Oxford professor and canon Carol Harrison's masterful study, the latest volume in Bloomsbury's Reading Augustine series, navigates a familiar dilemma in Augustine's faith journey and in the history of Christian spirituality. “What can we legitimately enjoy and what should we use? Is there a way of using and enjoying which does not take the object—however delightful—as an end in itself?” (106). Although Augustine is famously wary of the dangers of “sensuous gratification,” Harrison persuasively charts across three key texts—De Musica, the Confessions, and the Homilies on the Psalms—the birthing in Augustine of a profoundly sacramental affirmation of the effects of music on the soul's journey from and back to God. In Augustine we find an emerging “theology of music,” novel in the ancient church, grounded in God's own singing speech that gives birth to the material creation (40–44, 136–38).

In three carefully argued chapters—“The Conversion of the Senses,” “The Conversion of the Affections,” and “The Conversion of the Voice”—Harrison shows how the ineffable memories and sense impressions left on Augustine's heart by music lead him finally to endorse its use—to permit our “playing with fire, as it were” (106)—despite its potential dangers. By evoking what Harrison describes as “affective cognition” (107), music can inspire devotion in the listener “more ardently” than rational or discursive knowledge. Above all, it is the enduring impact of his teacher Ambrose's innovative church hymns that leads Augustine not only to “run after” and “gasp” for God but climactically to weep with joy, for “now at last I breathed your fragrance” (84). As Harrison comments, “If we weep because we are overcome by beauty, feel it as the overwhelming grace of God, and respond in faith, hope, and love, then the tears may still be involuntary and irrational but they are good tears” (84).

That music holds enormous capacity to convey a “felt” knowledge of God (107), not least in the “unlettered” majority of the faithful (23, 35), is a lesson I first experienced at the piano as a child, and which I carried into my first job as a high school theology teacher. Nothing prepared my students more felicitously for the terms and mysteries of formal theology, I found, than a well-chosen song or piece of instrumental music, contemplatively pondered together. What Harrison's study affirms is what many of us already know experientially, though we may not have the rational or discursive means to explain it. As Augustine came to believe, what “the generosity of God has granted music” (137) need not be feared but need only be lovingly channeled back in the direction from which it came. God's grace and God's majesty at once “render us speechless,” concludes Harrison, and “propel song to take flight in wordless shouts of joy” (136). Because God is Love, God is known in the “cry of the heart” (139) that music stirs within us.

To affirm our capacity to know God palpably through the senses awakened by music, and further, that in so tasting God's sweetness we grasp something of that eternal love that sustains all of creation, is no small gift for people who may feel themselves adrift in an uncaring universe. As Harrison meticulously, often poignantly demonstrates, music by its very nature is “heavy with theological content” (36), and here, we may add, teleological content, if it is true that “becoming the music while the music lasts is the joy that awaits us in the life to come” (54). Helping others to hear that faith-content resound in the depths of the heart is Augustine's—and here Harrison's—enduring gift to the church. Music “in a very real sense democratized the Church: it conveyed the truths of faith to all, regardless of age, gender, education or social standing” (3). For this point alone, and for many others, Harrison's case for an Augustinian theology of music merits careful study, and perhaps even, if we dare, singing celebration.