The Church’s Tradition has this in mind when it talks about the sober inebriation caused in us by the Holy Spirit. There is always an ultimate sobriety, a deeper rationality, resisting any decline into irrationality and immoderation. We can see what this means in prac­tice if we look at the history of music. The writings of Plato and Aristotle on music show that the Greek world in their time was faced with a choice between two kinds of worship, two different images of God and man. Now what this choice came down to concretely was a choice between two fundamental types of music. On the one hand, there is the music that Plato ascribes, in line with mythology, to Apollo, the god of light and reason. This is the music that draws senses into spirit and so brings man to wholeness. It does not abolish the senses, but inserts them into the unity of this creature that is man. It elevates the spirit precisely by wedding it to the senses, and it el­evates the senses by uniting them with the spirit. Thus this kind of music is an expression of man’s special place in the general structure of being. But then there is the music that Plato ascribes to Marsyas, which we might describe, in terms of cultic history, as “Dionysian”. It drags man into the intoxication of the senses, crushes ra­tionality, and subjects the spirit to the senses. The way Plato (and more moderately, Aristotle) allots instruments and keys to one or other of these two kinds of music is now obsolete and may in many respects surprise us. But the Apollonian/Dionysian alternative runs through the whole history of religion and confronts us again today.

[Spirit of the Liturgy (SF, CA: Ignatius, 2000), pp. 150-51]

Commentary: Once again, in this passage, the Holy Father confronts a rampant presupposition among many Christians that music is of neutral value, that there is no good or bad music for as long as they're not attached to certain "religious" or "irreligious" lyrics. It is affirmed yet again in great detail here, from a philosophical-historical perspective, that right from the time of the Greek philosophers, there was already a clear notion that music was not neutral in that various kinds of music had different types of impact on one's spirit.

There are certain types of music which, by sheer nature of their rhythm and brashness, causes the intoxication of the emotions. In an environment, especially in a social setting wherein such music is played with volumous extremeties, people tend to stop thinking rationally. In fact, their emotions may drown them so much that they are propelled to perform actions and exhibit behaviours which defy rational normalcy. For this reason, in many pop and rock concerts, and ALSO in many Praise and Worship settings, one would find that the "audience" behaves in almost the same way. They jump, bang their heads, and run around in such similar manners so that the concert and the "worship" are rather indistinguishable from each other.

There are also other types of music that neither robs its participants of their rationality nor intoxicates and displaces their senses. In fact, such music has great potential to integrate their rationality and their senses such that the whole being is elevated into the realm of the divine without the participant losing grip over himself. In the same instance that his spirit is drawn to the divine, his rationality also contemplates the mysteries of the divine with deep understanding. Such music does not divorce the person into a kind of confusive duality.

The second of these two kinds of music is where the realm of sacred music is to be found. It is such music that draws the person - the WHOLE person; heart, soul, body, and mind - into the life of God.