- THE THEOLOGY OF CONVERSION -
Psychiatry is able to give a certain measure of peace of mind, for it adjusts the mind to the mood and temper of the world; but it never inquires whether we ought to adjust ourselves so completely to the present society. "I have taken you out of the world," said the Savior. It is now becoming evident, even to the cynic, that those who help the world most are the ones detached from the world. Peace of soul is a different and a finer thing; it results from justice, not from adjustment, from rebirth, not from integration to the values of the moment. Pax opus justitiae. Justice implies the subordination of the body to the soul and of the whole person to God and to neighbor. On the other hand, adjustment is to become acceptable to those around us, whether they are good or bad, wise or foolish, saints or such individuals as a saint would rather flee than emulate.
It is important to distinguish between the two kinds of peace. Peace of mind rests principally on what called "sublimation," which psychology describes as a redirection of an instinct, passion, or energy from a crude, impulsive form to a creative activity that is social and, to some extent, ethical. There is nothing very new about sublimation except the name, for, throughout the ages, all wise teachers have recognized that it is important to divert man's interests from the base to the noble. Educators have always known that a child who is unduly curious can often have his/her curiosity sublimated into a healthy interest in science or history; the pugnacious instinct is sometimes sublimated by putting him/her in charge of a group, where he/she has to enforce the law. Such sublimations, useful as they are, can never give peace of soul, because this comes only from God. Psychological attempts to make man/woman create this sort of peace - which he/she has no potentiality to create - are like trying to get a spinning top to begin spinning in the other direction.
No flat tire can fix itself, and no frustrated, unhappy person can get well without the introduction into his/her nature of something that is not already there. Something more is needed to cure a person than his/her own libido or instinct. Water can never rise above its own level, and no amount of drainage from the unconscious to the conscious can make the stream of thought clearer, cleaner, or stronger. When the patient attempts to accomplish sublimation on his/her own, he/she is very apt - rightly - to have the feeling that he/she is practicing autosuggestion, a rather dangerous experiment. If the energy for betterment is believed to come from an outside human source, such as the psychiatrist, he/she feels - sometimes rightly - that he/she is being manipulated by someone incapable of judging all the factors of his/her case; if the psychiatrist is one of those who deny the soul, this is nearly always true.
If a person is physically sick, he/she does not try to cure himself/herself by expecting medicines to develop within his/her own body. Neither can a soul that is spiritually sick completely heal itself by its own efforts, without an energy and a power brought in from the outside. The sick person's own will is not sufficient; it is because the will and the instincts are at odds that he/she is suffering. Nor can human ideals alone cure him/her - these make no provision for the conflicts of those who cannot attain to them. Even the noblest of abstract ideals are of little use to a person who feels himself/herself a failure, shut off from the possibility of success, and too weak to achieve virtue.
It is precisely because many individuals are painfully conscious of their weakness and frustration that they yearn for a compulsive system of life that will dispense them from all responsibility, without fully evaluating the reason for their flight.
There is something both good and bad in this, as the prodigal son was right in being hungry and wrong in feeding on husks.
The modern soul, too, is right in hungering for a law higher than its own will, wrong in taking that law from a dictator. With the denial of God, eternal destinies, and moral righteousness, it has become disgusted with its own unworthiness to serve as a proper object of narcissistic devotion. Like the child in the progressive school, it asks, "Must I always do whatever I want?" Having denied Eternal Love as the object of its choice, it now turns to something apparently greater than self. It is right in wanting something to adore and love with an intense passion; it is wrong in adoring a false god.
When one mediates upon the number of individuals who, in the midst of their frustrations, try to find healing without the aid of a Divine Physician, without an energy more powerful than themselves, one is reminded of the words of Carlyle, "The tragedy of life is not so much what men suffer, but rather how much they miss." The greater opportunity they miss is that of becoming something more than their humanity. For it is possible for a human being to live on one of three levels. The first level is the subhuman, or the animal, in which a person is content to live only for his body, for his flesh and its pleasures; when a whole society lives thus, we have what Sorokin has called a "Senate Culture." If reason is used at all on this lowest level, it is only to discover new techniques for providing thrills and amusements for the animal nature. A human can also live on a second, or higher, level, the rational; here he will pursue a good pagan life and will defend the natural virtues, but without great enthusiasm. Under the inspiration of reason alone, he is tolerant, philanthropic; he favors the underdog and contributes to community enterprises, but he refuses to believe that there is a knowledge beyond the reach of his own intellect or a strength exceeding his own will. High above these two levels there is a third, which is the Divine level; in this, a human being, thanks to the grace of God, is elevated to the supernatural order and is made a child of God.
These three levels might be compared to a three-story house: The first floor is hardly furnished at all; the second has some comforts; but the third is orderly, luxurious, and full of peace. An individual who lives for purely animal pleasures will take as sheer nonsense the suggestion that there is a level of reason above the first floor, where peace of mind becomes peace of soul, is to invite them to ridicule the super-natural order. Those who dwell on the second floor have no understanding whatever of the supernatural; they regard it as a pious extra, as unessential as frost on a windowpane or frosting a cake. They are willing to admit that there is assimilation in the universe and that the progress has been upward and vertical from the chemical to man, but when it comes to the development of man himself, they refuse to admit a continuation of the same vertical process. They see the past in terms of an upward process until man was produced; from that tome on, they insist that it moves only on a horizontal plane and that man's progress is to be measured by his growing skill in the manipulation of nature and wealth and the acquiring of better material conditions - all of which are external to man. Those who refuse to mount to the third floor from the second are much like the two tadpoles who were one day discussing the possibility of a realm higher than that of the tadpoles. One little tadpoles said to the other. "I think I will stick my head above the water to see what the rest of the world looks like." The other tadpole said, "Don't be foolish. You don't mean to tell me that there is anything in this world besides water!"
A reasonable being should ask himself why - if chemicals can enter into plants, and plants be taken up into animals, and animals be taken into man - why man himself, who is the peak of visible creation, should be denied the privilege of being assimilated into higher power? The rose has no right to say that a vast capacity and unconquerable yearning for eternal life and truth and love.
The supernatural, the third level on which we may live, is not an outgrowth of the natural, as the oak develops from an acorn. It marks a complete break, a beginning anew. The development is not a gradual progress, in which a person becomes more tolerant, more broad-minded, more articulate about social justice, less hateful and less avaricious, until finally he reaches a point where he finds himself a Christian and a citizen of the supernatural order. That is not the way it happens.
It is a law of physics that a body continues in a state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line until it is compelled by outside forces to change that state; man, too, is subject to inertia, and he will remain a merely natural state unless he is changed from the outside. Stones do not become elephants, nor elephants people. Man, by nature, is only a creature of God, almost as a stone or a bird is a creature of God - although man reflects some of the attributes of the Creator more faithfully than the stars of the attributes of the Creator more faithfully than the stars and the plants do. In truth, the supernatural order is something to which man is not entitled; nevertheless it once belonged to our race. But the supernatural privilege of being a child of God, entitled to call Him Father, was always as unattainable to the nature of man as life is to a crystal. If a piece of marble suddenly burst into bloom, that would be a "supernatural" act, for it does not belong to the powers, the nature, or the capacities of marble to bloom. If a flower suddenly began to move from place to place, and to touch, and to taste, and to feel, that would be a "supernatural" act, for it does not belong to the flower's nature, its powers, or its capacities to possess the five senses. If a dog suddenly began to quote Shakespeare and Sophocles, that would be a "supernatural" act for a dog; it does belong to the nature, the powers, or the capacities of a dog to reason. Man is by nature a creature of God, as humbly as a table is a creature of the carpenter; if he suddenly begins to throb with the very life of God, so that he can call God not his Creator but his Father, that is a supernatural act for a man. Man then becomes something which he was not; that elevation of his nature can come only as a gift from God.
A plant is more than the sum of the chemicals that enter into it, because a plant possesses an X quality that is not in the chemical order; an animal is something more than the sum of, plant qualities, because it possess an X that is not found in the antecedent order; and, in the same way, man possesses an X quality that makes him different from the animal, something that makes him able to laugh and think and freely love. But when a human enters the supernatural order, a new and greater X quality is introduced - something that is different in its nature from the sum of merely natural virtues he may have possessed before. That is why, throughout the Sacred Scriptures, man is constantly invited to become something that he is not. There is assumed, throughout the Scriptures, a difference between making and begetting: We make what is unlike us - for example, someone makes a table; but we beget what is like us - for example, a father begets a child. Inasmuch as we are made by God, we are unlike Him in His Divine Nature; inasmuch as we are begotten by God, we can become like Him, be partakers of His Nature, assume our place as His Children and the Heirs of the Kingdom of God. This is possible only because of a miraculous elevation, which is not ours by right or nature; for if the supernatural order were natural to man, then man himself would be God. - PAGE ONE - This raises the important question of how man may become more than he was - of what happens when a person is converted. The answer is.......
BY VENERABLE FULTON J. SHEEN
Wishing you, 'Happy Reading', and may God, the Father, the Son of the living God, Jesus Christ, fills your heart, mind, thoughts, and grants you: The Holy Spirit, that is, Wisdom, Knowledge, Understanding, Counsel, Piety, Fortitude, Fear of the Lord, and also His fruits of the Holy Spirit, that is, Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, Goodness, Trustfulness, Gentleness and Self-Control. Amen! God blessing be upon you!
If we live by the truth and in love, we shall grow in all ways into Christ Jesus, who is the head by whom the whole body is fitted and joined together, every joint adding its own strength, for each separate part to work according to it function, so the body grows until it has built itself up, in love. - Ephesians 4:15-16 -
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