Music as sacramental

From the extraordinarily useful and interesting looking St Andrews Encylopedia of Theology (a new free online resource). This is from Jeremy Begbie on theology and music:

https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/MusicintheWesternTheologicalTradition#section3.2

 Theological questions may well be asked about what kind of deity haunts Steiner’s allusive prose, for in this scenario God’s basic relation to humans appears to be essentially antagonistic, and God’s nature wholly undifferentiated, monadic (Horne 1995). Less stark in this respect, and relying more on the notion of music as a mediator of divine presence, are writers who speak of music in terms of sacrament or the sacramental. Albert Blackwell, for example, pulls from diverse sources (including Augustine, Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, Schleiermacher, Paul Tillich, and Simone Weil) to demonstrate music’s sacramental potential (Blackwell 1999). He understands ‘sacramental’ as applying to ‘any finite reality through which the divine is perceived to be disclosed and communicated, and through which our human response to the divine assumes some measure of shape, form, and structure’ (Blackwell 1999: 28; quoting McBrien 1980: 731, original emphasis). Blackwell delineates two broad traditions of sacramental encounter in Christianity as applied to music: the ‘Pythagorean’ and the ‘incarnational’ (Blackwell 1999: 37–48). According to the first (already explored above), ‘as mathematics expresses cosmic order, so music echoes cosmic harmony’ (Blackwell 1999: 43). Reflection on this can engender a sense of trust in in the world’s order which in turn can lead to ‘trust in the second Person of the Trinity’ (Blackwell 1999: 86), the world’s Logos. The ‘incarnational’ tradition privileges the sensed materiality of music: citing Schleiermacher among others, Blackwell links the immediacy of embodied musical perception to a primordial religious awareness of the ultimate givenness of our lives and the world, of being wholly dependent on and immersed in a limitless ground.