by Russell Re Manning
As presented at Music and Transcendence Conference, Cambridge, November 2011
This paper engages with George Steiner’s powerfully suggestive characterisation of music as “unwritten theology”... more
This paper engages with George Steiner’s powerfully suggestive characterisation of music as “unwritten theology” (1989) to suggest ways in which the possibility of a natural theology of music might be theorised.
Steiner’s claim exposes a central dilemma for work that seeks to explore the ways in which music relates to transcendence. On the one hand, for those such as Jeremy Begbie, “music can serve to enrich and advance theology” in its ongoing quest, in his words, “to extend our wisdom about God, God’s relation to us, and to the world at large” (2000). Music, in this case, serves as an aid to reflection, further equipping the theologian in her inescapably writerly enterprise. On the other hand, as Frank Burch Brown suggests: what if the theologian of art allows art not only to assist theology but further to “reshape, somehow, the image and sound, the look and feel, of the substance of faith” (2012)? For such an approach, music itself becomes theology and hence the theologian’s task is radically transformed. No longer able to make use of music to enrich her writing, the theologian is thus displaced and the linguistic hegemony of theology is challenged in favour of a “theology without writing”.
This paper explores the possibilities for theorising a “theology after writing” capable of “reshaping, somehow” not simply the form but also the substance of faith by drawing on, and deliberately distorting, resources from Paul Tillich’s cultural-theological analyses of what he characterises as art with “religious style, but non-religious content”, as well as Jean-Luc Marion’s notion of iconic distance (particularly as developed by James Herbert (2008)). Taking seriously the challenge of thinking of music as “un-writing theology”, the paper suggests that a framework of a natural theology of music might provide the necessary openness to discovery that Steiner’s description requires.
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![](http://photos.academia.edu/857360/305780/362036/tiny_andrej.bukovac-mimica.jpg?1325539315 "<strong>Andrej Bukovac-Mimica</strong><br/>Theological Faculty "Matthias Flacius Illyricus""){kind=small}
