"...Let us think first of all of the Dionysian type of religion and its music, which Plato tackled from his own religious and philosophical point of view. In many forms of relgion music is ordered to stupor and to ecstasy. Freeing humans from limitations, which is the goal of that hunger for the infinite proper to humans, is supposed to be achieved through holy madness, through the delirium of the rhythm and the instruments. Such music pulls down the barriers of individuality and personality; in it human beings free themselves from the burden of consciousness. Music turns into ecstasy, liberation from the ego, becoming one with the universe. Today we experience the profane return of this type of music in a large part of the rock and pop music whose festivals are a counterculture of the same orientation---the pleasure of destruction, the removal of the barriers of everyday life and the illusion of redemption in the liberation from oneself, in the wild ecstasy of noise and the masses. It is a question of redemptive practices whose form of redemption is related to drugs and diametrically opposed to the Christian faith in redemption. Hence it makes sense that in this area satanical cults and satanical music are constantly spreading today whose dangerous power intentionally to wreck and eradicate the person has not yet been taken seriously enough. The dispute between Dionysian and Apollonian music with which Plato deals is not ours, since Apollo is not Christ. But the question Plato posed concerns us in a most meaningful way. In a form we could not have imagined a generation ago music has become today the decisive vehicle of a counterreligion and thus the showplace for the discerning of spirits. On the one hand, since rock music seeks redemption by way of liberation from the personality and its responsiblity, it fits very precisely into the anarchistic ideas of freedom that are manifesting themselves more openly all over the world. But that is also exactly why such music is diametrically opposed to the Christian notions of redemption and freedom, indeed their true contradiction. Music of this type must be excluded from the Church, not for aesthetic reasons, not out of reactionary stubbornness, not because of historical rigidity, but because of its very nature."
A New Song for the Lord
"The Image of the World and of Human Beings in the Liturgy and Its Expression in Church Music"
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
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