Music, Prayer, and “Something Understood”

During the Middle Ages, Christian theologians developed various means for addressing God’s ineffable, or indescribable, nature. One could, for instance, employ apophatic or “negative” theology, or use music and prayer as metaphors for the harmony of the universe and our relationship with Him. This paper examines the use of these and other approaches to the ineffable by the French indiciare Jean Molinet and the English poet George Herbert. Despite being written hundreds of years apart and in different languages, Molinet’s Chroniques (1474–1504) and Herbert’s “Prayer (I)” (1633) both rely on a series of impressionistic metaphors to convey something of the ineffability of their respective subjects (music and prayer). In their efforts to describe that which is difficult, if not impossible, to capture in words, both turn to the long tradition of Christian mysticism, and in particular the works of Pseudo-Dionysius and Boethius.