This essay by Dr Kania will leave most readers of Catholica
with much to think about. Essentially the writers who are quoted in it
are examining the relationship between mental health and religious belief.
The question many readers of Catholica might
go on to ponder is what kind of religious belief goes on to encourage
mental well-being?
Click HERE
to read the Scriptural quote Matthew 11:28-30 which is the starting point
to this commentary today.
The legacy of a politician, a statesman and a philosopher…
As the train meandered its way from the capital of Czechoslovakia, Praha,
those on board who were regular commuters understood the quaint ritual
that was soon to take place in the town of Lány, a town that in
1948, had barely a thousand residents to boast — if that. Lány's
claim to fame, other than her being a route to and from Karlovy Vary,
was in part due to her being the place of the summer residence for the
political heads of Czechoslovakia; but further still, she had become even
more famous by 1948, as the final resting place of the first President
of Czechoslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue
Masaryk (1850-1937).
As the train drew up to the station, a spontaneous chorus of voices seemed
to rise, simple folk songs were carried for miles on the crisp night air,
wafting on a breeze that led to the walls of the Castle, and over the
grave in which Masaryk's body lay; all in tribute to a man, who with kindness
and wisdom, had within the hurly-burly of inter-World War politics, calmly
established a democratic and prosperous nation.
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk had been
the most recognizable face of this young nation. Photographs taken while
he was President show an elderly gentleman, with a dark overcoat and hat,
a face covered with a white handlebar moustache and a well-trimmed goatee,
peering out at the world, wisely, behind owl-rimmed glasses — photographed
often carrying a book, his finger book-marking the page he was reading.
Yet well before Masaryk had become the statesman
of international repute, he had been a Professor of Philosophy, both in
his native land, and abroad in England.
Now in the years following the peaceful and amicable separation of Czechia
from Slovakia, it is as Masaryk the philosopher,
that his greatest legacy may yet be realized.
In Man and Religion (1938),
(a book posthumously published in the English language after his death,
but written at the turn of the 20th Century), Masaryk
opens up a critical polemic for modern living (and dying) based on the
premise that: "Modern man wants only to
live and to live, but it is very often because of this that he takes his
life. He who has not yet become aware of this, does not comprehend this,
does not know the modern man. In his mad chase after happiness and pleasure
death itself has come to mean heavenly joy for him … My psychological
and sociological analysis of suicidism has taught me that the number of
suicides is a direct mathematical measure of the real mood of society,
that society is deep down in the depths of its soul excited, perturbed,
sick …". (Masaryk, 1938, pp.
46-47)
To illustrate his point further, Masaryk quotes large portions from Arne
Garborg's, Trætte Mænd
(Wearied Souls). These passages
help Masaryk to reiterate the central thrust of his argument: "'The
main cause of the nervous sufferings of our time is that we have not a
well-ordered view of life. Man lacks … God, let us say; thus spiritual
life has lost its centre, spiritual life has lost its regulator, if I
may call it so, and is running on erratically, without aim or measure.
And it usually happens that the spring breaks … A sad generation
is this transitory human race. It is not even unconscious enough to be
happy; it is not even conscious enough to be resigned, it only sighs and
writhes in a kind of mental hysteria'". (Masaryk,
1938, pp. 32 — 33)
But Masaryk, a renowned academic and researcher,
does not base his theory on mere hearsay, but goes on to write that according
to research: "The statistics of suicides
vary with the spiritual and moral religious atmosphere; ceteris paribus
suicidism is strongest wherever the old religious life is most undermined.
Statistics show a greater number of suicides in France and especially,
of course, in Paris; suicidism is further quite marked in Austria and
quite considerable in the Protestant parts of Germany and Norway, in Petrograd,
and so forth. But it is comparatively weak in English countries and in
southern Italy, where religion has still a marked influence; that is why
there are fewer suicides in Russia and countries like it — among
peoples still governed by ancient forms of religion."
(Masaryk, 1938, pp. 38-39)
Faust — saved by the bell…
Masaryk goes on to recollect in the work
of the German literary giant, Johannes Wolfgang
von Goethe, how Faust,
driven to the brink of suicide, steps back from the precipice on hearing
the Church bells toning from afar, for the Easter liturgy. Faust,
who had in the moment before determined to take his life, is now filled
with hope, a hope that retrieves in his memory the catechetical teachings
of childhood — the presence in this world of a God of love.
Yet, the question that Masaryk poses, is
sadly far more relevant for modern man, than for the individual living
in a world prior to the horrors of the Great War, with all its mustard
gas and drowning in muddied tranches, and the rise of the twin evils of
communism and fascism; with all its soul destroying cult of personality
and atheism. Faust, in all his torments with
Mephistopholes, had the memories of a God
to fall back on, however distant he had pushed them in his mind —
but what does modern man have to fall back on — a modern man, too
often reared in a shattered, agnostic-cum-atheistic family, a modern man
who after the events of the 20th Century has become increasingly cynical
about the virtuous life?
Masaryk would argue that the modern man
has every reason to kill himself, if he will accept no God. For if God
does not exist — life is meaning-less; for there is no redress for
the child whose innocence in this singular life has been violently taken
from her; there is no better world to come for the child who is born to
a half-emaciated mother, living in a fly-infested tent; there exists no
one to hear the prayer of the wrongly convicted, sitting in a corner of
solitary confinement. If there is no God — the only point to living
is to die — for that is the only certainty that such a life offers.
If there is no God, why should anyone wish to wake up in the morning —
if for all they know their day may turn from gladness to the bitterest
of sorrows and loss? Why should modern man suffer the torments of the
damned for one moment longer than he need do? Why should the modern man
eventually succumb to the dark-hand of Fate, when he can rob Fate of his
victory, by cutting his throat before Fate can find out where he sleeps?
Such is the harsh reality that Masaryk wisely
points out — decades before, prayer and God were taken out of schools
and homes en masse. Such is the reality that wearies the soul, for even
the least intelligent of human beings can fathom the emptiness in their
life, if all they have to turn to for salvation is money and materialism.
The godless individual becomes weary in the quest to place some tangible
thing over the chasm that gapes between the two existential pinnacles
of life and death. They eventually tire and despair because nothing in
this world — but God, can span the void. Unwilling to believe in
something they cannot see, and disenchanted with life and living, they
choose the only exit from this 'loaded game' that can scar the author
of this folly to the quick — self-destruction so as to rob God of
his 'victory'.
It is this weariness of soul, that Masaryk
asks the leaders of modern nations to be vigilant against, so as to protect
their citizens from a cancer that will eat away far more voraciously at
the spirit through to the body than any cancer rooted in the purely physical.
For a people who have become too wearied to live — is a nation that
is all but ready to be harvested — a prey to the spiritual forces
of evil — a people that can be led by mere whim, a people who like
lambs in an abattoir, will meekly follow their neighbor into death, for
want of discovering, a solid, and sure meaning to life.
|
 Andrew
Thomas Kania is a visiting scholar at Blackfriars Hall at the
University of Oxford, where he is completing a book on Dag Hammrskjöld.
He has taken 12 months leave of absence from his position as Director
of Spirituality at Aquinas College, Manning in Western Australia
to complete this task. Prior to this appointment at Aquinas Dr.
Kania was a lecturer for the School of Religious Education at the
University of Notre Dame Australia as well as for the Catholic Institute
of Western Australia at Edith Cowan and Curtin Universities. Dr.
Kania belongs to the Ukrainian Church and is interested in ecumenical
issues as well as contemporary problems facing religious educators.
|
©2007
Dr Andrew Thomas Kania
[Andrew Kania's Archive]
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