Abstract
This chapter explains what is meant by ‘extravagance,’ first in relation to music and then in relation to the divine. The section on the former includes a consideration of music’s ineffability—which is defended against the objections of certain ‘new musicologists’—and a contextualizing historical discussion of music’s disclosive and affective capacities, which are associated with the ‘Pythagorean’ and ‘Orphic’ traditions. The chapter concludes with some brief reflections on what is innovative about the volume, which focusses in particular on its optimistic theological vision of music, which seeks to widen and multiply the spaces in which the divine may be encountered and encourages an openness to religious possibilities.
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Notes
- 1.
Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate ([1961] Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), xxi.
- 2.
Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott Montcrieff , vol. I ([1922] London: Chatto & Windus, 1966), 288. For a consideration of the possible sources of the imaginary sonata, see André Coeuroy , ‘Music in the Work of Marcel Proust ,’ The Musical Quarterly 12: 1 (1926).
- 3.
Swann’s Way, 291.
- 4.
Hoffmann , Sämtliche Werke, ed. Carl Georg von Maassen and trans. Bryan Simms , vol. I (Munich: G. Müller, 1908), 55.
- 5.
Heroes and Hero-Worship , and the Heroic in History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 80.
- 6.
‘A Happy Evening,’ Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis , vol. VII (London: Kegan Paul, 1898), 81.
- 7.
Real Presences: Is There Anything in What We Say? (London: Faber & Faber, 1989), 251. In addition, see Jean-Luc Nancy ’s, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), in which he argues that music opens up ‘a beyond significance that it is not possible to enter and analyze under any kind of code’ (58–9); and Jean-Luc Marion ’s, The Visible and the Revealed, trans. Christina Gschwandtner (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), in which he describes music as a ‘saturated phenomenon’ (129)—which is to say, a phenomenon that, in presenting itself to consciousness, involves a surfeit of givenness that exceeds conceptualization or containment.
- 8.
‘Ecstatic and Synaesthetic Experiences During Musical Perception,’ in Music and the Brain: Studies in the Neurology of Music, ed. Macdonald Critchley and R. A. Henson (London: William Heinemann, 1977), 217. See also Mary Priestley ’s Postlude on ‘The Ineffable,’ in Essays on Analytic Music Therapy (Gilsum: Barcelona Publishers, 1994).
- 9.
Although manifestly differing in their connotations, these three terms have all been used to describe the work of Lawrence Kramer , Richard Leppert , Susan McClary and others, whose once intensely controversial approaches to music—which reflect ‘a wider postmodern move to displace positivism and the concept of the autonomous musical work’ as well as ‘a will to engage with disciplines outside musicology’—have now ‘largely been absorbed into common practice’ (Musicology: The Key Concepts, ed. David Beard and Kenneth Gloag (London: Routledge, 2005), 122).
- 10.
Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), Introduction.
- 11.
‘Subjective’ here does not refer to ‘the condition of the self regarded as a private monad,’ but to ‘lived positions’ or ‘the process whereby a person occupies a series of socially defined positions from which certain forms of action, desire, speech, and understanding become possible’ (‘Musicology and Meaning,’ The Musical Times (2003), 6).
- 12.
The Thought of Music (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 46–7.
- 13.
Introduction to Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception , ed. Richard Leppert and Susan McClary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), xix.
- 14.
Like Kramer, Leppert and McClary bring together under the heading of ‘the ideology of autonomy’ both the ostensible self-sufficiency of the musical work and the ‘conventional musical reception of the “music lover” who listens to music precisely in order to withdraw from the real world’ (ibid., xiii).
- 15.
Carolyn Abbate , for one, dissents from such wholesale denunciations and insists against Kramer that ‘Aesthetic pleasure, the appreciation of beauty is not evil, nor is it just a hedonistic consolation’ (‘Music—Drastic or Gnostic?’ Critical Inquiry 30: 3 (2004), 532).
- 16.
For a wide-ranging and theologically informed discussion of ‘musical healing ’ and the ways in which the art-form offers us the possibility of transformation and strengthened living, see June Boyce-Tillman , Constructing Musical Healing : The Wounds That Sing (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2000); and Experiencing Music—Restoring the Spiritual: Music as Well-Being (Bern: Peter Lang, 2016).
- 17.
Musical Meaning, 4–5, 12.
- 18.
Kramer makes no secret of his allegiance to a form of ‘closed-world’ materialism, which may explain his allergy to the idea of transcendence . See, for instance, Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 155.
- 19.
See, for example, the opening chapter of Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge—a version of which was previously published as an essay entitled ‘The Musicology of the Future’ (repercussions, 1: 1 (1992))—in which Kramer notes that once upon a time music was experienced as ‘a venue for transcendence ,’ and agrees with Carl Dahlhaus that during the nineteenth century ‘autonomous music capable of conveying the “inexpressible”’ became a replacement form of religion; however, he goes on to claim that ‘Gradually […] the religious truth signified by autonomous music is effaced by the very autonomy that is, or had once been, its signifier. Where “strict concentration on the work as self-contained musical process” once meant the apprehension of the work in its unworldliness, the same concentration now means the apprehension of the innate character, the complex unity-in-diversity , of the musical process itself’ (ibid., 16). Quite a lot is asserted—and erased—in Kramer’s ‘now means.’ Perhaps most conspicuously, it absolutizes the already sweeping assertion about the gradual effacement of music’s transcendental significance into a universal truth, which not only assumes that no one now listens to music in this way but in the process also quietly seems to deprive music of the very possibility of such significance. This broad-brush narrative, in which the transcendental significance of music becomes a purely formal transcendence —in the sense of a cordoned off aesthetic sphere—such that music loses its potential metaphysical import, is repeated elsewhere in Kramer’s work. See, for instance, Musical Meaning, Chapter 1.
- 20.
R. W. Hepburn , ‘ Wonder ’ and Other Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984), 150.
- 21.
‘The Musicology of the Future,’ 10.
- 22.
For examples of recent critical works that seek to recover a sense of music’s affective power and ‘ontological vehemence,’ without denying its social meanings or divorcing it from its constitutive life-contexts, see Roger W. H. Savage, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism (New York: Routledge, 2010); and Theodore Gracyk , Listening to Popular Music : Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Led Zeppelin (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
- 23.
A panoramic survey of these changes is provided by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). For a recent reconsideration of the relationship between music and transcendence , see Music and Transcendence , ed. Férdia Stone-Davis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015).
- 24.
Kramer’s stance is somewhat ambivalent in this respect, since on the one hand he prefaces his discussion of transcendence in The Thought of Music with an exposition of Derrida’s reflections on the modality of the ‘perhaps’ and the ‘as if’ structure of humanistic knowledge—which would seem to announce a radical openness to the nature of the real—and yet, on the other hand, when it comes to determining the legitimacy of religious intuitions, this Derridean reserve disappears and there is little evidence of any real openness to different possibilities.
- 25.
It should be stressed that this is not to contest the constructed character of music. However, it is to take issue with the narrowed sense of the real that tends to be presupposed in such readings, and the suggestion of exclusive immanence that seems to underlie them. It is also to diverge from the views of Susan McClary , who sees ‘metaphysical’ readings of music as ‘irreconcilable’ with approaches that recognize it as a ‘socially grounded, socially alterable construct’ (Music and Society, 15). Against this view, the authors of the current volume hold that it is possible for a ‘worldly’ phenomenon such as music to be socially constructed and yet still evoke something beyond itself.
- 26.
The Thought of Music, 49.
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
Leonid Ouspensky , Eastern Orthodox Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003), 61.
- 29.
The Thought of Music, 168ff.
- 30.
Peter Bannister , ‘Kenosis in Contemporary Music and Postmodern Philosophy,’ Contemporary Music and Spirituality , ed. Robert Sholl and Sander van Maas (London: Routledge, 2017), 56, 77.
- 31.
The use of melisma in plainsong —and especially the extravagantly extended alleluia—is a clear example of how ‘excessive’ sonorous forms can be employed to signal something that surpasses quotidian speech and thus serve an apophatic function .
- 32.
Sander van Maas , The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen ’s Breakthrough Toward the Beyond (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 32–3, 116.
- 33.
In his study of ‘absolute music ’ Mark Evan Bonds provides an excellent survey of the interplay between ‘essence’ and ‘effect ’ in conceptions of music from antiquity to the middle of the twentieth century; the former he associates with Pythagoras and the latter with Orpheus , whom he argues ‘embody the two fundamentally different perspectives on music that together circumscribe the foundation of Western attitudes toward the art’ ( Absolute Music : The History of an Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 17). Philip Stoltzfus also offers an informative account of ‘Pythagoras and Orpheus as Premodern Theological Resources’ in Theology as Performance: Music, Aesthetics and God in Western Thought (New York: Continuum, 2006), Chapter 2.
- 34.
See Flora R. Levin , Greek Reflections on Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), Chapter 1.
- 35.
On further connections with Christianity and the durability of the notion, see David Brown , God and Grace of Body (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 231–2, 237–40.
- 36.
For an account of these differences, see Andy Hamilton , Aesthetics and Music (London: Continuum, 2007), 13ff.
- 37.
See, for instance, the Timaeus, 35–6. For a discussion of this, see Wayne Bowman , Philosophical Perspectives on Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Chapter 2.
- 38.
Boethius : The Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology, and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 80.
- 39.
See, for example, The Confessions, Book X, 33, 49–50.
- 40.
Augustine ’s meditations on beauty are shaped by what Robert O’Connell has called an ‘ascensional aesthetic’ (Art and the Christian Intelligence in St . Augustine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 22). What this means is that created beauty , for Augustine, is a sort of providential admonition that seeks to lure us ‘per corporalia ad incorporalia’ towards a vision of divine beauty , of which it is a fugitive and obscure intimation. As Augustine makes clear in the famous colloquy with nature in Book X of The Confessions, music or ‘melodious song in all its lovely harmonies’ is a salient example of such ‘admonitory’ beauty , which points beyond itself in obliquely revealing something of the enchanting beauty of the divine. See also De musica, Book VI, in which Augustine argues that music is one of the ways in which the mind can be drawn into contemplation of the divine.
- 41.
Music in Early Christian Literature, ed. James McKinnon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 156–7.
- 42.
The idea that music has some sort of kinship or congruity with the divine was not limited to Augustine, as we can see from the Musica Enchiriadis—an anonymous ninth-century musical handbook—which concludes with an allegory about Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the unfathomable mysteries of music—which at present, it suggests, we only see through a glass darkly—are compared to divine realities that exceed our grasp. (Music Handbook, trans. Léonie Rosenstiel (Colorado Springs: Colorado College Music Press, 1976), 76.)
- 43.
Hildegard in a Nutshell, ed. Robert van der Weyer (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1997), 79. For further commentary, see June Boyce-Tillman , The Creative Spirit—Harmonious Living with Hildegard of Bingen (Norwich: Canterbury Press, 2000).
- 44.
For a discussion of Luther’s sense that music is a gift from God, see Miikka E. Anttila , Luther’s Theology of Music: Spiritual Beauty and Pleasure (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013); and for a consideration of ‘Pythagorean’ tendencies in Luther’s thought, see J. Andreas Loewe, ‘“Musica Est Optimum”: Martin Luther ’s Theory of Music,’ Music & Letters 94: 4 (2013). The suggestion that God preaches by means of music is recorded in Luther’s Table Talk (1532).
- 45.
Absolute Music , 10–1.
- 46.
See Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin , Music in the Western World: A History in Documents (New York: Macmillan, 1984), 150.
- 47.
On music and the sublime , see Edmund Burke , A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Archibald Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790).
- 48.
Romanticism : A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 74. Ferber has the symphonies of Beethoven in particular in mind.
- 49.
Music in German Philosophy, ed. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and Oliver Fürbeth and trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 12.
- 50.
Music in German Philosophy, 13.
- 51.
The first volume of Aesthetica appeared in 1750.
- 52.
Music in German Philosophy, 13.
- 53.
Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 90–1.
- 54.
The Idea of Absolute Music , trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 63.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
See James Johnson , Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), Chapter 16.
- 57.
Nineteenth-Century Music, 94. Dahlhaus traces this idea to the work of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–1798), though the becoming-religious of art is also obviously part of the wider Romantic tendency towards ‘spilt religion.’
- 58.
Günter Zöller, ‘Schopenhauer,’ in Music in German Philosophy, 128.
- 59.
The World as Will and Representation, trans. Richard E. Aquila, vol. 1 ([1818] London: Routledge, 2016), 311.
- 60.
The Idea of Absolute Music, 73.
- 61.
On Wagner’s metaphysics, see Bryan McGee, Wagner and Philosophy (London: Penguin, 2000); and for a discussion of his complex relationship with the religious, see Roger Scruton, Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
- 62.
Absolute Music , 240.
- 63.
‘Zukunftsmusik,’ in Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, ed. Wolfgang Golther, vol. 7 (Berlin: Bong & Co., 1913), 110 [eine Offenbarung au seiner anderen Welt].
- 64.
Religion and Art, trans. W. Ashton Ellis ([1897] London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 213. For further remarks on the relationship between music and religion, see Wagner’s ‘Introduction to the Year 1880,’ in which he speaks of music as ‘something divine’ and claims that God has left us ‘in eternal memory of him—Music’ (34).
- 65.
The Music of the Spheres : Music, Science and the Natural Order of the Universe (London: Abacus, 1995), Chapter 7. Whilst this is undoubtedly broadly true, one might nonetheless prefer to endorse a somewhat more positive reading of the Romantics’ engagement with ideas of transcendence —which, as James concedes, were far from homogenous; for, as debates within Romantic studies attest, it is possible to interpret the ‘in-between space’ of Romanticism on the one hand as something that advances the process of secularization , in its ‘humanizing’ of traditional religious ideas, but also on the other hand as a counter-posture or protest against the Enlightenment vision that residually preserves, even as it transforms, religious ideas that it can neither fully affirm nor reject.
- 66.
Coleridge’s tragedy Remorse, for instance (first perfomed in 1813), describes ‘a noise too vast and constant to be heard,’ girdling the earth (II.i, 42–3); Keats alludes to ‘the glorious pealing / Of the wide spheres—an everlasting tone’ in ‘To Kościuszko’ (1816); in ‘Epipsychidion’ (1821), P. B. Shelley refers to ‘planetary music heard in a trance,’ and elsewhere writes of the way that music made by this-worldly instruments imitates the music of the spheres (‘With a Guitar—To Jane,’ composed in 1822). In Cain (published in 1821), Byron’s protagonist returns from a voyage to the ‘Abyss of Space’ and tells of the ‘loud-voiced spheres / Singing in thunder round [him]’ (III, 182–3); and in Don Juan, the poet writes: ‘There’s music in the sighing of a reed; / There’s music in the gushing of a rill; / There’s music in all things, if men had ears: / Their earth is but an echo of the spheres’ (XV, 5, published in 1824). The idea also recurs throughout the work of George MacDonald (see, for example, Robert Falconer, published in 1868 or At the Back of the North Wind, published in 1871).
- 67.
See The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1977), in which Schafer urges us to ‘let nature sing for itself’ and to listen for music ‘tuned by a divine hand’ in the sounds of the world around us (6).
- 68.
For further artistic examples, see the discussion of John Cage and ‘sound art ’ in Chapter 6; for more theoretical examples, see Andrew Hicks , Composing the World: Harmony in the Medieval Platonic Cosmos (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), who explores ‘the afterlives of dead metaphors’ and highlights ‘sympathetic resonances’ between the ‘harmonicizing traditions’ of antiquity and contemporary affirmations of ‘a musically animate cosmos,’ citing the work of Merleau-Ponty but also the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, who refuse the transcendence of a Pythagorian-Platonic vision, but who describe nature as ‘an immense melody’ and speak of a universe that is ‘made of refrains ,’ which constitute relations across heterogeneous territories and milieu (11–2, 248). On the latter, see also Michael Gallope , Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), who argues that what we find in Deleuze and Guattari’s work on music is a ‘post-structuralist revival of Pythagoreanism,’ which affirms the belief that ‘music shares […] a grand coextensive relationship with the cosmos’ (29, 207).
- 69.
This difference may in part be explained by the differing time periods with which two parts of the volume are concerned. For a discussion of the historical shift from a more determinate premodern model of divine transcendence —which allows some sort of analogical continuity with the created order—to the aporetic and sublimely indeterminate ‘beyond’ of postmodernity, see John Milbank , ‘Sublimity: The Modern Transcendent,’ in Transcendence : Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond, ed. Regina Schwartz (New York: Routledge, 2004).
- 70.
Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1955), 226.
- 71.
Theologian Platonis, I, 5 (I, 25–6, Saffrey-Westerink), trans. S. Burges Watson, Living Poets (Durham, 2014).
- 72.
Politics, Book VIII, The Complete Works of Aristotle , ed. Jonathan Barnes, trans. Benjamin Jowett, vol. II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2129.
- 73.
For a contrastive summary of the views of Augustine and Aquinas on music and its ability to raise the mind towards God, see Richard Viladesau , Theology and the Arts: Encountering God Through Music, Art and Rhetoric (New York: Paulist Press, 2000), Chapter 1.
- 74.
Cassiodori Senatoris Institutiones, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, II.v.10 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), 149.
- 75.
See John Block Friedman , Orpheus in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), Chapter 3. For a discussion of the ways in which early Christian apologists, such as Clement of Alexandria, both condemned and co-opted certain aspects of the Orphic tradition —denouncing the ‘unholy’ deeds attributed to Orpheus whilst interpreting other features of the myths as prefigurations of Christian doctrine—see Radcliffe G. Edmonds III , Redefining Ancient Orphism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Chapter 2.
- 76.
See Alexander Brouquet , ‘Orpheus Remembered: The Rediscovery of Orpheus during the Renaissance ,’ Rosicrucian Digest 1 (2008); and Redefining Ancient Orphism, 49ff.
- 77.
In L’altercazione [The Supreme Good] (1474), Lorenzo de Medici writes with reference to Ficino: ‘I thought that Orpheus was back on earth’ (II, 4).
- 78.
Letter to Antonio Canigiani (cited in ‘The Psychotropic Power of Music During the Renaissance ,’ in The Emotional Power of Music: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Musical Arousal, Expression, and Social Control, ed. Tom Cochrane et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 289).
- 79.
Opera omnia, 523 (trans. D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: The Warburg Institute, 1958), 5).
- 80.
Opera omnia, 1453 (ibid., 9).
- 81.
Ibid., 8.
- 82.
As Johann Cochlaeus writes in his Commentary on the Acts and Writings of Luther (1549): ‘He [Luther] played on the harp like another Orpheus , a tonsured and cowled Orpheus ’ (cited in Jules Michelet, The Life of Martin Luther (New York: A. A. Kelley, 1859), 52).
- 83.
Luther’s Theology of Music, 106. Having said this, it needs to be emphasized that ‘the heart’ is not, for Luther, as we might assume today, a metonymy for ‘feelings,’ set over against ‘the head’; instead, it denotes ‘the innermost being of a person as well as the source of thoughts, volitions, and feelings’ (109–10). In this respect, Luther’s conception of affectivity anticipates contemporary attempts to provide a less dichotomized model of cognition and affect .
- 84.
See Joyce Irwin , ‘“So Faith Comes from What Is Heard”: The Relationship between Music and God’s Word in the First Two Centuries of German Lutheranism,’ in Resonant Witness: Conversations between Music and Theology, ed. Jeremy Begbie and Steven Guthrie (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 69.
- 85.
‘Preface to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae iucundae,’ Luther’s Works, ed. Ulrich Leupold, vol. 53 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1965), 323.
- 86.
‘So Faith Comes from What Is Heard,’ 71.
- 87.
The term was coined by Johann Mattheson in Der Volkommene Kapellmeister (1739), in which he argued that music arouses an array of emotions and is capable of beneficially altering the disposition of the listener. As Jonas Lundblad points out, Schleiermacher ‘repudiates any theory of distinct musical affects’ and is more concerned with a less determinate religious ‘feeling’ (‘Theomusical Subjectivity : Schleiermacher and the Transcendence of Immediacy,’ Music and Transcendence , 100).
- 88.
On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. R. Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 78.
- 89.
Theology as Performance, 68–9.
- 90.
On Religion, 75.
- 91.
Thanks in part to the ‘turn to affect ’ in contemporary thought, Scheiermacher’s work on ‘feeling’ appears to be enjoying something of a renaissance. One of the most important aspects of which, from a musicological point of view, is his prescient meditation on the ways in which ‘music and philosophy unite to uncover and explore a dimension of consciousness which is not exclusively tied to a discursive mode’ (Lundblad, ‘Theomusical Subjectivity : Schleiermacher and the Transcendence of Immediacy,’ 104). For a discussion of Schleiermacher’s work that brings out its prescience with regard to contemporary philosophy, see Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy, and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Chapter 5; and Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), Chapter 6.
- 92.
Music Therapy : An Art Beyond Words (New York: Routledge, 2014), 194. See also Boyce-Tillman, Experiencing Music, Prelude and Postlude.
- 93.
See Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy Since Antiquity, ed. Peregine Horden (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).
- 94.
Ansdell, How Music Helps in Music Therapy and Everyday Life (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2014), 20; and DeNora, Music Asylums: Wellbeing Through Music in Everyday Life (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015).
- 95.
For a good introduction to such ways of thinking about the divine, see Stephen H. Webb , Blessed Excess : Religion and the Hyperbolic Imagination (New York: SUNY Press, 1993). For further reflections on ‘extravagant’ conceptions of the divine in the major world religions, see Part I of the present volume.
- 96.
The Divine Names, trans. Clarence E. Rolt (Montana: Kessinger Publishing, n.d.), 106.
- 97.
See David Kelsey , Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009).
- 98.
For a discussion of this contested notion, see David Brown , Divine Humanity: Kenosis and the Construction of a Christian Theology (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2011).
- 99.
See, for example, the wedding at Cana (John 2:1–11), the miraculous draught of fishes (Luke 5:1–11) and the feeding of the five thousand (Matthew 14:13–21; Mark 6:31–34; Luke 9:10–17; John 6:5–15).
- 100.
For a compelling restatement of this traditional idea and an explanation of its relevance for the arts, see Robert Johnston, God’s Wider Presence: Reconsidering General Revelation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014).
- 101.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 128.
- 102.
Ibid., 11.
- 103.
Michel de Certeau , The Mystic Fable, vol. 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 58.
- 104.
The Wreck of the Deutschland, l, 168.
- 105.
Brown, God and Grace of Body, 220.
- 106.
See, for example, Frank Burch Brown , Inclusive yet Discerning: Navigating Worship Artfully (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009); William Dyrness , Poetic Theology: God and the Poetics of Everyday Life (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011); and Robert Johnston, God’s Wider Presence.
- 107.
‘Conversation After Pentecost? Theological Musings on the Hermeneutical Motion,’ Literature & Theology 28: 2 (2014).
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Brown, D., Hopps, G. (2018). Introduction: An Art Open to the Divine. In: The Extravagance of Music. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91818-1_1
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