Annotatio CV
”Again he dug other wells, which the servants of his father Abraham had dug.” — Genesis 26:18
Philo the Jew, in the book On Dreams, allegorically treating the history of the wells found by [the patriarch], when he had incidentally fallen upon a discourse of those things which praise God, asserted that the celestial spheres — by the sound of the vocal harmony which is produced from their revolution — continually celebrate God.1 His words are of this kind: “Heaven, by the perpetual concord of its motions, renders a most sweet harmony, which, if it could reach our ears, would excite in us uncontrollable loves and an insane desire, by which, being stimulated, we should forget the things necessary for [our] sustenance — not fed by food and drink sent down through the throat, but as the candidates of immortality [are fed], by divine and consummate musical songs. Such [songs], when Moses, rapt out of the body, had heard them, he is reported [to have passed] forty days and as many nights, and to have tasted neither bread nor water. And so heaven, the archetypal instrument of music, seems to me to have been so elaborated for no other [reason] than that the hymns of the Parent of things might be sung skillfully and musically.” To the same opinion there is no doubt that St. Ambrose alluded, in the preface of the commentaries on the Psalms, in these words: “The Angels praise the Lord, the Powers of the heavens sing psalms to him, and before the beginning of the world the Cherubim and Seraphim, with the sweetness of the singing of their voice, say, ‘Holy, holy, holy.’ A more express discourse relates that the very axis of heaven turns with a certain sweetness of perpetual concord, so that its sound may be heard in the farthest parts of the earth, where there are certain secrets of nature; nor does this seem foreign to the use of nature.” Licentius, speaking to Augustine his teacher about God, briefly comprised this very thing in most elegant verses, saying:
He fitted numbers to the heavens, and bade [them] ply sonorous measures, and lead equal dances.
St. Anselm, in the first book On the Image of the World, approving the exposition of these, declares it in plainer speech in this manner: “The orbs of the seven heavens are turned with a sweet-sounding harmony, and by the most sweet concord of their revolution” [the orbs of the seven heavens are turned with a sweet-sounding harmony, and] by the most sweet concord of their revolution are [sounds] produced; which sound, for this reason, does not reach our ears, because it is beyond the air, and its magnitude exceeds our narrow hearing. For no sound is perceived by us except that which is produced in the air; but from the earth up to the firmament the celestial music is measured, to the exemplar of which our music was invented.” But to these things it seems to stand in the way that Epiphanius (in the first book of the Panarion) and Irenaeus (in the book Against Heresies) place this assertion among the condemned dogmas of the Marcosians; and Basil (on the Hexaemeron, homily 2) and Ambrose himself (on the Hexaemeron) despise the same as, so to speak, cavilling, and resting on a most feeble foundation — unless perhaps we should say that these most grave men reject not the very assertion of celestial sounds, but the ridiculous reasonings by which certain inept philosophers strove to defend it, or certain prodigious fictions which the heretics (especially the Marcosians) deduced from it. We have written more fully on this matter in the book On Physical Questions upon the divine Scriptures.2