The Misplaced Infinite

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up a copy of a book of transcripts from Archbishop Fulton Sheen's Life is Worth Living (Second Series). Being a lover of Fulton Sheen's inspirational work, I figured it would be a good pick, and it was. So in addition to all the other things about which I would like to blog over the coming weeks, I'd like to occasionally blog about my impressions of a few chapters as they strike me.

In his oration, which is titled Misplaced Infinite, Sheen discusses the delineation between a normal human being and an abnormal one.

The normal human being is meant to have open relationships with the eternal or the infinite. Man has a body, a mind, and a relationship with things in the great world that constitutes his environment. The normal human being recognizes that his body gives him the capacity to experience sensual pleasure or carnal love. This love is to be seen as a spark from the great flame of love, which is God. Sex love was made not only to deepen the affection between husband and wife, not only to be a prolongation of God's creative power to creatures, but also to be a steppingstone to a higher love of God.

You can see how Sheen characterizes normal living. Our bodies, our minds, and those things which make up our environment are given to us to be oriented such that their purpose is to lift us up and direct us toward God. As Sheen illustrates with the example of the capacity of the body to feel, touch, and experience sensual pleasure - properly understood, such pleasure is intended not only to deepen the love between a married couple, but is, as Sheen puts it, a prolongation of God's creative power and to deepen our love of Him. When used, all of these faculties should always have an orientation toward God.

The mind by discovering the truths of science, history, and philosophy, gradually unifies them and sees them as a descent, refraction, and echo of the Great Omniscient Truth, which is God.

When we exercise the faculies of our mind with proper appreciation of their purpose, we are taken to the depths of deeper awareness of God. So even after reading this, one can already begin to see what Sheen believes to characterize the abnormal mind - a misguided sense of the orientation of our bodies, minds, and things in our environments.

[In] abnormal living, man [cuts] himself off from God and [proclaims] his own sufficiency. But man cannot live without a god, that is impossible. The infinite haunts him constantly. So he has to make his own gods. These gods are generally three. The first god is his own body. Sexual pleasure then becomes the supreme goal of life and ultimate happiness. He attempts to compensate for a want of eternal divine destiny by the intensity of his erotic experiences. Other men make a god of their minds through egotism and pride and the exaltation of the ego.

The body, made its own limit, becomes sex. The mind, made its own limit, becomes egotism. The things, denied an extraearthly relationship, become the source of greed. Civilization then becomes a conflict of individual egotisms, each one affirming his own will. From this result jealousies, bickerings, ... and war.

The third substitute god men make for the true God is the material: wealth, avarice, business, and greed. The true infinite is replaced by the false infinite of "more." Men attempt to cover their nudity by a vain display, thinking they are worth something because they have something.

I think that Sheen has a really good point here. Without a proper orientation of our bodies, minds, and relationship with the things in our environments, we are desparate to give them some purpose which falls short of God, which typically means they fall in on themselves. Thus they no longer lift us up in our relationship with God but leave us stranded on the dusty floors of life.

Sheen continues to note that there are two primary effects that flow from the abnormal living: Anxiety and Despair.

Anxiety, because man sees a disproportion between what he is and what he ought to be... Dispair, because living in a closed circle makes a man despair in that he cannot escape the desire for the infinite, and having made himself the infinite, he foresees there is nothing ahead of him but death, annihilation, and destruction

What he notes about despair is really interesting and perfectly correct. Man despairs when he is limited from the infinite. Man rejoices when he is free. The trouble is that the cause of man's limitation here is himself. Therefore I call this a self-perpetuating blindness, and a self-fulfilling prophecy in that, once in this rut, man gets what he pretty much expects to get.

But is hope lost on us? Of course not. If in normal living our faculties are properly oriented toward God, it cannot be because we have done this out of our own power! They are gifts of God to His Creation and we, as instruments, are empowered by His grace to use them. When we cooperate with God's freely given grace, we are created anew.

There are two things that are meant to go together. One is the misery of man: his worries, his trials, his difficulties, his sorrows. The other, the Mercy of God. Our modern world... has separated the misery of man from the mercy of God. As misery without mercy begets despair, so also, a sense of God's Mercy without a sense of sin can beget presumption, arrogance, and pride. Man has already one-half the condition of salvation - he is miserable. Then he has peace as he hears, coming from out of the darkness, the plea, "Come to Me, all ye who labor and are heavily burdened, and find rest for your souls."