28.1
MAN is insufficient for himself, and not only by the ill-use he has made of himself. Many of our troubles flow from a defective use of our intelligence, will or energy. As a result, we are in danger of thinking all our troubles could be cured by better use of our own powers. That is, man has the secret of sufficiency within himself, if he uses it. Apart from the failings that we can address, there is a radical insufficiency in us flowing from our being. Man is insufficient, because without God he would not even be. Man can think himself autonomous, by not thinking very much. God does not jerk his elbow, but only solicits his mind. Why a being, who does not bring himself into and cannot put himself out of existence, should think he is maintained by any power of his own, is a sign that his mind must be engaged on other matters. For fullness of being, man must have a knowledge of and a co-operation with that maintaining him in existence, that which is the very condition of his being at all. Being wrong about that, is to be wrong about oneself, which means loving things for what they are not. There is an abyss of nothingness at the very heart of our being, and we need to counter it by the fullest possible use of our kinship with the Infinite, who is also at the very heart of our being. To be ignorant of this is to live in unreality, and there can be no satisfaction for our-self or adequate coping with anything.
Man's action is doomed to frustration, since the ground-rule of all things, of man himself who acts, of that on which he acts and of the universe within which he acts, is the will of God. We cannot thwart God's will. We can disobey His laws, not frustrating them, but frustrating us. We can glorify God's will in two ways, by obeying it, glorifying ourselves too, or by disobeying it, and degrading ourselves. The end does not justify the means. Morally, it is not permissible, and more profoundly, not possible to achieve a good result by evil means. It may succeed for the moment, as opium may give pleasure for the moment; but in a universe directed by supreme intelligence and supreme goodness, evil means of themselves must produce an evil result. Without God there is only frustration, as reason and history show.
Not only is there frustration when man's action is not in harmony with God's will, but a profounder frustration in our very being itself, showing most obviously in our mind and will. The mind is doomed to dissatisfaction, unless it sees things in God. There are so many things it cannot see, that it cannot get the meaning of the things it can see. The mind is living in a world of bits and pieces, with a hunger for order, that cannot be satisfied by bits and pieces. An active mind can propose all sorts of immediate purposes, short-range sectionalized purposes; but can have no overall sense of what reality is all about, and is brought to a standstill by a sense of futility.
The will is also doomed to dissatisfaction, as it aims at things separate from God. By the will we move towards things, loving and desiring to make them our own. Through experience we can fix our heart's desire anywhere between nothing and the Infinite. To love things without loving God, means loving shadows and expecting from the shadows what only reality can give.
One tragic result is the disappointment of men and women, each expecting what the other cannot give. This is the reason for the horrible disproportion between the ravenous hunger and the enjoyment. The shadowiness of things apart from God, which is at its most piercing in the relation of men and women, is in fact generalized over all life. It is hard to tell whether the poets mourn more for the pleasure that vanished too soon or the pleasure that lasted too long. The mind shudders and the will falters, at the thought of seeing any play, one half as often as we hear Mass. There is no weariness for mind or will in the Mass.
We have been considering the total absence of God from man's conscious relation with reality. Total absence is hardly the phrase for the general state of the world we live in. For the most part, it does not actually deny that God is. If it is not forgotten that He is, it has been largely forgotten what He is. Seeing no function for Him, the actual conduct of life tends more and more to omit Him. There is only a step from this to actual atheism, and a sufficient number of men have taken that step. Omitting God leaves man on top, but of a diminished universe, and to live in a diminished universe, diminishes oneself. To take a rough analogy: if we choose to ignore music and poetry, we are not humbled by the comparison of our own more mediocre equipment with the greater power of the musician and the poet. Our ego is spared that wound, but we are not fed by their music and their poetry.
28.2
Frustrations, hungers and despairs are facts that men can see by observing men, even without knowing the reason for them. We are wholly caused by God, as is everything else. Without God everything is literally inexplicable, not only in the sense that men cannot find the explanation, but that there isn't one. Apart from the knowledge of God, man is doomed to live in a meaningless universe. He can grow weary trying to live a meaningful life in a context that has no meaning. Not knowing God, he does not know what he is; equally he does not know what he is here for, where he is supposed to be going and how to go there. He is on a journey, not knowing his destination, without a roadmap or the rules of the road. Lacking this indispensable knowledge, men occupy themselves with other secular matters. One man may be a great authority on a subject, on which he will talk endlessly with enthusiasm. If you interrupt his discourse, asking about himself, where he is going and how, he will answer they are religious questions, and that he has no time for them, being so deeply engaged in something else. One can make no sense of a man, who gives so much attention to something, that he has none left for his own meaning. The man is hardly sane, and he is the perfect type of our world.
One calamitous result of this unawareness that the road of life leads anywhere in particular, is that hope dies. "Most men," says Thoreau, "lead lives of quiet desperation". This is fiercely true of our generation. It is quiet desperation, more than active despair, as the absence of hope. Men live day to day, hoping that tomorrow may be a little better, or not much worse. Occasionally stimulated, by some extra surge of hope, that something may turn out well. For most men even these hopes are temporary. Just as there is no over-all purpose in life, so there is no overall hope. There is no great thing in the future drawing them on: no goal. Occasionally a whole society will have some surge of hope like the individual. It may be a new social or political creed making life seem purposeful; or new techniques, giving men a sense of mastery. For a long moment the air is electric with new hope. The new creeds then will become old creeds and the fire dies out. Man's limitations and his illusion of mastery become a mockery. The moment passes and hope with it. Hope and vitality are bound together; where hope grows pallid, vitality weakens; where hope dies, vitality dies. Men do not have to be aware of their own lack of hope to be devitalized by it. Men are dying from lack of hope, not even knowing that they are hopeless. The hold on life is pretty precarious when men are living only for lack of any specific reason for dying.
This devitalization is aided by something else, resultant like hopelessness from ignorance of life's meaning. The hopelessness results from not knowing the goal of life's road. A second weakness results from not knowing the rules of the road. Where God is not sufficiently realized, men find themselves without any standards to decide the rightness or wrongness of conduct. What of conscience? It is a pretty universal experience that there is an inner voice telling us what we should or should not do, but the experience may be misinterpreted. Conscience is not the voice of God but of our own intellect, yet God is involved. Our intellect is judging by a standard, and primarily the standard is the law of God written in our nature. God did not first make us and then impose laws. He made us according to laws, so that the laws find their expression in the way we are made. Any actions contrary to them tend to provoke a revolt in our nature, and the intellect expresses the revolt in the judgments we call conscience. The trouble is, we are no longer as God made us. The generations have introduced distortions, so not one of us has in his nature, a clear clean copy of God's law, with the result that the intellect can judge wrong. For certainty, we need the objective statement of His law for us. God has given the ten Commandments, the teaching of the Church. Conscience must always guide us, but if the intellect has not this surer knowledge of God's law, conscience may guide us wrong. Either way, known in its totality or only in part, God's law is the foundation of the intellect's moral judgments.
Whether grasped or not, a moral code must be founded on something. A society can accept a moral code without any conscious awareness of its foundation, provided the code is long standing and not questioned. In a generation like ours, where everything is questioned, the foundation must be clearly seen. Apart from God, the foundation cannot be clearly seen. The practical result, for the average man of our generation, is that when faced with what his grandparents would have called a temptation, he has nothing to judge it by. His first reaction is "Why shouldn't I?" Conscience may put up a brief resistance, but is the judgment of our intellect that precisely is confused; and our modern man will have heard many theories to explain conscience away. This is too weak a barrier against any really strong rush of temptation.
From the initial "Why shouldn't I?", he passes with slight uneasiness to "I don't see why I shouldn't". He does not see why he shouldn't. He does not see anything. He has turned out the lights, or had them turned out for him. He is simply conscious of a lot of urges and appetites in the dark. There is no mistaking their direction. It is the line of least resistance: the following of one's inclination: the avoidance of suffering: the avoidance of effort. For our special consideration, it is the avoidance of effort that matters. Even if the moral law had no foundation at all, it still remains true that the will, whose only rule is to avoid effort, must grow flabby and unmuscular.
This simple principle “I don't see why I shouldn't”, so sane and reasonable, begins by justifying divorce and birth control. It continues to justify all sorts of abomination; and has not ended yet. In the absence of a moral law clearly forbidding them, why should the will fight against the things which promise pleasure? A few men might be willing to impose a discipline on their own desires, not in the interests of morality but in the interests of spiritual fitness, well-toned spiritual muscles. For the mass of men there can be only the following of inclination, the avoidance of effort, flabbiness and the lack of muscularity of soul. Those qualities in the soul, as in the body, lead to a general sense of unfitness, in plain words reduced vitality. Men devitalized by their own softness, lack of a goal for their hope and sense of futility, can still respond to a major stimulation like war. Under the quieter stimulations of peace, they are in danger of complete collapse.
28.3
A generation living a devitalized life, half-wasted in looking for happiness where it is not and avoiding suffering that cannot be avoided, is not happy. Unhappiness is always unused or ill-used spiritual energy. Man has within himself so many energies made for God, but lacking God these energies cannot be satisfied. They can only turn on the man and rend him. If one put the definition of man into a description, it might say that man is a rational animal who can despair. The moral theologians tell us that there are two sins against hope, despair and presumption. We might as truly say that there are two alternatives to despair, hope and apathy. By hope we rise above it; by apathy we fall below it. Despair is a particular form of unhappiness, resulting from spiritual energy unused. Where there is no spiritual energy, there is no unhappiness, because there is nothing. There are people whose minds and wills have so few hungers, that they are not actively unhappy. They would probably regard themselves as happy if asked. Their spiritual energies are so reduced, that they are not conscious of and still less tormented by their dissatisfaction. No one knowing happiness would mistake this for happiness. Happiness should not be defined as the absence of unhappiness. It is a splendor resultant from spiritual energies functioning at their maximum. The man sunk low, has neither God nor despair. One service for them is to make them see the face of their own hopelessness.
An unhappy generation needs to distract itself from its own emptiness. Since the beginning of the world, men have sought distraction in sin. Now our own world has found a further distraction in science. It is amazing as to how long science continues to keep men's minds off their fundamental unhappiness and its own limited power to remedy it. The soul of man is crying for hope, purpose or meaning; and the inventor offers distractions "Here is a telephone or a television!". The stream of invention has kept man occupied, and from remembering his troubles. He is only troubled, not getting around to analyzing his sense of futility, but is half strangled.
The timeframe of science distracting man from his own misery is unknown, but sin will not pass, especially that which quiets the mind's appetites by the indulgence of the body. We are concerned not with sinning through passion, but with sinning through sheer futility. Futility is the gaping wound everywhere. Men are either tormented by it, or have their vitality sapped by it. This is why some men, among the most energetic, seek to overturn the order of the world by revolution. The majority, not that energetic, must have their outlet; and the indulgence of the body, especially sexual indulgence, makes it the obvious resource of futility. The act is so easy, so effortless; giving a kind of reassurance to the battered and discouraged ego. This gives the seemingly appearance, that he is acting as himself, doing what he chooses, expressing his personality, being someone: at once himself and lifted above himself. It is only a seeming, and in fact means a further dispersal of man's powers, leaving him a less master of himself
Men are rational animals needing one another and not possessing themselves. We are fallible in judgment, muddied in will, not clear sighted and not disinterested. Our judgments differ and passions agitate differences. Social life has to be carried on. As bad as it is, for the individual not to know what man is, where he is supposed to be going and how he is to get there; it is more chaotic for society. The individual can choose a goal, that even if the wrong, will satisfy something in him and unify his effort; while society, a mass of individuals, is pursuing a variety of goals. Only men, rightly related to God, can be rightly related to one another; and through this fundamental unity, can secondary unities as marriage, social order and international society be healthy. This, men must freely accept. While men refuse the fundamental unity of the right relation to each other in God, we still have to strive for success, as possible, in the secondary unities. We have the job of working for a second best. The real job is to Christianize the world, beginning with ourselves, but not postponing the rest of the world, until our own Christianization is completed.
We must work for the good of the secondary social reality, and for the primary reality. There is devitalization and fatigue throughout our world, and spreading fast. Death is staring us in the face. There is no guarantee of immortality to any human order. Civilizations have died before and time has eaten them. Our own civilization might die. The danger signs are there. Men may grow weary; and beyond the safety point of the efforts and resistances life demands. Aside from the obvious and nameable dangers that threaten, there is the greatest danger of all; the danger of nothing in particular, of mere drift, seeing nothing, shaping nothing, living for nothing.