Theology and Sanity 

      Theology and Sanity is a book by the well-known English apologist Frank Sheed, a book I would like to recommend to you.  Its title suggests a bond between theology – the study of God – and sanity – the right ordering, according to reality, of the human mind.  There could be no doubt that if there is God, then the human mind, absolutely dependent upon Him, will only be ordered rightly, sane, if it has knowledge of its Source, a knowledge that then leads to correctly ordered living, living sanely. 

      Sheed begins an early section of his book by noting the extraordinary compliment the Catholic Church, at the First Vatican Council (1870), paid to the human intellect, to human reason:  that it could, unaided by divine revelation, come with certainty to the knowledge of the existence of God.  “What the Vatican Council put in its carefully measured words, the Holy Spirit had said much more abruptly three thousand years before – ‘The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God’.”  Thus, if someone does not know of God’s existence, it is because his reasoning is defective (or dormant); the inspired Psalmist is a bit more severe, at least to the one who articulates his unbelief:  he is a fool. 

      I cannot help but make note of this in regards to British biologist Richard Dawkins, an atheist who penned the famous The God Delusion.  Well, he was ably answered by an English Dominican in his rebuttal, God is No Delusion; and guess who ended up looking like, if not actually being, a fool?  For acknowledging God’s existence, Sheed points out, is not an act of sanctity; it’s an act of sanity.  And as his book unfolds, we begin to see that the more one knows of God, the saner he becomes, simply because this knowledge, growing knowledge, is the mind’s conforming itself to reality – a rare feat these days in many circles.

      Sheed is a delight to read, since he can, and does, touch on the most profound subjects and difficult arguments in a style the is easily graspable by those untrained in theology or philosophy.  His summary, for example, of the proof of God’s existence from an argument from contingency is straightforward and, without oversimplifying, far easier to understand than Aristotle’s or Aquinas’ version of it. 

      But the author makes a supremely important point toward the beginning of the book, a point he keeps mentioning all the way through, and that is that theology is good for the mind and the soul.  To study God, in this sense to seek to know Him as well as more about Him, is for the mind to swim in healthy and healthful waters.  There is first, though, to be overcome that late modern attitude among many Christians that knowledge of God is not really that important in the light of loving God.  Sheed responds, “It would be a strange God who could be loved better by being known less….  [L]ove of God is immeasurably more important than knowledge of God; but if a man loves God knowing a little about Him, he should love God more from knowing more about Him; for every new thing known about God is a new reason for loving Him.” 

      The vaunting of the imagination over the intellect is another modern tendency that Sheed deals with expertly.  He reminds the reader that people today almost always collapse into one the meanings of the words “unimaginable” and “inconceivable.”  This does untold damage in thinking about God, who is truly unimaginable, but not at all inconceivable, the former depending on images drawn from sense experience and the latter depending on arriving abstractly and logically at a concept, which is not an image.  “To complain,” continues Sheed, “that a spiritual thing is unimaginable would be like complaining that the air is invisible.”  But the nature of a spirit – even the existence of God, Infinite Spirit – is conceivable.   

      With all this preliminary tidying up of things done, the author launches the reader on an adventure of exploring the mysteries of our Faith.  He assures the reader that though “mysterious” these things are truly knowable, and that to an ever increasing depth and breadth, never completely and fully comprehensible, but enough, from the very beginning, that assures one that he is on the right track.  The exploration commences with a delving into who God is and what He is like, then takes up the theme of creation, and finishes with an examination of “Oneself”; the reader, then, sees himself in the light of God and of being a creature (something, someone created).

      As I’ve been reading this book, and as I have been speaking now for years with young people on the general subject of knowledge, it has repeatedly occurred to me that there is another significant modern hurdle to climb over.  Ever since Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes reduced the understanding of the nature of knowledge and the motive in pursuing it and finding it to the formula “knowledge is power,” we moderns have tended to dismiss philosophy and even theology as a kind of “ivory tower” hobby.  Such a pursuit, we have been led to believe, having no immediate and “practical” application, is a waste of time and energy.  Following in the pathway of the great philosophers, Sheed holds that since the mind is made for knowing, all things come under its purview, and that since – a la St. Thomas – “the slender [and so not as certain] knowledge of higher things is many times more valuable than the most certain knowledge of lower things,” this theological endeavor is eminently worthwhile. 

      In Frank Sheed’s book, then, the mind is put to its very best use, and, ultimately, to its most practical use, since to know God, as our Savior informed us, is indeed eternal life.  The reading of Theology and Sanity is mental exercise, a stretching of the brain muscles, and a stunning glimpse at Reality.  It shows how Christian theology is not only coherent, but also marvelously interesting…. at least to the mind that wants to know.