But the Catholic reaction to the Reformation, now called the Counter Reformation, eventually took on
a mystical, enthusiastic, and antirationalist character that spelled fundamental theological change—and
with that, of course, came musical change. This did fundamentally threaten the ars perfecta, which was if
nothing else a rational style. As the “church militant” turned toward pomp and spectacle, and as Catholic
preaching turned toward emotional oratory, church music began to turn toward sensuous opulence and
inspirational “sublimity,” the instilling of awe. For the late Counter Reformation, church music became a
kind of aural incense, an overwhelming, mind-expanding drug.
“To attain the truth in all things,” wrote St. Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises, “we ought
always to be ready to believe that what seems to us white is black, if the Hierarchical Church so defines
it.”^5 God-given though it was, human reason had its limits. To place excessive trust in it was a hubris on
which the Devil could play, if it led proud thinkers away from faith. This much of Counter Reformation
teaching was in harmony with the spirit of the Reformation that spurred it. To that extent Reformation and
Counter Reformation were united in reform. The huge difference was the source of the faith the two
churches espoused. The one placed it in the hands of an infallible Hierarchy, the other in the spirituality of
the individual believer. It became the job of the Counter Reformation to win souls back from Luther by
fostering emotional dependency on the Hierarchy, which (like the feudal hierarchy it supported) viewed
itself as God’s own institution among men.
The highest spiritual premium was placed on what was called the ecstasy, or, more loosely, the
“religious experience”—a direct and permanently transforming emotional apprehension of the divine
presence. The most famous literary description of religious ecstasy, visually immortalized by the
seventeenth-century sculptor Giovanni Bernini, is from the Vida (1565), or autobiography, of a Spanish
nun, Saint Teresa of Avila, an epileptic, whose seizures were accompanied by visions. In one of them (the
one portrayed by Bernini), she was visited by a beautiful angel, who, she wrote,
thrust a long dart of gold, tipped with fire, through my heart several times, so that it reached my very entrails. So real was
the pain that I was forced to moan aloud, yet it was so surpassingly sweet that I would not wish to be delivered from it.