Anton Bruckner, Sacred Tonality and Parsifal's Redemption: Spiritual Enfleshment and the Musical Via Positiva

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Mary the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand: and all the women went forth after her with timbrels and with dances.

(Exod. 15:20)

David and all Israel played before the Lord on all manner of instruments made of wood, on harps and lutes and timbrels and cornets and cymbals. . . . And when they that carried the ark of the Lord had gone six paces, he sacrificed an ox and a ram: and David danced with all his might before the Lord.

(2Sam. 6:5, 13-14)

Music speaks to both parts of man, the bodily and the spiritual: addressed to his sense of hearing, it reaches and fills the ear of the soul.¹ A healthy people make good music, and the Jews, of course, are no exception: in their centuries of worship they have fashioned rhythms and melodies for every nuance of mood and message conveyed through their holy scriptures. In the best music, there is no opposition between the sensuous and the sacred. Man is not a soul imprisoned in the body, a distant participant of the agent intellect moving toward reunification with it. Man is, and reaches his perfection by being to the fullest, an embodied spirit, a spirit that in its very essence is the formative, life-giving principle of the flesh united to it, with all the fleshly powers and susceptibilities. Music at its most perfect imitates this union. It mysteriously speaks to man at the intersection of spirit and flesh as if it were the native language of the composite, a privileged means by which the intimate union of body and soul can be experientially felt and intuitively known, even furthered in secondary perfection. "Rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful," Socrates says to Glaucon.² Think again of the Hebrew chanting of the Psalms: is it not the case that by singing the songs of Zion, dancing in celebration, soul and body are brought into harmony, confirmed in their natural togetherness—the body ennobled by participating in the higher world of devotion, the soul's motions redounding, in turn, more deeply into the body's powers? One might even attribute to music the lofty function of an ongoing enfleshment of spirit and inspiriting of flesh. Good music is incarnate and incarnative.³

By being and doing this, music imitates at a distance the Incarnation of our Lord, the eternal Son of God's having taken flesh of the Virgin Mary, uniting in one suppositum the divine and human natures, analogous to the union of intellect and body in the human suppositum.⁴ The advent of the Lord opens before our eyes (and ears) an understanding of man infinitely more profound than the pagan world could have known. In his Exhortation to the Heathen, Clement of Alexandria rhapsodizes about the mystical symphony of the Logos, Jesus Christ:

Behold the might of the new song! It has made men out of stones, men out of beasts. . . . It also composed the universe into melodious order, and tuned the discord of the elements to harmonious arrangement, so that the whole world might become harmony. . . . And He who is of David, and yet before him, the Word of God . . . having tuned by the Holy Spirit the universe, yes, and the little world of man, body and soul together, makes melody to God on this instrument of many tones, and to this instrument (I mean man) he sings accordant: "For thou art my harp, and pipe, and temple"—a harp for harmony, a pipe by reason of the Spirit, a temple by reason of the word. . . . A beautiful breathing...