The Assumption and the Modern World

THE ASSUMPTION AND THE MODERN WORLD EVERY defined dogma has two sides: one which looks to clarifying the Tradition which is the living memory of the Mystical Christ; the other which looks to the world and recalls it from its excesses of thought. It is this second aspect alone which interests us presently. The decision of the Council of the Vatican that human reason .can prove the existence of God, was a Christian Rationalism telling·a Kantian world that man ought not to give up on the power of the human brain. The definition of the Immaculate Conception was made when the Modern World was born. Within five years of that date, and within six months of the apparition of Lourdes where Mary said, " I am the Immaculate Conception," Darwin wrote his Origin of the Species, Karl Marx completed his Introduction to the Critique of the Philosophy of Hegel, ("Religion is the opium of the people") and John Stuart Mill published his Essay on Liberty. At the moment the spirit of the world was drawing up a philosophy that would issue in two World Wars in twenty-one years and the threat of a third, the Church came forward to challenge the falsity of the new philosophy. Darwin took man's mind off his Divine Origin and fastened it on an unlimited future when he would become a kind of God. Marx was so impressed with this idea of inevitable progress that he asked Darwin if he would accept a dedication of one of his books. Then following Feuerbach, Marx affirmed not a bourgeois atheism of the intellect, but an atheism of the will, in which man hates God because man is God. Mill reduced the freedom of the new man to license and the right to do whatever he pleases, thus preparing a chaos of conflicting egotisms, which the world would solve by Totalitarianism . 81 FULTON J. SHEEN If these philosophers were right, and man is naturally good and capable of deification through his own efforts, it follows that every one is immaculately conceived. The Church arose in protest and affirmed that only one human person in all the world is immaculately conceived, that man is prone to sin, and that freedom is best preserved when, like Mary, a creature answers Fiat to the Divine Will. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception wilted and killed the false optimism of the inevitable and necessary progress of man without God. Humbled in his Darwinian-Marxian-Millian pride, modern man saw his doctrine of progress evaporate. The interval between the Napoleonic and Franco-Prussian Wars was fifty-five years; the interval between the Franco-Prussian Wars and the First World War was forty-three years; the interval between the First and Second World Wars, twenty-one years. Fifty-five, forty-three, twenty-one, and a Korean War five years after the Second World War, is hardly progress. Man finally saw that he was not naturally good. Once having boasted that he came .from the beast, he now saw himself acting as a beast. Then came the reaction. The Optimistic Man who boasted of his immaculate conception, now became the Pessimistic Man who could see within himself nothing but a bundle of libidinous, dark, cavernous drives. As in the definition of the Immaculate Conception, the Church had to remind the world that perfection is not biologically inevitable, so now in the definition of the Assumption, it has to give hope to the creature of despair. Modern despair is the effect of a disappointed hedonism and centers principally around Sex and Death. To these two modern ideas, the Assumption is indirectly related. The primacy of Sex is to a great extent due to Freud, whose basic principle in his own words is: " Human actions and customs derive from sexual impulses, and fundamentally, human wishes are unsatisfied sexual desires.... Consciously or unconsciously , we all wish to unite with our mothers and kill our fathers, as Oedipus did-unless we are female, in which case we wish to unite with our fathers and murder our mothers." THE ASSUMPTION AND THE MODERN WORLD 88 The other major concern of modern thought is Death. The beautiful philosophy of...