The Poetic Metaphysics of Time and the Music of the Spheres

The New Middle Ages, part 2

Enrollment is still open for my course on William Blake’s Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, set to begin in March. You can read all about it here.

During the Christian Middle Ages, even the calendar, indeed, time itself, was poetic. The medievals marked the passage of the year not so much by numerical dates and months, as by feasts and saints’ days. Prior to the invention of mechanical clocks, even smaller increments of time were measured in the span of various prayers, as so often occurs in the writings of St. Teresa of Avila, for example, when she observes that an ecstasy lasted “for the space of an Ave Maria.”[1] It could be argued that these kinds of practices reached their richest expression in the way (or ways) the medievals viewed March 25^th, the Feast of the Annunciation.

First of all, as with astrology, there is certainly rationality of a kind involved with the setting of this date, exactly nine months (the period of human gestation) before Christmas. But the import of the date is deeper even than that. The medievals also recognized March 25^th as the historical date of the Crucifixion. In addition, they also believed March 25^th marked the last day of Creation as set out in Genesis, which is why the calendar year also changed on this date (and not January 1^st). In regard to medieval understandings of story of Creation and its relationship to the calendar, Eleanor Parker explains how: “18 March was the first day of creation, when God separated light from darkness; on 19 March, he created the sky; on 21 March, the day of the equinox, the sun and the moon were created, and that was the beginning of time.”[2] Since March 25^th marked the completion of God’s work, then, as medieval calendars noted, it is the anniversary of the “first day of the world.” Such a constellation of meanings, if nothing else, certainly evinces a poetic metaphysics.

The calendar in the Middle Ages was deeply associated with astrology, deeply associated with sacred history, and deeply imbued with sophianic participation. But this participation—or at least the potential for it—did not simply vanish with the onset of materialist modernity. There has always been, as John Milbank has argued, an “alternative modernity.” Nevertheless, the belief system of scientific materialism has held—and desperately endeavors to secure—hegemony over the modern soul, even to the point of convincing many that such a thing as a soul simply does not exist. Thomas Vaughan, alchemist, Anglican priest, and Rosicrucian apologist puts it very succinctly: “the School-men have got the Day, not by Weight but by Number,” words as applicable today as they were when he penned them in 1652.[3] Vaughan was writing as the cloud of materialist darkness began to spread over the West, what once was called Christendom. Roughly one-hundred-seventy years later, Florensky noticed signs of a new dawn:

“We are witnessing the rebirth of alchemy and astrology. Many people are perceiving a much deeper connection between man and nature than that which positivistic science desired and knew. A connection between different strata of being. Countless threads. All phenomena are reflected in every single phenomenon. A symbol is not a conventional constant but is truly connected with other phenomena. The significance of symbols in the contemporary world-understanding. Everything is in all things. One of the foundations of the medieval world-understanding is the universal connectedness and law-governedness of nature. This is now evident not only in the domains of mechanics and physics. Every sphere of being, every separate stratum of being, every phenomenon, is a microcosm, a symbol of every other phenomenon. The revelation of phenomena in a symbol, of everything in all things; but the manifestations can be particularly vivid is separate elements.”[4]

Florensky here anticipates the arrival of quantum mechanics, which has upheld (and renamed) the medieval notions of microcosm and macrocosm in David Bohm’s term “implicate order,” the proposal that the part is implicit in the whole, while the whole in the part.[5]

The idea of implicate order also inhabits the medieval (actually classical) notion of the Music of the Spheres. The mystical astronomy-mathematics-geometry which Pythagoras applied to music argues that the entire cosmos, and in particular the celestial bodies of the planets, as bodies, would each possess a particular tone and that individuals attuned (note the metaphor) to the cosmos, God’s Creation, would be able to hear these celestial harmonies. The reality of the Music of the Spheres held purchase in the Western imagination well into the early modern period. Shakespeare, for example, employs the image in Pericles, Prince of Tyre to great dramatic effect, and in these lines from The Merchant of Venice:

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it. (Act 5, scene 1, lines 57-65)

In Religio Medici (1642), Sir Thomas Browne writes illuminatingly of the Music of the Spheres:

“For there is a musike where-ever there is a harmony, order or proportion; and thus farre we may maintain the musick of the spheares; for those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the eare, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony; which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaime against all Church musicke. For my selfe, not only from my obedience but my particular genius, I doe imbrace it; for even that vulgar and Taverne Musicke, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in mee a deepe fit of devotion, there is something in it of Divinity more than the eare discovers. It is an Hieroglyphicall and shadowed lesson of the whole world, and Creatures of God, such a melody to the eare as the whole world well understood, would afford the understanding. In briefe, it is a sensible fit of that Harmony which intellectually sounds in the eares of God.”[6]

Brown’s contemporary and fellow physician, the Rosicrucian apologist and hermetic philosopher Robert Fludd dwells much on the spiritual importance of music, particularly attentive to the Pythagorean studies of the monochord, in relation to the Music of the Spheres; and he brings together not only music theory but astrology and Christian mysticism into the equation.

from Utriusque Cosmi Historia… (1617) by Robert Fludd

Lacking a poetic metaphysics, our own age not only claims that the Music of the Spheres doesn’t exist, never mind astrology, but that even the soul and spirit don’t exist—and that to think they even could is the height of absurdity. Are we not in the hands of lunatics?

“The Triumph of Harmony” by Robert Fludd, as played by my seventh grade class at The Detroit Waldorf School, c. 2006:

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[1] The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, Volume One: The Book of Her Life, Spiritual Testimonies, Soliloquies, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1976), 260.

[2] Eleanor Parker, Winters in the World: A Journey through the Anglo-Saxon Year (London: Reaktion Books, 2022), 118.

[3] From the preface to The Fame and Confession of the Fraternity of R: C: Commonly, of the Rosie Cross in The Works of Thomas Vaughan, ed. Alan Rudrum with Jennifer Drake-Brockman (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1984), 483.

[4] Florensky, At the Crossroads of Mysticism and Science, 73.

[5] The thesis of which can be found in David Bohm and Basil J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory (London: Routledge, 1993).

[6] Part 2, section 9 in Sir Thomas Browne: The Major Works, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Penguin, 1977), 149-50.