1. Schrijnen [ed.] , Latinitas Christianorum
primae va 4, Nijmegen 1933).
H. Weil, Etudes de litterature et de rhythmique grecques (Paris
1902) .
K. Wenig, 'Uber die Quellen der Schrift Augustins de Musica: Listy
Philologicke 33 (1906). Not consulted.
R. Westphal. Aristoxenus von Tarent. Melik und Rhythmik des
classischen Hellinenthums (Leipzig 1883, 1893).
---, Fragmente und Letrsiitze der griechischen Rhythmniker (Leip-
zig 1861)_

A. Wikman, Beitriige zur Asthetik Augustins. Not consulted.

C. F. A. Williams, The Aristoxelliall Theon' of Musical Rhvthm
(Cambridge 1911). . .
 CONTENTS

BOOK ONE
The definition of music is given; and the species and pro-
portion of number-laden movements, things which belong
to the consideration of this discipline, are explained . 169

BOOK TWO
Syllables and metrical feet are discussed . 205

BOOK THREE
The difference between rhythm, meter, and verse; then
rhythm is discussed separately; and next the treatise on
meter begins 237

BOOK FOUR
The treatise on meter is continued . 260

BOOK FIVE
Verse is discussed .297

BOOK SIX
The mind is raised from the consideration of changeable
numbers in inferior things to unchangeable numbers in
unchangeable truth itself 324