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The Sound of the Analogia Entis Part II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Francesca Murphy
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Von Balthasar’s “On the Unfolding of the Musical Idea” contains one of his recurrent stories: the grave suggestion that musical form expresses the beautiful, and therefore touches on the horizon of the divine. Von Balthasar later recalled Ehrenfels’ achievement. He says that the conception of form which undergirds Aristotelian and scholastic ontology, as a “totality of parts” which “transcends its members as parts”,

“. . . was excavated with sufficient success out of the ruins of atomistic psychology ... by Christian von Ehrenfels”.

The first step in the reappraisal of die ontological difference is the recovery of the essentia. As von Balthasar says in reference to Anselm, the theological act needs the grip hold of the philosophical intuition of essences. The realistic phenomenologists showed that this can be achieved, and that, not as a dogmatic exercise, but as a living philosophical enterprise. Any exit into a static essentialism is blocked by Ehrenfels’ starting place in the study of music. The melodic gestalt flows out of a movement in time. Przywara hears the ‘essence’ as an interplay of phonic forces, interweaving in their diverse speeds and velocities. Von Balthasar takes beautiful form as the analogy for the Christology of The Glory. He finds in the Incarnation a design of horizontal and vertical thrusts. He says,

”... Everyone who has listened to Bach knows that in the classical fugue, the slow rhythmical arrangement is oppositional: the first theme is slow and reposeful, the second runs along swiftly, and the third contains a rhythmical hammering; and every hearer knows that this varied thematic construction is determined by the rationale of the fugue‘s total construction. Something similar occurs with the Gospel. The eschatological theme, … is incomprehensible without the cadence of Christ’s suffering. The vertical form of the Son of God who descends from the Father and goes back to him would be illegible without the horizontal fom of historical fulfilment …”

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 74 , Issue 877 , December 1993 , pp. 557 - 565
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

54 Von Balthasar, “The Unfolding of the Musical Idea” (37–8).

55 Von Balthasar, , The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. IV: The Realm of Metaphysics in Antiquity, edited by Riches, John, translated by McNeil, B., Louth, A., Saward, J., Williams, R. and Davies, O. (T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 29–30Google Scholar.

56 Von Balthasar, , The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics. II: Studies in Theological Style: Clerical Styles, edited by Riches, John, translated by Louth, A., McDonagh, F. and McNeil, B. (T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh, 1984), p. 224.Google Scholar

57 Von Balthasar, Glory: IV, p. 31.

58 Von Balthasar, Glory: I, pp. 512–13.

59 Ibid, p. 153.

60 Von Balthasar, Glory: II, p. 166.

61 Von Balthasar, Glory: I, pp. 166–67.

62 Ibid, p. 162.

63 Ibid, p. 244.

64 Ibid, p. 245.

65 Ibid, p. 307.

66 Ibid, pp. 157–58.

67 Ibid, p. 450.

68 Von Balthasar, , Glory: II, pp. 220–23 and 227.Google Scholar

69 Ibid, p. 229.

70 Ibid, p. 232.

71 Ibid, p. 237.

72 For the four Stages: von Balthasar, , Glory: V, pp. 615–23.Google Scholar

73 Ibid, 622–23.

74 Von Balthasar, , Glory: IV, p. 375.Google Scholar

75 Owens, Joseph, “The Accidental and Essential Character of Being in the Doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas”, in St. Thomas Aquinas on the Existence of God: The Collected papers of Joseph Owens, edited by Catan, John R. (State University of New York Press, Albany, 1980) pp. 52–96Google Scholar (pp. 92 & 95–6).

76 Thomas Aquinas, Concerning Being and Essence, Ch. 5, p. 28.

77 Von Balthasar, Glory: I, p. 463.

78 Ibid, p. 431.

79 Kolnai, Memoir, p. 15.

80 Von Balthasar, Glory: V, p. 548

81 Von Balthasar, Glory: I, p. 448.

82 Ibid, p. 253.

83 Ibid, p. 432.