Analytics are funny things to examine.
Recently out of curiosity I logged into my distributor account and pulled down a report of every Augustinus Vox song and the number of times it has been played. This report does not include Spotify where nearly half of all listens come in so I also pulled a separate Spotify report to get those numbers.
I sent both reports into the “A.I. overlord” and I inquired about top 10 tracks by number of plays. It responded back with the top 10 tracks which quite surprised me because a song was listed first I did not expect. Here is the list.
1. The Living Law
2. Shadow of a Doubt
3. The Handing Over
4. Canticle of the Creatures
5. The Order of Love (Instrumental)
6. Grief and Gratitude
7. The Light Beyond the Tomb – Piano Sessions Version
8. Nothing for Certain
9. Heart and Mind
10. The Question of Joy
Upon checking further it seems that someone recently utilized The Living Law within some kind of social media short or ad and this caused it to jump up to the number one spot.
On seeing this I begin a journey to recall what that song was about and how it came to be. One memory that is very distinct is that the idea for the song occurred to me over a lunch break and that it was a song inspired by Augustine’s Retractions where he comments on and critiques his past works. At the time I had been working and thinking about the Immortality of the Soul album for several weeks and had essentially finished the album. I was in what I call the QA stage where I listen over and over and then make micro adjustments to songs and sometimes regenerate a song entirely when I like the tune but dislike aspects of how it sounds or way lyrics are sung. In this phase I explored Augustine’s retractions and he had this to say about the work:
After the books of the Soliloquies, once I had returned from the countryside near Milan, I wrote a book called On the Immortality of the Soul. I had intended it to serve as a kind of reminder for finishing the Soliloquies, which had been left incomplete. But somehow, against my wishes, it got into people’s hands, and so it is counted among my works. At the very beginning, the force and brevity of its chain of arguments make it so obscure that it tires even my own attention when it is read, and I can hardly understand it myself.
Then, because I was thinking of nothing but human souls, I said in one argument in that same book, “There cannot be any discipline in that which learns nothing.” And elsewhere I said, “Knowledge embraces nothing except what belongs to some discipline.” It did not occur to me that God does not learn disciplines, and yet has knowledge of all things, including foreknowledge of future events. Something similar appears where I said, “No being has life together with reason except the soul.” But life without reason certainly cannot be denied of God, since in him there is both the highest life and the highest reason. And I also said earlier, “That which is understood is always of this kind,” even though the mind too is understood, and yet it is not always of this kind. Again, when I said that the mind cannot be separated from eternal reason because it is not joined to it spatially, I certainly would not have said that if I had already been so trained in the Holy Scriptures as to remember what is written: “Your sins separate you from God.” From this it is clear that even things joined not by place but in an incorporeal way can still be said to be separated.
I also cannot recall what I meant when I said, “If the soul is without a body, it is not in this world.” For are the souls of the dead not without bodies? Or are they not in this world? As though the lower regions are not part of this world. But since I used being “without a body” in a positive sense, perhaps by “body” I meant bodily afflictions. If that is what I meant, then I used the word far too strangely. This too was said rashly: that bodily form is given by the soul from the highest essence, and that a body exists, to whatever degree it exists, through the soul. Therefore, the body subsists through the soul, and exists by the very fact that it is animated, whether universally, as in the world, or particularly, as in each individual living thing within the world. All of this was said altogether too rashly.
This book begins: “If there is such a thing as discipline anywhere…”
In the above quote we see Augustine’s awareness that some of what he shared in the work was shared in ignorance of the Scriptures. This idea prompted me to explore a song that incorporated scripture and his later corrections. The song came together quickly and here it is!