Church environment
It was an obvious concern to return the rediscovered cultural heritage to the institution that had lost it and an unexpected surprise to repeatedly encounter rejection in 2015. (For more information see blog B22 “On the index of society”)-
The causes are obvious. An institution that claims to convey truth seeks proximity to science, since it intends the same thing and is also able to present evidence. Staying close to the probative suggests a commonality, which a priori does not exist.
Where church truth was put to test, rejection has a long tradition - keywords: index and censorship - it was the representatives of science: Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Charles Darwin, and many others. which shook the Catholic world view.
Now cultural studies and philosophy with their polydisciplinary approaches are added and methodically meet the Catholic all-encompassing world view on an equal footing. A construction that could be set up with the help of unrestrained networked thinking can only be analyzed if these connections are taken into account, and analysis has the property of bringing facts to light. The Fathers of the Church, for their part, did not proceed analytically but rather synthesized. Since then, the church has been in the mode of intellectual circular reasoning, which must be recognized as completely unscientific. Practiced faith - to put it another way: the permanent circumlocutio of a hypothesis that is held to be true about an inaccessible terrain, whereby, according to Christian ideas, life after death can be earned by adopting a code of conception and behavior, is the diametrical counterpart to an open-ended-on the question related to this world, combined with the sole acceptance of answers with causal reasons. Growth of science takes place methodically through refutation, so it is almost defined by the inner distance to the previous assertion. But no statements can be made about what she has not in her hands. It would just be replacing one assumption with the other. This is the only reason why it is possible for different cultures to project equally complex and also polytheistic ideas into the afterlife with the same seriousness. Such processes have nothing to do with science related to this world. Therefore they do not allow themselves to be claimed for questions of faith. Methodological embarrassments arise where in nature viewed as creation, indications of the creator are searched, i.e. evidence of God - resp. evidence to the contrary - to be sought. Even more than 100 plant names with a Bible reference, such as passion flower, blood drops of christ, St. John's plant, God's eye, cannot change anything, although it can be seen that popular piety does not even question it in a differentiated way, because a parable is enough.
With their references to analogy, parables are able to describe something that cannot be pinpointed in any other way. For this reason alone, the power and importance of poetry and the arts should not be underestimated. Seeing music as a gateway of the divine in particular was a good way to spread faith ad propaganda fidem, because it comes across as immaterial and hits people's emotional world with its power. The art of music has in common the immaterial consistency and soul-warming quality of light, which acquires a similarly great importance in cathedrals. All the more against the background of Jesus' statement: "I am the light of the world", "ego sum lux mundi". (John 8:12) It therefore made sense to enrich the theory of harmony with references to symbols in such a way that the motto MUSICA DONUM DEI could be conveyed as spiritual knowledge, following the principle: "Strongly felt is half believed." If you subtract the man-made ingredients, what remains is the physically describable vibration behavior of strings and air columns. The willfulness of the relationship can be read from the illogicality of adventurous makeshift constructions. That, too, analytics brings to light.
More recently, Peter Sloterdijk has drawn attention to the theopoetic character of the Holy Scriptures and shook the tree of knowledge until the dogmatic appendages fell to the ground like ripe fruit. A rich harvest for cultural studies, which appreciatively collects everything that allows conclusions to be drawn about the embarrassment of people to cope with their life-adversities - meaning suffering and death. This includes all symbol references as well as the Latin interval designations prime, second and third..., which symbolize the immaterial stages of the acoustic Jacob's ladder to bliss.
However, the appreciation does not primarily apply to the found objects. It is brought to those people whose thoughts they hand down to us. They enable a comparison with the present, which still has the civilizational quantum leap ahead of it, provided it does not fail on the same globe with the same task, which is to abolish wars. Not being interested in what history teaches prevents them from understanding and growing from themselves. This is definitely contra-evolutionary.
The rejection of the Christian symbolism of the Western tonal system and the ethical content of the theory of harmony, which is significantly older than Christianity, leads to stagnation in cultural and civilizing further education.
The theory of harmony provides nothing more than an example of the non-violent handling of consonance and dissonance with the result: music. Kadmus and Harmonia's bridal chariot is said to have been drawn by a lion and a boar. This is just another picture of the synergistic interaction of incompatible natures who would be able to achieve something greater together than they could ever achieve on their own. The overarching goal of the theory of harmony transferred to humans is world peace, which can only come about if humans learn to appreciate differences within their own species and to resolve conflicts diplomatically.
Culture may be apolitical in some areas - harmony is not!
© Aurelius Belz 2021