Music of the Soul with Léon De Corte
By Catholic Home Magazine | 16 July 2025
Catholic Home Magazine is a joint initiative of the Catholic laity and clergy dedicated to making the Catholic faith loved and understood in its integrity from an early age, and to passing on the treasures of the Church’s intellectual and aesthetic traditions to assure children have all the resources they need to grow and thrive as Catholics adults. Catholic Home is available in the USA and Canada, in the UK and in Ireland & the EU.
Léon De Corte was born on 18 July in 1937 in Brussels, Belgium. His father, Marcel De Corte, was a philosopher, who tried to bring order to the confusion of twentieth century thought by drawing deeply from the scholastic tradition founded in the philosophical realism of Aristotle and the supernatural revelation made to us by Christ through His Church. Léon’s mother, Marie, was every bit her husband’s intellectual equal, and a gifted musician. Marcel and Marie De Corte took great care to pass on to Léon and his siblings the rich gifts God had given them, but they were aware of their responsibility as Catholic parents not only for their children’s health and education but for their salvation. Like all good Catholics, they knew that the way to heaven is none other than the Way of the Cross.
In 1948, at the age of 11, Léon was struck with polio, a terrible virus which paralysed his whole body. For a long time, Léon was unable to move or even breathe by himself. He had to spend weeks at a time in an iron lung — a chamber with alternating air pressure, which allowed him to breathe. When he was well enough to leave the hospital, he still had to use an oxygen mask, as well as a special device just to hold his head up. Eventually, however, with therapy and exercise, he slowly regained the use of his arms and legs, and was able to write, draw, and even play the piano again. But for the rest of his short life, he still had to bear a heavy cross brought on by his physical weakness, isolation, sleeplessness, and uncertainty as to whether he would live and for how long. He would die on 15 October 1955, at the age of just 18.
But, amidst all his suffering, Léon never forgot that the purpose of life, and only happiness which is a foretaste of eternal happiness in heaven, is to conform yourself to God’s will; that is, to become what God intends you to be, or, according to a simple but profound expression, Deviens ce que tu es — “Become what you are”. This is the title of the book Léon’s parents wrote about their son in the months after his death. In it, they recall (always in the present tense), that despite Léon’s heavy cross, “He is joyful. No disappointment hurts him, because he is settled in the essential …”
“Here is a young man whose essential vitality, like that of all boys of his age, is intact and turned outward towards the conquest of the world, towards all the riches of the universe which cannot be seized without going towards them, without trying to encounter them. The way he must go is now forbidden to him. The obstacle which stands before him is impassable. He feels incapable of toppling it, perhaps forever. Will he fold in on himself in a morose submission? Will he fill the horrible emptiness of his being with tears? … Everything incites him to this … At any moment, he can turn the deadly point of his sharpened mind against himself to wound himself more, to widen his wound, to increase his misery.
“But his heart, and no doubt the grace of God in him, protests. He still feels open to the world … because he loves. But he feels confusedly, ardently, that the universe is no longer within his reach … The earthly horizon is blocked. An immense fog masks it. From now on he must climb to contemplate it. There is no way forward for our son but spiritual ascent. He is at an impasse, but the impasse has no ceiling. It is there that he shall attempt to go toe to toe with the nothingness which is gaining on him and to reconquer the universe by turning his eyes on high.”
This was the key that unlocked for Léon the door of life, the virtue that enabled him to walk through it and the vision to see, in the light of reason and grace, something of the light of glory hereafter. For the rest of his earthly life, Léon drew from a mysterious inner strength and lived a life of joy and wonder founded in prayer, reflection, and study. This life, which we call “interior,” nonetheless has many points of contact with the exterior world: spiritually, through the practice of the Catholic faith (especially through the Sacraments, the gospel and spiritual reading); aesthetically, through art, music and all creation; and socially, through communion with family, friends, and teachers.
Léon read many books in French, Flemish, and English, drawing spiritual nourishment from the works of the saints (especially St. John of the Cross, St. Francis de Sales, and St. Therese of Lisieux), drawing knowledge from textbooks (his favourite being those about ancient Egypt), and shaping his imagination with works of fiction (like The Little Prince, Diary of a Country Priest and The Moonstone). Yes, even novels, in their own place, helped him grow in his love for the true, the good, and the beautiful! But especially important to Léon was his love of music. Before his illness, his parents recalled, “music was still for him only a beautiful diversion, a pleasure. It was not yet a saturating joy. It was only after his illness that he would see in music … the door of entry to a higher region, peopled by invisible realities and very close to the Kingdom.”
As he grew stronger, he was able to walk on crutches and go to school, where he made a great impression on his classmates and teachers by his charity and astonishing insight. Later, he was able to go on excursions. He especially loved to explore Romanesque churches, which for him were closely tied to his love for music. Like the German poet Goethe, who said that “Architecture is frozen music”, Léon intuited that there was something analogous in their beauty and harmony:
“For him, music, like Romanesque art, is the way which leads to the interior life and, at the same time, hands him the key to the outside world. All by himself — without us ever having spoken of it to him — our son has discovered the medieval perception of the Christian soul, such as it was formed by grace and the gospel.”
In the 12th century, St. Hildegard wrote that “the soul is essentially music.” Léon quickly developed a clear perception of the kind of music which most clearly “translates” the language of the soul. He even planned to write a treatise on the spirituality of music and, at the age of 16, astounded his classmates by giving a presentation of some of his initial ideas. Léon, like all wise music-lovers, knew Gregorian chant to be the summit of man’s musical achievement, followed by the choral works of the Renaissance, which, according to his parents, he considered, “the most elevated forms of music because they are most directly united to the soul ‘in its life properly lived and prayed’.”
Léon discovered how this spiritual sense had been perfected and then gradually lost in the subsequent history of Western music. He was sure that the music of these periods differed not only in the ideas they “translated,” but in the essential sources of their inspiration.
“Léon describes Classical music (c. 18th century) as having ‘a spiritual signification neighbouring grace’, whereas Romantic music (c. 19th century) ‘is humanised like man himself and it now only translates man, just like so-called modern culture (c. 20th century). Music has descended little by little from the soul to the heart, and from the heart to the gut; that is when it does not go to the head, which is no better.”
We will let Léon have the last word, in the confident hope that he now enjoys before the face of God the ultimate reality of what he intuited on earth, through his contemplation of music as “the imitation of God’s absolute Silence”:
“Music is a language which unites being to the Source itself. The soul lives music intensely. She is one with music. The language of music is therefore addressed to the soul itself, to the first Source of the soul. It does not reside properly speaking in the musical act but in the transcendent inspiration of the music. Taken in its highest conception, music, like mystical contemplation, thereby allows the soul to be united with God, her Source…
“Although silence is the ideal cessation of all noise, we call by this name what is only its imperfect approximation — unrealisable on earth. It is forbidden to us to conceive true and complete silence, except in our soul … The silence of God alone is silence. Ours is full of noises. We are therefore reduced to savouring only a sketch of this great joy … Because this silence is a word, and because music alone can translate it, music possesses the faculty to transcribe silence …”
This article was written by Peter Newman and first appeared with illustrations by David Lloyd in Catholic Home (volume 3, issue 3) Summer 2025. Catholic Home Magazine is available in the USA and Canada, in the UK and in Ireland & the EU.