Remember friends, that I see that if music is the ultimate language of the liturgy, and the liturgy is the fulfillment of the faith, then ultimately natural music in its base foundation should reveal all mysteries of the faith.
Well, actually, in our full discourses that I've shared, we have seen that this is true! How? Let us revisit it as follows:
The nature of western music
There are exactly 12 notes in any tuning for a key in western music, and they are derived naturally by the law of harmonics. Given these 12 foundational notes, each key has seven primary pure notes, leaving five imperfect, or discordant, notes, which are like sharps or flats.
The easiest illustrious way to visualize this is on the piano, where in the key of C, all the white keys are the pure notes of the key, and the five black keys are the flats or imperfect notes, exclusive.
There can only be four base scales
Out of these considerations, there can only be four primary foundational scales out of any infinite possibility of scales which alone have the unique and base characteristics that make them the same foundational and unique.
The first way to consider this is that each scale essentially has all the notes in perfect sequence for the key and concluding with the octave note, or the eighth note, to resolve it.
This means that no note is repeated or backed up, except the octave, which brings it to resolution to close it with the base note of the key.
Moreover, each scale is only one direction, which, of course, is either ascending or descending.
Finally, each scale conveys a unique emotion, which is to say, happy or sad, or, in musical law, major or minor.
Consistent or ironic scales
One of the final characteristics is whether the scale is consistent or inconsistent, which we can also call ironic.
In this view, a consistent scale has the direction in a correlation to the emotion. Obviously the two such scales that fit here are ascending joy and descending sorrow.
This is because we would consider joy as getting better and better, or ascending, whereas we would consider sorrow as getting worse and worse, or descending.
The consistent scales are the great ages of the world, both of joy and light, or darkness and evil
In these cases, the scales will be seen as the greater ages of the whole divine plan, both in terms of the great phases of redemption and also the great phases of sin or resistance to God?s love.
This makes sense, because, as we move through salvation history, beginning with Noah?s day through the Old Testament, to the conquering of the Church over pagan Rome?and presumably on to Our Lady?s age of peace prophesied at Fatima, which will evidently bring the world back to the Catholic Gospel?with each successive phase of redemption, more of the world loves God to a greater degree and in greater sincerity than any age before it. This can be seen as one looks at these ages set aside, but we will forgo it for now, as it will be discussed at a later time.
In a similar vein, the sorrows descend, which means that with each successive phase of sin against God's love, more and more of the world becomes against God and more culpable, so that, at the end of the world, nearly all of humanity will be the most culpable against God with the most knowledge and the most radical and in the most depraved rejection of Him through the great apostasy?somehow like the demons, who knew so much and yet spat in God?s face.
Once again, these are the consistent scales, where the emotion is in right correlation to the direction.
The ironic scales: the specificities of the faith
What about the other kind of scales, which we would otherwise call the ironic ones? These would be, as we would expect, scales in which the direction does not match the emotion, but is contrary. In other words, ascending sorrow and descending joy.
Again, these are ironic, since we don?t think of sorrow as ascending, and we don?t think of joy as descending down but going up.
Well, let?s just explore this; we have just seen that the consistent scales give us a huge overview of salvation history from the beginning unto the end, meaning even from the beginning of the Old Testament unto the very end of the world.
So, if the consistent scales give us a huge outlook of Catholicism, then we might expect that the ironic scales introduce complexities that are more specific to the Catholic faith.
Indeed we will see this! Let us look deeper!
More specifically,
Two dimensions of specificity: intellect and will, truth and grace
Once we digress into the specificities of the Catholic Church?s faith, they can really only involve two great dimensions of the church, which correlate to the two great dimensions of the human person, which are in turn the two great faculties of the soul, namely, the intellect and the will.
The intellect is meant to receive truth, and the will is meant to be strengthened by grace.
Ascending sorrow: the doctrinal development of the church, the truth
The specificities of truth and intellect clearly lead us to the doctrines of the faith, which we will soon see can be correlated to the doctrinal development of the Church, which in turn will be seen to be an ascension of growth in understanding the set of great sources of Catholic truth through the Church?s history of the last 1700 years.
Descending joy: grace, the mystery of the sacraments
Now, when we move on to the will and the specificities of how it gains grace, we ask, where are the greatest specificities of such except in the sacred mysteries, the sacraments? Yes! In fact, the sacraments are the supreme sources of grace and contain the deepest theology of the human person!
Having said this, we can now begin to inspect the ironic scales to work these out analogically.
Examining the ascending sorrow, the development of Truth
Ascending sorrow is like the illuminative way of the Church, or her doctrinal development:
As the church develops her doctrine, what we can say is that, effectively, the great sources of Catholic truth are attacked from top to bottom where, at each phase, the church is growing in her understanding of the mysteries of Christ and His truths. That is, effectively, she is ascending the mountain of mystery and understanding of God. And it is in this way that the scale of irony can be ascending.
Yet, on the other hand, in each of these phases, a great portion of the world rejects her doctrinal development at that point, which is sorrowful, since it breaks the heart of God and the Church, seeing as a great part of the world does not receive his love through mystery.
This then explains the scale of the ascending sorrow as the doctrinal development of the Church, which, again, can be seen as the illuminatve way of the church.
Examining the descending joy: the grace of the sacraments
Now, as for the dimension of grace and the sacraments, the only other possibility for the scale is the last ironic one left, which is descending joy.
How might we look at this?
Well, here we will look at the human person who journeys through the fullness of the sacraments , assuming they are a married priest or deacon , who will therefore presumably receive all seven by the conclusion of his life.
That the scale is joyful is self-explanatory, since the sacraments bring joy and love to the human person. This is to say peace and rejoicing, whether by restoring one to grace, or whether by increasing that grace, such as giving them gifts or dimensions of help for salvation.
So this is the dimension of joy.
What about the descent?
The solution is this: the descent is physical, the physical life of the deacon or priest, who is progressively dying since birth, moving towards frailty and death.
In the next part, we will work out the specificities of the greater ages, or the consistent scales.