"Carmen Dei: Music and Creation in Three Theologians"

Peter J. Casarella, DePaul University

Abstract

The essay traces the idea that God creates the world with the harmony, order, and beauty of a song or poem (carmen Dei), through the works of St. Augustine, St. Bonaventure, and John Polkinghorne. Some common themes emerge: The idea of musical temporalization, the harmonious unity of the world, a logic of wholes and parts, the priority of a theological aesthetics, the realization of temporal harmonies in daily life, and the notion that the composition of the world is produced by a trinitarian Creator and that its last note will be played in an eschatologically open future.