The Effects Of Original Sin

EWTN Global Catholic Radio and St. Joseph Communications proudly present Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. This 50-part series was recorded on photograph records in the 1960s and the sound quality is sometimes limited. But the word of God spoken by Archbishop Sheen is timeless. And now here is Archbishop Fulton Sheen. Peace be to you. Already there is a background about original sin. In this lesson we are concerned with how it affects us. In other words, it's very practical application. Everyone is tremendously interested in psychology. We try to understand ourselves. We search the reasons of why we take. We probe and analyze our anxieties and our conflicts. Some of us wonder why we are run down. And others why we are wound up. Now there are many explanations of all of these conflicts within us. But original sin alone gives us the basic understanding of human nature. No one can understand psychology. And as they understand human nature, no one can understand human nature unless he understands original sin. Somehow or other, the abuse that has happened to our mind or that has come to our mind has been driven some way to human freedom. It will not feel like a radio that's tuned into two stations. We get nothing but static. We are tuned into heaven. We are tuned into hell. Avi DeLatinpoit described it very well. He said, I see and I approve the better things of life. The worst things of life I follow. He also described our inner psychology when he wrote, the good which I will to do that I do not. The evil which I will not that I do. We feel dual. Torned in two different directions. If we were a team of horses, one horse was going to the right and the other horse was going to the left. Our soul is like a battlefield in which a civil war is being waged. We feel split almost into many worlds. Some of us may even feel like the young man after whom our Lord drove the devil. Our Lord said to the devil, what is your name? My name is Legion for we are many. Notice the conflict between my and we. He was one. He was multiple. Even the best of us feel as if we are mountain climbers. We can see the summit and the peak toward which we are striving up above us. And then we look back and we see the abyss into which we might fall. Above is what we ought to be and below is what we can become. As before it is put it, within my earthly temple, there is a crowd. There is one of us that humble, one that is proud. There is one that has broken hearted for his sins and one who unrepentance sits and graces. There is one who loves his neighbor as himself and one who cares for not but fame and health. From much colloding care I should be free if once I could determine which is me. Now there are explanations that are given for this conflict within us. They are true to some extent but actually they are only partial. These false explanations can be reduced to three. One is psychological. The other is biological and the other is economic. They are, I should not say, altogether false. They are just partial explanations. The partial explanation is the psychological. It tries to find out what has happened personally to us in the path. Some will say the reason we have this particular psychosis is because we were frightened when we were locked in a closet one day because we were bad. Or else because our parents scolded us when we tried to manifest our interest in a particular kind of pleasure. And conceivably it might have been sex. The other words, whatever is wrong with us has a personal background. Therefore in order to be cured of our difficulty there must be an analysis of our subconscious mind. And if we can bring out of the subconscious mind the source of this personal conflict we will be cured. Now this explanation has some merit in it but it is only a partial accounting for the way we are. It is wrong in as much as it assumes that if we are to find the source of the difficulty of any particular person we need to go into that person's background. No, everybody has a conflict. It is not just our personality and our psychological background that is wrong something that happened to our nature. Do not think this is because you have a temptation that does something wrong with you. And you are not believing there. That you have a monoclequino temptation. Everyone has temptations. Everyone in the world. You will all be not queer. Everybody is queer. If therefore we are to find the ultimate explanation we must get beyond the person we have to get back to human nature. Something just happened to us, whatever it is, and it is affected every single human being in the world. Another partial explanation and false because of this partial is the biological. This assumes that we are the way we are because there was a false somewhere in the evolutionary process. And we all have the traces of our animal origin. Now this is hardly the explanation because animals left to themselves never have any anxieties. They may have natural fears. But they have no subjective anxieties in this fixed sense of the word. A pain has no neurosis. Birds do not develop a psychosis about whether they will take a winter trip to California or to Florida. An animal never becomes less than it is. But a man can. And the reason is he is accomplished at the both spirit and matter. If we are to find a total explanation of what is wrong with man, it must be sought within man himself. When we see a monkey acting crazily in a zoo, we do not say, oh, do not act like a nut. But when we see a man acting foolishly, we say, no, act like a monkey. You see, a monkey cannot get below itself, but man can. Because man is spirit as well as matter, he can descend to the level of beasts. Though never so completely, as to destroy the image of God that is in his soul. It is this possibility that makes the peculiar tragedy of man. Man would never be frustrated. He would never have an anxiety complex if he were an animal. And if he were made just for this world. It is because of that summit, that peak, that desire for perfect happiness, which he does not attain. That he can become the seat of context. Therefore the animal in us is not the cause of why we are the way we are. It is something more profound. A third false explanation, because it is partial as the economics. Here it is assumed that man has conflicts because he is poor, because of capitalism, or because of communism. Is it not a fact that never before has the world had so much wealth and never before has its head so much unhappiness. Never before has it had so much learning and never before has it had so little coming to the knowledge of the truth. Never before has it had so much power and never before has it been so bent on the destruction of human life. Economic development is not the total cause of man's derangement. All the rich are not virtues. All the poor are not sinners. If poverty were the cause of the way we are, then the rich should be parodons of virtue. But the fact is that it is more of the overprivileged than the rich who have mental conflicts than it is the poor. Very often the more one is detached from this world. The more normal he is, more healthy on the inside. This world of ours has not just made a few mistakes in bookkeeping. Rather the world has swindled the treasury of morality. And that is the kind of poverty from which we suffer. Somehow or other, we lost spiritual capital. We are like prodigal sons that have left the father's house, and we are feeding on husks. Looking back then on all of these explanations, we have to conclude this that God certainly did not create us this way. We are fallen and the facts support this view. There is the voice inside of our moral consciousness that tells us that our immoral and non-moral acts are abnormal. They ought not to be there. There is something wrong in us, something dislocated. God did not make us one way. Or rather he did make us one way. We made ourselves in virtue of our freedom another way. He wrote the drama, we changed the plot. We are not just animals that fail to evolve into humans. We are humans who have rebelled against the divine. If we are riddles to ourselves, we are not to put the blame on God. Or an evolution we are to put the blame on ourselves. We are not the slaves, criminals. We are weak. We are not just a mass of corruption. We bear within ourselves the image of God. We are very much like a man who is fallen into the well. We ought not to be there, and yet we cannot get out. We are sick. We need healing. We need deliverance. We need liberation. And we know very well that we cannot give this liberation and freedom to ourselves. We are like a fish on top of the Empire State Building, somehow or other way, outside of our environment. We cannot swim back into the stream, someone has to put his back. Now it is true that God, as we said, has established the law. There will be a more univirst. A more univirst implies a free universe, and because we are free, we can abuse our freedom. But we are not to blame God for it. When you buy an automobile, you are always fine with it instead of instructions. The manufacturer tells you the pressure to which you walk to inflate your tires and the kind of oil you walk to put in your crankcase and the kind of gasoline you walk to put in the gas tank. He has nothing against you because he gives you these directions. And God has nothing against us when he gives us commandments. The manufacturer of the automobile really wants to be helpful when he gives us these laws. He wants you to get the maximum utility out of that car. And God is anxious that we get the maximum amount of happiness out of life. And so he said, I will tell you what you should do, what you ought to do. Now we are free. We can do justice. We please. We ought to put gasoline into the tank of our car. But we can put perfume in there. We can put in smell number five. And there's no doubt that it's going to be nicer for our nostrils to fill the tank with perfume and with gasoline. But the car simply will not run on smell number five. Like man, we were made to run on the fuel of God's love and commandments. And we simply will not run on anything else. We just bogged down. Give another example which explains original sin and also the conflicts that are within us. Suppose there was before us an orchestra. And there was a distinguished conductor directing that orchestra. There has been a symphony composed. It is well-not, well scored. All musicians have to do is to follow it. Now we can remember that orchestra is free to follow the conductor and therefore produce harmony. Suppose one of the musicians in that orchestra, deliberately plays a false note. And any jabs the violin is the long side of him and tells him to play another false note. There's discord somewhere. Now having heard that discord, the conductor can do one or two things. He can either strike his bottle and say play it over or he can ignore it. And we have no difference which he does because that note is already going on into space. At a certain temperature it's traveling at the rate of about 1,100 feet a second. The norm and the norm it goes affecting even the infinitesimally small radiation of the universe. This is the stone got in the pond causes a ripple so to this discard affects even the most distant stars. And as long as time endure somewhere in God's universe there is a dish harmony introduced by the free will of man. Can I discord the stock? Not by man himself? For man can't reach it. Kind as a reversible and man is localized in space. Is there any way of stopping the discord? Yes there is one way and that is if the eternal came out. If the eternal came out of his eternity into time. He might lay hold of that small note. He's arrested in this man's flight. Stop it from going any further. But with this newbie discord in the universe there could be harmony introduced on one condition namely if God wrote a new symphony and made that false note the first note in the new harmony. And there would be harmony again. Now a long time ago God wrote a symphony and asked man and woman to play it. He gave a complete set of instructions down to the last detail of what to avoid. The man and woman being free could obey the divine director and produce harmony or they could disobey. The devil suggested that because the divine director had mocked the script and told him up to play and what not to play that he was destroying their freedom. And they believed him and he introduced the false note into the universe and on and on to the human race. They think the visual and discord continue to sweep and it affected every single human being in the universe with this harmony. And this discord even had its repercussions in the material universe. Tessos grew, these became wild. Man had earned his bread by the sweat of his brow, women brought forth their children in sorrow, the extreme politic at its source. Castles on its pollution through its length. So the original false was transmitted to all humanity. And that discord could not be stopped by man himself because he could not repair an authentic incident with his own finite self. The debt could be paid only by the divine masterpiece music musician coming out of the eternity. It is a time. But there will be a lot of difference between stopping a discordant note in a rebellious man. The discordant note has no freedom. Man has. That's where the analogy breaks down. God refuses to be a totalitarian dictator. And therefore he refuses to abolish freedom by destroying or rather abolish evil by destroying human freedom. God could reason out but he would not see the man. So instead of conscripting man, God will to consult humanity again. As to whether or not it wanted to do later a member of the divine orchestra once more. To start, come the great white throne of light comes an angel. And it comes for a woman whose name is Mary. In the angel asks Mary in the name of God. Will you give to God a man? Will you give to God a new note out of humanity with which he can write a new symphony? Yes, new man must be a man. Otherwise God would not be acting in the name of humanity. But he must also be outside of the current of the infection which all men are subject. And being born of a woman who would be a man and being born of a virgin who would be a seamless man. So the virgin was asked if she was consent to be a mother. And she gave to God. Amen. And the angel was, be a tonne to me according to thy word. Nine months later the eternal establish its beechhead in Bethlehem. As he was eternal appeared in time. This name is Jesus Christ. God and man. He is God. Therefore whatever he does has an infinite value. And though this human nature of his is seamless, he makes himself responsible for all the sins of the world. This rich brother takes upon himself the debt of his bank, wealth, brother. So our Lord takes upon himself all the discourse and harmony and all the sins and all the guilt and all the blasphemies of man. Has it he himself regilted? His goal is thrusting to the front to add its dross burned away. So he takes that human nature plunges it into Calvary to have our sins burned away. For to change the figure since sin is in the blood and pours out his blood in redemption or without the shedding of blood there's no remission of sin. And in our Easter Sunday he rises again with his glorified sinless human nature. And this becomes the first note in the new creation, the beginning of the new symphony which was played again in the game of the divine conductor. And our other notes added, really the other notes, if like Mary, we really consent to be added to that first note. And how do we become added? We become added by the sacmur the baptism by which each man dies to the old Adam and incorporates himself to the new Adam Christ. And all of these notes that are added to this first note constitute the new body of Christ or what is known as his mystical body, the church. This is what it means to be a Christian. God. This has been Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen. For more information about this series, contact St. Joseph Communications at 1-800-526-2151. Outside the US, call 818-3313-3549. And please join us again next time for Life is Worth Living with Archbishop Fulton Sheen on EWTN Global Catholic Radio.