The patient transmission of ancestral knowledge, the priceless wisdom accumulated through the generations, has broken down - or, more precisely, it was voluntarily broken, as we have said in previous letters. The sacred authority of the parents, which should naturally have been a model for the child, was cruelly lacking. The child easily criticizes authority under any form and, involuntarily, develops a marked inclination to isolate and turn upon himself, thus contradicting his very nature, since man is a social being.
Dear Friends and Benefactors,
The patient transmission of ancestral knowledge, the priceless wisdom accumulated through the generations, has broken down - or, more precisely, it was voluntarily broken, as we have said in previous letters. The sacred authority of the parents, which should naturally have been a model for the child, was cruelly lacking. The child easily criticizes authority under any form and, involuntarily, develops a marked inclination to isolate and turn upon himself, thus contradicting his very nature, since man is a social being.
This shriveled-up man is not only a diminished being, sub-human, but really a monster. No longer living in conformity with his social nature, but rather taking pride in a shameless individualism, this man - so perversely focused upon what he believes to be his own excellence and not knowing anything else - makes of his petty universe the single criterion for his dogmatic judgments, setting himself up as a pitiless judge. Cut off from reality, this unpleasant individual claims to be its judge!
After having outlined in our previous letters the social consequences of this failure in the transmission of the ancestral wisdom that protects man against himself, we must now consider the personal, fatal consequences. Man is not only exposed to losing his social nature: his very human nature is in danger.
Human nature is in danger because at the age where the child should have received from his parents a rigorous education that gave him a strict and solid internal framework, he found his parents unable to give him a framework that they had never received. During his education, more than at any other time of his existence, man requires a structure that he can only receive from his family. How can we ever measure the tragedy of these men who grew, as young saplings full of promise, without support on which to rest?
The framework that the family offers to a child cannot be reduced to its material aspect - it is, above all, of a spiritual nature. The child must acquire, in the bosom of his family, the sense of his limitations. Being a creature, and thus essentially dependent, man has certain limitations which he must know and respect. However, at his birth, the new-born baby does not have the knowledge of all these limitations, contrary to a young animal which is led immediately by its instincts.
Discovering the world at two years old, the child is astonished by everything and, to the great displeasure of his parents, tries to grab all the things that are within his reach. How many times, from the throne of his high chair waiting to receive his meal, will he throw his spoon to the ground, filled with wonder at discovering the laws of gravity? And the child does not measure only the difference between the resistance of the table and that of the air; he very quickly grasps this obvious difference. He studies a more complex reality: the resistance of his parents to his whims. The thrown-away spoon turns quickly into an extremely useful test for his own guidance. The little rascal tests the limits of his power over his parents. He will often renew this "spoon test" throughout his youth. As he grows up, other objects will replace the spoon, and later the child will test himself on more complex subjects. With the passing of the years these attempts will appear to be a challenge against the authority of his parents, but we must remember that, initially, the child was led primarily by a healthy curiosity of knowing, of which Aristotle speaks about in his "Metaphysics."
If his parents do not understand this, or if they do not try hard to fix the limits essential to the harmonious development of the child, he will suffer all his life from major deficiencies on the psychological, intellectual and voluntary levels. Not having been able to grow and develop within a well-defined framework, the child, on becoming a man, will be afflicted with a chronic instability and will make all those around him suffer. He will remain for ever handicapped.
In our next letter we will consider these dramatic deficiencies by detailing them, in order to penetrate further into the mystery of the present decline and to be able, later on and finally, to suggest some guidelines to allow us to cure the appalling disaster that is already rising in our generation. This month, it is enough for us to specify that, although the nature of man cannot disappear as such, it is nonetheless in danger because it is strongly deteriorated by these crippling deficiencies. Indeed, the absence of limits removes the possibility of the formation of the intelligence and of the will of man, who thus has great difficulty in acting according to his human nature, as only those faculties make him really a man!
In Christo sacerdote et Maria,
Fr. Yves le Roux