Abstract
Maeve Louise Heaney,
Music as Theology: What Music Says about the Word
, Pickwick Publications: Eugene, OR, 2012; 352 pp.: 9781610974509, £26.00/$40.00 (pbk)
Maeve Louise Heaney’s book makes a striking assertion: music is a means of theology on similar footing to written and spoken language. Music not only illuminates doctrine but is itself theology – a means of God revealing God’s self to human beings. Music says things words cannot and, since God communicates to human beings using all of our embodied faculties, there are things that God may only say through music.
The argument proceeds in two stages. First, Heaney explores how music communicates to human beings at an epistemological level and how we interpret music. She draws from seminal thinkers in musicology and semiotics (the philosophy of signs) to suggest that music provides ways of understanding and discerning reality unavailable through spoken and written language: music’s communication involves movement, harmony, embodiment and interaction. Second, she applies this to theology, arguing that beauty and the senses play a vital role in revelation and knowledge of God. With a musical and theological epistemology in place, Heaney provides a framework for music as revelation primarily through the doctrine of the Ascension. Music carries the ability to hold human beings in the present moment while also mediating the Spirit of God. Heaney likens this to Christ in his Ascension: no longer restrained by time and space, the ascended Christ is universally present to the world, able to accompany us in every moment and mediate the presence of God through the Holy Spirit.
As a musician and composer with astute theological and philosophical sensibilities, Heaney enriches the growing conversation between theology and the arts through widening its philosophical and hermeneutical resources. Her explorations about what music means provide a way through clichéd debates about church music – which are often stuck between concerns about accessibility, on the one hand, or elite appreciation of high art, on the other – because both communicate through a shared epistemology. Her comparison of music with the disciple Thomas after the Resurrection proves especially rich: like the hands of Thomas reaching to touch the wounds of the risen Christ, music enables an embodied experience of connection with Jesus. In fact, one wishes Heaney had spent more time focusing on such original insights instead of covering such a wide range of material. Indeed, it seems that two books are competing with one another. The first is a critical exploration of various thinkers, both musicologists and theologians, whose works carry significant implications for music’s role in theology, evangelism and mission. The second is a constructive theological argument for music as theology, particularly in the light of Christ’s Ascension (chapters 4 and 6). Both are fruitful projects but, when combined, the book offers readings of multiple thinkers without sufficient explanation as to how they fit into her larger argument. Overall, though, Heaney provides an incarnational account of music and theology that will prove vital for anyone interested in philosophical resources for expanding music’s place in theological reflection.