This article explores the place of music in the classical liberal arts curriculum, which consists of the trivium (the arts of language) and the quadrivium (the arts of number). Music is part of the quadrivial disciplines and studied as applied arithmetic. However, as argued in this article, it is also a bridge to the discipline of rhetoric, which is part of the trivium. The article begins with a brief review of St. Augustine’s De Musica, the first in a planned (but unrealized) series of dialogs on the value of the classical liberal arts to the emerging Christian culture of Antiquity. It proceeds to a discussion of music and its relation to the contemporary American liberal arts curriculum. Two case studies follow that address the ontological reality of music as a time-bound medium, and attempts to mute this reality in the service of creating a sense of timelessness. Thus subsuming the temporal into the Divine–what Augustine called “a poem of the universe”. The first case study is Dante Alighieri’s Paradiso, which is a journey through the heavens with each planet representing one of the seven liberal arts as preparatory to the Beatific Vision. The second case study focuses on J.S. Bach’s attempts to create a sense of timelessness in the St. Matthew Passion by the use of musical forms and musical rhetorical devices that tend to abolish time. The article concludes with suggestions on how teachers can use 20th and 21st-century movements in Western art music as pathways to appreciate music’s pivotal role in the Catholic liberal arts tradition.

This essay advances a theological reappraisal of Impressionist painting as a modern mode of sacramental perception capable of renewing the contemplative imagination within a disenchanted West. While recent scholarship has interpreted Impressionism as a limit case of aesthetic immanence, reducing vision to light, temporality, and surface, this study argues that such immanence is not closed. Drawing on Aidan Nichols’s distinction between art made for the liturgy and art tutored by it and informed by David Fagerberg’s account of liturgy as the right ordering of reality itself, the argument proposes that Impressionist form can be evaluated according to precise theological criteria. Sustained ekphrastic analysis of Monet’s Portal of Rouen Cathedral in Morning Light (1894), Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (c. 1902–1904), and Messiaen’s Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus (1941) is brought into conversation with Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, Pavel Florensky’s theology of perspective, and Augustine’s account of distentio animi. Read in this light, Impressionism emerges not as indifference to the sacred, but as a discipline of attention that disposes artist and perceiver toward participation in a liturgical reality already given in creation: a modern praeparatio evangelica whose formal achievements, though historically bounded, remain theologically available. The argument does not presume that Impressionist form is theological in intention, but that, when attended to with sufficient formal discipline, it may be recognized as consonant with theological accounts of perception.