Is Catholicism Authoritarian?
Erich Fromm accuses many strands of the modern Christianity of being “authoritarian” rather than “humanistic.” An authoritarian religion depreciates the individual; it makes him weak, unloving, insignificant, even as it glorifies God. “The essential element in authoritarian religion and in the authoritarian religious experience is the surrender to a power transcending man. The main virtue of this type of religion is obedience, its cardinal sin is disobedience. … Submission to a powerful authority is one of the avenues by which man escapes from his feeling of aloneness and limitation. In the act of surrender he loses his independence and integrity as an individual…” (Critiques of God, 164) It is in this very act of adoring the infinite God that the human dependence and irrelevance are made manifest. “He projects the best he has onto God and thus impoverishes himself. … In worshipping God he tries to get in touch with that part of himself which he has lost through projection.” (172) This results in a man’s “alienation” from himself. Devotion to such a God is masochistic in nature, because the believer hates and despises himself in order the better to contrast the greatness of God with his own worthlessness. There is in him an “unconscious desire to be weak and powerless.” “We find furthermore that this masochistic tendency is usually accompanied by its very opposite, the tendency to rule and to dominate others…” (174)
“Humanistic” religion, on the other hand, is concerned with man’s own perfection, of power, knowledge, love and whatever else is required for happiness: “Inasmuch as humanistic religions are theistic, God is a symbol of man’s own powers which he tries to realize in his life, and is not a symbol of force and domination, having power over man.” (165) There is a difference between humility which results from knowledge of one’s own abilities and potentialities and “self-humiliation” of authoritarianism. “God is the image of man’s higher self, a symbol of what man potentially is or ought to become…” (172) There is a strand of process theism, in that “God needs man as much as man needs God” (171)
Alright, the first question I want to ask is, who psychoanalyzes the psychoanalyzers? Is Fromm an NT Rational rebelling against the SJ Guardians? His notions, though many, are not worth a penny. For example, in (ST, I, 6, 4) Aquinas writes that “everything is called good by reason of the similitude of the divine goodness belonging to it, which is formally its own goodness, whereby it is denominated good.” (italics added) So, all things possess goodness and are good in and of themselves; they are not, for example, modes of a pantheistic God. In (I, 90, 1) he writes that “Augustine mentions certain opinions which he calls ‘exceedingly and evidently perverse, and contrary to the Catholic Faith,’ among which the first is the opinion that ‘God made the soul not out of nothing, but from Himself.’” Aquinas repeatedly states that man’s task is to imitate God, e.g., “[c]onsequently both angel and man naturally seek their own good and perfection.” (I, 60, 3)
Those who say that Christianity (or Catholicism) is authoritarian fail to realize that insofar as it prescribes duties and virtues, it prescribes them according to the natural law: if or since, it says, you want to be happy, do this and that or be such and such. The Church cannot be accused of arbitrarily and incorrectly telling people how to live.
As Pope Benedict XVI said in an interview, “Christianity, Catholicism, isn’t a collection of prohibitions: it’s a positive option.”
Then there is the charge that submission to God entails a renunciation of a man’s dignity, rationality, individuality, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth. If indeed there is any submission, it means preferring the best good, which is the fullness of truth, beauty, etc. which is God to any temporal good. To be sure, winning against the flesh, the world, and the devil is difficult and can involve unpleasant experiences, such as penances. But the end is communion, righteousness, comprehension, and joy, precisely what Fromm prefers in a religion.
In other words, the case against Christianity from “psychoanalysis” is fully dismissed.