12 - Attuning to the Cosmos: The Ethical Man's Mission from Plato to Petrarch

Summary

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.

Keywords: Plato, Neoplatonics, Proclus, Augustine, Petrarch, Music, Silence

O may we soon again renew that song,

And keep in tune with Heav’n till God ere long

To his celestial consort us unite,

To live with him, and sing in endless morn of light.

Milton, ‘At a Solemn Music’, 25-28

Introduction

This chapter explores the tension between two moral paradigms ascribed to Plato and zealously embraced by medieval thinkers, especially Petrarch: virtue is realized when, having perceived cosmic music, humans strive to attune to it; yet, at the same time, virtue is perfected in silence. I start by examining Plato's references to man's musical nature and to cosmic harmony, including his odd description of the role of the Sirens in generating it. Although Plato did not discuss the ideal of quiet reflection in an overt or systematic manner, ‘Platonic silence’, as the expert way to grasp philosophical truth, is already advocated by Cicero. Both concepts were advanced in the Neoplatonic tradition in which Augustine was steeped and through whom the notion of silent contemplation was firmly transplanted in Christian philosophical thought. In the second part of the chapter, I trace the milieu of ‘Platonic silence’ in Petrarch, arguing that he joined a long line of earlier thinkers who, having interpreted the Platonic Sirens in a specific way, believed that their music marked an initial stage of spiritual awakening and that the wise man ultimately ought to overcome the appeal of music in favor of silence.