Abstract
This essay explores the commanding heights of George Steiner’s and Robert Jenson’s thinking about music and God. Despite their far-reaching differences, both thinkers bring the phenomenon of music into close descriptive proximity to the divine life. For Steiner, music witnesses to the undeniable presence of the divine, ever pressing upon us through artistic creation. Yet the divine life itself remains finally inaccessible to us, beyond human discourse and intelligibility. In Jenson, we overhear the life of God as a ‘great fugue,’ the divine music that is none other than the living discourse of Father, Son and Holy Spirit: the identities named in Holy Scripture. But, for all their differences, Steiner and Jenson share more than what one might suppose at first glance. In this essay I demonstrate that, in spite of their irreconcilable differences, Steiner and Jenson exhibit remarkable similarities in their treatments of the temporality, ontology and freedom of music. In revealing these similarities within a greater difference I hope to show that Steiner’s analysis of music can be appropriated to lend a descriptive thickness to Jenson’s systematic musings on the temporal and ontological richness of the divine life as it happens between Father, Son and Holy Spirit and our creaturely participation within that divine harmony. Further, I aim to reveal how, through his analysis of the nature of music, Steiner effectively overhears something essential to the Christian understanding of God as triune, in a way at odds with his own agnostic tendencies to misplace the life of God or mis-identify a mute or solitary God behind the temporally and ontologically diffuse phenomenon he describes as the life of music. The point of the essay is not to use the musical experience as a ‘proof’ of God’s existence or as a prolegomena to faith. Rather, in large measure, a more modest ambition motivates the essay: to continue the missionary task of the church within earshot of a theologically pagan and musically literate audience.
