ABSTRACT
Chapter 1 frames the book’s principal materials by looking to Boethius and St. Augustine’s understanding of divine Providence and its reciprocal relation to Fate. The chapter argues that Providence presents an unmoved, in-folded version of the manifest world (Fate), whereas Fate unfolds the providential reality linearly, in time. Providence thus instantaneously embraces and enfolds a multiplicity of manifest forms within the divine mind, whereas fate gives us a distributed, temporal, and distended version of that perfection. The relation between the two is mediated through the concept of the fold (plica). Through Augustine first, then many others, the chapter develops musical, theoretical, and philosophical dimensions of the fold as a form of network simulation and transformation. The remainder of the chapter examines how the fold and the related philosophy of immanence appear in Hildegard’s writings, with a specific focus on the sections of Hildegard’s visions that discuss the speculative metaphysical qualities of the voice and sound, and their relevance to a reading of the Ordo Virtutum.
