St. Augustine’s Aesthetic of Rhythm: from Antique Science to Modern Art

Abstract:

The starting point of the research is the paradox of St. Augustine’s aesthetic of rhythm consisting in that despite the presence of the scientific form of rhythm which is elaborated to the utmost in his early treatise ‘On Music’ (387-381), the African bishop creates his extended versified work ‘Psalm against the Donatists’ (393), founding it on other rhythmical principles than those that constitute the determinacy of his learned treatise. Analyzing the contents of each of the modes of being of Augustine’s rhythmic the author argues that the given ‘revolution’ is justified by the development of spirit from its old form that is Antiquity, to its new form, that is Christianity. To realize his idea the author solves the following tasks.

First of all, the treatise ‘On Music’ is examined from the point of view of its objective historical characteristics constituting the environment of its appearance. For the treatise under examination this element was firstly the spirit of antique scholarship enclosing itself into a circle and secondly the spirit of the Christian religion entering into the process of its formation. Through this examination is accomplished the historical matter of the research which is composed of the conflict between the thinker’s general world view transformation and the scientific form of his consciousness.

The further progress of the research presupposes the consideration of the subject-matter of the treatise in its correspondence to the very concept of music as rhythmic. This correspondence of the subject-matter to its concept or its concept to the subject-matter is in fact the judgment to what extent the subject-matter conforms to the concept and is its realization. This judgment is historical critique. But the competence of this judgment is itself dependent on the measure in which the consciousness considering it managed to develop for itself the universality, i.e. the concept of the subject-matter of the treatise. The accomplished analysis has shown that the negativity which is typical as regards the subject-matter of Augustine’s work and its non-recognition as a treatise dedicated specifically to music is explained by that its critics grasp the determinacy of music only in its finite particularity and overlook its metaphysical layer constituting the moment of universality of its concept. But this aspect of being of the musical subject-matter is not discovered by the critique till it ascends to the philosophical (logical) point of view. But in order to get to this point it is necessary that the consciousness should preliminarily have an adequate representation of the form and content of the treatise.

Its form is dialogical, but as opposed to a whole range of the African’s previous pieces having the form of a ‘Ciceronian’ conversation, the literary dialogism of Augustine’s ‘On Music’ is depersonalized to the maximum. The author believes that the reason why Augustine freed himself from conventionalities of the dialogue genre consists in that thinking in his work was in the process of paving the way to its independency, to its inner dialogism in which it is present in the form of itself.

Concerning the content of the treatise the author starts by giving an outline exposition of all its six books and then concentrates his attention on the last one for the sake of presenting a philosophico-historical attribution of the treatise. The author points out that though there is enough evidence according to which one might take the most philosophically important Book VI for the one which is oriented towards Christianity right in the scientific aspect, however it is such only in the aspect of its general world outlook. Meanwhile, its scientific ground work remains predominantly antique in the interpretation of the specificity of the rhythmic matter – verse – as well as in the properly philosophical relation for it dwells within the limits of the Neo-Platonist tradition.

Having proved that Augustine’s aesthetic of rhythm as science belongs to antiquity the author proceeds into the consideration of the determinacy of his aesthetic of rhythm as art which was realized by Augustine in his ‘Psalm against the Donatists’. Analyzing this poem, the author starts by acquainting the reader with its contents – the struggle of the bishop of Hippo against the Donatist sect – and then passes to the formation of the representation of its compositional structure as a whole and to the determination of its rhythmical characteristics in particular. It is shown that according to its determinacy the rhythmic of the Psalm is essentially different from that whose reflection is found in the treatise ‘On Music’. To solve the mentioned paradox, the author consider its philological interpretations attempting to explain the transition to the new rhythmic from the ‘external’ point of view (the hypothesis of the influence of Semitic verse) as well as from the ‘internal’ one (the explanation by means of shifts within one and the same language) which resulted in the alteration of the system of versification. However, the author argues that in both cases the philological interpretation is capable to expose only ‘efficient causes’ of the transformation of rhythmic, whereas it is unable to discover what is the reason of the language shifts themselves. The author affirms that this problem is solved with the help of his philosophical interpretation in which the new rhythmic of Augustine’s Psalm is incorporated into the context of the world’s development of verse in general.

As an appendix to the research the author’s publishes his translation of the most philosophical Books I and VI of the treatise ‘On Music’.

Key words: St. Augustine, history, philosophy, aesthetic, rhythm, science, art, music, verse, Psalm, concept, logic, Neo-Platonism, Christianity