An Appearance of Satisfaction

(Anxiety by Eduard Wilking)

“Everything is happening as though we broke the implicit contract with God around two centuries ago and accepted the devil’s bargain. . . . Satan offered us power, the knowledge of good and evil, eternal happiness, on the condition that we renounce God. We renounced God, and the devil granted our wish. . . . But we are approaching the end of the agreement, and we are coming to understand that it was a fool’s contract. We possess everything, but we do not have God. We have power, but we have lost meaning. Our society [which] is oozing with anxiety. . . is going to disappear.”

~Xavier Emmanuelli

“The deepest root of this sorrow is the lack of any great hope and the unattainability of any great love: everything one can hope for is known, and all love becomes the disappointment of finiteness in a world whose monstrous surrogates are only a pitiful disguise for profound despair. And in this way the truth becomes ever more tangible that the sorrow of the world leads to death: it is only flirting with death, the ghastly business of playing with power and violence, that is still exciting enough to create an appearance of satisfaction. ‘If you eat it, you must die’…”

~Joseph Ratzinger