In Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy, the universal harmony of the macrocosm is supported by musical proportions that are reflected in the human microcosm, which acts as a mirror of the universe.

When we use the term mousike in the ancient and late antique Greek world, we always refer to a combination of word, melody and dance.

In the Enneads Plotinus mentions the soul using the body as a musical instrument and, referring to Plato, makes a comparison with dancers in a chorus: in addition to singing together, every member also needs to sing their part well. This concept was later adopted by Clement of Alexandria in his Paedagogus, presenting the metaphor of the incarnate musical body by comparing the instruments mentioned in Psalm 150 to parts of the body. He says: “And praise him on the lyre. By the lyre is meant the mouth struck by the Spirit, as it were by a plectrum. […] Praise him on the chords and organ. Our body he calls an organ, and its nerves are the strings, by which it has received harmonious tension”. According to Clement, Christians should live their lives like an eternal liturgy, using their body parts – tongue, mouth and nerves – as instruments to sing praise to God. Christ, the Logos, is presented as the New Song: a Christ-Orpheus that charms the hearts of men and creates harmony from the dissonance of the universe.

Many of these assertions have somehow become disembodied and taken on more abstract meaning in our perception. This is the result of a long-term cultural and linguistic process whose stages are difficult to reconstruct in detail. However, we have to imagine that when Clement referred to men as musical instruments, he was speaking of actual bodies in movement. These bodies acted and interacted in a determined space and had to produce harmony, with all the accompanying musicality of the term. These considerations can be made by analysing the Greek concepts of choreia and schema. The former term is generally translated in modern languages as ‘choral dance’. However, only a tiny part of what we now describe as ‘dance’ encompasses the wide variety of meanings and the pervasiveness of these concepts in the ancient and late antique world. For example, they also included processional movement, ways of speaking, walking and interacting with space, and etiquette.

In Plato’s political thinking, the choreia is an instrument of education and learning to dance properly can lead to the acquisition of moral and civic virtues. The term nomos means ‘law’, but also ‘melody’ and ‘musical mode’. In this way, just as nomos, in the sense of ‘law’, is the foundation of social order, it is by following the musical nomos that the collective choreia can guide the social body harmoniously. Only those who are trained to follow this harmony can live in the Platonic City, while a man who cannot dance is defined as achoreutos and excluded from the ideal City because his inability to move in harmony with the rest of the civic choreia is considered immoral and depraved.

As we know that Christian authors in the early centuries were particularly steeped in Platonic culture, when Basil of Caesarea invited Christians to imitate the choreia of angels on earth, he almost certainly attributed the same Platonic value to the term. As Christian society had to aspire to this musical harmony, frenetic dances were prohibited because they were associated with dancing demons. The aversion to dance is especially apparent in homiletic texts which had the precise objective of educating the faithful. They were also always connected to contingent situations such as episodes of disorder, like drunken Christians dancing on martyrs’ tombs, which bishops had to judge negatively. The real problem was a certain type of gesture that led to the loss of social and spatial control. In this way, the preaching of Christian bishops also sometimes contributed to the construction of religious otherness, because behaviour such as disorderly dancing combined with drunkenness and licentiousness was often variously attributed to pagans, Jews and heretics – in other words, all those outside the ideal harmonious gestural space that bodies in the Christian community had to construct.

Bibliographhy

Spectacula turpitudinum. Christian Schemata of the Dancing Body, in RIHA Journal 2019, 0222-0229

(https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/rihajournal/article/view/70056/65856)