ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a critique of the ‘theology of music’ found in Søren Kierkegaard’s essay ‘The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical Erotic’ and its exploration of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. This theology errs, the author argues, because it separates the transcendentals from one another, allowing the Beautiful (the aesthetic) to be overshadowed by the Good (the moral) and the True (the intellectual). The latter two, Wilson suggests, have taken priority in modernity as the primary means for constructing authentic selfhood, a move counterproductive for theology since it risks erasing God from the project of self-realization. Drawing on George Steiner, David Bentley Hart, and the wisdom of Job, Wilson challenges this overemphasis and makes his case for the recovery of the aesthetic, the needlessness of Beauty, and, within that, the role of music. As essentially ‘unsayable’, music grasps faith’s resistance to intellectual containability, and rightly locates authentic selfhood in self-surrender, in the ceding of control to an uncontainable God of love, desire, and delight, reality’s ultimate context.
