38 Spirituality Studies 9-2 Fall 2023 Hippo) by the Greco-Roman tradition, but also by the Jewish one: the harmony of the universe in this religion undoubtedly influenced the development of Boethius (Gersh 2011). A paradigmatic case is that of Philo of Alexandria, who speaks of the Chaldean people as those who have learned how to harmonize or assemble the things that are on Earth with those that are above with heavenly things and have shown how, since the proportions of music, the most melodious of consonances is realized in the universe. This idea may have come to Philo because of his Judaism and by his incardination in Greek culture; in any case, his vital experience was that of a contemplative mystic, as he describes in his own work, De vita contemplativa. So far, we find the cross-cutting persistence of the concepts of harmony and unity, both in music and spirituality. But this entire tradition has been taken up in our days and has thus expanded with the most recent paradigms of the philosophy of science, which include energy (vibration), as well as ineffability, and the senses as proxies for the direct knowledge provided by spiritual contemplation. This is expressed very clearly by Normand Laurendeau (1944–2012), who was Professor Emeritus of Combustion – that is, his point of departure was science – and whose series of three articles on Christian Mysticism and Science was published in the journal Theology and Science in 2012 and 2013. In them he analyzes the convergence of mysticism with science in a broad sense, including philosophy and the human sciences, and develops it through an epistemological (Laurendeau 2012a), phenomenological (2012b), and psychological (2013) analysis. We now proceed to highlight from this broad analysis only those areas that connect with music from the century-old philosophical tradition with which we began this epigraph. It seems clear that there is a parallel between the physical senses and the spiritual senses; this assimilation is already present in Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–253), continues also with Augustine of Hippo, (contributing another concept to those cited above), and persists in Thomas Aquinas (1225– 1274), etc., “[a]s for all models, whether in science or religion, the spiritual senses clearly express only partial understanding. For this reason, they provide a viable link between the known and unknown.” (Laurendeau 2012a, 232). And although, among the senses, sight seems to be more linked to the mystical experience, it is no less true that hearing – the sense par excellence for music – is also related to such experiences. We think of those who listen with clarity to sounds or words that are imposed on them, or those who transcribe such experiences as if writing by dictation, hardly adding anything of their own, but with a direct knowledge of what they receive, which they hear with total clarity and receive without any kind of doubt as a gift, and with total auditory clarity (D’Amato 2009, 49). On the other hand, the energy that God is shown as, is as an ontological metaphor that expresses both the immanence and transcendence of God (Laurendeau 2012a, 235): This metaphorical concept has received its most thorough explication through the work of Gregory Palamas (1296– 1359), mostly in his Triads for the Defense of the Holy Hesychast. According to Palamas, God is unknowable in his essence, but knowable by humans through his manifestations or energies. God’s energies, of course, proceed from his essence, which is the source of his creation. Even more concretely and contemporarily, some theological currents (overcoming the Aristotelian dualism that has traditionally equated interpretation in terms of form), consider the very sacraments of the Christian liturgy as forms of energy, especially Baptism and the Eucharist (Roll 2013, 266). Thus, although these are elements of a particular religion, it is clear that in the paradigm it represents, they constitute the most obvious links to spirituality. In our judgment, the vibration that is necessary to produce any kind of music is also a source of energy, so it can equally be considered as one of the energetic manifestations of God Himself, and of our access to transcendence that stems from our own nature as well as from the natural world, connected literally by both physical and metaphorically ontological vibrations. Laurendeau’s phenomenological and psychological analyses relate more directly to music, and even to singing as a concrete practice. For this reason, we will analyze them, together with other concepts and authors, in a separate section. 4.3 Spirituality of Music and Metaphysics of Singing So far, we have unveiled connections between music in general, singing, and spirituality on a philosophical level. These connections have been concretized in the concepts of harmony, unity in multiplicity, energy, and vibration, as well as in the capacity of the senses, especially hearing, to capture this energetic vibration. In the same way, their capacity to appre-
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