Confession

Psychology has become a much needed antidote for a world that has increasingly rejected philosophy.

The beginning of philosophy was not deep and profound thoughts, but common sense observations. When these things were investigated further, it sometimes led to some profound conclusions.

For instance, Aristotle starts with the common sense observation that all men desire to know things and from there he was able to discover his theory of four causes, which explains the different ways we can know why a thing exists.

But the modern world has gotten much too scientific for common sense. Our obsession with proving everything has made it seemingly impossible to regain those unprovable, self-evident truths.

Fortunately, psychology has come to the rescue. By using scientific methods, psychology has done the unthinkable: it has proved to us all the things we’ve known since before we could think. The research has now indicated that man is afraid of death, our relationships with our parents influence our relationships with the world, and we all need a sense of belonging. Who knew?

Religion sits at a very interesting place related to these two. Both psychology and philosophy (and other disciplines as well) are the roads man takes to get to the truth. But religion is not so much man’s struggle to God, as it is God’s gift to man. We lift ourselves up to God, but only after we have first received and accepted His Revelation. In other words, man is only elevated because God condescends.

This is what St Paul is teaching today. And when we look at St Paul’s teaching side-by-side with the efforts of philosophy and psychology to reach the same conclusions the differences will become more apparent.

One of the first and possibly most famous philosophical literary images is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In The Republic, Socrates tells a story about prisoners who are chained by their ankles and necks in a cave. There is a fire behind them and it creates shadows of objects on the wall in front of them. He tells how these prisoners think these shadows are real things and even give each other prizes for who can speak most eloquently of the shadows.

But then he says there is one man who escapes the cave, his prototypical philosopher. He is first blinded by the light but then when he regains his vision he realizes that he is now gazing upon the actual objects rather than their shadows. He then descends into the cave to attempt to free the prisoners. But tragically, the prisoners do not want to leave.

This image has become popularized and seen for its surface level meaning, or its social and political implications. But many forget that this was an allegory within an allegory. The dialogue starts with Socrates and his interlocutors looking for what the true nature of justice looks like in the soul and agreeing to investigate the city instead as an analogy.?

So, anything Socrates and his friends discover about the city, any images they portray, are on a much deeper level truths about the soul. The Allegory of the Cave then suggests that within the soul there is a higher part which engages with deeper levels of reality that descends into lower parts of the soul with hopes of liberating the whole man.?

Plato discovered this all through philosophical reasoning, but modern psychology, through extensive research, seems to have returned to his starting point, namely that we have parts within us that are repressed and are weighing down our souls. It is no coincidence that psychologist Carl Jung called these parts “the shadow.”

Psychology helps us understand why Plato’s prisoners did not want to leave and it has shown us that we are caught in a paradox in which the things we are most frightened to face within are the very means to our own liberation. To use more religious language, we all want to ascend with the Lord, but are scared to descend with Him.

But this fear is exactly what Christ came to abolish. Philosophical reasoning brought us to discoveries of man’s condition and psychological research explanations of it, but Christ brought us power to break free from this state of being stuck. We do not get images of man’s condition but we get God entering into man’s condition and fundamentally transforming it.

Christ does not simply tell us the truth in an image, but He is the Truth in the flesh. And He does not enter the world at one point and time, but continues to be present in His Church. Every day Catholics descend with the Lord to the lowest parts of their souls to liberate them and be set free to enter higher levels of reality.

Philosophical reasoning used to encourage man to make this descent in ancient and medieval times, and it is only a matter of time before psychological research demonstrates the same thing. That is, that the most effective medicine for our troubled souls is the confessional.

The idea of a Sacrament is that the power of Heaven is made present here on earth. In the Sacrament of Confession, the power of God to not only forgive sins but to create us anew, with fresh life, is made actual. We are freed from whatever sins have been weighing down our souls and our souls are restored to a grace beyond what is previously known.

In the Confessional booth, Christ descends with us into the depths of our souls to lift them up with Him to the heights of Heaven. It is not a magic trick where we say the right words and manipulate reality. It is a spiritual journey where we enter deeper levels of reality to experience deeper levels of freedom.

It is also not a place where one goes to have their sins excused. It is a place where one goes to have their sins forgiven. The extent to which we recognize the gravity of our sins we will also experience the loftiness of His grace. When Catholics are encouraged to examine their consciences, it is not to shame them but to liberate them and dignify them. By willingly acknowledging our sins and bringing them before the Lord, we are capable of experiencing the Lord in quite literally otherworldly ways.

But this might have been too much philosophical reasoning. We will likely need extensive psychological research to bring to the surface what already lies dormant within the soul of every man.