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For the Christian, the physical world we inhabit can never be seen as just there, a naked fact, to be treated as a neutral boundary or (worse) as something that is basically an impediment to a fulfilling life. The cosmos did not have to be. It is made freely, without any prior constraint or necessity superior to God's nature or will. It is given, and given in the rich sense: as an expression of divine love, the love that is God's own trinitarian life.
In his book Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony, Leo Spitzer puts his finger on the decisive issue here in the context of a discussion about music as a metaphor of the cosmos. "According to the Pythagoreans," he says, "it was cosmic order which was identifiable with music; according to the Christian philosophers, it was love. And in the ordo amoris ('loving order') of Augustine we have evidently a blend of the Pythagorean and the Christian themes: henceforth 'order' is love." There is a huge difference between regarding the harmony in which musical sounds are grounded as simply a bare fact or as an outpouring of love.
Music making and music hearing are ways we engage the physical world. Even in the case of electronically generated music, the body is often involved through, say, a keyboard, and patterns of vibrating air are mediated through physical speakers. The physical things we involve ourselves with in music have ultimately arisen through the free initiative of God's love—they are part of the ordo amoris. To treat them as given in this full sense has a series of radical implications for understanding music. The most basic response of the Christian toward music will be gratitude. This does not mean giving unqualified thanks for every bit of music we hear, but it will mean being thankful for the very possibility of music. It will mean regularly allowing a piece of music to stop us in our tracks and make us grateful that there is a world where music can occur, that there is a reality we call "matter" that oscillates and resonates, that there is sound, that there is rhythm built into the fabric of reality, that there is the miracle of the human body, which can receive and process sequences of tones. For from all this and through all this, the marvel of music is born. None of it had to come into being. But it has, for the glory of God and for our flourishing. Gaining a Christian mind on music means learning the glad habit of thanksgiving.
Brought forth from God's own free love, the cosmos as a whole is value-laden, the object of God's unswerving faithfulness and the theater of God's loving intentions. As such it is able to sing his praise despite the pollution that evil has brought. God, we said, has pledged himself to the world in its physicality—a pledge confirmed in the coming of Jesus, the Word made material flesh.
Sadly, this is often just where the church has been most hesitant about music. It is not hard to trace a double tendency marking much thought about music in the Christian West: a proneness to doubt the full goodness, and with it sometimes the full reality, of the physical. The outcome is that music, along with the other arts, has frequently been seen as fulfilling its highest function insofar as it denies, shuns, or leaves behind its own materiality.
This twin tendency surfaces prominently in the ancient Greek tradition, not least in some Platonic music theory: as part of this material world, music can be of serious value only insofar as it directs our attention to the ideal and enduring harmonies beyond the material. Even in Augustine there is a marked ambivalence about physical beauty and the materiality of music (especially in his early writing). In this current of thinking, musical sounds become a vehicle for the contemplation of eternal or ideal beauty, hence the colossal emphasis in much medieval writing on the superiority of intellectual theory over the practical making and enjoyment of music. Commonly, the thrust seems to be to look beyond material sounds to the order or beauty they reflect or point to rather than to welcome them as valuable embodiments of God-given order and beauty in their own right, with their physical character intrinsic to that value. Related ideas colored Zwingli's attitude to music: the spiritual set against the material and an overplayed fear of anything that might imply an idolatry of music. Some modern evangelical approaches to music (and the other arts) have followed similar tracks: music, bound up as it is so closely with physical things, is regarded as at best irrelevant and at worst dangerous, tugging us away from the more real, nonsensory "spiritual" realities.
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