"he ‘walks on high and arranges the entire cosmos’ for having come to be a part of the whole, he produces the whole." This reminds me that I just read how st Benedict saw a vision of the whole world in a single beam of light. You apply this to artists, but it is also a good explanation of why the saints being given contemplation of the first cause also are given authority to command nature and otherwise participate in the outpouring of divine power.
What you wrote about the unity of word, music, and image in Wagner also applies to why poetry, in which the sound of words are ordered to beauty in unity with the meaning, has always been associated with magic and mysticism and contemplation.
Nice comment. Yes, I think, since Beauty is one of the names we find on the "porch of the Good", the other two (proportion and truth) could equally apply to different "types" of ascent (rather different modalities of their relationship to what comes after). Maybe saints or mystics are more truth-focused and dialecticians more proportion-focused, or something like that, but they must all be views on the same thing given how Plato lays them out in Philebus.
Something similar for the beauty and unity of poetry. At its best (and I admit to not being very poetry-savvy) it achieves a great beauty and a unification of many elements. I was emphasizing Wagner and music-drama both for my own predilections (fanatic Wagnerian) and because it seems to me that he uses the poetry (he wrote his own libretti) as one element that comes to be unified with the staging and the music/motifs. Meaning just reading the libretto is fine, but it's missing its essential components in the music. Especially with Siegfried, the musical cross-references become so interwoven and infinitely fractal-like that I just don't even know how I would "get" it all, much less relate it to the libretto. And nonetheless, it isn't just random, the deeper you go the more the unity is still there!
"he ‘walks on high and arranges the entire cosmos’ for having come to be a part of the whole, he produces the whole." This reminds me that I just read how st Benedict saw a vision of the whole world in a single beam of light. You apply this to artists, but it is also a good explanation of why the saints being given contemplation of the first cause also are given authority to command nature and otherwise participate in the outpouring of divine power.
What you wrote about the unity of word, music, and image in Wagner also applies to why poetry, in which the sound of words are ordered to beauty in unity with the meaning, has always been associated with magic and mysticism and contemplation.
Nice comment. Yes, I think, since Beauty is one of the names we find on the "porch of the Good", the other two (proportion and truth) could equally apply to different "types" of ascent (rather different modalities of their relationship to what comes after). Maybe saints or mystics are more truth-focused and dialecticians more proportion-focused, or something like that, but they must all be views on the same thing given how Plato lays them out in Philebus.
Something similar for the beauty and unity of poetry. At its best (and I admit to not being very poetry-savvy) it achieves a great beauty and a unification of many elements. I was emphasizing Wagner and music-drama both for my own predilections (fanatic Wagnerian) and because it seems to me that he uses the poetry (he wrote his own libretti) as one element that comes to be unified with the staging and the music/motifs. Meaning just reading the libretto is fine, but it's missing its essential components in the music. Especially with Siegfried, the musical cross-references become so interwoven and infinitely fractal-like that I just don't even know how I would "get" it all, much less relate it to the libretto. And nonetheless, it isn't just random, the deeper you go the more the unity is still there!
I need to read more poetry probably.