Music, Math, and God

The whole house and garden are one vast obscenity. It bears a sickening resemblance to the description one human writer made of Heaven: "the regions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence."

Music and silence--how I detest them both! How thankful we should be that ever since our Father entered Hell... no square inch of infernal space and no moment of infernal time has been surrendered to either of those abominable forces, but all has been occupied by Noise--Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile--Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end.

-- demon Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters (Letter XXII)

I was listening to The Screwtape Letters read by John Cleese while I was on the treadmill today, and this passage made me pause to wonder about the association between music and the divine. I am not one particularly given to music; I prefer audiobooks and talk radio to CD's and MTV, so I do not usually feel that association intrinsically the way other people do. But there are times when I can "feel" that association, and there is another reason that I think it is valid:

Music is ordered noise. It is math.

I remember writing in a journal as a teenager and fixed atheist, "God doesn't exist, but if he did, he would be made of math." I remember thinking that thought with a great sense of clarity. Perhaps God was especially close to me in that moment, pressing in to work on turning my heart. I don't know. But I do think that that thought had some truth in it. Not that God is made of math, but that God made math, and that math is the foundation of all God's physical creation.

At the heart of every science, at the heart of every description of the universe, at the heart of every observed law of nature, there is math. It is everything. To make a very crude metaphor: it is the operating system on which the whole network of physical reality is based.

And so then it makes sense to me, the association between music and the divine. Music is math, and math is the closest we can come to describing the mind of God in reference to creation without bringing in explicit talk of the spiritual realm.

That's pretty impressive. Maybe I should appreciate music more.