In this chapter, I will analyse how the Christian world view assimilated those classical musical metaphors of the orderly polity and the ideal ruler. I will focus on thinkers who had an impact on the musical iconography of power in seventeenth-century Spain and its territories, such as St Augustine, John of Salisbury and Thomas Aquinas; this will show that the musical model of the community underlies both the political archetype of the Kingdom of God and the one that sees the state as a reflection of the order of nature.

Early Christianity acknowledged the legitimacy of political power and the divine origin of the imperial office, although it denied the divinity of the emperor himself. Christian musical metaphors of power emerged in a cultural frame that saw in Rome a legitimate political institution which, leaving aside its pagan sacrality, had reduced an infinity of diverse peoples to the peace and harmony of one single law. The Roman state, the argument went, although not divine in itself, fulfilled a divine mission, and therefore existed as a link between the divine world and that of politics: once such great polity could be stripped of its pagan aspects, it could be incorporated into the Christian order and fully accomplish the mission which God had assigned to it.