Attuning to the Cosmos

Abstract

The essay discusses music and silence as two important paradigms for articulating spiritual progress in the Platonic corpus and its reception by Neoplatonic and Christian thinkers. After examining the importance of music in Plato’s theory of the soul, mainly in the Republic and the Timaeus, I argue that he appreciated music as a spiritual awakening, as preparation for the truth which is always experienced in deafening silence. Proclus, a sensitive reader of Plato, and later thinkers such as Proclus and Boethius, provided a secure path for the survival of Platonic ideas in the West. Petrarch, a meticulous reader of Augustine, grappling with the same Platonic notions that frustrated the fourth-century theologian, experiments boldly with Platonic silence in the Secretum and his Rime Sparse.