Augustine The Confessions

It surrounds people and consumes their minds in the car, at home, at work, or school, and in their phones—music today is the constant soundtrack of most people’s lives. American society seems to have made a commitment to the constant use of sonic stimulation, which has even extended to Christian churches. The role of music was not always as prominent in culture and religion practice as it is today; however, the conversation of music’s’ role in life, particularly in Christian religious life, was discussed by Augustine. In his infamous work, The Confessions, Augustine contemplates on human desire meditated through the five human senses, one of these senses being sound. Ultimately, Augustine argues in The Confessions that church music can only …show more content…
In particular, Augustine’s prose, The Confessions, focuses on how human temptations of the senses—smell, taste, touch, sight, and sound—can distant the relationship between one and God. For Augustine, the temptations of the senses—smell, taste, touch, and sight—are not difficult to resist when compared to the singular temptation of sound. In Book 10 chapter 33 of The Confessions Augustine admits to the reader, “I was enthralled by them (sounds)”. In other words for Augustine sound has the ability to enslave humans through desire. Furthermore, Augustine states that sound has the ability to seize one’s conscious thought. Sounds potency, he remarks, only increases in the pattern of music (The Confessions, Book 10, Chapter 32). Furthermore, one should note that Augustine, like other medieval thinkers, regarded music as having prosperities of number—arithmetic (Professor Morse). Consequently, Augustine viewed music as a pattern, like the pattern of arithmetic, which could disclose something of the structure of creation and bring a sense of immediate, contemplative, and deeply affecting contact with reality (Professor Morse). Therefore, Augustine could not reject sound—and consequently music—like he rejected sex and eating. In other words, Augustine recognized music’s useful power of communication, which could be used to …show more content…
However, Augustine cannot fully reject music like the readers see him do with sex and eating. Augustine recognized music’s power to “stir my mind to greater religious fervor and kindle in me a more ardent flame of piety” (Confessions, Book 10, Chapter 33). Therefore, Augustine’s view on music can be summed as that of a chain-smoker who wants to quit and cigarettes—one need’s something (like music or cigarettes), but does not want to need to literal or figurative