The music we make or listen to has serious moral and spiritual implications

Michie said:

Interview with Dr. Kwasniewski on Music: The Good, the Bad, and the Holy​

Natalie Sonnen of Regina Magazine asked if I would answer some of her questions on music. This fall, a version of the interview will appear in the pages of that magazine, but with permission, I am sharing the text here at my Substack ahead of time.

Natalie: Isn’t the music we listen to a matter of indifference? Surely, it’s just superficial entertainment.

Dr. Kwasniewski: Such may be a common point of view in the modern democratic Western world, but it is a minority opinion in the history of human thought—and I’m not quite sure that anyone really believes it anyway.

That music has a profound effect on the formation and development of our human potentialities and moral character is the teaching of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Pieper, Ratzinger, and Scruton, among other heavyweights—and surely, when thinkers who disagree about so many other things agree on this point, their agreement should give us pause.

If what these thinkers hold is true, music cannot but affect our lives as Christians and our eternal destiny. According to the two greatest philosophers of antiquity, Plato and Aristotle, whenever we listen to music, we are allowing it to come inside and make its home in our souls. We are saying: Shape me; make me like yourself. We wouldn’t sleep with just anyone, or entrust our education (or that of our offspring) to just any teacher—yet we often allow sordid characters and their cheap goods to enter the doors and windows of our body and live inside our minds and hearts! Plato in particular argues that what we really believe, what we are, is most of all revealed by that in which we take pleasure.

If our tastes in music or movies are the same as those of modern American atheistic hedonists, what does that say about the strength of our faith or the vitality of our intellectual life?

Exactly. The Logos, the Word of God, should permeate our thinking, our feeling, our loves and hates, our way of being human. This is what it means to live a life of virtue and to be a son of God. We become beacons of light, keeping alive the memory of the beautiful and attracting others to a nobler way of thinking, living, being.

That we are supposed to care very much about the reformation of our interior life, especially by turning away from corrupt passions, is impressed on us by Saint Peter:


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So far, so good. But all of the above is too general—painting with a broad brush. Can you be more specific about what’s wrong with the music you once told us you threw away in high school, and what, in contrast, is so good about the more artistically refined music?

Continued below.

Interview with Dr. Kwasniewski on Music: The Good, the Bad, and the Holy

The music we make or listen to has serious moral and spiritual implications

www.traditionsanity.com

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Question: Would you say, then, that listening to music bad for your soul is actually sinful?

Response: With much of the bad music out there, we are not dealing with something intrinsically evil, as if the mere listening to it would constitute a mortal sin. Rather, we are dealing with something relatively evil: something that indicates and fosters moral imperfection, which, if unresisted, may lead to mortal sin. [ ! ]

Saint Thomas Aquinas argues that venial sin is bad not only because of the offense in itself, light though it may be, but also because repeated venial sins are a slippery slope to mortal sin. By listening to rock or pop or rap, one is stunting one’s moral growth, depriving oneself of intellectual perfection, and impeding or clouding one’s spiritual life. [ ! ! ]

I would put it this way. Today’s popular music is largely unhealthy for its imbibers, in a way that is not dissimilar to the way in which eating junk food or doing drugs is bad for your body, playing videogames is bad for your psyche, or seeking sexual pleasure for its own sake or looking at pornography is bad for your soul. It can also be bad for you in the way in which reading only comic books when you could be reading great literature is bad, or dressing sloppily or immodestly when you could dress well. All these things are connected to the moral life and, ultimately, to the spiritual life. [ ! ! ! ]

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