Preface

Abstract

Preface Michael C. Jordan Cistercian Publications offers a remarkable, newly translated book that provides a deeply Christian meditation on the liberating power of music, The Song That I Am: On the Mystery of Music.1 The author, Élisabeth-Paule Labat, OSB (1875–1975), was both a brilliant musician and a Benedictine nun who entered the abbey of Saint-Michel de Kergonan in 1922. In the true spirit of the contemplative and the mystic, Labat’s essay engages profoundly but also humbly with the transformative power of music that, assisted by grace, opens us to the call of beauty. Indeed, Labat’s essay presents a discerning account of the experience of beauty especially as achieved through listening to and performing music and a theologically well-grounded account of the Christian significance of beauty in the contemplative life. Labat positions the musical composer in relation to both the mystic and the saint while also emphasizing important distinctions. The great composer shares with the mystic a highly developed openness to the inner world and a realization that “our soul contains unexplored depths attuned to an invisible reality” (28). This depth is discerned not through our faculties of perception or knowing, but [End Page 5] is experienced as the origin of all of our faculties, as their source, and Labat draws upon a theologically informed sense of the spiritual center of the human person to acknowledge such a center as “a mysterious sanctuary where we are inseparably joined to God and maintained by him upon the abyss of void, posed as a living mirror of his life and being” (32). But she insists that we must not lose sight of the difference between the mystic and the composer or poet, even if the possibility exists that one person might in a remarkable instance be both mystic and artist. The mystic, through God’s love, has been, in Labat’s words, “conformed . . . to God’s nature” (30). Contemplative union with God through grace effects a renewal of the mystic that divinizes the faculties of knowing and loving, “leading them back through a kind of reflux in our innermost self toward the Father” (33). The mystic, like the saint, is transformed by grace through “the extravagant love of a personal God and by Christ’s redemptive incarnation” (77). The mystic and the saint cooperate with God’s grace and allow themselves to become a new creation, to live the life of Jesus Christ, to be molded or sculpted by the presence of God within so that they manifest the redemptive and creative power of God’s love in themselves and exhibit that power through their participation in love in the world. The artist shares with the mystic and the saint a deep attunement to the spiritual center of the human person, but the artist is gifted with the power of recognizing the affinities and resemblances throughout the created order that radiate from God’s creative love. Through this gift the artist can discern the levels of analogy, resemblance, and correspondence through which the inner unity of the created order and its connection to its divine origin can be artfully traced and sounded. The artist labors to bring these affinities to appearance in a painting, sculpture, poem, or musical composition, and it is the conformity of the work of art to the truth of the artist’s vision to which the artist aspires, and not the conformity of the artist’s self to God’s inner call. This is why a great work of art, and according to Labat especially [End Page 6] a great work of musical art, can enable us to follow the pathways embedded in the work of art that lead through the multiplicity of sensory and conceptual experience to the inner sanctuary in which God is mirrored. It is not through the artist—as personality transformed by Christ as occurs in our encounter with the mystic and saint—but through the work of art in which the artist manifests the human power of co-creation that we experience the beauty that brings us back to God. And this is why, I believe, Labat emphasizes as repeatedly as she does what I...