György Heidl: Saint Augustine on singing

The aim of my paper is to present Augustine’s conception of singing and its theological background. His early dialogues and the Confessions reveal that during the period of his conversion, Psalms and hymns played a prominent role in Augustine's spiritual development. At the time of the famous conversion, he silently read St. Paul; in Cassiciacum he recited Psalms, and after his Baptism in Milan he sang hymns in church. According to the carefully constructed narrative of the Confessions, Augustine became silent when renouncing his rhetorician’s profession, and then gradually regained his voice while reading the Psalms. However, he did not sing until he became a member of the Church. The narrative is in harmony with how Augustine usually interprets singing hymns, namely that the hymns are praises sung to God in the Church. Unlike others, I do not see a contradiction between Conf. 10.33-50, where Augustine speaks about the priority of words over sounds, and EnPsalm. 32.2.8, where he emphasizes the importance of singing songs without words. The former text is concerned with syllabic singing, the latter refers to melismatic one, and neither of them can be understood as spontaneous "singing in the bath type song”.