Beauty for Truth's Sake Read online

  Notes that are in whole-number ratios to each other sound good together. These ratios can be displayed visually by an instrument called a harmonograph, in which each vibration is conveyed by pendulum to a pen and paper. Harmonic or resonant patterns can also be displayed on a plate covered in sand that is made to vibrate at certain frequencies by being connected to a sound system. Either way, sounds made by notes that harmonize together turn out to be visually, as well as audibly, beautiful:

  Chladni patterns produced by sand on a vibrating metal plate.

  For the Pythagoreans the whole universe was composed of a single “octave,” the interval between 1 and 2, Unity and Diversity, Monad and Dyad. The musical scale was thus nothing less than a model of the cosmos, and could be analyzed mathematically in a way that confirmed our intuitive response to beauty.5

  In the twelfth century, at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, a musical revolution took place expressing the genius of the new Gothic architecture in the world of sound: the monastic plainchant, with its single line of text, became polyphonic. Now two or even four different voice parts could overlap and interweave, making harmony together. This added whole new dimensions to the sound, and made possible an explosion of creativity in music that has still not exhausted itself. Written notation was developed to enable the singers to record and transmit their new harmonies more easily, and thus the revolution quickly spread throughout Christendom. As part-music reached a new level of complexity, the question of timing became increasingly important, leading to measured rhythm and new conceptions of musical form.

  As plainchant and drone gave way to polyphony and chords, Pythagorean music theory evolved too. The sixteenth century divided the octave into twelve exactly equal parts (called the chromatic scale) to make it easier to tune an instrument. It eliminated the so-called “Pythagorean comma,” a discrepancy—like those mentioned at the end of the last chapter—that occurs when tuning in perfect fifths (3:2 intervals). Twelve perfect fifths are almost but not exactly equal to seven perfect octaves, and the Pythagorean comma is the amount of the discrepancy. They can therefore be treated as the same interval by flattening (tempering) each fifth by a twelfth of a comma.6

  Mathematically the octave, the fifth (five notes up from the note of the whole string), and the fourth (four notes up) are said to be the purest intervals, while the most consonant or harmonious are unison, of course (because it has a frequency ratio of 1:1), the octave (2:1), the major third (5:4), and the major sixth (8:5). Some say that the most beautiful interval is the major sixth, which, it will come as no surprise, happens to be a close aural approximation to the golden ratio (8/5 = 1.6).

  The word “music” has acquired a rather more restricted meaning than it once had. Today we think of a musical piece as a piece of writing, whose author is known and which is generally performed for aesthetic pleasure in a concert-hall setting. Music has been mechanized and packaged in ways typical of our society. As we saw earlier, among the Greeks the “art of the muses” enfolded the whole of intellectual and literary culture (as opposed to the physical culture of gymnastics), while even in its narrower meaning it included dance and poetry as well as singing and the playing of instruments. As such it was not a specialized study but a vital part of all humane learning, as well as being closely related to its companions in the quadrivium, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy.

  Polyphony did nothing to undermine that broader and deeper understanding of music that we see, long before the golden age of Western classical music, in Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon (c. 1130), where his chapter on the subject begins: “The varieties of music are three: that belonging to the universe, that belonging to man, and that which is instrumental.” And he elaborates:

  Of the music of the universe, some is characteristic of the elements, some of the planets, some of the season: of the elements in their mass, number, and volume; of the planets in their situation, motion, and nature; of the seasons in days (in the alternation of day and night), in months (in the waxing and waning of the moons), and in years (in the succession of spring, summer, autumn, and winter).7

  It is assumed here that to understand the universe is to appreciate its music, the harmonies between its parts, the rhythm of its movement, and the proportion of its elements. (The teaching goes back to Ptolemy’s Harmonics in the second century, and of course to Pythagoras before him.) So too for what today we would call psychology and medicine: “Of the music of man,” he says in the same place, “some is characteristic of the body, some of the soul, and some of the bond between the two.” Music is characteristic of the body in its “vegetative” power (the power of growth), as well as through its composition and activity. It is “characteristic of the soul partly in its virtues, like justice, piety, and temperance; and partly in its powers, like reason, wrath, and concupiscence.” Finally,

  The music between the body and the soul is that natural friendship by which the soul is leagued to the body, not in physical bonds, but in certain sympathetic relationships for the purpose of imparting motion and sensation to the body. Because of this friendship, it is written, “No man hates his own flesh.” This music consists in loving one’s flesh, but one’s spirit more; in cherishing one’s body, but not in destroying one’s virtue.8

  Since the twelfth century Western tonal music has evolved in so many directions that today it can be said there are as many kinds of music as there are moods and aspirations of the human heart. But perhaps it is still possible to find some underlying principles in the nature of man, as Hugh suggests with his attempt to relate different types of music to the different levels of the human organism. In the final chapter I will come back to the question of anthropology and the three fundamental levels we need to consider in this connection: body, soul, and spirit. Different sounds resonate in different parts of the body, so the natural symbolism of musical sound is related to the symbolism of the body itself, with the higher and purer notes often representing spiritual aspiration (even when played on the electric guitar), the lower bass notes connecting us more with the earth. There are styles of music that appeal to each of the three levels, and within each style or genre there may be an upward or a downward tendency. Rhythm connects us with the cycles of time and of biological life, while melody and lyrics, dynamics and texture evoke other ideas and associations across the whole range of human experience.9

  There is also a close parallel between sound and light. In Sanskrit the roots of the words for “shine” and “sound” are the same, and in modern physics both are forms of vibration. Haydn linked each instrument in the orchestra to a distinct color (the trumpet scarlet, the flute sky blue, and so on), and Messiaen attempted musically—some would say unsuccessfully—to evoke the “perpetual dazzlement” of heaven and the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21:2, 10–27) that he glimpsed through the stained glass of St. Chapelle, describing his sonic language as intended to evoke a “theological rainbow.”10 It is for this reason too that J. R. R. Tolkien represented the creation of light in his mythological story “Ainulindalë” as a making-visible of angelic music. There are mysteries here that we need to explore further.

  According to the English composer John Tavener (b. 1944),

  all music already exists. When God created the world he created everything. It’s up to us as artists to find that music. Of course that’s an exhausting experience, but you have to rid yourself of any preconceived idea about what music is; rid yourself of the idea that you have to struggle over note rows, or with sonata form, or the humanist bugbear, development. Music just is. It exists. If you have ears to hear, you’ll hear it! . . . I believe we are incarnated in the image of God in this world in order for us to re-find that heavenly celestial music from which we have been separated. Our whole life is a continuing return to the “source.” The fact that modernism can envisage no source is a very grave and catastrophic state of affairs.11

  Tavener, of course, is a purist, and is, besides, talking mainly of sacred music. He believes that chant “is
the nearest we can get to the music that was breathed into man when God created the world.”12 It must be sung, because “music is the extension of the Word, not a frilly decoration of the Word,” and ideally (according to the Greek Orthodox Church which influenced him at this time) “there must be no harmony, no counterpoint, just a single melodic line with an ison, or the tonic note of the melody, representing eternity.”13 In fact he is not necessarily advocating a “return to chant,” but stressing our need to learn from chant, and to aspire to produce again a kind of music that is transparent and timeless in that way.

  Humane Architecture

  For Hugh and the medievals, the ultimate concern of music, as of all the arts, “is with the changeless archetypal patterns in the divine Wisdom, to whose likeness the arts restore man.”14 Similar principles apply in the field of architecture. The conditions that make modernist architecture mechanistic and inhuman—in a word, ugly—are rooted in a philosophy of life that architects, by and large, have absorbed, accepted, and perpetuated along with everyone else.

  You can see the problem while walking around any ancient city like Oxford, with its buildings of many periods and styles. What I will call “modernist” buildings (because they make a virtue of being modern, and therefore deliberately break with traditional principles of design) tend to be those which resemble concrete boxes, blockhouses and bunkers, or are composed of rectangular plate glass over metal and concrete frames. Children, with their fresher eyes, can recognize the ugliness of this kind of building when we adults sometimes cannot. But even when the buildings are made of brick or stone, the mean or gaping windows and the flat roofs of the modernist building give the game away.

  One way of describing what happened to architecture is that the vertical dimension was devalued, or else that the link between the vertical and the horizontal had disintegrated. For there is a natural cosmic symbolism associating the vertical with the spirit, the horizontal with matter. The sky transcends us, the light from heaven illuminates us, the breezes from the sky refresh us, and the gales threaten our destruction. On the other hand, the horizontal is the dimension in which we walk, in which we reach out and touch the world around us, in which we exert our own dominion. These two dimensions are integrated in the human body, which as the medievals rightly perceived forms a “microcosm,” a compact representation and sampler of the cosmos as a whole. We stand upright, and this very posture hints at our potential role as mediator or high priest of creation. We are divided symmetrically between left and right, because the horizontal is the world of division. Within the body, it is the face (and especially the eyes) that represents the soul.

  In the first century BC, many of the classical traditions based on the symmetry and proportions of the human body were codified by Vitruvius. (His book was rediscovered in 1414 and had an enormous influence on the Renaissance.) In modern times, with the rise of rationalism and materialism, the transcendent or vertical dimension was neglected as we concentrated on mastering the world around us. At the same time, the significance of the human image was forgotten and man was regarded increasingly as no more than an animal, to be studied by the methods of science. Once these attitudes and assumptions had sufficiently penetrated the popular mentality, architects (along with other kinds of artists and designers) began to create buildings that reflected the modern understanding of man and the world; that is, machines for living in, spaces designed to facilitate efficient motion in a horizontal plane.

  Though buildings now reached higher than ever before, skyscrapers were simply horizontal spaces piled one on top of another, with none of the mechanically replicated floors bearing much of an intrinsic relationship to the elevation in which they dwelt. The rectangular designs of the World Trade Centre and the UN building in New York were based on the mechanical repetition of one floor on top of another.15

  In general, buildings that are flat tend to strike us as drab and ugly, while buildings with peaked roofs, with triangles and curves that connect the horizontal with the vertical, are felt to be more beautiful.16 Decoration magnifies the effect. Proportions in windows and doors and their settings that echo the shape of the human form, and windows set into recesses or covered with arches that faintly echo the pattern of the eyes within the face, seem “right” to us because they speak at a deep level of the connection between the human person and the world as a whole. The materials of which we make our buildings are just as eloquent. Traditional materials such as wood, stone, or clay speak an immediate connection with the earth. On the other hand, concrete and cement by their very nature represent the brutality of modernism—the reduction of the world to particles in order to force it into shapes of our own devising. The shaping of concrete is done from the outside, by the imposition of mechanical force, rather than from inside by growth or natural accretion.

  If we look at a modern city in this way, its underlying philosophy becomes more evident. It is a place where too many obvious features express the desire to control and manipulate, to herd and standardize. The human eye is held on the horizontal plane mainly in order to expose it to advertisements for things we might buy, and it is raised above that plane only to remind us that we are dwarfs in the face of technological power.

  One of the aims of the European Enlightenment was “mathesis,” or the spatializing of all knowledge, mapping the world onto a notional “grid” so that it could more easily be measured and controlled—effectively reducing the world to pure quantity.17 With this went the attempted substitution of a concept of space for the concept of eternity, and with the attempt to achieve through frenetic activity or movement in space what can only really be attained through contemplation. Aspirations of this sort tend to be implicit in most drives toward greater efficiency, and lie at the root of the sense of ever-increasing stress and shortness of time with which modern man is afflicted.

  Our contemporary cityscapes can be traced to a profound philosophical shift in Europe after the fourteenth century. Known as the via moderna (probably the first use of the term “modern”), the new-style nominalist philosophy associated particularly with Oxford’s Duns Scotus and William of Ockham located meaning and order not in the objective but in the subjective realm. Without the mediation of a world-order rooted in divine wisdom, the order of intelligibility had to be imposed on nature by the human mind. From being primarily receptive to reality, we gradually came to see our intelligence as constructive, as though the structure of the world depended on the way we saw and named it.18

  Though I have referred to religious concepts, I have not yet been talking of sacred or church architecture, but only of the secular architecture that one might find on any street corner. The practical implications were summarized in 1989 by HRH Prince Charles in a book called A Vision of Britain.19 His ten perennial principles for good architecture and town planning based on the concept of service and a sensitivity to the human meaning of buildings were as follows:

  Place. By this he meant be sensitive to location and setting. One place is not the same as another. “Don’t rape the landscape.”

  Hierarchy. The composition of a building should lead the eye to its most important elements. “If a building can’t express itself, how can we understand it?”

  Scale. “Buildings must relate first of all to human proportions and then respect the scale of the buildings around them.”

  Harmony. “Sing with the choir and not against it.”

  Enclosure. “A community spirit is born far more easily in a well-formed square or courtyard than in a random sampling of developers’ plots.”

  Materials. “Let where it is be what it’s made of.”

  Decoration. “We need to reinstate architecture as the mistress of the arts and crafts.”

  Art. “Sculpture and painting play an essential role in conferring on public buildings their unique social and symbolic identity, which architecture alone cannot.”

  Signs and Lights. “We should bury as many wires as possible and remember that when it comes to lightin
g and signs the standard solution is never enough.”

  Community. “Let the people who will have to live with what you build help guide your hand.”

  If we now focus more specifically on sacred buildings, we find that Michael S. Rose has attempted a summary of the principles of church architecture, reducing them to three in particular, which he calls Verticality, Permanence, and Iconography.20

  In the case of Verticality Rose believes that “the massing of volumes upward . . . most readily creates an atmosphere of transcendence and, in turn, enables man to create a building that expresses a sense of the spiritual and the heavenly.” I would add that monumental scale is not an essential element in this “massing.” What is essential is that the natural symbolism of the vertical be taken into account, and that the vertical is used to add something qualitative, not merely quantitative, to the form of the church. Gothic architecture achieved its effects by a combination of height and light, evoking by its pointed and interlacing arches and columns the atmosphere that one might find beneath an ancient forest canopy, or within vast caverns under the earth. Byzantine architecture has a different feel entirely, even when the spaces within the building are huge. Here the heavens are closer, indeed seem almost wrapped around the worshipper. Either heaven has been brought to earth, or we have been raised to heaven. But both styles use space to express a theology.

  The second of Rose’s principles, Permanence, involves a similar use of the “fourth dimension,” time. The transcendence of time by eternity, and by Christ as the incarnation of eternity in time, is suggested by the stability and durability of the church. An effective church building is a manifestation of tradition, and tradition is more than just the dead accumulation of custom; it is a living organism that overcomes time and death by a process of continual regeneration and gradual creative development. The church building, if it achieves permanence simply by resisting change and being preserved over centuries, might be no more than a museum or monument. But if it is built to last and is sustained from within by a community of worshippers then its permanence becomes a true reflection of eternity.