David Pugmire claims that nonbelievers can genuinely appreciate the emotions of religious music. He gives two basic arguments. First, through a form of counterfactual secularists can imagine greater and greater ‘kinds of perfection’ to the point that they can without sentimentalism partake in the power of such music.Footnote ¹ This imaginative counterfactual is possible because of his second argument, i.e., that music expresses what he calls ‘Platonistic emotions’ which allow the listener to go beyond everyday life and imagine the world of perfect joy or perfect serenity common to deep religious faith.Footnote ² The world of religious music is thus open to all because imagination is free to function with the Platonistic emotions expressed in religious music.

I will argue that Pugmire is wrong on both counts - the possibility of imaginative counterfactuals doing emotional justice to religious music and his arguments about ‘Platonistic emotions.’ I will begin with the latter because his incomplete analysis of Plato's concept of emotion lays the groundwork for the former claim. I will then argue that a clear demarcation line exists between those who actually believe and those who do not. The emotions of the believer listening to religious music are justified by the properties of the object of the music. To the secularist, no matter how much imagination is applied, the properties of the object can never in fact justify the emotions of the music and this distinction I will argue modifies the experience of the emotion itself. There is no imaginative ‘last instance’ on the scale of perfection that allows the secularist to join the believer in fully appreciating religious music.Footnote ³

Pugmire cites Peter Kivy's point, based largely on the work of Julius Moravcsik, that certain emotions, which Moravcsik and Kivy call Platonic attitudes or Platonic emotions, are necessarily tied to objects with the justification for the emotions lying in the particulars of the object. Kivy argues convincingly that such emotions cannot be expressed by pure instrumental music. For example, ‘respect’ is not a generalized emotion and cannot be expressed by instrumental music alone. Respect as an emotion can only be explained by the specific properties of the person or entity that is the object of the emotion. Likewise for emotions like admiration and approval.Footnote ⁴ Plato would certainly have agreed with the terminology. For Plato emotions that are not tied to specific properties but are left to the imagination are not grounded in Reality and can in fact be dangerous for human development.Footnote ⁵ But Pugmire quickly glides over Kivy's argument by saying it is too narrow and then borrows the same terminology to make a very different point.

Pugmire uses ‘Platonistic’ to apply to emotions which ‘attach to unindividuated forms of the property that is their proprietary kind of object.’Footnote ⁶ These emotions, such as awe or reverence, are subject to imagination attaching greater or lesser degrees of perfection to them. But this is not what either Moravcsik meant by the term nor how Kivy applied it in his analysis of music. Pugmire can be excused for appropriating and then equivocating on the terminology of Moravcsik and Kivy but he cannot be excused for his incomplete and misleading use of Plato. It is true in the Symposium that eros for Plato has degrees of appreciation in our imagination but, fundamental for Plato, the true object of eros has clearly defined properties. It is those properties in the Symposium that make the other forms of eros discussed there inferior and make those other varieties mere functions of imagination.Footnote ⁷ The move upward from the body to the true source of eros is not for Plato a wonderful example of imagination in action or praise for the power of imagination. It is a call for a maturation beyond imagination. It expresses how mired we are in the material world and that we delude ourselves in imagining that natural objects are the proper object of eros. It is no defense of his position on religious music to use Plato as a foundation for claiming that our imagination can adjust the properties intended by religious music to suit our personal experiences. This is exactly what Plato did not encourage. Pugmire says at one point, ‘Music that employs explicit religious imagery is a special way, but still only one way, of doing justice to the Platonism of emotion.’Footnote ⁸ This statement is in fact an injustice to Plato's concept of emotion.

The claim that religious music is not necessarily defined by the properties of the object is what allows Pugmire to say that ‘devotional emotions may be of more general interest than it might seem.’Footnote ⁹ Using Kant, he points out that awe and reverence can be experienced without any theological foundation and religious music provides the ‘last instance’ of those emotions. The idea seems to be that, since we can experience awe at the first view of an Alpine Valley, we are able to attach ‘ever greater kinds of perfection’ to that emotion and thus appreciate the awe expressed by religious music without connecting religious belief to it. But, contrary to Pugmire's claim about unindividuated forms and kinds of objects, religious music does have specific properties attached to its object and these exist precisely because of belief. They are not on a scale with the secularist's emotions because the emotions of the believer are necessarily tied to the properties of the emotion's object. To believe truly that bliss awaits one after death or that Jesus is the Messiah demarcates religious music from the imaginary just as belief in the Forms demarcates the real object of eros from the inferior material objects. The emotion of the believer is not the grandest version of an awe or bliss generated at a lower level by the Alps or the Grand Canal. It is qualitatively different and defined by the properties of belief.

What are these qualitative differences? A common one in the West, briefly alluded to by Pugmire and then glossed over, is the sense of absolute joy which the believer has in believing that he or she is granted eternal bliss by Jesus being the Messiah. When religious music addresses this belief, it has nothing whatsoever to do with imagination for the believer. The emotions expressed by the music are deeply personal and pervasive in the person's outlook on life. A sense of ‘surrender’ exists which is part of the emotion of total joy in this case. This emotional dimension of surrender cannot be experienced by the secularist because the properties necessary for it are not held to exist. Imagining we are saved eternally is not even on the same plane as actually believing we are saved eternally and the emotions of the latter have a depth quality to them that affects the believer's entire way of life. Another example of an unbridgeable qualitative difference would be the emotion of total fear generated by the belief that one can be damned eternally and which is expressed in some Christian music. One may try to imagine eternal damnation as the ‘last instance’ of everyday fears and then, afterwards, forget about it. But the actual fear of eternal damnation is not on the scale with ‘being a little scared’. ‘Eternal’ means something distinct and it is tied to the properties of the emotion's objects - God and Hell. While secularists may imagine some terrible things to be afraid of, they can walk away from such fears because they are imaginative. The believer cannot walk away and profoundly experiences fear in a way that no imaginative version can replace.

The qualitative difference between imaginary and real is more clearly present in religious hymns than music in the classical music tradition. Pugmire does not discuss religious hymns. If his analysis is to be generalized, one would have to say that the emotions of Dies Irae, How Great Thou Art or Amazing Grace are ‘last instances’ of emotions we can have in other contexts. But, to a believer, the emotional power of these hymns lies exactly in the reality of the belief. A believer's experience of the emotions in Dies Irae upon the death of a loved one is tied specifically to the properties of the object in which he or she believes. The comfort as well as the sense of total dependence on God exist because of those properties. If one no longer believes in the properties of God which make such comfort and dependence possible, nothing is left to the music except a lingering emotional attachment and a revivifying of emotions which one now knows have no object. We may very much want to experience the full emotional power of these hymns, but, alas, a chasm is now present that is just as real as a Westerner trying to appreciate fully the emotions of Tibetan religious music without having the least belief in Tibetan Buddhism. For secularists listening to Western religious music, our overall cultural background gives us glimpses of the musical emotions, we can understand more or less what the emotion is about and we can (perhaps) remember our childhood. But full appreciation cannot be attained by imagining a perfection embodied in a belief one knows is not real. A sense of sadness may follow upon the loss of the full appreciation of our culture's religious music. But such is the lot of the secularist. In that the properties of an other worldly object are intrinsically tied to the qualitative emotional experience of the music, religious music is truly Platonic and the line between material reality and the Forms cannot be crossed by the imagination.