to stimulate them because of some mysterious relationship between the two,” he maintains a special guard
“not to allow my mind to be paralyzed by the gratification of my senses, which often leads it astray.”^6
That ambivalence, expressed by Saint Augustine in the fourth century, has remained a characteristic of
Western religious thinking about music.
But if the early medieval Christians did not recognize our category of the “aesthetic,” which
anachronistically implies a “pure” (that is, disinterested) contemplation of beauty, that does not mean that
we cannot now apprehend a musical product of the ancient church—say, a troped Introit—with aesthetic
appreciation. (Indeed, if we did not know how the process of troping worked, we would never have had
an aesthetic problem with a troped Introit; it would just be a longer Introit.) As Saint Augustine implies,
and as a hackneyed proverb confirms, the religious or sensuous or aesthetic “content” of works of art (or,
to be careful, works capable of being regarded as art) is not an inherent property of such works but the
result of a decision taken by the beholder, and defines a relationship between the observer and the
observed. When such decisions are not consciously taken but are the result of cultural predisposition, they
can easily seem to be attributes of works, not of observers.
By now, the aesthetic reception of ancient service music is well established. Gregorian and medieval
chants can be for us (and, indeed, have definitely become) a form of concert music, which we now
experience in new surroundings (concert halls, our homes, our cars) and for new purposes. In 1994, the
year this chapter was first drafted, a compact disc of Gregorian chants sung by a schola of Spanish monks
unexpectedly rose to the top of the popular music sales charts, betokening a wholly new way of
apprehending (and using) them. Or maybe not so new: the pop reception of chant may not be so much an
aesthetic phenomenon as a renewed form, mediated and modified by the pacifying objectives of “New
Age” meditation, of the intellectus Amalar celebrated at the very beginning of our story.
Be that as it may, putting ourselves imaginatively in the position of the chant’s contemporaries gives
us access to meanings we might otherwise never experience. And perhaps even more important, it gives
us a distanced perspective on our own contemporary world, a form of critical awareness we would
otherwise never gain. These are among the most potent reasons for studying history.