La Music and Liberal Arts in the Anthropology of Young Augustine of Hippo

Abstract

The conception of discipline and the reflection on the liberal disciplines in the early philosophy of Augustine are found mostly in his work De ordine. There, Augustine prescriptively describes the wisdom of the liberal arts as modest and succinct. On the other hand, in Retractationes, the author outlines his project to rethink the liberal disciplines, dedicating a work to each of them. This unfinished enterprise gave rise to a work on grammar, lost in Augustine's time, and another on music. In De musica, Augustine describes the operation of sensitivity and its articulation with rationality that culminates in the recognition of God in the soul. We will try to show how the psychological dimension of the functioning of sensitivity allows us to return to the concept of discipline and understand the liberal disciplines through the development of one of them in particular, taking as its axis the approach to the divine through rational means.