30/06/2026 14:30 - 15:30

HALL: Parenzo - A12

Contact: Mccosker P.

Chair: Mccosker P.

Recent explorations of catholicity (kath'holou: 'according to/towards the whole') emphasise its coordination of parts and whole, finites and infinite, particulars and universal. Whatever the 'whole' catholicity aspires to actually is, it is thought to include all creaturely particulars. As de Lubac insisted: 'nothing is excluded', or as Maritain put it 'catholicity…embraces everything that is real'. In this view of catholicity, finite particulars somehow relate to and express the whole.


Analogously, music seems to coordinate parts and whole, finite and infinite. Pieces of music point to wholes which are not reducible to the sum of their parts. Whether as absolute form or expressing meaning or emotion, music conjugates variety or difference with unity. As Stravinsky emphasised, music needs both difference and similarity: 'Contrast is an element of variety, but it divides our attention. Similarity is born of a striving for unity. The need to seek variety is perfectly legitimate, but we should not forget that the One precedes the Many. Moreover, the coexistence of the two is constantly necessary, and all the problems of art...revolve ineluctably about this question, with Parmenides on one side denying the possibility of the Many, and Heraclitus on the other denying the existence of the One.'


This coordination of endless variety and holistic unity gives music its immediacy and power, for von Balthasar. But he also thinks that the whole or unity which music expresses, or aspires to, is Godself, and this is linked to music's endless variety and asymptotic aspirations to that ultimate unity. That's why, for von Balthasar, music also has a tragic or incomplete nature: its repetitions are always pointing to more, to an ever-greater whole.


This panel seeks papers considering relations between catholicity and music. These could reflect on von Balthasar's 1925 essay 'The Development of the Musical Idea: Attempt at a Synthesis of Music', or other suitable resources.