you are the celestial love song
the musical meaning of it all
All of reality is one never-ending love song, angel-sung, star-bowed, composed by God, and not one of us can help but dance. We are formed through celestial music; accordingly, your very soul is harmony. Or so the ancients say. And so I sometimes think.
For much of the history of philosophy, the arts, and the sciences, humanity’s greatest minds wrote of the “music of the spheres,” a theory that connected astronomy or astrology to music, and to theology, physics, psychology, politics, and more. Even to early embryology.
Today, the theoretical underpinnings of this view of the world have been annihilated by newer science — an empiricism less infused with mysticism, more distinguished from theology. Most importantly, astronomy and astrology parted ways and with this necessary split came a great disenchantment. We no longer see the planets and think of song. We no longer view the rhythms of our bodies as a microcosm of the rhythm of a great cosmic symphony. “Since modern rationalism has untuned the sky,” writes Joscelyn Godwin, “the Music of the Spheres is still mentioned but seldom heard.” For the sake of its beauty and to better understand some fundamental facets of ancient to early modern art, including the works of such famous figures as Shakespeare, it’s worth revisiting this musical cosmology. Until a hot minute ago almost everyone believed it.
While the modern empirical view of the cosmos has given us so much, I think that we should seek to undo some of the tone deafness it has inflicted on our society. The musical view of reality is one of humanity’s most gorgeous achievements, however wrong it may be. Since our epoch militates against the musical cosmology, fewer of us than ever have perfect pitch; let us at least try to attain the skill of relative pitch. Only then can we hear “the heavens declare the glory of God” (Ps. 19:2) in the same way our ancestors believed they could.
Allow me to retell the story of everything, from beginning to end, from the musical point of view. There were various versions of the tale but I’ll stick with its core elements. After all, it descended from Pythagorean tradition through Plato, particularly his Timaeus and Republic; was strengthened through later pagan elaborations; retained its normativity after Christianisation, enforced by such titans as St. Athanasius, Boethius, and St. Thomas; and attained still more significance and complexity in the Renaissance. Only the scientific revolution crushed it. The story of how the music of the spheres creates and impacts our world has surely had many variations on its great theme across various religions and many centuries. Nevertheless, one great theme remained. Here is that old story.
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In the beginning there was an unmoving Being Who created the spheres and turns them, and at the centre of the spheres sits our dirty, sublunary, ever-shifting world, so prone to imperfection. The spheres’ motion is traceable and calculable in the motion of the planets they carry—the moving stars, as one used to think of them—while the farthest sphere from us is the one that bears the fixed stars. As Godwin efficiently explains this cosmological schema, “the Earth remains unmoving at the centre of all things, and around it spin eight concentric spheres which bear the heavenly bodies. These spheres may be visualized as solid shells of crystalline ether, harder than adamant yet more translucent than air; or they may be purely mathematical loci for the orbits of the planets.” Beyond those spheres are the orders of angels.
The Pythagorean tradition seemingly first began the work of comparing the planets’ motions to the intervals of musical scales. The incessant motions of the spheres, whatever they consist of, produces music. Since our music operates on the same principles as the heavens themselves, music down here reflects the music of the spheres. We can learn about the heavens—and experience them, to some extent—through exploring music, and vice versa. Censorinus (c. 3rd century AD) summarises:
Pythagoras’ assertion [was] that the whole world is made according to a musical plan, and that the seven stars [e.g., the planets] wandering between heaven and earth, which affect the birth of mortals, move rhythmically and in positions corresponding to musical intervals, and give forth various sounds consonant with their altitude which together make the most exquisite melody.
The way our world, orderly as it was perceived to be, mirrors the orderly heavens above results from the music of the spheres directly impacting our sublunary world, the world beneath the Moon — even by creating it. Dating back to Plato’s oeuvre, the music of the spheres was commonly written of as having played a role in creating our entire sublunary world. Famously, in 1687, John Dryden writes:
From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
This universal frame began.
When Nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay,
And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high,
Arise ye more than dead.
All of nature finds its form from the heavens’ harmony. Out of the chaos of scattered atoms, nature solidified only through the ordering principles of the celestial music.
The spheres’ music continues to hit us long after creation, so it’s important to learn how the sounds emitted by particular spheres have differing properties and effects on us. Franchino Gorfini (1451-1522) approvingly summarises the major perspectives of his time, writing, for instance, that Venus “is said… to emit a feminine sound,” because it’s moist, while Saturn is cold and dry and thus its sound is masculine. And so on. Censorinus, extrapolating upon a normal line of thought for centuries before and after his time, writes about how the musical alignment of the planets affects the development of foetuses. All this was very scientific per the worldview of the time, wherein astrology still linked star-patterns to our world.
The separation of astrology from astronomy is under-acknowledged as a sudden and cataclysmic cultural shock, the waves of which we still feel. After all, astrology and the music of the spheres lent us the idea of an orderly, hierarchical, and predictable, if magic-infused world. Jamie James captures the way that musical cosmology formed a cornerstone in a comfortingly tidy outlook on everything from divinity to politics.
Everything you can see and hear and know is an aspect of the ultimate truth: the noble simplicity of the a geometric theorem, the predictability of the movements of heavenly bodies, the harmonious beauty of a well-proportioned fugue — all are reflections of the essential perfection of the universe. And here on earth, too, no less than in the heavens and in the world of ideas, order prevails…
This idea of the world’s creation through heavenly harmony had ethical implications. Many thinkers explored and explained how music affects our souls, even postulating that our souls are themselves a kind of numerical harmony. But we must also work to align our souls with the eternal harmony of the perfect spheres surrounding our fickle world. Andreas Werckmeister (1645-1706) penned a short treatise comparing the entire process of creation to music, concluding with the ancient idea that “music is not only a mirror and symbol of the spiritual and divine being, but also of all secular and earthly actions[.]” Some famous thinkers, among them notably the c. 4th-century philosopher Aristeides Quintilianus, sought to mathematise ethics in accordance with musical scales and thus with the music of the spheres (“the four virtues do not happen to be otherwise than similarities to numbers…”), but I won’t dive further into that pit here.
One of the most famous ancient writers to discuss the relation of music to the soul (and to the planets and the zodiac etc.) at length is Ptolemy (c. 2nd century AD), who writes that “the modulations of the soul through life’s circumstances” mirror the ways music works. Even the modulations of politics and the law reflect musicality, per Ptolemy, and the ups and downs of whole societies’ fortunes impact the soul in musical ways. The tonoi he discusses reflect different lifestyles and thus states of the soul; thus “our souls evidently experience the same effects as the melody, as if they recognize the kindred relationship of the ratios of each state and are modeled by some movements appropriate to individual musical forms.” Thus our moods fluctuate with, and like, music, and this per Ptolemy explains a piece of health wisdom that was ancient even in his day:
Pythagoras advised rising at dawn and, before beginning some work, employing music and gentle melody so that the confusion in the soul felt at awakening from sleep, first converted by modulation into a pure state and an ordered mildness, then prepares the soul to be harmonized and consonant for its daily activities.
Aristeides cites the medical knowledge of his day to point out that our bodies are like musical instruments, veins and sinews like strings surrounding the lungs, which are but hollows for air. Physicians measure our health through our body’s rhythms, the drumbeat of the heart above all. Ill health is marked by unmusical beats of the heart. Death is the end of our bodies’ music. Music obeys the same basic principles as our souls and bodies—so goes the wisdom of the ages—and thus plays a role in healing us mentally, physically, spiritually, bodily. It even guides us in finding true love.
Edmund Spenser tells us that the First Mover, God, Who arranged and propels the spheres, first “mov’d in it selfe by love.” True love down here is a reflection of the love we find perfected in the eternal world, and true harmony of the souls was in fact predetermined when our souls yet remained in heaven:
For Love is a celestiall harmonie,
Of likely harts compos’d of starres consent,
Which joyne together in sweete sympathie,
To worke each others’ joy and true content,
Which they haue harbourd since their first descent
Out of their heauenly bowres, where they did see
And know each other here belov'd to bee.
Perfect love is found through perfect harmony, identical with the “celestiall harmonie” of the heavens, one big tune. But as Spenser is aware, we can go awry in trying to sort true, celestial love from false. Lorenzo, in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (act 5), summarises this quandary, as he begins to realise his soul may not be as aligned with his lover’s as he had thought at first:
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens 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.
Ah, but we can hear it, say some philosophers. Even Lorenzo theorises that Jessica dislikes “sweet music” because her soul is out of tune.
Since ancient times, philosophers had wondered why we can’t hear the all-penetrating music of the spheres, mostly concluding that the sound is either too alien or too overwhelming for our ears to pick up. But others reached an alternative conclusion, that living an ethical life results in being able to detect the heavenly harmony. Thus Gafori: “But those who are endowed with virtue and distinguished mores, and are removed from baser men (who live like beasts), can hear without difficulty celestial sounds with the uncorrupted sense of their nature.” Our entire selves ideally attain relative pitch through virtue, so to speak. We should detect, amplify, imitate the harmonies of the heavens and the angels above; as Werckmeister writes, “a musician should rule over all [the] numbers or notes, bringing them into good order; and should also live his life so that good harmony comes from it. Clean and unclean beasts, consonances and dissonances, have their uses at certain times, and must become compatible so that God and man may take pleasure therein.” Virtue was only music all along. Accordingly, vice is destructive disharmony. What began with the creation of the harmonious spheres can be put into disarray by sin, but all can come back into harmony. Thus we approach the end of the story of everything. To return to Dryden:
As from the pow’r of sacred lays
The spheres began to move,
And sung the great Creator’s praise
To all the bless’d above;
So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And music shall untune the sky.
Perfect music from heaven created us and perfect music from heaven will herald the new and perfect world. Just as the heavens moved the spheres to sing harmonious praises to God, so too will we be redeemed by music from “on high,” which will eradicate the sublunary world’s flawed tune, exchanging death for life among the righteous. It all begins and ends with one long love song.
All good things come from harmony — love, morality, just law and righteous governance, physical and psychological wellbeing, ultimate redemption. These come from the attunement of our souls with the Soul of the World, the song of which we can measure by the stars and planets and feel in our own hearts. You are the celestial love song. Hearing and heeding the cosmic symphony is the simple, yet intellectually and emotionally demanding meaning of life; you have a place in this orchestra whose players are themselves made of music, body and soul, constituted by and harmonising with the rest of Divinity, striving to bring our selves and world back into total alignment with the beauty of God.
Or so the ancients say. And so I sometimes think.
That is the message of the music of the spheres. But we live after this star-song’s end. As Jamie James acknowledges: “Those ideals are gone forever.” Nevertheless, writes Thomas H. Troeger, “The harmony of the spheres is less a description of the universe and more a revelation about our need to find a way to a state of harmonious existence with ourselves, with one another, with creation, and with the very source of our being. Cosmologies will come and go, but the hunger for harmony will persist.” The harmony of the spheres is a useful and beautiful metaphor, not a science, but is nevertheless worth preserving somewhere else in our drum-like hearts, the musical instrument by which we know life from death.
Selected bibliography
I wrote a bit of my dissertation on this topic so a lot of the history comes to mind by memory; I’ll only give my chief sources in writing this, specifically. For history, I mostly referred back to:
Joscelyn Godwin, Harmonies of Heaven and Earth: Mysticism in Music from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde (Inner Traditions, 1995).
Jamie James, The Music of the Spheres: Music, Science, and the Natural Order of the Universe (Copernicus, 1993).
Other quotations came from:
Aristides Quintilianus, On Music, translated by Thomas J. Mathiesen (Yale, 1983). One can, I think, find the same passages in Godwin’s anthology below.
John Dryden, “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687.”
Joscelyn Godwin, editor, The Harmony of the Spheres: A Sourcebook of the Pythagorean Tradition in Music (Inner Traditions, 1993).
Ptolemy, Harmonics, translated by Jon Solomon (Brill, 2000).
For convenience, I quoted Shakespeare from the Gutenberg edition. I recommend the Cambridge edition of The Merchant of Venice from 2018. For a fuller analysis of Jessica’s unmusical soul, see early on in: Ruth HaCohen, The Music Libel Against the Jews (Yale, 2012). Or a chapter of my dissertation. But you can’t read my dissertation (yet?), ha-ha.
Edmund Spenser, “An Hymne in Honour of Beautie,” and “An Hymne of Heavenly Love,” in Fovvre hymnes, made by Edm. Spenser (London, 1596), accessed via EEBO.
Thomas H. Troeger, Music as Prayer: The Theology and Practice of Church Music (Oxford, 2013).
I also had in mind, although I didn’t end up citing him, Agrippa’s Three Books, which is a useful guide to the topic.
Personal, highly niche, religious appendix
Part of me, the religious part of me, thinks there is truth to the music of the spheres, in some way — at the very least, to the notion that our souls and health have to do with divine music. The Jewish and Christian thinkers who took the theory of the spheres’ music for granted easily found scriptural basis (e.g., in Psalm 19). But here I will get personally interpretive.
Our quest is immortality and we find that immortality is related to musical perfection. The deathless biblical figure Serakh bat Asher gains her immortality through skill in music, per the tradition. She revives her grandfather Jacob and restores his connection to God through her Orpheus-like musical abilities; for this she is granted immortality. Moses, David, Solomon; the second Joshua, Shabtai Tzvi, Señor Santo; the rest of the bigwigs and the failed messiahs — all left this world with nothing, having grasped the wrong thing. If our goal is “to make a man in wholeness, stable and possessing eternal life,” we ought to look instead to Serakh and to the role of divine music.
This is brilliant.