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In our day psychiatry recognizes that the origin of many organic illnesses lies in psychic disorders and in ignorance of the elementary principles governing the economy of the soul. Jung goes so far as to think that the fundamental problem of all the sick has its origin in the ambiguity of their religious attitude.4.1
The great uneasiness of modem man comes from his feeling a secret dependence on the elements he bears within the depths of his soul and which he no longer knows or understands, or which he fears to understand. Whether he is ignorant or not, it makes his psychic equilibrium very precarious and unstable. Although the rapid evolution of psychology has unsettled our knowledge of the human soul, this science has refused to define clearly the changing border between health and sickness.
How much more vulnerable is the man who is totally ignorant of his interior life. In moments of solitude or of suffering, he has no social formula to protect him or to solve the conflicts in his soul.
Freud saw in mental disorders a diversion or an escape from conflicts that had grown unbearable. In extreme cases, the instinct of self-preservation makes a man prefer madness to suicide.
Analysis does not stop at the level of the psyche. At a deeper level, psychiatrists who are believers discover spiritual disorders. For Jung, except in clinical cases, men suffer from the fact that their life is deprived of meaning and of any positive and creative content. Man is bored by his own indigence and is so worn out by his worries that, according to Jung: “His complexes very much resemble demons.” This is the threshold of temptations, and ascetics know well the abyss of “sinful sadness” which ends in acedia, in dereliction or the extreme dejection of despondent souls.
Most believers, even when they are interested in psychology and know something about psychiatry or have submitted to it, manifest great levity in the spiritual life. Lived according to the inspiration of the moment and with a total lack of appreciation for its nature and its laws, the religious life of the majority of believers fails since it offers only a feeble resistance to indifference and to the sensation of emptiness.
The simplifications of the positivists reduced sin to ignorance, crime to the influence of the social environment, evil to imperfection, and ascesis to hygiene. The notion of “sin” gets no hearing today; one does not know anymore what it means, According to the definition of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, sin is a sickness of the spirit. We know, on the other hand, that according to P. Janet: “Insanity is the loss of the function of the real.” A madman no longer conceives reality as others do. Thus, not to be able to form an idea of sin and of its contrary, holiness, is a functional disorder, a form of spiritual madness.4.2 When St. Paul asked for the spirit of discernment, he desired to find the norm, spiritual health, a function of total reality that comprises the earthly and the heavenly.
“Man,” says Pascal, “is a mean between nothing and everything.” He vacillates between nothingness and the absolute. The ambivalence of his situation leads to an acute sense of his own limits. Even when he has arrived at the summit of his genius, man remains like Job: “I cry for help but there is no redress.”
At a certain level, this reflection borders on the pessimism that gnaws at the roots of life. Civilization is evolving and is causing a profound lack of equilibrium in the human mind; it is striking in its techniques and at the same time in the astonishing superficiality of its pragmatic philosophy. The universe is becoming a vast workshop where everything is expressed in figures and is submitted to the sole principle of production and curiosity. The anguish felt in the face of the inhuman anonymity of these enterprises provokes man to escapes that are in a rhythm more and more abrupt and jerky, the “atomic” style. The more the necessities of life weigh us down with all their constraints, the more does society tend to free itself from all taboos, and the general atmosphere to express a secret revolt. Is the modern world for or against man?
The biological rhythm of rural civilizations regulated by the sun gives way to the technical rhythm of invading and massive urbanization. Life in a world of factories and laboratories is no longer organic; it is organized. Its reinforced concrete very rapidly kills the sense of living nature. Even the simplest materials used in the administration of the sacraments--water, bread, wax, fire--are disappearing from natural use in homes, or are so falsified as to be no longer the familiar and known representation of the cosmos. Thus liturgical symbolism is not appreciated; the ritual no longer says anything spontaneously. It requires a very laborious initiation. The coming generations are more and more strangers to sacred symbols.
Modern symbolism takes refuge in insignia and groups of capital letters. Words are dehydrated and the most familiar objects seem to have lost their first meaning. We see in modem churches candles surmounted by an electric bulb, a hybrid which we do not know how to name.
Nevertheless, it is this world that is the object of God's care. He calls on Christian thought to make a creative effort and he asks it to translate into modern terms the immense heritage of the past, the precious experience of the great spiritual men of former times, all put in perfect harmony with the most venturesome life, thought and art.
It is not a question of modernism, but of a vision of what remains above time and by that fact directs history and man's destiny. It is on this level that the spiritual life can be offered again to wondering man, now become attentive to signs.
In present conditions, under the burden of overwork and the wear on nerves, sensibility is changing. Medicine protects and prolongs life, but at the same time it lowers resistance to suffering and privations. Christian ascesis is only a method in the service of life, and it will seek to adapt itself to the new needs. At Thebaid extreme fasts and constraints were imposed; today the combat is not the same. Man has no need of supplementary pain; hair shirts, chains, flagellations would run the risk of uselessly breaking him. Mortification could be the liberation from every kind of opiates--speed, noise, alcohol, and all kinds of stimulants. Rather, the ascesis could be necessary rest, the discipline of regular periods of calm and silence, when man could regain his ability to stop for prayer and contemplation, even in the heart of all the noises of the world; and he could then listen to the presence of others. The fast, as opposed to the maceration of the flesh inflicted on himself, could be his renunciation of the superfluous, his sharing with the poor and his smiling equilibrium.
The modalities of ascesis, like the faces of the saints, reflect the age. How symptomatic it is that in a world bowed down under the weight of cares, St. Therese speaks of spiritual childhood, traces her “little way”, and invites all to sit down at “the table of sinners”. Depth psychology for its part draws attention to the transcendence of humility and to the incarnations of the spiritual in social life. Modern ascesis sees itself in the service of the human that has been assumed in the incarnation; it is violently opposed to any lessening or abdication of man.
“No longer do I call you servants... But I have called you friends.”4.3 These words of the Lord announce the adult state of man where man will go beyond man. The spiritual life is oriented toward divine friendship. The ascesis will divest itself of a penitential mentality and will become a preventive therapy. Almost everywhere monasticism seems to be seeking, beyond the somatic and psychological ascesis of the Middle Ages, the eschatological ascesis of the first centuries, that act of faith which kept the Christian in a joyful expectancy of the Parousia.
Experienced spiritual directors are rarer than ever; however, there is a vast ascetic literature that offers us a very precise knowledge of the human soul. If Freud and Jung professed their admiration for the psychological insight of Dostoievski, it was because he had been nourished by the works of the great spiritual writers.
From the time of Clement of Alexandria and Origen the spiritual bears the name of ascesis. This signifies application, training, exercise. The negative ascesis of suppression is allied to the positive ascesis of acquisition and growth of charisms. In a wide sense, an ascetic is a Christian who is mindful of the appeals of the Gospel, of the beatitudes, and who seeks humility and purity of heart in order to help his neighbor to do the same.