Élisabeth-Paule Labat (1897–1975) was an accomplished pianist and composer when she entered the abbey of Saint-Michel de Kergonan in her early twenties. She devoted her later years to writing theology and an “Essay on the Mystery of Music,” published a decade ago as The Song That I Am, translated by Erik Varden. It’s a brilliant and beautiful essay, but what sets it apart from most explorations of music is its deeply theological character.

Against modernists like Stravinsky, Labat insists music is no mere assembly of sound, but an address, a form of language that enables man to convey modes of experience that lie beyond the capacity of language. Like all languages, music is a system of aural signs that point beyond themselves. It has the double power of expression and impression. It translates the song in the heart of the composer or performer into audible music, which then takes possession of the listener so as to reproduce the music of the musician in the soul of the listener. Through significant sounds, in short, music harmonizes one soul with another. This, I take it, is what Labat means by the recurrent phrase “sovereign music,” its capacity to arrest attention and seize our hearts. (Early in the book, she recalls a transformative moment during the German occupation when she overheard Mozart’s Violin Sonata in E Minor during a walk one October evening.)

Music may not possess the precision of words, but it makes up for this lack through its richness. Music communicates love, for instance, but love is multi-faceted—“calm or impetuous, joyful or sad without ceasing to be love,” in the words of Joseph de Maistre. As an “art of movement,” with complex, tensed textures, music can express the infinite variations of feeling, including contradictory emotions experienced simultaneously. It is “tailor-made to take on all the modalities of life, from extreme force . . . to extreme gentleness.”

Music harmonizes what is logically contradictory, as an aesthetic “coincidence of opposites.” That phrase, associated with Nicholas of Cusa, accurately captures the theological underpinnings of Labat’s viewpoint. Music addresses us ultimately by signifying something divine. It doesn’t just make us resonate together with the composer and one another, but harmonizes “some unknown world [with] our inner world.” Music offers a glimpse of the Triune God in whom motion and rest are one. It springs ultimately from the “infinity of triune love” that is infinite fecundity. Through music, the “indestructible, silent, hidden” love of God reaches to summon our desires. Giving voice to a love beyond words, music is a call from love to love.

Music places us within the biblical account of reality. It reaches back to Edenic bliss and forward to the music of the end of time, touching the ear with an echo of the harmonious world before sin and with a fore-hearing of the new creation that follows sin’s final conquest. As it casts its magic over all it touches, music anticipates the drawing-together of all things into harmony with the one God and the one Lord Jesus, in whom all things cohere. This is why music both satiates and entices, leaving a residue of regret at music lost and intense hope for music yet to come. Music is the pre-eminent art of what C. S. Lewis called Sehnsucht.

Labat understands man’s relation to music within this theological framework. We’re “cantors of all creation” called to gather and harmonize the voices of all creatures into a “cosmic act of praise.” Adam’s sin put humanity and creation out of tune with the Creator, but Jesus is true Man in this as in every other way. He’s divine Musician and divine Music, “Conductor of a universal symphony” that brings earth and heaven back into harmony.

All this might seem to apply only to the music of the Church, but Labat finds traces of the divine in all music. Unless we hear God’s summons within the music of earth, we haven’t grasped the full significance of music at all. Yet liturgical music, Gregorian chant especially, most completely fulfills the purpose of all music. In liturgical song, man transcends himself. Making music to God, we’re no longer singers merely, but become praise. In the song of the liturgy, we become the song we were created to be.

Peter J. Leithart is president of Theopolis Institute. 

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