Q. I have a question. I think you'd give me a better perspective than what I'm finding on the internet... Why does God want us to deny ourselves?
A. Short answer or long answer?
Q. Long.
A. Ok... Well believe it or not, even pagans born BEFORE the birth of Christ, when they spent some serious time thinking and philosophising on the topic arrived at the same conclusion: we have to deny ourselves, we cannot hope to live a virtuous or happy life by giving in to our every whim or fancy.
Q. Really!?
A. Yup.
Q. So this is not just a Catholic obsession?
A. Not even a Christian obsession.
Q. But God does ask us to deny ourselves, right?
A. Yup. And because He does so, we now have a SUPERnatural reason to do it. The philosophers of old only had the noble but still natural reasons to do it.
Q. And by the way, these are philosophers like who exactly?
A. Well among the Greeks you had individual philosophers like my favoured Socrates, and you had groups or parties or movements or schools like the Stoics.
Q. And why did they deny themselves?
A. Well these guys - as with others around the ancient world - had made the observation that we all have the experience of wanting to do one good thing but due to some internal and repeated mutiny, many times I never actually manage to do that one good thing I wanted. St. Paul captures this universal human experience excellently in his letter to the Christians in Rome around 57 or 58AD: "I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.... For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do... So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand."
For all their wisdom, the ancients had figured there was something wrong with each of us... There was something amiss... Something wasn't working the way it should. But for all their philosophising, they didn't know exactly what the cause of the problem was.
At that point in time, the answer was only known several hundred kilometres from Athens in the land of Israel. And the Jews knew what was wrong not through philosophy but through theology. St. Paul, a descendant of that Jewish biology and theology, touches on what the cause of the problem was. "For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?"
The problem was sin - or better, a particular sin that was the origin of this ubiquitous weakness in all men, women and children. Original Sin.
(To be continued.)
2ndOctober 2016