Guilt Unreal and Real

Wilfred McClay's article "The Moral Economy of Guilt," notes a curious paradox in our world, the assertion by our therapeutic intellectuals of the unreality of guilt and its simultaneous infinite extensibility. It seems the more we try to suppress the guilt sense, the more it crops up in other guises. The guises McClay mentions are the cult of victimhood wherein we try to dissolve our sense of sin by cloaking ourselves in the innocence of the victim and scapegoating guilty perpetrators.

McClay nowhere mentions names, but his analysis rests on two counter-intellectuals, Philip Rieff and Rene Girard. So to elucidate McClay, it might be useful to consult these background figures.

Rieff coined the term "therapeutic" used by McClay in Rieff's book, The Triumph of the Therapeutic. There he described how the ideas of Freud were turned into quasi-religions by certain intellectuals in order to escape from "guilt," understood by Freud to be, as McClay mentioned, a purely psychological phenomenon, and without judgment as to whether guilty feelings "had any moral justification." p. 26. Guilt, for Freud, was ordained by the superego, which itself was founded in the irrational subconscious, not "the deposit of God's law written on the heart." Ibid. As a result, guilt came to be thought of as meaningless, unreal, and a feeling to be managed away through therapy.

McClay describes the Christian understanding of guilt and its necessary connection to sin. It would be good also to hear Rieff. Guilt, he says, is "shame of conscience." Sacred Order/ Social Order Vol.1, p.89. Of course, conscience is consciousness of sacred order, the knowledge of a law beyond and above our desire, which commands us to obey on pain of death of our very self.

Rieff quotes Nadezda Mandelstam in her book Hope Abandoned: "A sense of guilt is man's greatest asset." Rieff says, "True guilt is inseparable from an offense against interdictory demands called for by highest authority. Deaf to those calls, the self-mover may deny guilt and so lose consciousness of where -- and therefore, what -- he is." Ibid at p.144.

Our faith holds the same belief: "It is by the judgment of his conscience that man perceives and recognizes the prescriptions of the divine law." CCC 1778. "It is important for every person to be sufficiently present to himself in order to hear and follow the voice of his conscience. This requirement of interiority is all the more necessary as life often distracts us from any reflection, self-examination or introspection." Ibid. 1779.

In sum, to attend to and follow the voice of conscience is part of the debt, or guilt, we pay to live in the sacred order, to be properly human. As Rieff says, "Shame occurs to the fully human even at the possibility, let alone the inevitability, of giving offense to sacred order." p.144. Cf. Ps.19:13: "Cleanse me from my unknown faults!"

What happens when we lose a realistic sense of guilt, when guilt becomes unreal?