he antique world, where
everything proceeded from corporalization manifest to the senses; it
had to be reserved for more modern times. The two opposite artistic
poles of Heathenism and Christianity are Sculpture and Music.
Christianity destroyed the former and created the latter (along with
painting, which is nearest akin to it). In painting, the ancients knew
neither perspective nor colouring; in music, neither melody nor harmony
(I use the word 'melody' here in its highest sense, to express an
uttering of inward feeling, without reference to words and their
rhythmic relationships). But beyond this particular imperfection, which
may perhaps indicate only the narrower footing upon which music and
painting at that time stood, the germs of those arts could not develop
themselves in that unfruitful soil; not until the advent of
Christianity could they grow gloriously, and bring forth flowers and
fruit in luxurious profusion. Both music and painting maintained their
place only in appearance in the antique world; they were kept down by
the power of sculpture, or rather they could take no adequate form amid
the mighty masses of sculpture. Both those arts were not in the least
what we now call 'music' and 'painting.' Just so sculpture disappeared
from bodily life by means of the Christian tendency which strives
against all corporeal embodiment to the senses, volatilising this into
what is spiritual. But the very earliest germ of the music of the
present day (in which was enclosed a holy mystery, solveable only by
the Christian world), could serve the ancients only according to its
essential characteristic specialty, namely, as religious cult. For
nothing else were, in those earliest times, their dramas, which
were festal representations of the joys and sorrows of a god.
The declamation of those dramas was supported by instrumental
accompaniments, and even this fact proves that the music of the
ancients was purely rhythmic, were it not otherwise demonstrable that
(as I have said already) melody and harmony, the two pivots on which
our modern music moves, were quite unknown to them. Therefore, though
Ambrosius, and afterwards Gregory, based Christian hymns, about the
year 1591, on ancient hymns, and that we come upon the traces of that
purely rhythmic music in what are called the 'Canto Fermo' and the
'Antiphones,' this is nothing but that they made use of germs which had
been handed down to them. And it is certain that a deeper