More than seven hundred years ago, one of the most learned men who ever lived, Thomas Aquinas, wrote a treatise on the passions that to this day has never been surpassed. Treating of anxieties, he said, "Any idea which is hurtful to the mind does harm in just the proportion that it is repressed. The reason is: the mind is more intent on a repressed idea than if it were brought to the surface and allowed to escape."

This was not a completely new idea even when he wrote, for it was already implied in the Sacrament of Confession, which bares hidden anxieties, thus serving two purposes on the psychological level: It prevents their seeping into the unconscious and causing a complex, and it also weakens them because when they are brought to the level of the will, they can be controlled or even conquered.

The nineteenth century (which was already four centuries removed from the Christian practice of confession and repentance) began to see the terrible effects of the general repression of anxieties, guilt, sin and worries. But the new writers gave a slightly different twist to the old idea that repressions are dangerous. Because God, morality, and the possibility of personal guilt were all denied, the new philosophy affirmed that the repression of passions and instincts was wrong. (It was the repressed idea against which Thomas Aquinas warned.) The new notion said that a person's id and his animal instincts ought to have free expression against the totems and taboos of the old superstitions of morality, God, religion. This psychology affirmed, "Be self-expressive. Religion and morality are destroying your personality." All restraint, authority, and discipline were viewed as harmful to the character. Such a philosophy could not stand up against sound reason.

If a person is really made better and saner because he gives way to his sexual instincts and is uninhibited  by the Christian law of lifelong marriage, why should not a person be better because he gives way to other instincts, such as the hunting instinct? Why not organize a "kill your enemy" hunt, uninhibited by the moral taboo of the Fifth Commandment? If we were logical in allowing the same self-expression to the fear instinct as to the sex instinct, then we ought to praise a soldier who, in the midst of battle, deserts his post, just as some writers now praise a husband when he deserts his wife. If the sex instinct is not to be bound by moral taboos, why should the pugnacious instinct be bound? Why should not an aggression be allowed to assert itself by punishing the people who get ahead of us at a bargain counter - especially if they are smaller? If arrest followed this demonstration, why not plead that the civil law is only a moral taboo that originated among African headhunters and is, therefore, destructive of human personality, with no binding force in this enlightened twenty first century?

If the repression of the sex instinct is abnormal, why should not the repression of the hunger instinct be abnormal? Why not condemn dieting? No one has yet tried to convince the body cultists that a religious totem and taboo are responsible for a fourteen-day diet.

This theory of license is founded on the false assumption that a psychological complex can always be cured by giving it a physiological outlet. This is as silly as saying that the way to cure a worry about your debts is to drain the blood out of your heart. The mental and the physical, the spiritual and the carnal, are not on the same level. One might as say that the psychological urge some people have to kill others could be cured by giving them a machine gun or that the mental impulse to commit suicide could be cured by a plunge off the Brooklyn Bridge. In regard to the sex instinct, self-expression can hardly be the cure it is said to be - for those who are most abandoned to the gratification of these instincts are not only the most abnormal but also the most unhappy of people, and they constitute the greatest menace to society.

The theory of license assumes that the so called religious "totems" and "taboos" have been responsible for repression and are therefore the causes of mental disorders. But why, we may ask, have these religious totems and taboos had such an appeal if not because they already coincided with the right reason and the highest aspirations of the human race? Why should moments of social degeneration and world chaos, such as the fall of Rome and our own times, be also the periods of greatest license and irreligiousness?

But there is a profounder objection to this program for people. For if the free expression of a person's carnal instinct against his moral instinct is right, then surely the repression of the moral instinct must create a problem of still greater repression. There is always going to be something repressed. Giving the animal instincts free play causes a repression of moral ideals. All that, this false theory of license does is to substitute one form of repression for another. The facts of history and individual experience prove that nothing has so much contributed to the development of mental disorders, especially neuroses, as the repression of the moral sense by those who wanted no higher ethics than that of the stud farm.

Finally, the theory is founded on a false idea of what self-expression means. Everything ought to be self-expressed according to its nature. But the nature of a human being is not the same as the nature of a goat. Endowed with an immortal soul, as well as with a body, a person is most self-expressive, not when he follows his animal instincts, but when his rational, God-given nature is in command. When a person expresses himself contrary to his nature, he begets sin in his soul, evil tendencies in his bones, odd twists and abnormalities in his unconscious - to say nothing of remorse in his conscience.

Such a person's whole being rebels against its misdirection by the evil will. A railroad train is most self-expressive when it follows the tracks laid down by the engineer; if its self-expression consisted in repudiating the tracks (because they were laid down by an engineer with a religious psychosis) it would discover it was no longer free to be a railroad train. If a triangle sought the power to express itself into four sides, it would discover it was no longer free to be a triangle. A boiler that rebels against the dogmatic limitation of having only a certain number of pounds pressure per square inch and thus explodes finds that its expression is nothing but self-destruction.

Dr. C.E.M. Joad has written that the theory of self-expression is so ridiculous that nobody really believes in it.

What we do believe is that some forms of self-expression are good, others bad; that the expression of self in sympathy is good; in jealousy, bad; in kindness, good; in cruelty, bad; in helpfulness and service, good; in malice and self-aggrandizement, bad. However - this also we know - in so far as what is expressed is bad, the more expression of it there is, the worse. For example, if I am good tempered and kindly when sober, but am a congenital dipsomaniac with a tendency to wife beating when drunk, it is obvious that the more I express myself in terms of my sober traits and kindliness and good temper, and the less I express myself in terms of my congenitally drunken traits of rage and violence, the better.

Very serious effects follow the abandonment of oneself to biological and animal instincts. It increases despair and morbidity; the individual becomes trapped in the license to which he or she submits. Freedom is destroyed when the victim becomes a slave to something external. Sacred Scripture tells us that the one who sins becomes a slave to sin. This kind of self-expression, instead of allowing a person to become self-possessed, ends in his losing control over the self and making it other-possessed, which is the new form of modern slavery. Finally, because it repudiates the moral sense, such self-expression lessens responsibility and thus leads to the destruction of the human character. As time passes, it brings sorrow and despair. For if abandonment to the passions and animal lust is the pathway to self-expression, then what consolation shall an individual seek in old age? Such a philosophy may satisfy young animals, but not old animals.

Actually, there are needed for humanity's development two kinds of activities or expressions: the immanent and the transcendent. One remains within the person; the other acts without. The false philosophy of self-expression admits only the second kind and results in a completely externalized human being. A true self-expression perfects the spirit first and then objectifies it, producing culture; culture always perished when inwardness of the spirit is lost in the "activism" of externals. Slavery results - a new serfdom quite different from the slavery of earlier ages. For in the old variety, man was subject to the external through his own egotistic, selfish will.

Marx and Freud were right in dealing with slavery as one of man's recurring problems, but neither of them understood its nature. Both of them took the inner slavery for granted; both rightly assumed that egotism is normal, one of them studying it in the collective field, the other in the individual. Such egotism is Fallen Man's flaw, recognized by everyone who assumes a Transcendent Source from which man comes and toward which he tends. Someday, some historian with profound insight will show us how external slavery is always the mass production of internal slavery - how man, in slavery to his own lower nature, has attempted to make his condition normal by enslaving others.

Debauchery is another effect of personal sin that seeks external expression, in this case by corrupting others. For the inwardly empty cannot bear their burden alone - they trend to empty society of whatever values it possesses. Solitariness of the soul creates its own atmosphere and makes a solitary world. Self-expression, understood as the expression of the animal self whose satisfactions are external, thus begets not only its own destruction but also the dissolution of peaceful society.

The traditional restraints and moral sanctions of society come to be regarded more and more as worthless, outworn taboos or as cruel checks placed upon individual egotism, which now goes under the name of freedom. A stage is eventually reached where there is no acknowledged limit to self-expression. The most traitorous deeds are defended as civil rights; the defense of even the natural law is ridiculed as "medieval." This lawlessness, if widespread, creates such confusion in society that a tyrant soon arises to organize the chaos through force. Thus is fulfilled the dictum of Dostoevski that "unlimited freedom leads to unlimited tyranny."

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Sunday, May 24, 2009

I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!

I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.

HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -