His Holiness

Benedict XVI

Supreme Pontiff

  

Your Holiness,

we present to You a piece of writing under the title Life philosophy and submit it to Your consideration.

  

Life philosophy

 

Life philosophy based on the Gospel actually is the wisdom which teaches us how to pass through this short life, which for the major part is a spiritual fight, so as not to lose eternal life. In this fight it is being decided: we will either pass to eternal life or fall into eternal condemnation by God. Therefore this life philosophy – the wisdom of God – is vital for each man!

 

Unfortunately, the contemporary philosophies do not fulfil this function, they even do quite the reverse. They purposefully deceive, they darken the true sense of human life and instead of true means they enforce false ones leading to destruction. They kill time given by God to salvation with their idle, useless and false philosophizing, so these philosophies will never achieve the aim. In principle they should not even be called philosophies because they contradict the true wisdom and lead to foolishness (cf. 1Cor 3:19) as well as to the loss of eternal life.

 

Such life such philosophy; it grows either from practical following of Christ and His Gospel or from other spiritual roots, and then it is anti-Christian. So what makes man is his life principles – either they are rooted in the Gospel or not. And then, man either lives with Christ or without Him, but the latter means to be in darkness here as well as after death.

 

The life attitude for us, Christians, is clear – to live the Gospel and then to express this Gospel, as well as the spiritual fight connected with sin and lie, in a simple way, in simple life principles. It is necessary that experienced people living truly by faith in Christ should teach the Christians through so-called discipleship to actualize these sound principles in their lives, and that in God’s Spirit.

 

Human philosophies do express a certain grain of truth, but they wrap it with their theories which have nothing to do with practical life and with the following of Christ. These grains serve only as a decoy into a trap which is hidden behind them. The grains of truth deny the Spirit of truth because they are built in systems behind which is the spirit of lie and death. This fully applies to all Oriental philosophies and to whole paganism, which ends up in idolatric worship of animals or in divinization of man and leads to eternal perdition. Unfortunately, even the very Thomistic philosophy, which contains the most grains of truth, rather diverts from the simplicity of the Gospel and from the following of Christ and disposes to intellectualism and to various lifeless theories.

 

No philosophical, psychological or pedagogical system is able to transmit the life wisdom of the Gospel which is anchored in Christ’s cross. These theoretical systems divert from the true following of Christ and seriously reckon neither with death nor with the Judgement nor even with eternity.

 

 

The reality of original sin in us

 

In exposing original sin the Word of God speaks about so-called old self which has been crucified with Christ (see Gal 2:20; Rom 6:6). If we do not live by faith, we boycott God’s Word as well as God’s laws given to us through conscience, through the Decalogue and through Christ’s Gospel.

 

Original sin in us darkens the objective and God’s truth and distorts everything. This distortionism of darkness and sin causes man to make himself the highest norm, to make himself god, to set his own truths, his own good and to consider others a mere means to achieve his interests. This self-divinization has its root in the very first sin. The same enemy of God through false philosophies whispers even us to think that by disobedience to God’s commandments we shall become free, we shall be like gods and our eyes shall be opened. But this is a lie! Man actually stands before a choice, whether he will obey God, His natural law in us (conscience), the Decalogue and the evangelical counsels, or he will himself determine what is good and what is bad – but that is demonic! All abstract philosophies and psychologies become in practice a substitute for the Gospel.

 

The whole problem of society and of mutual human relations as well as of the relation to God is based on the reality that man is darkened by his egoism and does not want to admit the objective truth, nor his mistake and his sin. However, the admission of this reality leads through repentance and truth to inner healing and salvation of soul.

 

The truth about oneself is the most painful reality and man does not want to accept it, even if it is told to him by someone who loves him. In fact, man does not want to see his sin and call it a sin, because he himself is unable to get rid of it. Only the Gospel gives the solution. The substance of the Gospel and of true repentance is: 1) to admit that I am a sinner and to confess my sins for which Jesus died on Golgotha; 2) to give them through faith to Jesus; 3) to receive forgiveness from Him; 4) by obedience of faith to cooperate in my own liberation from the slavery of the sinful nature (cf. Jn 8:36).

 

The people of the Church who have not truly become Christ’s disciples and witnesses cannot have the wisdom of God, for it is connected only and only with the cross to which we must nail our old self, that means our wilfulness and spiritual blindness.

 

Unless there exist vital communities of converted Christians in which it would be possible to speak openly, at least in a narrow circle, about the substance of our failings and thus to point at the main faults of concrete members of the community, there are then no conditions for the spiritual growth and maturation of Christians. God is not given space to work there and spiritual gifts and ministries then cannot be used to build up. Only on the deep foundation of truth it is possible to make a true diagnosis and to receive from Christ true healing through His word of truth. And that is why there is a need of fellowship, of the spirit of prayer and of the apostolic teaching just as it was among the early Christians. Then we can put off the old man and put on the new one (cf. Eph 4:24). This process of change often lasts all through the life and is actualized in different situations through persistently entering the power of Christ’s death by our faith (cf. 2Cor 4:10f).

 

Broken families, prisons full of people, drug addicts, alcoholics, robberies, criminality, suffering, psychical breakdowns, suicides, murders etc. are a testimony of the reality of original sin. To deny this most essential reality is a sign of hardness of heart and darkness of mind!

 

If unconverted people are shown their inborn negative quality, they feel dead offended and many times this hatred leads to revenge. When seeking the truth, one needs to respect the prevalence of lie over the truth and to perceive the psychological regularities of the old nature. Man easily succumbs to lie and easily gets into dependence on food, property, owning of people, things and plans which then fill his mind. This, however, has nothing to do with truth. When looking for the truth, one first needs to admit human laziness, human cunning, manipulability and willingness to let oneself be deceived by false phrases which one gladly accepts for his own so as to disguise his real intentions and purposes, since to reveal them is humiliatory. All human philosophies move only in abstractions because they do not reckon with original sin; but then they have nothing in common with the real life, nor with the real fight with sin, lie and powers of darkness (whose existence, moreover, they practically deny).

 

The key to salvation is true repentance and highlighting of the fundamental truths, above all of the reality of original sin. Card. J. Ratzinger, the present Holy Father, wrote: “Should sometime Providence relieve me of my present duties, I would like to devote myself to the very theme of original sin, or to the necessity of reexposure of its activity in the world.” (Interview with V. Messori, 1984)

 

Every one of us meets daily with the reality of original sin. To talk about love, truth, justice etc. but not to reckon in earnest with its influence in us leads to a life in illusions and unreality. Only the courage to admit the truth about ourselves opens our soul to the true knowledge that we need Jesus, the only One in whom is true deliverance and salvation of soul.

 

Life wisdom (philosophy) and systems of lie

 

A converted man, regarding the fact that he is exposed to a spiritual fight, needs life philosophy. This philosophy helps him rightly to orientate himself in this spiritual fight, that in every situation the day brings he may return to the substance, which is a living and true relation to Christ. Otherwise through various situations, unless he treats them in faith, he will quench the Spirit of Christ in his heart and then he already behaves automatically in dependence on his old nature. This nature has its own truth, its own justice, its good, its right, its love and its unity with its egoistic interests, its pretensions to others… simply “its own”. To automatically put this “our own” on the first place even is the “sincere” behaviour of our nature. Noone needs to learn this.

 

However, the disciple of Christ, who forsakes all for the sake of Jesus, must learn to stop and not to identify himself even in his mind with these primary impulses of the old nature. In practice it means, in a short stop through inward self-denial to dissociate oneself from them as soon as possible. Here one may apply Jesus’ call: “Transform your minds, and believe in the Gospel.” (Mk 1:15) Concretely it means to dissociate oneself in the particular situation from the concentration on “one’s own” and to wish the will of God. This will is expressed by the conscience, by the Decalogue and by the evangelical counsels. The crossing of my views and God’s demands is my cross! In this powerlessness of the cross, provided I receive it, God’s almightiness will start to work – it is God’s dialectics. Saint Paul puts it in the following words: “When I am weak, then I am strong.” (cf. 2Cor 12:10) The one who learns this wisdom of the cross, every day gains experience of God’s love and God’s almightiness. The Apostle expresses this experience by the words: “We preach Christ crucified… the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1Cor 1:23-24) And he further testifies: “For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain.” (Phil 1:21) and next: “In Him (in Jesus Christ) are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” (Col 2:3) The attitude of the Apostle and of the early Church towards philosophers is expressed in the Epistle to the Colossians: “Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to cosmic energies, and not according to Christ.” (Col 2:8) “The wisdom (philosophy) of this world is foolishness with God” (1Cor 3:19), for “it is doomed to destruction” (cf. 1Cor 2:6).

 

In the 4th century St. Basil the Great wrote rules for Christians which express the wisdom of life. They are not a collection of instructions but they show how to think and act in concrete situations in order not to quench the Spirit of God (cf. 1Thes 5:19). In his rules St. Basil at the same time unmasks the way of thinking of the corrupted nature and shows that it is motivated by the lie incarnate in us. To conform oneself to such thinking is called by him madness.

 

Life philosophy (built on the Gospel) helps rightly to orientate oneself how to pass through the maze of the world victoriously and save one’s soul.

 

We are deceived through people, through various psychological pressures and through the lie which is in us, that is through our thoughts. There are many traps which abuse human desire for happiness, for wealth, for knowledge, for power… Unexperienced and unwise man becomes their victim and falls into the toils of various professional liars. Someone for example desires wealth and becomes addicted to slot machines. The result is that he loses even the last penny. Another one becomes a slave of impurity through pornography, another one opens to the spirit of homosexuality, another one desires knowledge and power and falls under a curse through diviners, magic or spiritism. Another one falls into the slavery of alcohol or drugs. Under the vision of gaining freedom and happiness young people become slaves and then also unhappy!

 

Example: Billboards – big advertising boards – propagate smoking by means of an attractive picture. Under this picture it is written that smoking causes cancer. One would think that the purpose is to warn against smoking; however, in fact the purpose is its propagation. So here man is psychologically influenced. It is similar in contemporary theology and philosophy. One says a certain truth which, however, is either connected with the spirit of heresy or diverts from the concrete life with Christ. How many suggestive advertisements there are in the world that pretend to be truthful but in essence they are deceitful.

 

An example of how man is deceived through his thoughts: In the evening, though I was not hungry and had no appetite, I finished up the rest of a sourish soup. Why? A suggestive thought occurred to me that by the next morning it will have been totally spoilt, therefore, so that we do not have to throw it out tomorrow, I would rather finish it up. The result – stomach troubles. This thought was a deceit. What I should have done is oppose it with the truth: “I don’t need that soup, better when it is thrown out than it should ruin my stomach.” One learns from mistake; however, it is necessary to keep watchful, for otherwise within a certain period one will let oneself be deceived again in a similar situation.

 

Another example: After collective work at the construction of a building there arose a dispute with my fellow brother, after which my dark “self” as if illuminated to me how many times this brother had acted unfairly and a conflict had arisen. As a consequence of such memories there emerged bitterness towards my brother. What to do? Jesus speaks about the speck and the log in one’s eye (see Mt 7:3-5). Following this instruction I changed my attitude of mind and started to reckon the other way round: I reckoned how many good things the brother did during the construction, how much blessing came through him and, on the other hand, where I made mistakes in relation to him as well as in relation to the common good by my wantonness or unskilfulness and slowness. The spirit of bitterness immediately vanished! Owing to this practical step of repentance, I came to reveal my inward darkness which has its own subjective truths and the fruit of these “truths” is a breakup of mutual relationships. So at the root there was a false faith in my own truth which, from the objective point of view, is a lie.

 

Another example: A wise mother, who has several children and every child has different character, is able to discern precisely how to punish the guilty child so that it may serve its benefit and atonement. To one she has to deliver an educative slap, against another it is enough just to raise her voice, at the third one only to look sadly. To this she does not need to study modern pedagogy, philosophy or psychology. Considering the spiritual background which nowadays already is behind them, these systems do more harm than good. Only the principles stemming from the Gospel can give a Christian mother the true life wisdom.

 

Our old nature (old man) wants to be deceived

 

The old man in us sees his own good in living in compliance with his lusts and not in compliance with the law of God. Therefore he needs to deceive himself as well as his surroundings by some rational and seemingly virtuous argument. This self-deception is then repeated by him on every occasion and thus artificially kept in himself in order that he does not have to admit the covert and true reason of his attitude and repent.

 

Example: Some people justify their being atheists by claiming that in the religious lessons the priest pulled them by ears for disturbing (but this they admit not). They feel wronged thereby and this is a sufficient reason for them why they cannot believe in God. Others hypocritically seek bad features of the priest or his mistakes so that they could have them as an argument why they themselves need not turn to Christ and live the Gospel in truth and in fullness.

 

There exist even more artful ways of self-deception, which are practised e.g. by persons consecrated to God.

Example: A certain religious sister did not want to accept the truth which would change her life to saintliness. She cast down another sister, who was a remorse to her in that she pursued an order of interior prayer, in such way that she highlighted her concrete mistake from the past; she purposefully did not discern that it was not a material thing and generalized her mistake as something substantial. Behind this process of false thinking the main and hidden reason was that she did not want to change her comfortable way of life. Moreover, if somebody unmasked this hidden reason, she would be offended.

 

When one does not want to accept the truth, one always finds some “virtuous” reason why not to accept it. The Lord Jesus expresses this reality of our crafty nature by words: “John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say: ‘He has a demon’. The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say: ‘Look, a glutton and alcoholic…’” (cf. Mt 11:16-19) Why did the representatives of the Church of that time morally blacken John the Baptist and also the Saviour Himself? The main reason as then so today is: they do not want to be sincerely converted and they delude themselves that they will be saved automatically! This mechanism of hypocrisy works in the same way up to the present time. Our pride – the darkness of original sin in us – cannot bear the truth about itself and that is why it does not want to admit things as they are and unmask covert intentions. So it always attacks the one who stands up for the truth. Its purpose is to liquidate undesirable witnesses – to kill the prophets, and that either physically or morally.

 

A dilemma before the decision

 

If man faces a serious decision, he is offered several variants of solution. Here a big part is played by our inclinations which dispose us to adopt an alluring vision, even when it is a false one! Unless one is used to self-denying and to seeking the will of God, one will forsake the vision proposed to him by God and will decide wrongly. However, he will thereby take a certain direction and get into a system from which it is hard to return back.

 

When making a decision, even other people play part. Man in his hypocrisy knows already beforehand who will approve what. Then he goes and consults those who will confirm his own will and afterwards, he hypocritically shelters himself behind their authority.

 

Another type of false counsellors are those who pursue their interests and describe their false vision exactly according to the inclinations of man whom they influence, using such manner as to make him accept it.

 

However, if one really wants to seek and fulfil the will of God, the process is completely different. One stands in truth before God, gives Him his sin and also truly confesses the motives which are for or against a certain resolution. Then he sincerely prays God to give him His light. Afterwards, it is also possible to turn to virtuous people who themselves sincerely seek the will of God, and to consult them.

 

Example: A Christian mother has two children and is expecting the third one. She is exposed to psychological pressure of lies on the part of her family as well as of the doctors. These describe the birth of her third child as a heavy complication. They artificially make up various reasons why right now it is unthinkable for her to have another child – they emphasize lack of finances, the fact that she cannot leave her job, that she has already crossed the age of 30, which signifies an increased risk. The child will certainly be handicapped, then, they say, she will be tormented by it for the rest of her life; however, if she has an abortion, essentially, they say, it is no big matter, today it is even modern etc. If she opens herself to this attitude of mind and to the spirit of lie and death, she will start to see the abortion as the only possibility of solving her situation and will believe the deceit that it is something good for her. If she gives her consent to this murder, later on her eyes will get opened and for the rest of her life she will be troubled by remorse. A frequent consequence is even physical diseases.

 

If in the strategic moment of the decision she put on the first place the law of God and asked God for help, she would have the strength to act rightly and for the whole of her life she would be thankful that she did not let herself be manipulated to murder her own child. Here we can see, too, how the life philosophy rooted in the Gospel is needful for common life. What can philosophies of Kant, Hegel, Heidegger… help in similar cases? Why should the intending priest need to open to these philosophies? What benefit can he derive from them for the sheep entrusted to him? Just negative one!

 

Christianity, which should preach the truth and bring life in fullness, is paralyzed by false philosophies as well as by lifeless and heretical theologies. The solution is solely in the return to the living Truth, which is Jesus Christ.

 

Antichristian system of the New Age

 

Contemporary philosophical and psychological systems are a part of the spirit of the New Age and open the door for it. The aim is to deceive human soul by means of philosophical teachings, then to enslave it through various psychotechniques, meditative practices and initiations, and finally to throw it into eternal perdition.

 

Modern philosophies and psychologies know well the regularities of our corrupted nature and the spirit of the world forwards its aims through them. In the present time these philosophies e.g. point at spiritual hunger and emptiness caused by the consumer way of life and by the apostasy from living Christianity. They offer a false solution through meditative and relaxation techniques rooted in yoga, zen and in Oriental philosophies. These techniques are far from indifferent, they open one’s soul to the antichristian spirit. The Christians who are not anchored in the life philosophy of the Gospel become victims of this spirit of the New Age.

 

The whole antichristian system demands and at the same time enforces a change of thinking and subsequently even a change of the life style; thereafter the spirit of darkness will start to rule the whole territories. Why does it happen so? Because the Church which was and is obliged to preach the biblical change of thinking and lifestyle does not do so; the main blame for the self-destruction of the individual, of the family, as well as of the society thus falls upon her.

 

The New Age movement is based on worldwide religion which, in fact, is the religion of the old self (see Gen 3 – you shall be like gods) and merges into a change of the life style. First it eliminates the last remains of sound principles by means of relativism and atheism. Then it disables the conscience by means of buddhistic and hindu meditations connected with psychotechniques. Subsequently it leads to systematical development of covetousness of our fallen sinful nature, which ends up in self-destruction and eternal perdition! All is built on the philosophy of the old self which accepts all these traps “in its own interest” and finally, in its own interest, goes to hell. This is the essential deceit and therefore the only solution is to fulfil Christ’s demand – to forsake even one’s soul for His sake and the Gospel’s (Mk 8:35) and to become Christ’s disciple and witness. In this is the true freedom and eternal life!

 

Fr. Eliáš A. Dohnal ThD. OSBM

Fr. Cyril J. Špi?ík Ing. ThD. OSBM

Fr. Metod?j R. Špi?ík ThD. OSBM

Fr. Markian V. Hitiuk ThLic. OSBM

 

Pidhirtsi 28th August 2007

 

Copies to: Cardinals and bishops of the Catholic Church

 

Address: Monastery OSBM, 80660 Pidhirtsi, Brody district, Lvov region, Ukraine

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