Given a soul alienated from self, lawlessness follows. A soul with a fight inside itself will soon have a fight outside itself with others. Once a man ceases to be of service to his neighbor, he begins to be a burden to him; it is only a step from refusing to live with others to refusing to live for others. When Adam sinned, he accused Eve, and when Cain murdered Abel, he asked the antisocial question, “‘Am I my brother’s keeper” (Gen. 9). When Peter sinned, he went out alone and wept bitterly. Babel’s sin of pride ended in a confusion of tongues which made it impossible to maintain fellowship.
Our personal self-hatred always becomes hatred of neighbor. Perhaps this is one of the reasons for the basic appeal of communism, with its philosophy of class struggle: Communism has special affinity for souls that already have a struggle going on inside of themselves. Associated with this inner conflict is a tendency to become hypercritical: unhappy souls almost always blame everyone but themselves for their miseries. Shut up within themselves, they are necessarily shut off from all others except to criticize them. Since the essence of sin is opposition to God’s will, it follows that the sin of one individual is bound to oppose any other individual whose will is in harmony with God’s will. This resulting estrangement from one’s fellow man is intensified when one begins to live solely for this world; then the possessions of the neighbor are regarded as something unjustly taken from oneself. Once the material becomes the goal of life, a society of conflicts is born. As Shelley said: “The accumulations of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of power of assimilating them to the internal laws Of our nature.” Bishop Fulton Sheen ‘Peace of Soul’
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