A zene tradicionálisan rítus.4 Ez valójában minden tradicionális művészetre igaz. S hogy minden esetleges félreértést eloszlassunk, ki kell jelenteni: tudomány és művészet tradicionálisan egyet jelentenek. Az a fajta különválasztása tudománynak és művészetnek, mint ma, egy tradicionális társadalomban nem létezik. Minden művészet tudomány is egyben és minden tudomány művészet. A két szó valójában csak két eltérő, de összetartozó aspektust jelöl: egy igazi Tudás (gnosis) elnyerését, illetve a művész azon igyekvését, hogy emberi létét meghaladja, vagyis magasabb, spirituális lehetőségeit kibontsa, „kiművelje”. (Hasonlóan a magyarhoz, a latin ars (művészet) szó etimológiailag rokon az arare (szántani, földet művelni) igével.) Ez adhat bármely művészetnek valóban szakrális jelleget, amennyiben megértjük, hogy csak azt nevezhetjük szakrálisnak, ami a spirituális „szférával” való kapcsolatot létrehozza, fenntartja és/vagy felerősíti. Ezek után érthető az is, mi ad a zenének (de, mint mondtuk, valójában bármely a tradíció által áthatott tevékenységnek) rituális jelleget1.

Metafizikailag szemlélve ez a folyamat az esszenciális pólusból a megnyilvánulás egyre mélyebb rétegei felé, a szubsztanciális pólus irányába tartó fokozatos ereszkedésként írható le. Az egyszólamúság már természetéből fakadóan az Egy princípiumát, a mindent meghatározó abszolút Esszencia létezésbe való alászállását jeleníti meg, a fiat lux-ot (Legyen fény!); míg a polifónia által a megnyilvánulás világa, a többszerű kvantitás uralma szólal meg. Ha az egyszólamú zenékre inkább mozdulatlanság, a polifóniára a mozgás a jellemző. Ebben a mozgásban a sötét, passzív, mozgatott anyagot képviseli, szemben a fényteli, aktív, meghatározó formával, a tulajdonképpeni „mozdulatlan mozgatóval”.142

Every living thing in its own kind, and in its due relation to the whole, proportione uniuersitatis, has been endowed with a sense of magnitude in space and time, so that as its body is in a certain proportion to the universal body of which it is a part, so its permitted life-time, aetas, is proportional to the whole duration of the universe, universi saeculi, of which it is a part… It is by such an organization of parts according to scale that our world achieves its vast size, sic habendo omnia magnus est hic mundus: the world which in the Scriptures is called “heaven and earth”…(6.7.19)3

In book 11 of his Confessions, Augustine’s idea of “Judicial Rhythm” in the cosmos, similar to the Ainur’s Music, is represented as the creature through which the Creator’s own act of creation is somehow mediated. As Augustine inquires of God:

But how did you speak [in creation]?… [T]he utterance came through the movement of some created thing, serving your eternal will but itself temporal. And these your words, made for temporal succession, were reported by the external ear to the judicious mind whose internal ear is disposed to hear your eternal word. But that mind would compare these words, sounding in time, with your eternal word in silence…(Augustine, Confessions 11.6, trans. Chadwick)4

Another well-known passage from Augustine dealing with music as a metaphor for cosmic order comes from a letter in which he compares the way a good song-writer “knows how to distribute the length of time allowed to each word so as to make the song flow and pass on in most

1 http://www.artifexfolyoirat.hu/2szam/zenealaszallasa.htm2 http://www.artifexfolyoirat.hu/2szam/zenealaszallasa.htm3 http://jonathansmcintosh.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/augustines-metaphysics-of-music/4 http://jonathansmcintosh.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/augustines-metaphysics-of-music/

beautiful adaptation to the ever-changing notes of the melody,” to the way that God in his wisdom ensures

that not one of the spaces of time allotted to natures that are born and die—spaces which are like the words and syllables of the successive epochs of the course of time—shall have, in what we may call the sublime psalm of the vicissitudes of this world, a duration either more brief or more protracted than the foreknown and predetermined harmony requires!… [E]very man’s life on earth continues for a time, which is neither longer nor shorter than God knows to be in harmony with the plan according to which He rules the universe. (Augustine, Letters of St. Augustine 166.5.13, trans. Cunningham, emphasis added. See also Houghton, “Augustine in the Cottage of Lost Play,” 178)5

Spitzer describes Augustine’s notion of a transcendent, cosmic pattern both behind and unfolding within creation as a “hymn scanned by God” and a “poem of the world” which, “like any poem, can only be understood in time by a soul which endeavors to understand the action of Providence, which itself unfolds in time… The God-Artist, creating in time, realizes his idea, his providential decisions, like a musician…” (ibid., 316).Schopenhauer now comes to the highest art of music for whose unique position there has hitherto been no fitting place in the systematic [363] connection of his exposition. Music "stands alone, quite cut off from all the other arts." What can it be in this great and exceedingly noble art by which it affects the inmost nature of man so powerfully and is so entirely and deeply understood by him in his secretest consciousness? After giving himself up entirely to these impressions of all forms of music, which are usually left here as insolvable in their mystery, Schopenhauer then returned to reflection and an explanation of the nature of the imitative relation of music to the rest of the world. The independence of music and the secret of its influence he found in the explanation that in music we do not recognize the copy or repetition of any Idea of existence in the world. "Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity these Ideas are. This is why the effect of music is much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself." Thus is explained the phenomenalism and individualism of the lesser arts as contrasted with the universality of music. "Music does not express this or that particular and definite joy, this or that sorrow, or pain, or horror, or delight, or merriment, or peace of mind; but joy, sorrow, pain, horror, delight, merriment, peace of mind themselves, to a certain extent in the abstract, their essential nature, without accessories, and therefore without their motives. Yet we completely understand them in this extracted quintescence. Hence it arises that our imagination is so easily excited by music, and now seeks to give form to that invisible yet actively moved spirit world which speaks to us directly, and to clothe it with flesh and blood, i. e. to embody it in an analogous example. This is the origin of the song with words, and finally of the opera, the text of which should therefore never forsake that subordinate position in order to make itself the chief thing and the music the mere means of expressing it, which is a great misconception and a piece of utter perversity; for music always expresses only the quintescence of life and its events, and never these themselves, and therefore their differences do not always affect it. It is precisely this universality, which belongs exclusively to it,

5 http://jonathansmcintosh.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/augustines-metaphysics-of-music/6 http://jonathansmcintosh.wordpress.com/2012/08/03/augustines-metaphysics-of-music/

together with the greatest determinateness, [364] that gives music the high worth which it has as the panacea for all our woes. Thus if music is too closely united to words, and tries to form itself according to the events, it is striving to speak a language which is not its own."7

"According to all this we may regard the phenomenal world, or nature, and music as two different expressions of the same thing"—will, the fundamental world-stuff, expressing itself as nature indirectly and indistinctly as through Platonic Ideas, but immediately and subtilely in music as will-in-itself. "Music, therefore, if regarded as an expression of the world, is in the highest degree a universal language, which is related indeed to the universality of concepts, much as they are related [366] to the particular things.8

A hangszeres zene elmélete, amelyre az abszolút zenérõl szólva Wagner hivatkozik, a romantikus metafizika volt. A "végtelen és határozatlan kifejezés" azonban nem maradhatott a szellemvilág nyelve; véges és határozott kifejezéssé kellett válnia, tehát mintegy le kellett szállnia a földre. "Minden meglévõ és elgondolható dolog kezdete és alapja a valóságos érzéki lét".39

Wagner esztétikáját mindamellett törésvonalak hálózzák be. Már a nyelv is önellentmondásról árulkodik: ellentmondás, hogy Wagner egyfelõl az abszolút zene "korlátairól" beszél, másfelõl viszont arról, hogy az abszolút zene a "végtelent" fejezi ki. Ez az ellentmondás az ítélet belsõ meghasonlottságát jelzi.10

7 http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/articles/ney48218.htm#d0e9348 http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/articles/ney48218.htm#d0e9349 http://www.muzsikalendarium.hu/muzsika/index.php?area=article&id_article=128510 http://www.muzsikalendarium.hu/muzsika/index.php?area=article&id_article=1285