The Naked, the Violent, and the Mentally Ill

The great 20th-century existential psychologist Dr. Rollo Reese May, in his influential 1969 work Love and Will, argued that there are three manifestations of the diabolic: nudity; aggressiveness, violence, hate; and the schizophrenic mind, or split personalities. Curiously, these are precisely the qualities exhibited by the young man in the land of the Gerasenes as described in the Gospel of Mark (5:1-20): the possessed man is naked, he is kept in chains because of his violent proclivities, and he asserts, “my name is Legion; for we are many.”

This, at least, is Venerable Fulton J. Sheen’s analysis in On the Demonic, a new collection of essays, book chapters, and talks, compiled and edited by Fr. Dave Tomaszycki. The anthology contains an illuminating and profoundly relevant summation of the devil’s designs upon our souls.

“The fig leaf, that in Greek sculpture was over the secret parts of man and woman, is today put over the face. They don’t care who gives the exhilaration,” writes Sheen. That indictment seems especially germane to the exponential rise not only of pornography but AI-generated pornography, in which the faces are not even pixilated representations of real people but entirely imagined.

Sheen provocatively describes the sexual revolution and its aftermath as “the Copulation Explosion of a decaying civilization,” which, in its self-absorption, “deafens ears to the call of the Shepherd.” It is a harrowing depiction of our age, though the imagery is a little dated: though overwhelmed with sexual imagery, Americans today are having less sex, even while they are consuming more pornography. Perhaps we might call it the malaise of onanism.

Sheen takes the nudity connection further: “Nudity therefore is the affirmation that we must not have any artificiality about us.” Nudity isn’t just about sexuality but about the aspiration for authenticity, and our culture understands being “authentic” as repudiating norms of respect and reverence that once governed social interactions. We go out in public in clothes once deemed so informal we wouldn’t even wear them to dinner at home with our family.

Sheen even sees this paradigm at work in the tendency among many Catholic clerics to reject the collar and religious to disdain the habit, all out of a misplaced desire to “eliminate barriers.” Yet the casualization of dress, whether we are talking about soccer moms in yoga pants or Fathers in flip-flops, reflects a desacralization of both the natural and supernatural, obscuring if not eliminating boundaries created by God to communicate truths about both ourselves and God.

“An age of carnality is always an age of violence,” warns Sheen, turning to the second manifestation of the diabolic.

He who does not crucify his own concupiscences and his libidos will nail others to a cross. He who does not take up his own cross will lay it in contemptible self-righteousness upon the back of a neighbor.

Somewhere between a third to almost one-half of online pornography features violence, and research indicates that compulsive sexual behavior is associated with aggression and violence.

Again, Sheen is pointing us to a reality that is about more than only violence against others—remember, the Gerasene demoniac was “bruising himself with stones” [emphasis added]. Self-harm and suicidal ideation are on the rise, but one also sees this self-mutilation today in the number of American adults with at least one tattoo, which in a quarter-century has doubled. Nearly half of Americans between the ages 30 to 49 have a tattoo. And what is the modern tattoo, insightfully observes First Things editor Mark Bauerlein, but an exhibitionist demand to “look at me.”

It is curious that Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade”—at this point more of a “Me half-century”—so sinisterly unites narcissism and hedonism with brokenness and despair. An era of unprecedented focus on the self (e.g., “self-care”) and its needs and pleasures (e.g., the cult of fitness or “looksmaxxing”) has coincided with unprecedented levels of depression and mental illness. Ironically, the more we look at ourselves, the unhappier we become.

This brings us to the third diabolic trait, what Sheen defines as the “schizophrenic mentality” but which we might call the crisis of the self.Young people, he notes, bemoan that they don’t know who they are. “Faceless people” who feel “obliged to become noticed,” neatly summarizes our contemporary obsession with viral moments and influencer culture, in which everyone yearns for their celebrity moment, no matter how illusory.

Modern man is uncertain of his destiny. He is always afraid and he doubts whether there is anything at the top of the ladder. The result is dread. The result of that dread: sleeping tablets, opiates, constant search for pleasures—all these are attempts to suppress this awful, gnawing dread of nothingness.

Increasingly disassociated from the traditional sources of identity and self-grounding such as family, nation, and God, we struggle for new ways to find meaning and selfhood—not only via bespoke tattoos and carefully curated digital profiles and personas but even remaking or redefining what it means to be a man or woman. Foreshadowing the rise of transgenderism and other strange new sexual and gender identities, Sheen warns: “Today, we have a kind of ‘unisex’ culture that blurs the dividing lines between male and female.”

Rarely does one find such a concise, coherent précis of the satanic strategy and its deleterious effect on humanity, a demonstration both of Sheen’s incredible gifts of rhetoric and spiritual analysis as well as the unplumbable depths of Holy Scripture’s meaning. The devil aims to destroy us, and his methods and the results are the same in every generation: to profane or eliminate sacred barriers, be they natural or supernatural; to dupe us into thinking harming others or ourselves will bring satisfaction or clarity; and to deceive us into navel-gazing and self-obsession—which, counterintuitively, diminishes our ability to know ourselves.

Of course, to “know your enemy” is only half the story. We need a battle plan. Counterintuitive to modernity’s carnality and self-worship, the answer is one of humility and self-denial, recognizing it is we, not others, who must bend the knee and seek pardon. Rather than seeking the next sensual thrill, we must discipline ourselves and our desires through prayer and fasting. And we must find our identity not through self-discovery but by lifting our gaze out of ourselves and upward to the Divine.

Sheen urges us to employ the spiritual weapons of the name of Jesus (said through prayer and worship); the blood of Jesus (experienced, in particular, through the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist); and Mary, mother of Jesus, who is both our advocate and our model for sainthood. As much as our world writhes under the torments of the demonic, Sheen shows us we are not helpless. With God’s help, we can arm ourselves for the fight.