Sacred Heart Sugery
Subjugating the Human to the A-human
One of the things I’ve learned recently that surprised me is how the Catholic Church was, at one time, suspicious of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus - and why.
St. Alphonsus Ligouri writes, in 1758 …
And many devout persons hope that the Holy Church may some day grant permission for the Office, and proper Mass, in honor of the most Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ. We know, indeed, that even in the year 1726 this request was made through the medium of … Father Gallifet, who was the postulator of it; he explained that the Sacred Heart of Jesus deserved this special veneration, because it was the sensible origin and the seat of all the affections of the Redeemer, and especially that of love; and because it was also the centre of all the interior sorrows which he suffered during his life. But, as far as my weak judgment goes, I believe that this good religious did not obtain his petition because he urged it upon grounds which were dubiously tenable. It was therefore justly objected to his views that it was a great question as to whether the affections of the soul were found in the heart or in the brain; and even the most modern philosophers, with Louis Muratori in his moral philosophy, adopt the second opinion, viz., of the brain.
Of course, anyone with an ounce of poetic sense, even people with the poetic sense to appreciate pop music and Hallmark movies, can tell you that the heart is a symbol. It’s the symbol of what is at the center of us, of what is most important to us, of what makes us tick. People who would speak of the heart as the literal center of emotions (literally, as determined by medicine and science, with the left ventricle controlling love; the right auricle controlling sadness, etc.) are the same sorts of people who take the first few chapters of Genesis literally - and who miss the symbolic significance thereof.
But for many years, after my conversion, I took 2 Corinthians 5:17, and similar passages, quite literally. St. Paul writes …
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
See as well …
We were therefore buried with Him through baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may walk in newness of life.
… to put off your former way of life, your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; / to be renewed in the spirit of your minds; / and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
Do not lie to one another, since you have taken off the old self with its practices, / and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator.
In other words, I thought that the Old Self should have died in me, and that the New Man, by the grace of Christ, would live the sort of life such a New Creation ought to live, and quite naturally would live, automatically and organically, as it were, since my very being would have changed by the grace of God. I would be ontologically (and magically) a Christian.
And yet I constantly had to (and still have to) struggle against my Old Self: petty and egotistical as it is.
CS Lewis writes …
The job will not be completed in this life: but He means to get us as far as possible before death. That is why we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time. When a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well, he often feels that it would now be natural if things went fairly smoothly. When troubles come along — illnesses, money troubles, new kinds of temptation — he is disappointed. These things, he feels, might have been necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days; but why now? Because God is forcing him on, or up, to a higher level: putting him into situations where he will have to be very much braver, much more patient, or more loving, than he ever dreamed of being before. It seems to us all unnecessary: but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous thing He means to make of us.
Let us say, then, that when Paul speaks of a New Creation, he is using a symbol of something that is not literally manifested in the immediate reality of this world, a symbol that describes a mystery spread out over time and never completed before death. And, to be clear, it is not a symbol of total transformation; it is more a symbol of a worm becoming a butterfly: the same creature becomes renewed in a way that was implicit in him, potentially, from the beginning: the new wine is put into new wineskins recycled from the old wineskins, so to speak. But the body of the worm still survives, albeit with wings. The worm does not become a dog.
And yet, there is, in the Super Catholic subculture, this notion that if we only strained hard enough, we could overcome our spiritual constipation. They overlook the mysterious grace that motivates us, whether we cooperate with it or not; the grace that Lewis describes, a grace that is uncomfortable, but that is, ultimately, in accord with and oriented towards the butterfly that we worms are designed to be.
Because of this, the atmosphere in the Super Catholic world resembles brainwashing and “thought control” more than it does education, and more than it does the actual cultivation of human potential.
Robert Jay Lifton writes about one of the defining aspects of cults and totalist organizations, the elevation of Doctrine over Person …
The same doctrinal primacy prevails in the totalist approach to changing people: the demand that character and identity be reshaped, not in accordance with one’s special nature or potentialities, but rather to fit the rigid contours of the doctrinal mold. The human is thus subjugated to the a-human. And in this manner, the totalists, as Camus phrases it, “put an abstract idea above human life, even if they call it history, to which they themselves have submitted in advance and to which they will decide quite arbitrarily, to submit everyone else as well.”
“To submit everyone else as well” reminds me of a serious joke that Eric Voegelin once made …
Mankind needs a noble goal and a lofty purpose, but there is the difference between an ideal and an ideology. An ideal is a lofty purpose a man sets for himself to attain. An ideology is a lofty purpose he sets for everyone else. Consequently, the ideologue is the vainest, the most arrogant, and the most self-righteous of creatures.
He knows my former friends quite well.
In an ideology, not only does Doctrine trump Existence, but Magic trumps Faith. Man will be “abolished” (in CS Lewis’ phrase), as his very nature will be changed - not in the symbolic sense of attaining a fully developed potential which is never finally achieved in this mortal life, but, literally, in the here and now - by force! By God, by gum, the square peg will be made to fit into the round hole, even if we have to break it by shoving it in over and over again!
This brutality reeks of “magical thinking”.
Voegelin again …
The expansion of the will to power from the realm of phenomena to that of substance or the attempt to operate in the realm of substance pragmatically as if it were the realm of phenomena - that is the definition of magic.
In other words, rather than making use of pragmatic methods to change something in the realm of phenomenal things (using saws and hammers to reshape wood; using medicines to restore health; using education to improve men), the magician (and the ideologue) hope to change the very being of the thing upon which they operate (using magical words, rituals and thought control) - to reshape “substance” (a thing’s transcendent “nature”) as opposed to “phenomena” (the thing’s temporal existence).
And when such magic doesn’t work - despite its brutality - the ideologue Dispenses with Existence (another hallmark of cults and totalitarians, according to Lifton). The recalcitrant is shunned. The heretic is banished; he’s “dead to them”.
This, of course, happened to me when I pushed back against Trumpism, conspiracy theories and other “a-human” elements of the Super Catholic Cult. I am now persona non grata to them.
With all of these errors in thought and in practice, we see the power of men trying their best to replace the grace of God.
Thanks Kevin, this is informative. I looked up the Lifton book, and found his 8 characteristics or steps on wikipedia. I especially like "thought eliminating cliche", man o man have I heard these within my tribe. I've found also these cliches often consist of one word or name, like Woke or Soros or Cheney which cause discussion and thinking to immediately be concluded
Had a good chuckle over this, because it's true of Super Catholics: "if we only strained hard enough, we could overcome our spiritual constipation." Just before reading your piece, my husband and I were discussing some of the same things about what it means to be "new". I have always particularly liked the caterpillar/butterfly analogy, especially once I learned that the innards of the caterpillar turns to soup, and is somehow completely remade into a butterfly. There have been times when God was trying over and over to teach me something where I felt pretty much like that when He was done. Be careful what you ask for. LOL