The Music of the Spheres

 A friend shared with me this following clip, which is indeed quite beautiful in its own right:

As I listened, this got me to thinking. (I know, dangerous, right?) The theory of music as a philosophical concept is something well grounded in Natural Law. Natural Law being that idea that God left in the heart of every created person a basic knowledge of right and wrong and the gift of the intellect to be able to a certain logical way come to rationally understand the idea that God exists. Part of that primordial consciousness left by the Creator on His created is the power and understanding of beauty.

While some notions of beauty can change due to cultural tastes like fashion or proportions of the human body, the concept and appreciation of beauty itself is transcendent and can't logically explained by sheer philosophical determinism or reduction-ism. If the universe is just randomly created from random chaos, how does extrinsic beauty exist and why do humans intrinsically know when they are witnessing something beautiful? It's a bit of a conundrum that sheer materialistic atheists can't really easily account for, and they either end up tying themselves up into philosophical knots or they basically move the goal posts and say beauty doesn't actually exist and it's just an illusion to our biologically predetermined programming, at which point they usually try hard to change the subject.

But, back the beauty of music and Natural Law...there is a rich academic pedigree on the basic theory of the power of music going back to at least Pythagoras and the concept of the "music of the spheres." How much of this actually came directly from Pythagoras himself is debatable, but certainly his odd philosophically religious cult was into looking at music and the mathematics behind it. In good music that has beauty there is a musical mathmatical genius that is somehow at work with 5ths, 4ths, Octaves, and golden means. Some of this comes off to modern ears as pre-scientific mumbo jumbo, but there is an intrinsic beauty that the human ear can discern through Natural Law that there is something to that philosophy that good music touches on harmony and balance which reflects the omnipotence and transcendence of beauty and of that beauty's Creator.

And it is kind of interesting that we have come full circle in the concept of the music of the spheres. Aristotle picked up on it, as did others, believing that the planets and stars were part of this music of the spheres. Most scientists and theologians in the West totally bought this in its entirely well into the Renaissance. Then interestingly, when astronomy began to be mechanized with telescopes and mathematics and all that, the concept of the music of the spheres fell into philosophical disrepute because surely planets don't make music. But then when we started understanding deep space radio signals and realized stars and pulsars and all do in fact make sound at regular mathematical intervals and we come back full circle to the idea of the music of the spheres to the point where they are research all sorts of musical therapies nowadays.

Some of that research is dubious, but music doth indeed have powers to soothe the savage beast, it turns out. The astute theologian should be quite to point out that maybe, just maybe, there is order and beauty in music, and that order and beauty reflects the fingerprints of the Divine.