In The Screwtape Letters, the Senior Demon Screwtape advises his novice Tempter nephew, Screwtape, that he can damn people by making them PROUD of their humility.
Since the beginning of Christianity, people have tried to prove they are more Christian than Christ by Suffering. And, indeed a lot of them did suffer more than Christ did.
I keep saying that the fatal error is not being silly. It is believing that your silliness is the opposite of silliness:
1) Nobody is more destructively dumb than the dumb man who thinkgs he is smart;
2) No one is more disastrous than the professor who thinks that HIS bigotry is the opposite of real bigotry;
3) And so forth.
After the Age of Martyrs, when Christianity was the established religion, a lot of ascetics tried, as one historian put it, “To take Heaven by storm.” They tortured themselves for decades.
In trying to suffer more than Christ, they forgot a simple point:
You are NOT Christ.
The sufferings of the Son of God are not in the same category with self-torture.
No, I don’t think they are damned for their mistake. A lot of self-righteous people hand out damnation as a matter of course. If Christ could forgive his tormenters from the cross, I think he got certain amount of ironic humor out of the human attempt to mimic him.
The man who could call Peter a rock had a sense of irony.
Jesus told us not fear the Judgement.
As long as you do not think that your bigotry is righteousness, there is nothing to worry about.
#1 by Shari on 01/20/2006 - 6:08 pm
Now days such people don’t outsuffer Christ, they just care more for all the poor people in the world. They are Commies for Christ.
#2 by Elizabeth on 01/21/2006 - 1:40 pm
The religious life (taking the habit, taking vows in
a religious order) attracts a lot of people with
varieties of depression and assorted mental disorders.
The earliest mention I’ve seen of this is St. Teresa
of Avila’s FOUNDATIONS, in which she discusses how
to manage such nuns. (She wrote this around 1580.)
Here in the U.S., the Catholic religious orders have been
testing and sending applicants in for assessment for at least
the past 40 years.
A monastery of Carmelite nuns, for example, would be
VERY careful about mental stability in its candidates
because, once they accept a candidate, they might have
to keep her for the rest of her life. A large, multi-
location “active” order could (and would have)
shifted around the trouble-makers and the unstable.
#3 by Peter on 01/21/2006 - 11:54 pm
Elizabeth: do you know anything about the frequency monks and nuns consigning themselves late in life after they had families?
#4 by Bob on 01/22/2006 - 4:02 pm
Yes, Peter, Elizabeth knows a lot about that.
Elizabeth, you’re not off the hook.