Theology and Sanity

Theology and Sanity by Frank Sheed

Excuse the slight delay in my posting the next CTS book review.  I am reading the next one a second time prior to reviewing it (and I'm not telling what it is as a teaser campaign to stimulate your interest!)

In the meantime, here's a review of another old favourite.

Sheed was a leading light in the Catholic Evidence Guild, committed to explaining the Faith at street corners and dealing with any questions the well-intentioned or ill-intentioned passers-by might lob at him.  This book is one of the fruits of that apostolate: presenting a Catholic worldview in a clear and cogent manner.  As he says in the Preface to the Revised Edition:

 This really is aggiornamento - doctrines restated, not to be made more acceptable, but more comprehensible., related to the questions people were actually asking, to the needs they were actually feeling, in the language they actually spoke.

Sheed starts by making it quite clear that sanctity is more important than sanity; but sanity - that is seeing reality as it really is, ie God-illumined - is very important, nonetheless.  He also engages with the particular challenges the intellect faces when addressing matters of faith, especially mysteries.   He examines the various ways the intellect may seek to deal with apparently irreconcilable truths, and makes it clear which way is sane: and how a sane approach actually casts intellectual light on the mystery - though it remains beyond resolution.  But all this is by way of a short prologue.

The bulk of the book is in three major sections: God, Creation, Oneself.

The section on God is, in itself, worth the price of the book.  Sheed takes us through the nature of God, including the fundamental fact that God's nature demands that He exist (unlike all other beings which are contingent) and the enormity of that fact; and that the proper operations of a Spirit are to know and to love, and that God does these infinitely.  Sheed therefore makes our intellects wrestle with infinity: difficult but rewarding work; and he provides the most lucid, inspiring and thought-provoking explanation of the Blessed Trinity that I have ever read.  He concludes, characteristically, with a few paragraphs headed Rejoicing in the doctrine.  He suggests reasons why it should delight us, but realises that nonetheless it might not.  But finally, that is not the point:

But the prime question about a doctrine is not what it does to us, but is it so.  The doctrine of the Trinity is reality about God.  If we thrill to it, so much the better.  But thrill or no thrill, let us keep hold of it and mentally live with it, for it is reality, and whether we perceive its effects on us or not, reality nourishes.  And nothing else does.

The next section, on Creation, is equally valuable.  Starting with God as Creator, and examining why God created at all, Sheed goes on to talk about the different types of being, and (something new to me when I first read the book) the different types of duration they inhabit:

For the changelessness of God, there is Eternity; for the continuous changefulness of matter, there is Time. [...] But what of spirit? [...]For his duration too, there is a word - the word aevum or aeviternity, the duration of that which in its essence of substance knows no change: though by its accidents it can know change.

And this leads to some startling insights:

Love of change is a disease the soul contracts form the body - one sure symptom of it is the inability to contemplate.  During contemplation, time really does stand still for the soul, which is one reason we should practice is: for it means practicing the soul in its own proper element.

Having laid the foundations for thinking sanely about Creation, Sheed then goes on to outline the history of creation and salvation. The chapter headings give you a sense of the scope:

• God as Creator;
• The Created Universe;
• Angels, Matter, Men; 
• The Testing of Angels and Men; 
• The Fall of Man;
• Between the Fall and the Redemption;
• The Mission of Christ;
• The Redeemer;
• The Redeeming Sacrifice;
• Redemption;
• The Kingdom;
• Dispensing the Gifts;
• The Mystical Body of Christ;
• Life in the Body;
• LIfe after Death;
• The End of the World.

It is all rich material, beautifully clear and compelling in its logic.  Perhaps one of my favourite parts is Sheed's exposition of the Sacraments.  He takes both the incarnational and relational aspects of our Faith very seriously, and grounds his understanding in the fact that we are body and soul, and that we are social beings.

We see now that because man is a union of spirit and matter, God treats him as both.  The Sacraments are a union of spirit and matter. [...] A religion which took no proper account of man's body and left it unsanctified would be as monstrous as a religion which left out of account his essential relation with his fellows.

The final section is about Oneself:

Given that the context is what it is, it remains for us to study our own being and our own life in it; and this will be the theme of the third and last section of this book.  In summary, we see the context as statable in three actors and four events.  The actors are God, Adam, Christ: all of them are in us in various ways, and we cannot know ourselves without understanding them.  The events are the Creation, the Fall, the Redemption, and the Judgement.  Knowing this context, we know where we are, what we are, and what we exist for; knowing the totality, we can know our place in it and establish our relation to everything else in it.

 So Sheed sets out to help us habituate our minds to that reality, and to the truths about Man, including his insufficiency (without God).  He explains how the Church is God's chosen way of providing the meaning, hope and law which we need, and goes on to expand on the Life of Grace and the Landscape of Reality.  He concludes with a chapter, Idyll and Fact, contrasting our aspirations to holiness with our experience as sinners, and exploring how we make sense of that; but as ever he concludes positively, with a reflection on saints and sanctity.  His envoi is:

This book is not about sanctity, only about sanity.  But sanity points straight toward sanctity.