How a Carolingian Monastery Used Music to Transform the Soul
How a Carolingian monastery experienced music
Remigius of Auxerre, who died after 908, began his commentary on the mass not with the origins of liturgical celebration or its significance, but with the congregation itself and the experience of taking part. He proposed that the mass should open in a way that would “first soften the hearts of those listening” so that they “might receive the healing word of the Gospel with burning desire.” This softening of the heart, along with the arousal of desire, came directly from singing and psalmody. Both achieved this beneficial effect through “the singing of sweet little songs.”
Remigius wrote his commentary by drawing on three main sources: the Expositio missae, an unedited text preserved in Troyes BM 804; an anonymous commentary known as Expositus missae (better known by its incipit Missa, ut beatus Isidorus dicit), for which multiple manuscript copies survive; and an unidentified commentary that Florus of Lyons also used for his own interpretation of the mass canon. However, Remigius’s account of the emotional response liturgical music was meant to produce in the congregation did not come from any of these sources. Instead, it was his teacher at the monastery of Saint-Germain in Auxerre who had earlier used the language of sweetness to describe musical performance.
Heiric taught Remigius, and Heiric himself had studied under Haimo, the first of the celebrated Auxerrois schoolmasters. All three wrote about music and its effect on listeners. That reflections on music appear in the works of three generations of Carolingian monks is unsurprising, because the ninth century constitutes a major phase in the history of liturgical music. This is especially true of the later ninth century, which produced Hucbald of St.-Amand’s pioneering treatise on music theory and notation around 880. Scholarship on Carolingian musical activity has rightly focused on technical matters—notation, performance, textual transmission, and manuscript traditions. Rarely, however, have scholars examined the experience of hearing music in the ninth century.
Yet that experience—specifically its affective dimension—is precisely what Remigius chose to highlight at the start of his mass exegesis. In his biblical commentaries, Haimo also wrote about the effects of listening to music, and Heiric did the same in his extensive surviving homily collection. What follows is an initial investigation into what three generations of teachers and students working in a single monastery believed about music and the emotional transformations it brought about in listeners. The sources are Haimo’s biblical commentaries and Heiric’s homiletic compositions. Writing in the second half of the ninth century, Haimo (to a lesser degree) and Heiric (more emphatically) displayed distrust toward music, a position grounded in a broader suspicion of all sensory phenomena. By the first decade of the tenth century, however, Remigius regarded music not merely as a desirable element of liturgical celebration, but as a necessary one.
Haimo’s active career spanned from roughly 840 until sometime after 860, and he produced a substantial body of exegetical writings. These commentaries can be read individually as complete works, but mining them collectively reveals the views held by the first Auxerrois master on numerous subjects. On a fundamental level, Haimo described a hierarchy of musical types, with secular music (unsurprisingly) rated below religious music. Moreover, Haimo distinguished between the affective consequences of listening to each type: secular music amplified whatever emotion the listener already felt, while liturgical music evoked new emotions. In his interpretation of Isaiah 5.11–12, which condemns people who wake only to plunge into drunkenness and entertainment, Haimo explained that the prophet denounced “not only eating and drinking but also the delighting of the ears and the creation of diverse musical arts. Those who do these things do not respect the work of the Lord, nor do they consider what will befall them.” Commenting on Apocalypse 18.22 (the verse about harpers, musicians, and players of pipe and trumpet falling silent), Haimo observed that “the leaders of the world seek all these things with delight, but they will be taken away from them, because nothing will be a delight to those placed in torment; they will suffer eternal punishment.”
As it “delighted the ears,” secular music amplified whatever emotional state the listener was in. Isaiah 23.16 (the verse about taking a harp and singing many songs to be remembered) gave Haimo an opportunity to discuss the power of musical skill. In the first part of the verse, Haimo explained, the harlot represented a sinner, and her walk through the city represented penance. This brought him to the second half: the harlot had to sing well and sing many songs, because “this is the power of music: if it finds someone happy, it makes him happier. If it finds someone sad, it increases his sadness.”
Heiric was Haimo’s student, and where this subject appears in his homilies, it shows his teacher’s influence. Heiric discussed the connection between music and emotions in his homily for the 24th Sunday after the Octave of Pentecost. The biblical passage was Matthew 9.23, the story of Jesus raising Jairus’s daughter. When Jesus entered the ruler’s house and saw the minstrels, Heiric paused to explain what tibicines were. They are “flute-players who sound together a song suitable for mourning with flutes; we know it was the custom among many peoples to use music when mourning the dead. For just as the sweetness of musical playing customarily brings greater joy to the happy, so too it brings weightier grief to the sad.” The scriptural inspiration differs from Haimo’s, but the interpretation is identical: when people listened to music outside a liturgical context, it amplified their existing emotional state.
When the two Auxerrois monks discussed songs and cantica, they went beyond simply restating this message; they defined the different categories still more starkly. Songs could be worldly. As Haimo succinctly put it in his commentary on chapter 5 of Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, “there are songs which are not spiritual nor sung in the praise of God, such as the songs of worldly men.” Spiritual songs, by contrast, were “those composed by the prophets, suffused and filled with the Holy Spirit.” Furthermore, he distinguished between a song and a psalm: “a song is put forth with the mouth alone; a psalm comes with the addition of certain instruments of the musical arts, that is, stringed instruments.” This spiritual singing is what Paul meant, Haimo explained, when he wrote “singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord,” for surely he could not have meant “the songs of worldly men.” Haimo also found the reference to singing in the heart relevant to the performance of spiritual music. Paul said “in your hearts,” Haimo explained, “because there are many who sing with their mouth yet their minds do not agree with their voice; and there are others who pay great attention to the quality of their voice, who consider with their mind that which they say, so that they might please the listeners.”
Heiric again followed his teacher by condemning the worldliness of some songs. In a homily delivered at the end of the second week of Lent, Heiric explained to his brethren the meaning of the man who would have filled his belly with the husks the swine did eat (Luke 15.16). The word for husks is siliqua, which Heiric described as a type of bean with a pod that was large and noisy because it contained “a paucity of seed and was almost empty.” By siliqua, he said, is meant secular teachings resounding with unprofitable attractiveness—“that is, they resound with the stories and songs of the poets by which the swine, that is demons, are delighted.”
This passage points to a subtle yet persistent difference between Haimo and Heiric. For Haimo, those who delighted in secular music foreshadowed their own damnation, which would take the form of an inverted life: they would be deprived of all worldly pleasures in the afterlife. For Heiric, these same people were swine consuming the husks of bean pods, noisy with their scanty dried contents. They would not simply be tormented by demons at some future point; as swine consuming “the songs of the poets,” they themselves were demonic.
The problematic nature of sensory perception is key to understanding the dangers of worldly music, for both Haimo and Heiric undoubtedly regarded the senses as perilous, even to the point of damnation. According to Haimo, however, sensory input only potentially led to perdition. Reason and faith together could mitigate the risk posed by sensory phenomena and transform danger into reward. In Isaiah 60.8, the prophet asks “Who are these that fly as clouds and as doves to their windows?” Haimo offered a dual meaning for the doves. They represented the faithful, coming into the Church as doves use a window to enter a room. But windows could admit more than doves, and so doves—in this case meaning faith—also “stand before the windows of the holy, who defend themselves from the five senses of the body, so that death cannot enter through them.” While the senses were dangerous, the faithful were not without recourse; they could use faith to protect themselves.
Heiric, Homiliae I:41, 360–61: The siliqua is a kind of legume with the largest pods and a loud rustling, but it is barren and nearly empty because of the scantiness of its seeds, and thus the siliquae signify secular teachings resounding with barren sweetness. In them the praises of idols resound—that is, the fables and songs of the poets—in which pigs, that is demons, take delight.
Haimo, In Isaiam, 1035: Or, just as doves stand at the windows, so the saints stand, because, rejoicing in simplicity, they fortify the five bodily senses so that death cannot enter them.
Guard against the dangers inherent in sensory experiences. This is what Haimo meant when he advised in his commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians 6:17 (take unto you the helmet of salvation):
“ A helmet is placed on the head, and it guards and protects all the senses of the body … What ought we to understand by a helmet, which, as we said, protects all the senses of the body? Lord Jesus Christ and his protection; by the head truly the mind, because just as the limbs are governed by the head, thus thoughts are regulated by the mind. Therefore let us place a helmet on the head, that is, let us put the protection of Christ in the privacy of our mind, having always faith in him, not in ourselves, and he himself will protect all our senses, lest they be able to be wounded by the ancient diabolical enemy.”
In addition to the protection afforded by faith, people could use their intellect to overcome the weakness inherent in sensory perception, as the allusion to the mind in the example just cited suggests. When Haimo described the destruction of Nineveh in Nahum 3:13, he equated the gates of the city to the senses. Just as the gates of the city were open in the scriptural text, “their gates, that is the senses of the body, were wide open to enemies, that is, to demons.”
The population of Nineveh should have been able to defend themselves, since “they had reason and intellect, like the strongest bars, by which they are able to block their senses.” These bars were overcome in the past by the fires of the devil, but the lesson that Haimo drew from this passage was that the “water of divine words” in the present would serve to extinguish these diabolical fires, thus ensuring that the fortissimos vectes of reason and intellect would continue to protect the faithful from the dangers posed by their senses. He repeated the connection between reason and the senses in his Apocalypse commentary. “The number five,” he wrote, “pertains to the five senses of the body, by which, after infancy, error arises in the unfaithful; yet in the faithful arises understanding according to reason.”
The reference to the life cycle leads to the final aspect of Haimo’s discussion of sensory perception. Age, reason, and faith combined not only to protect individuals against the dangers posed by their senses but also allowed them to channel their sensory experiences into positive behaviors. Haimo alluded to this possibility in his commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, in which the apostle to the gentiles wrote about a human thing, because of the infirmity of the flesh. “For as you have yielded your members to serve uncleanness and iniquity, unto iniquity; so now yield your members to serve justice, unto sanctification” (Romans 6:19). “By iniquity,” explained Haimo, “we ought to understand all sins, because doing something contrary to the law of God is called iniquity; and by justice we ought to understand all virtues. And this is the sense: Just as before you were called to faith you prepared yourself so that you might serve all filthiness and vice, now standing in faith, prepare your members and all the senses of your body, so that you might serve all virtues.”
The potential for the senses to yield virtuous rather than vicious behavior was realized through faith, but a kind of faith that only came with maturity and reason. Haimo gave a much more expansive explanation of this in his Apocalypse commentary. When explaining the five kings who have fallen found in Apocalypse 17:10 (“Five are fallen, one is, and the other is not yet come: and when he is come, he must remain a short time”), Haimo instructed his readers: “By the five kings understand the five senses of the body, which rule our infancy, because naturally we desire soft touch, we love sweetness, we seek harmonious and melodious sounds, we delight in pleasant smells and in beautiful sights … Reaching mature age, these five kings mentioned above cease, and another king succeeds, either understanding or error.” The transition from being ruled by the senses to being ruled by reason allows the faithful to have what Paul called confidence in the flesh. In his letter to the Philippians, Paul wrote: “For we are the circumcision, who in spirit serve God; and glory in Christ Jesus, not having confidence in the flesh. Though I might also have confidence in the flesh” (Philippians 3:3-4). Haimo assigned a broad definition to circumcision in his interpretation of this passage, one that pertained directly to the ability of faith to properly channel the senses:
“For we are the circumcision. We, that is, all who, believing correctly, are spiritually circumcised, we who in spirit serve God, that is spiritually and not carnally; or indeed we who serve God with our mind, just as it was said by the Evangelist: God is a spirit; and they that adore him, must adore him in spirit, that is with the mind. And we glory in Christ Jesus, not having confidence in the flesh, that is, in carnal circumcision, because we have circumcised all the senses of the body. Though I might have confidence in the flesh, that is, I am able to have confidence in carnal circumcision if there also be faith.”
Heiric of Auxerre took many things from his teacher, but confidence in the flesh was not one of them. In his discussion of the dangerous nature of perception, Heiric certainly shared Haimo’s assessment of the threat posed by sensory phenomena. Unlike his teacher, however, Heiric left no room for mitigating factors, whether age, reason, or faith. He followed Haimo and, in the specific context of the Luke gospel text, Bede, by describing the senses as openings through which evil might enter. The story of the dead man who was carried out of the city of Naim, whom Jesus restored to life (Luke 7:11-16), gave Heiric an opportunity to warn his brethren about the problematic nature of the senses. “By the gate of the city,” Heiric explained, “through which the dead were brought out, any one of the senses ought to be understood.” Following this with the interpretation that just as the dead were carried out of those gates, thus he “showing evidence of evil desire through any sense of the body declares himself to be dead in soul.” He then illustrated this point by explaining how each sense could lead to damnation. Two of these examples might have been especially poignant for monks: the desirable woman seen with the eyes and the problem posed by odoribus meretriciis, both of which imperiled the spiritual condition of the celibate brethren. The ears were also portals through which death could enter, of course. “When one opens his ears,” admonished Heiric, “to hateful words and to indecent and wanton songs, this makes his ears a gate for the death of his soul … Indeed,” Heiric concluded, departing from his Bedan exemplar, “in the same manner that an enemy hurls javelins into the city through openings [in the walls], wounding and killing those within, thus an evil spirit, when through any of the senses of the body will hurl a spear of temptation into the mind, soon it forces the soul from its position, and destroys it in pernicious slaughter.”
This was a categorical statement, and in the corpus of Heiric’s homilies there is nothing of the more accommodating aspects of Haimo’s position—no suggestion that once one had reached a certain age, it was possible to use reason and faith to escape the corporeal tyranny of the senses. In fact, Heiric did distinguish between a time in which the senses ruled and a time ruled by reason; these had nothing to do with the life cycle but instead with sacred history. The story of Jesus’s conversation with the Samaritan woman, told in chapter 4 of the Gospel According to John, prompted his reflections on sacred history. In that story, Jesus told the woman that she had five husbands, which Heiric interpreted as the five senses. When he looked back at the history of humanity, Heiric concluded that “before the coming of Christ the people of the church were subjugated by these five senses and, not having the light of reason, they passed through carnal life without any understanding of truth … But now has come a time in which the soul does not make use of the direction of the senses, but has strength, that is spiritual reason, by which it places those earlier men, that is the five senses, into subservience.” By relating the mastery of sensory experience to the Incarnation, Heiric made it a characteristic of membership in the community of the faithful and a requirement for salvation. As he put it in another homily: “those who perfectly guard the five senses of the body from sin, by divine grace they merit heavenly fellowship.”
So the Auxerrois masters thought, generally, that sensory experiences were dangerous. What, then, was the implication of this attitude for the experience of hearing spiritual music? Haimo argued that those who experienced spiritual music did not hear it in the same way as they heard other kinds of music; in fact, they did not hear it with their ears at all. They could not, because the ears were breaches in the body’s defenses that allowed for the incursion of things that were inimical to the soul. Spiritual music was heard instead with the heart and the mind. The most important aspect of musical experience, then, was the mechanism by which one heard it; liturgical music inspired an emotional state, rather than amplifying an existing one, because it was heard with the mind and heart and not with the ears. Haimo expressed this in his explanation of Isaiah 22:24 (“And they shall hang upon him all the glory of his father’s house, divers kinds of vessels, every little vessel, from the vessels of cups even to every instrument of music”). The cups, which Haimo imagined as filled with wine, meant the Apostles and the doctors of the Church, who “intoxicate us with wine, that is with the mysteries of divine Scripture and who are drunk with the grace of the holy Spirit, indeed they make us drunk. By instrument of music, [that signifies] the singers of the holy Church, who with their singing provoke the hearts of the listeners to the love of God.” According to Haimo, remember, the singing that one experienced in church was psalmody, in which the mind and the voice agreed with each other (mens nostra concordet voci nostrae) in a way that was pleasing to the listener. Psalmody bypassed corporeal hearing and penetrated straight to the hearts of those who heard it. Once there, it did not enhance a preexisting emotional state, as did secular music—instead it effected an emotional transformation, provoking them to the love of God.
Heiric did not preach about the virtues of spiritual music. Indeed, the reference to the music of the flute-players was one of only two times in which he used the word musica in his entire corpus. He believed that sensory experiences posed significant dangers to the faithful, and he seemingly did not accept Haimo’s distinction between being able to hear with the heart as opposed to with the ears. Consequently, he did not conceive of the transformative effect that a certain type of music, heard in a way that bypassed the fallible and dangerous body, could have on the emotional state of the listener. For Heiric, music amplified a preexisting affective state. Heiric referred to and cited the text of the psalms, and the things said by the psalmist, numerous times in his homilies, as one would expect. But he said nothing about psalmody as a component of the liturgy, except obliquely: the psalms were one of the gifts offered to God (an audience free from the limits of corporeal hearing) by the devoted faithful, and in separate homilies he described the “sweetness of the psalms” (dulcedinem psalmorum and iocundam psalmorum). But to whom they were sweet, or how they could be experienced as such, or about the spiritual results of being exposed to such sweetness, Heiric remained silent.
Heiric’s use of sweetness to describe the psalms recalls the manner in which Remigius opened his commentary on the mass, and the importance that he ascribed to “singing of sweet little songs” as a component of the liturgy. As mentioned, in another place Heiric used dulcedo in a distinctly non-liturgical context to describe that quality of the songs of the flute-players that made them appropriate for those who were mourning, whose sadness was thereby increased. Remigius himself was a prolific exegete, although he focused his attention more on classical rather than scriptural texts. Only a small amount of this material has been securely attributed to him and has received a critical edition, so how he fits into the overall Auxerrois picture remains to be seen. This includes, lamentably, his commentary on music, which remains available only in manuscripts. But on the subject of music he is best seen as a combination of his two predecessors at Saint-Germain. He took Heiric’s language, stripped it of any taint of references to secular music, and used it as part of a description of an emotional transformation that Haimo would have recognized.
It seems appropriate to call Remigius’s position (and Haimo’s as well) broadly Augustinian. In the Confessions, Augustine spoke of the dangers of aural pleasure and also of the potential spiritual benefits of music if sung well. The great Bishop of Hippo ultimately concluded: “Thus I fluctuate between the danger of pleasure and being led to a greater and salubrious experience, and I am more led to put forward the (not irrevocable) opinion that the custom of singing in Church is to be approved, so that through the delights of the ear the weaker mind may rise up to the devotion of worship.”
But characterizing the attitude of the monks of Saint-Germain as Augustinian overlooks the important differences. Haimo did not describe liturgical music as one of the “delights of the ear”; indeed, it seems that he thought that such music somehow bypassed the ears entirely and was instead “heard” in the heart. And neither Haimo nor Remigius said anything about the “weaker” minds.
The three authors—Haimo, Heiric, and Remigius—described a kind of musical experience that was distinctly, if not exclusively, characteristic of Auxerre. These ideas were central to Augustine’s acceptance of liturgical music, which was necessary for inspiring devotion. By the late ninth century, while contemporaries like Hucbald were writing provocatively about music theory and envisioning a notation system that would bring that theory into practice, Remigius merged the intellectual contributions of the two earlier masters who had taught at his monastery. The effects of this experience—the softening of the heart and the awakening of desire—enabled those who attended mass to receive, through “the healing words of the Gospel,” the salvific benefits available to them only after they had encountered the singing of sweet little songs.