Music, Liberal Arts, and transcendence in Augustine of Hippo (354-430)
Luiz Cláudio Luciano França GONÇALVES
Original title: Música, Artes Liberais e transcendência em Agostinho de Hipona (354-430)
Published in The Kingdom of the Spirit
Keywords: Liberal Arts, Music, Transcendence.
The dialogue De musica (387/391) is part of the unfinished project of the Disciplinarum libri, undertaken by Augustine of Hippo (354-430) on the liberal arts. At the time, the author conceives the musical discipline as scientia bene modulandi, kind of knowledge that has as its goal the understanding of the transcendent signs that underlies and governs the corporeal world. Taken in its proper and worthy sense – as a science that rises beyond the sensitive sphere –, the art of music is dedicated to the revelation of the incorporeal nature that sustains the modus and, at the end, leads to contemplation of its transcendent source. It is an anagogical path, by which the soul, turned to its noblest activity, deciphers, through reason, the divine order inscribed in proportion and measure of the material world.
The Knowledge that Beautifies the Soul. Philosophy according to Diotima of Mantinea, Herrad of Hohenbourg and Christine de Pizan
Georgina RABASSÓ
Original title: El saber que embellece el alma. La filosofía según Diotima de Mantinea, Herrada de Hohenbourg y Christine de Pizan
Published in The Medieval Aesthetics
Keywords: Beauty, Liberal Arts, Medieval Aesthetics, Medieval Philosophy, Wisdom, Women Philosophers.
Diotima of Mantinea’s arguments in Plato’s Symposium (5th century BC) and the writings of Herrad of Hohenbourg (c. 1125-c. 1195) and Christine de Pizan (1364-1430) show the deep influence the study of philosophy had on them, in varying ways. Analysis of texts (and certain images) in which these writers speak of their relationships with the discipline of philosophy evidences the importance they give to their intellectual work, knowledge and critical analysis, not only for themselves but also as a distinctive component of female beauty as narrated by women themselves. This ideological contribution was key to the genesis of concepts such as “merit”, “nobility” and “excellence”, terms through which the women thinkers of the querelle des femmes (14th-18th centuries) took on the auctoritates of the male gender, who had stipulated that the overriding, exclusive beauty of women was corporeal and, occasionally, spiritual.
The Music. One of the keys to understanding Time
Ricardo da COSTA
Original title: A Música. Uma das chaves para a compreensão do Tempo
Published in Music in Antiquity, Middle Ages & Renaissance
Keywords: History, Liberal Arts, Methodology, Music.
The purpose is to present José Enrique Ruiz-Domènec’s (Spanish Historian 1948- ) methodology for the study of the Past: the appreciation of Music – traditionally one of the seven liberal arts – in historical studies as a key element for understanding the history of cultures in time. To do this, we will concentrate on four of his books: España, una nueva historia (2009), Personajes intempestivos de la Historia (2011), Europa. Las claves de su historia (2012), and Escuchar el pasado. Ocho siglos de música europea (2012). In them three characters are presented that symbolize the imperative need for Music studies to find the key to the Past: Pope Gregory, the Great (540-604) and the creation of the universe European sound with Gregorian chant, Mozart (1756-1791) and the rational sense of civilization of the Ancien Régime, and Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1999) and the incurable nostalgia of Spanish in Aranjuez Concert (1939).
