I recently have quoted St Augustine, from more than 1500 years ago, to the effect
that "He who sings, prays twice." In the early days of the church, it was music
that helped attract worshipers... and was, naturally and powerfully, an irresistible
means to praise God and express joy.
Before the church fathers (and mothers; St Cecilia becoming the Patron saint
of Music) Plato identified not only music but harmony as capturing - as best
humankind could - the abstract but Perfect Good that reigns over us. Plato did not
particularly ascribe it to the manufactured Greek gods, but he believed that there
existed an Absolute Truth; and that, even if we could never fully know it, humans
are ennobled by seeking it. Although he lived 300 years before Jesus, the early
church recognized his philosophy in some ways as proto-Christian; and many of
them were neo-Platonists.
