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TEACHING MOMENTS You may read more of my editorials and commentaries on this page, where I store old editorials with other material.
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Signs of the Times Editorial (06/07/2009) Of Retarded Pessimists and Tiny Saints I thought I would not return to Signs of the Times before July, but an unexpected opportunity presented itself, of which I’m happy to avail, to get in touch with you once again, Gentle Reader. A certain joke always hits my funny bone. It is this: “What is the difference between a pessimist and an optimist? A pessimist is an optimist, he is just very realistic.” Many clever versions of this joke run rampant among pessimists. It paints the optimist, implicitly, as a sort of ditz who has no grasp of what is honestly happening. But it would be a grave mistake to consider this humor as good philosophy. Nonetheless, pessimists are on to something. (Let’s get that out of the way before we provide a serious criticism of this spiritual state.) After all, the pessimist justly condemns those who giggle themselves to disaster. Or those who worry about the loss of Babylon’s wealth in the moment of the Second Coming. Yet pessimism can only be discerned as a defect of character, the defect of a man who is unrealistic about who he is, what the world is and where God is. The attraction of pessimism is that it contains, as we just hinted, a certain kernel of truth, like most lies. Yes, every lie contains a truth; for example, communism (today people soften it with the word “socialism”) is a lie, but it contains the truth that there is a common good, that one dimension of this common good is material wealth, and that the government of civil society has some role in procuring that common good. But many lies within communist socialism reveal its evil. So, what is the lie in pessimism? The easy answer is the wrong one. The easy answer would be this: “The pessimist says that everything will end catastrophically; but this is a lie, because it won’t be that bad.” Won’t it? Hmm. That refutation is a wrong one, because, in fact, everything may actually end in a catastrophe. “Katastrophe” is the best Greek word I could find, come to think of it, to describe the state of affairs of the Second Coming. But the refutation contains the same error as the assertion. Both the pessimist and the one who refutes him here fall into this fallacy: the assumption that they know, that they have it all figured out, that they have foreseen all ends. An important lesson of my entire life has been that I have never quite done anything that I planned. And whether I planned it or whether Providence brought me to it, those enterprises in which I found myself engaged were full of toil, humiliation and failure. (Don’t get me wrong: that’s no complaint, in fact, it just adds to the adventure of it all.) This has motivated me to seek meaning in it all; not subjective interpretation, but a grasp of God’s designs, and in light of that, make good decisions. But then I could find myself in the situation of Job, whom God rebuked, telling him to gird his loins like a man, and answer about where Job was when God made the foundations of the world. Job simply repented for having questioned God about the meaning of suffering, and that was seen as praiseworthy. Yet the question remains: why all this suffering? Is Job reduced to fatalism? Am I? My mind and heart resist this, because it is the way of animals, plants and rocks, for which all is a given, and they have no discernment or option. And to this question of the meaning of suffering, Job could not find any answer, because the Messiah, the Crucified Christ, had not yet come. OK, Christ has come. And what from that? He resolved suffering in salvation, yet for the evil suffering is destruction, much as a launch resolves in a landing, yet may fail by crashing. This poses a bigger canvas upon which the particular figure of my existence is painted. It is the whole that matters. Does man not matter, then, because he is an unimportant sketch in a huge canvass, because he is a blade of grass in a field, a leaf of a season destined to wither and fall and soon be forgotten, be replaced? If he were an animal, a plant or a rock, that would be the case. But it’s not that way. In man’s case, God causes free action: and that is as much a paradox as it is undeniable. How can we understand this? The following analogy may work: that God is writing the great Book of the Living, yet he leaves entire chapters for each man to write. (It must be a very, very big book!) By the very act of making man free, God makes man a co-author, a co-worker, a cooperator in all that is. Yet this puts me back at the very start: every time I try to write one page, something different, which I did not intend, usually gets written. Yet is this not the experience of every writer? He starts out with a general inspiration, a vague direction, a fuzzy sight, but after he chisels out the words on the page, he may be surprised at what he finds when he is done. Perhaps the characters in the story did something that surprised him. Perhaps the essay took a different turn. Perhaps an insight came to the historical narration. And what is this that happens? It’s that man is free in a real world, a world which is beyond his power to control. It is this inflexible, rigid, concrete wall against which existentialists cast themselves again and again until they destroy themselves. For man, and for me, to exercise his freedom perfectly requires, then, a profound grasp of realism to discern exactly which things are under the optative election of his own freedom, and which things are given, and still which things allow for a combination of both of these. For a saint, and for one who pursues holiness, to exercise his freedom with spiritual perfection requires, therefore, a profound grasp of faith, to discern exactly which things are under the meritorious deliberation of his own soul, and which things come from the Holy Spirit, and which things have elements of both and in which ways. Many souls forget this and enter into confusion and distress. They become bitter and angry because they don’t have it their way. They are not resigned to play the hand that is dealt them, but rather, they stomp their feet and protest because the hand they were dealt didn’t seem fair – sometimes only in the secret depths of their lonely, dark hearts. Busy about what others should be doing (according to their own minds, at least), they fail to have the mature realism to grasp that being such busybodies accomplishes nothing; for another man’s actions are beyond his control, and rarely even within the sphere of his own influence. Bitter men are not realists, they are simply proud. It is the pride of assuming they have foreseen all ends. Pessimists cannot deal with suffering, nor with failure, nor with sickness, nor with poverty, nor with humiliation, nor with death… experiences all of which form the bread and butter of the daily existence, I think, of most men ever in the course of history. Pessimists do not take risks, because they think they have all the ends figured out – at least those associated to the topic or project at hand – and what their calculations tell them is that it will all be a catastrophe. Therefore they do nothing, and criticize – or even undermine! – the risks that others do take. Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange describes souls who cast off the cross, at some point during their spiritual lives, as “retarded souls.” This is a very Latin use of “retarded,” as “tardere” is “to be slow,” and “re-” adds a particularly strong emphasis. They are very slow to progress, because progress without embracing the cross is practically impossible. He says that one of the key manifestations of their state of spiritual retardation is ridicule. For this reason, perhaps pessimists form a sub-category of retarded souls (hence the title of this article). So, Gentle Reader, if you are like me, wondering why everything you try seems to go amiss, then be of good cheer. It is merely evidence that something, indeed Someone, other than you is in control, and from His hands nothing is ever out of control. Just trust Him. That done, let’s both go back to the school of realism, and shirk off any temptation to throw in the towel. What things are within my reach? No matter how small you may think they are, they are those things which can make you a hero and a saint. This wisdom the Little Flower understood. OK, I think I won’t be back here until July… but who knows? Providence may supply another chance to post… † |
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