Plato, Aristotle, and Christian Music

Plato, Aristotle, and Modern Church Music

In this paper, my overall purpose will be the examination the modern musical habits in the church in light of Plato and Aristotle’s philosophical understandings of the role of art within the human, and more precisely, Christian experience. I want to use Plato and Aristotle to consider the subtle, yet unimaginably significant and dangerous effects of our practices as they distort and suppress our understanding of the Good. I will argue that our musical practices do not benefit the Christian life. I will go about achieving this by first laying down the foundational concepts upon which Plato and Aristotle agree, and then develop their contrasting ways of thinking about art. Plato first. Aristotle second. I will then present a brief explanation of overall goal of the Christian life as the pursuit of love in order to provide a lens through which to analyze the place of modern church music as an art form within the Christian life.

Plato and Aristotle agree with the concept of a closed cosmos, meaning, they come to the same philosophical conclusion that there are intelligible, governing principles that structure the physical universe. Consequently, they both think that the world can be arranged in a hierarchy, with these principles, or patterns, that make the world go being the highest approximation of reality, and with all other things being a lesser degree of what is real. It is from this notion that Plato’s famous analogy of the divided line is born, as it explains the four degrees of existence, or reality. These four degrees are then broken down into the visible (“shadows“ and things that do not really exist, and physical or sensible things) and the intelligible (scientific things such as abstract mathematical objects, and Forms - especially the Form of the Good). #

Plato then explains the overall goal of the human endeavor as the upward movement along the divided line, from the lowest approximations of reality (the visible) to the highest (the intelligible). He expands upon this notion via his cave analogy which can be most simply understood as the turning of the soul to love the right things; that is, the Forms. # In order to fully grasp what this means, one must understand Plato’s conception of the soul in three parts - the appetitive, the honor loving, and the rational. # With this in mind, it then follows that in order for a soul to love the right things it is necessary that it be ruled by the reason of the mind and not the appetites in order to result in the achievement of true honor and satisfaction. It is upon these understandings of the soul and reality that Plato and Aristotle formulate their opposing ways of thinking about art.

However, before we explore their differences, let it be said that Plato and Aristotle both see art, that is, all forms of entertainment, as mimesis. In other words, they view art as the representation of what is real, that is, the Forms. Where they part ways is an issue of epistemological disagreement, as they do not see eye to eye on the role of art in the human experience in regards to how we go about accessing these ultimate principles governing reality (The Form of the Good).

From Plato’s point of view, matter is dependant upon the Forms. That is to say that the Forms transcend the physical world, leaving the senses behind. Therefore he claims that we must stay rational and not get distracted in art, because art, he says, of necessity, originates from the imagination and consequently works at levels of reality three and four times removed from true reality as it wallows in the perceptible - the lowest degrees of what is real.# Because of this, art, Plato claims, is unbeneficial to the human condition since its overall affect is to leave us in an emotional state which is not desirable because if you are sentimental and nostalgic, you cannot think clearly and therefore cannot achieve the good as it is dependant on ones rational capacity.

Aristotle, on the other hand, views the Forms as dependant on matter. That is to say that from his point of view, everything we see is a complex of matter (tangible and visible), and form (has a specific identity by its structure). The significance of this is that it allows for the Forms to imminently reside within the world, which is complete opposition to the Platonic view previously discussed. One way of looking at Aristotle’s spin on Plato’s view of art is to say that he tilts Plato’s divided line on its side, bringing Plato’s mystical and abstract world of the Forms from outside of this world to within it, thus allow the form of the good to be revealed and investigated through the senses and by material states of affairs. This changes everything since, what he refers to as good art now has the potential to represent universal patterns and not simply the particulars. In light of this Aristotelian way of thinking on art, good art belongs in the category of philosophy as it has the capacity to lead us into a better understanding of what it means to be human by representing the Good and forcing us not only to philosophize this Good as we critically analyze why it is that we desire such, but also by its capacity to teach us how feel the right kind of things in a given situation. Aristotle refers to this process of learning how to feel the right kind of things as catharsis.

It is with the ultimate goal of bringing the entire soul to work in harmony in order to achieve a balanced life, which is said to be marked by the mind controlling one‘s being, that Plato and Aristotle develop their opinions of the place of art. This pursuit of the Good, that is those things that do not change, is in essence the same basic message of Christianity if we only spell Good with one less “o”. Moreover, I would like to suggest that it is rightful to further define this fundamental pursuit of the Christian life as not only the pursuit of God, but in particular, the pursuit of His love.

In his book Wishful Thinking, Frederich Buechner says:

In the Christian sense, love is not primarily an emotion, but an act of the will. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors, he is not telling us to love them in the sense of responding to them with a cozy emotional feeling. You can as easily produce a cozy emotional feeling on demand as you can a yawn or a sneeze. On the contrary, he is telling us to love our neighbors in the sense of being willing to work for their well being even if it means sacrificing our own well being to that end . . . Thus in Jesus’ terms, we can love our neighbors without necessarily liking them. In fact liking them may stand in the way of loving them by making us overprotective sentimentalists instead of reasonably honest friends. #

In light of these words, the overall goal of the Christian life, that is the pursuit of love, is primarily a matter of action. However, it is my fear that modern church music is distorting our conception of love to be something different. I intentionally call it church music because I’m afraid calling our music “worship” is terribly dangerous as it is unintentionally causing people think that singing “worship” music isn’t true worship.

To worship God means to serve him and basically there are two ways to do it. One way is to do things for him that he needs to have done – run errands for him, carry messages for him, fight on his side, feed his lambs, and so on. This is true, essential worship. The other way is to do things for him that you need to do – sing songs for him, create beautiful things for him, give things up for him, tell him what’s on your mind and in your heart, in general rejoice in him and make a fool of yourself for him the way lovers have always made fools of themselves for the one they love. This kind of worship which wallows in the senses is only necessary in as much as it translates into the first category of worship and it is this category under which musical worship is found.

With these understandings of the Christian life and the place of musical worship within it, we can now get down to analyzing our modern musical practices through the lens of Aristotle and Plato’s conception of art. My first claim is that our modern church music is bad art in an Aristotelian sense. My reasoning for this is two fold. First, it is my belief that, in general, the music does not force us to philosophize the Forms. This is because the majority of the lyrics are lacking in theological and void of most any philosophical notions. Instead, the lyrics are highly emotive, which is embellished by a musical form that manipulatively draw out intense emotion through dramatic builds and repetition. This is an issue in the minds of Aristotle and Plato alike because this music keeps us within the sense experience, the lowest approximations of reality, rather than acting as a stepping stone up the “line” to true reality.

The second half of my reasoning lies in the other negative implications the music upon the soul from the perspective of Aristotle’s idea of catharsis, since the music is not teaching us to feel the right things. What I mean by this is that people listen to the music and go to their favorite “worship” bands show (which is sadly just that), or sing the same songs in church service (which can also be just that), where they are hit with an emotional high within a super-spiritualized atmosphere. People enjoy this, and thus continue to seek it out, especially because of the great importance the American church puts on singing these worship songs in a way teaches us to do so. However there is great danger in this and I think C.S. Lewis states it best, “God will set us off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to us, with emotional sweetness…But sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from our conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves us to stand up on our own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish.”

These things said, my purpose in this is not to deny the place of music within the church, the simple inclusion of the book of Psalms within the Biblical cannon, not to mention the numerous texts expressing that it is good to sing unto the Lord, seem to make such an argument rather difficult; nor is my purpose to deny that God, or the Forms, can be found in it (art) and thus argue Plato or Aristotle to be the distinctly Christian perspective. Rather, my purpose has been the examination our modern musical habits in the church in light of these two philosophical understandings of the role of art within the human, and more precisely, Christian experience; recognizing that there are no black and white answer here, and in that tension seriously consider the subtle, yet unimaginably significant and dangerous effects of our practices as they distort and suppress our understanding of love to the lowest approximations of reality and are thus completely unbeneficial to the goal of the Christian life - and to be conformed to the likeness of the Good (God).

It is in his book, Confessions, that St. Augustine seems to echo very similar opinion that offers a rather fantastic summation and conclusion for my thoughts:

The pleasures of the ear had a more tenacious hold on me, and had subjugated me; but you set me free and liberated me. As things now stand, I confess that I have some sense of restful contentment in sounds whose soul is your words, when they are sung a pleasant and well-trained voice. Not that I am riveted by them, for I can rise up and go when I wish. Nevertheless, on being combined with the thoughts which give them life, they demand in my heart some position of honour, and I have difficulty in finding what is appropriate to offer them. Sometimes I seem to myself to give them more honour than is fitting. I feel that when the sacred words are chanted well, our souls are moved and are more religiously and with a warmer devotion kindled to piety than if they are not so sung. All the diverse emotions of our spirit have their various modes in voice and chant appropriate in each case, and are stirred by a mysterious inner kinship. But my physical delight, which has to be checked from enervating the mind, often deceives me when the perception of the senses is unaccompanied by reason, and is not patiently content to be in a subordinate place. It tries to be first and to be in the leading role, though it deserves to be allowed only as secondary reason. So in these matters I sin unawares, and only afterwards become aware of it.#