So as a faculty of the soul, memory poses an insurmountable problem for self-consciousness and makes the search for soul an existential ordeal. “I have become to myself,” he confesses, “a land of difficulty over which I toil and sweat.”32 If the terrain of the soul in Augustine is a land of difficulty with numerous caverns and abysses along the way, travel through this territory is like spelunking in subterranean depths, advancing by touch and feel, living by faith not sight. And without a fixed essence at the core, human identity is subject to constant variations, changes, and upheavals, as is evident in so many biblical characters (the subject of the following chapters). The soul is an ever-expanding vessel, one that constantly grows and swells, contracts and stumbles, advances and retreats. For Augustine, though, the keys to the soul’s growth and not its ruin are the biblical values of dispossession over possession, caritas over the libido dominandi, self-renunciation over self-gratification.33 If the soul is to be true to its divine nature—its fathomless and shoreless being—it must embody these values with the same wanton generosity as the sun over the desert.
In spite of these apophatic moments in classical theology (the moments of unsaying in theological discourse), however, Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine clearly assumed that we can in fact achieve some wisdom about God and the soul, even if that is a revelation in obscurity, seen through a mirror dimly. Augustine did believe that we encounter God in the labyrinth of the soul, that God graces us with an understanding, however partial, of who we are, who we can be, and who we ought to be. It is obvious, then, that knowledge of God is revelatory and revolutionary for the meaning and purpose of our lives. Even if our grasp of God—and the human soul—is evanescent and imperfect, like Moses’s glimpse of God as he passed by, it is enough to stun and transform us (Exod. 33:17–23). And even if the soul is as elusive as a phantom (“Few catch the phantom,” as Woolf writes; “most have to be content with a scrap of her dress, or a wisp of her hair.”), the Christian tradition dresses up the soul in radiant colors and voluptuous profiles, which makes the soul into something a lot more sensual and alluring than a bloodless ghost.34
The Aesthetic Contours of Soul: Mysticism, Music, and Festivity
To speak of the soul as an icon—in which God is simultaneously revealed and concealed, present and absent—is to inevitably invite the question of aesthetics. At least in classic Christian theology, especially in the analogical tradition, the experience of beauty is a seductive ruse of God to charm and beguile the soul and hence a confirmation of what is true and good. Nicolas of Cusa said that we can taste eternal wisdom in everything savored, feel eternal pleasure in all things pleasurable, and behold eternal beauty in all that is beautiful.35 In the myriad forms of creation, everything is saturated with grace, thus compromising the divisions of sacred and profane, spirit and flesh, the transcendent and worldly. God’s presence teems and overflows in the cosmos, bathing and penetrating everything, large and small. The human soul, as a result, is indivisible from the elegant tapestry of creation, and a microcosm of the larger pattern of the universe. In this world of grace, a “house made of dawn, house made of the dark cloud,” the soul walks surrounded and steeped in beauty (“Navajo Night Chant”).36
In David Bentley Hart’s assessment, this classic vision of the soul was eventually forsaken for the modern self:
But before modern subjectivity had fully evolved and emerged from the waters, a person was indeed conceived as a living soul swimming in the deeps, participating in the being of the world, inseparable from the element he or she inhabited and knew; and the soul, rather than the sterile abstraction of an ego was an entire and unified spiritual and corporeal reality; it was the life and form of the body, encompassing every aspect of human existence, from the nous to the animal functions, uniting reason and emotion, spirit and flesh, memory and presence, supernatural longing and natural capacity.37
In this enchanted cosmology, the soul is submerged in the being of the world and is related to the whole of creation; it is the brother of the sun, the sister of the moon, and the child of mother earth.38 And it is of course related to the verbal and musical artistry of the cosmos: When the soul is attuned to and synchronized with grace, it rises into being at the sound of creation’s sonata-like summons and moves and dances to the gravitational pull of the heavenly spheres. In fact, as the ancient Pythagoreans, Neoplatonists, and Christian theologians believed, everything is formed with the cadence and rhapsody of poetry and song. God created the universe by the artistry of language like a great orator or musician, filling the silent void of the earth with melody and sonority, producing music from the rotation of the heavenly bodies, so that all of creation became an ode to beauty: the chiming of the planets in their orbits, the splashing voices of the sea, the caroling air, whistling winds, warbling birds, buzzing cicadas, and groaning and pealing thunder.
The concept of the soul in the Middle Ages was a reaping of this Greco-Roman and Jewish-Christian vision, in which music was the food of the soul and a medium of transcendence. Many medieval theologians saw music as both edifying and elevating. They discerned in music a unique mode of perception, one that draws the soul into ethereal spheres of truth. In reference to the musical ear of Gregory of Nyssa, Hart remarks: “According to Gregory of Nyssa, creation is a wonderfully wrought hymn to the power of the Almighty: the order of the universe is a kind of musical harmony, richly and multifariously toned, guided by an inward rhythm and accord, pervaded by an essential symphony.”39 In appealing to this great symphony of creation, Gregory of Nyssa clearly resonated with the rich pedagogical culture of early Christianity, in which the sequence of the liberal arts gradually moved in an ascending pattern through grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.40 The liberal arts were spiritual exercises that worked to elevate the mind beyond the bedlam of noises in the world to the perfect consonance of the stars and the beauty beyond them. (Augustine’s tract De musica is an example of this and culminates in the sixth book with a meditation on the mystical number patterns in music.)41
Since music is revelatory of the pattern of the universe, not to mention the divine pattern within the human person, sin might be seen as a note of cacophony and discord that suddenly disturbs the soul’s rhythm, pace, and sense of time. Thrown off balance and dazed by sin, the soul is now a dancer without grace, knocked awry and tangled up. As the Lord of the dance, however, Christ enters the world to reform, inform, and transform the soul. Christ recovers the soul’s dexterity and converts it from the graceless condition of a will that is curved in upon itself to a condition of charity and self-abandon, lost in the arms of the other—the ecstasy of Teresa of Ávila is nothing else.42
While Teresa’s ecstasy may be a particularly intense and special case of mysticism and seemingly remote from the experiences of modern man and woman, music has a way of making us all into mystics of sorts, of spreading to us the peace, joy, and knowledge that surpasses all the art and argument of the earth.43 No wonder that Nietzsche considered the intoxicating appeal of Dionysus to be indistinguishable from music.44 His own experience of modern music confirmed what the ancient Greeks had understood: that music could seize and shake one’s soul in moments of pleasure, and that it is incomparable in its revelatory possibilities. “Compared with music,” he wrote, “all communication by words is shameless.”45 Just as Aquinas considered everything he wrote to be like straw compared to what God had revealed to him, Nietzsche considered music in a similar mystical sense, as a spiritual phenomenon with a unique ability to penetrate the secrets of life.46 Western civilization is filled with testimonies of music’s mesmerizing and transporting power, its ability to raise the temperature of the soul to feverish highs. Music can hypnotize, as Biggie says, or it can cause us to lose ourselves in it, as Eminem and T. S. Eliot say, or it can simply make us say “uhhhh,” to summon Master P.47
In following this stirring signature inherent in music, I want to insist that these kinds of spiritual raptures were not just encased in marble and confined to theological circles during the Middle Ages. One would have witnessed a feast of beauty in myriad rituals, carnivals, festivities, and theatrical performances.