Spiritual and Sensual, Music and Silence
In the Mystical Life, All Opposites find their Point of Union
Music is indeed the mediator between the spiritual and sensual life. — Ludwig van Beethoven
We don’t know the exact date of Beethoven’s birth, but he was baptized on December 17, 1770; and given that it was customary in this time to baptize infants as soon as possible after birth, December 16 is widely regarded as the great maestro’s birthday.
By the time of his death at the age of 56, Beethoven had composed 9 symphonies (every one arguably a masterpiece), five piano concertos, sixteen string quartets, thirty-two piano sonatas, and many other works — we know of over 700 compositions of his, securing Beethoven’s place as one of the most renowned and influential of classical musicians.
He was a mercurial and difficult individual, and quotations attributed to him often emphasize his oversized personality more than any particular wisdom about the artistic (or spiritual) life. But given the breadth and depth of his musical achievement, he did manage to speak to the spiritual depth of his genius.
His comment about the spiritual and sensual dimensions of life, found in a letter written to Goethe by their mutual friend Bettina von Arnim, could easily be read as suggesting kind of dualistic way of seeing things. But in music, Beethoven finds the key to nonduality, even if he would have been unfamiliar with that term. Music not only “mediates” between the earthly and heavenly realms of our experience, but it invites us to experience the essential unity hidden in the encounter between the ethereal and the physical realms of experience. Music literally makes the spiritual and the sensual one.
I imagine most mystics and contemplatives would agree with Beethoven, although to a contemplative, silence is just as powerful as music (if not even more so) in forging a unity out of apparent duality. Then again, musicians from Joseph Haydn to John Cage to Tōru Takemitsu use silence in their compositions. Perhaps in the world where the material and the spiritual are “mediated” even the difference between silence and music begins to fall away. To be a mystic is to find, to perceive, to be one with, the silence in the music — and the music in silence; just as we are invited to find, perceive, and be one with the sensuality in spirituality, and the spirituality in sensuality. Julian of Norwich reminds us that “the fullness of joy is to behold God in all; Beethoven reminds us that music is one means by which such mystical beholding takes place.