The Sound of the Analogia Entis Part II

Abstract

Von Balthasar’s “On the Unfolding of the Musical Idea” contains one of his recurrent stories: the grave suggestion that musical form expresses the beautiful, and therefore touches on the horizon of the divine. Von Balthasar later recalled Ehrenfels’ achievement. He says that the conception of form which undergirds Aristotelian and scholastic ontology, as a “totality of parts” which “transcends its members as parts”, “. . . was excavated with sufficient success out of the ruins of atomistic psychology ... by Christian von Ehrenfels”.The first step in the reappraisal of die ontological difference is the recovery of the essentia. As von Balthasar says in reference to Anselm, the theological act needs the grip hold of the philosophical intuition of essences. The realistic phenomenologists showed that this can be achieved, and that, not as a dogmatic exercise, but as a living philosophical enterprise. Any exit into a static essentialism is blocked by Ehrenfels’ starting place in the study of music. The melodic gestalt flows out of a movement in time. Przywara hears the ‘essence’ as an interplay of phonic forces, interweaving in their diverse speeds and velocities. Von Balthasar takes beautiful form as the analogy for the Christology of The Glory. He finds in the Incarnation a design of horizontal and vertical thrusts. He says, ”... Everyone who has listened to Bach knows that in the classical fugue, the slow rhythmical arrangement is oppositional: the first theme is slow and reposeful, the second runs along swiftly, and the third contains a rhythmical hammering; and every hearer knows that this varied thematic construction is determined by the rationale of the fugue‘s total construction. Something similar occurs with the Gospel. The eschatological theme, … is incomprehensible without the cadence of Christ’s suffering. The vertical form of the Son of God who descends from the Father and goes back to him would be illegible without the horizontal fom of historical fulfilment …”