Music Understanding Faith

Abstract

Our experience can either disclose or occlude the reality that lies at the heart of experience. The various forms of artistic expression are privileged pathways to that reality, and of these pathways music, as the most abstract of the arts, discloses the real presence in meaning in an utterly substantive way. The presentation is built upon three theses: (i) that music puts us in touch with that which transcends the sayable; (ii) that understanding, in both its substantive and verbal senses, is the act of translating an object of creative endeavour into one's personal “code”; and (iii) that faith is that mysterious condition or habit in which one is, to whatever degree, and with whatever constancy, familiar with God.