Alienation from Self and from God

...Given a soul alienated from self, lawlessness follows.

A soul with a fight inside itself will soon have a fight outside itself with others.

Once a man ceases to be of service to his neighbor, he begins to be a burden to him; it is only a step from refusing to live with others to refusing to live for others.

When Adam sinned, he accused Eve, and when Cain murdered Abel, he asked the antisocial question, "Am I my brother's keeper?" (Gen. 4:9). When Peter sinned, he went out alone and wept bitterly. Babel's sin of pride ended in a confusion of tongues which made it impossible to maintain fellowship.

Our personal self-hatred always becomes hatred of neighbor.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons for the basic appeal of Communism, with its philosophy of class struggle: Communism has a special affinity for souls that already have a struggle going on inside of themselves.

Associated with this inner conflict is a tendency to become hypercritical: unhappy souls almost always blame everyone but themselves for their miseries. Shut up within themselves, they are necessarily shut off from all others except to criticize them.

Since the essence of sin is opposition to God's will, it follows that the sin of one individual is bound to oppose any other individual whose will is in harmony with God's will.

This resulting estrangement from one's fellow man is intensified when one begins to live solely for this world; then the possessions of the neighbor are regarded as something unjustly taken from oneself.

Once the material becomes the goal of life, a society of conflicts is born. As Shelley said: "The accumulations of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of power of assimilating then to the internal laws of our nature."

Matters divides, as spirit unites. Divide an apple into four parts, and it is always possible to quarrel as to who has the biggest part; but if four men learn a prayer, no one man deprives the other of possessing it--the prayer becomes the basis of their unity.

When the goal of civilization consists, not in union with the Heavenly Father, but in the acquisition of material things, there is an increase in the potentialities of envy, greed, and war. Divided men then seek a dictator to bring them together, not in the unity of love, but in the false unity of the three P's--Power, Police, and Politics.

ESTRANGEMENT FROM GOD. Alienation from self and from one's fellow men has its roots in separation from God. Once the hub of the wheel, which is God, is lost, the spokes, which are men, fall apart.

God seems very far away from the modern man: this is due, to a great extent, to his own Godless behavior. Goodness always appears as a reproach to those who are not living right, and this reproach on the part of the sinner expresses itself in hatred and persecution.

There is rarely a disrupted, frustrated soul, critical and envious of his neighbor, who is not at the same time an antireligious man.

The organized atheism of the present hour is thus a projection of self-hatred; no man hates God without first hating himself.

Persecution of religion is a sign of the indefensibility of the antireligious or atheistic attitude, for by the violence of hate it hopes to escape the irrationality of Godlessness.

The final form of this hatred of religion is a wish to defy God and to maintain one's own evil in the face of His Goodness and Power. Revolting against the whole of existence, such a soul thinks that it has disproved it; it begins to admire its own torment as a protest against life.

Such a soul will not hear about religion, lest the comfort become a condemnation of its own arrogance; it defies it instead. Never able to make sense of its own life, it universalizes its own inner discord and sees the world as a kind of chaos in the face of which it develops the philosophy of "living dangerously."

"He functions as a distracted atom in a growing chaos made poor by his wealth, made empty by his fullness, reduced to monotony by his very opportunities for variety."...

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Excerpt of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen's Peace of Soul, copyright 1949, Nihil obstat: Rt. Rev. John M.A. Fearns, S.T.D., Censor Librorum; Imprimatur: Francis Cardinal Spellman, Archbishop of New York, Page 9-11

HT to DM for the suggestion who thought it timely, in light of the post We Will Attack you from Within.