fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Suffering, sanctity, vision

Via Andrew Sullivan, this observation from  Jonathan McCalmont’s critical appraisal of the film Melancholia: When happiness became the end point of human existence, pain and suffering took on an altogether different character. Under Christianity, pain and suffering had been tangible proof of God’s promise that the meek would inherit the Earth and that worldly happiness […]

Via Andrew Sullivan, this observation from  Jonathan McCalmont’s critical appraisal of the film Melancholia:

When happiness became the end point of human existence, pain and suffering took on an altogether different character. Under Christianity, pain and suffering had been tangible proof of God’s promise that the meek would inherit the Earth and that worldly happiness is only fleeting when compared to the infinite joy of union with the Godhead. Under the grand ideologies of the Enlightenment’s children, pain and suffering were things to be extinguished either by revolution (surgery) or by reform (chemotherapy). Now our culture no longer sees misery as divine, it sees it as something to be eradicated and avoided at all costs. Every advert screams promises of material and sensory happiness while bookshops explode with self-help guides designed to help you kick the sadness habit. Films, food, books and even sex are commodified, packaged and sold to us as means to greater and more intense forms of happiness. Even the miseries of work become vehicles for happiness as we are encouraged to work harder for bigger rewards and grander promotions. You must have a career. You must be successful. You must be happy. And if you can’t be happy by your own means then the multi billion-dollar neuropharmacology industry stands poised to offer you deliverance. You have no choice… you must comply.

Yes, the oppression of compulsive happiness. The book to read, of course, is Philip Rieff’s “The Triumph of the Therapeutic,” which diagnoses a world in which the achievement of happiness is the point of all existence. (Buy the book via the ISI Press site, and it’s only $14.40). There is perhaps no surer way to be unhappy than to make happiness the absolute telos of one’s life. Anyway, I love cello music and rainy days and autumn and winter. Just so you know.

My sister’s attitude toward the cancer that killed her was both inspirational and mysterious. People couldn’t believe how upbeat she was through the ordeal. Well, “upbeat” is not the right word; it sounds too girlish and glib. Ruthie said flat-out that she hoped for the best, and was willing to submit to whatever therapies her oncologist though would give her a chance at life, no matter how onerous the chemo would be. And she did. But she also always maintained that whatever happened to her was God’s will, and that He had a plan for her. That is to say, her suffering was never meaningless, not to her. She refused either to be angry at God, or to think of herself as a victim of cosmic injustice. She was not fatalistic — if she had been, she wouldn’t have endured all that gruesome chemotherapy — but she did have a peace about her that came from accepting that she might not live, and that that was okay too, because God Had A Plan.

But here’s the thing: she never dwelled on the prospect of death. She just didn’t. She told me more than once that she felt that meditating on death, on the prospect of her non-existence, would be pointless at best, and at worst would tip her into depression, and sap her will to resist. Personally, I have philosophical objections to that, and see it as a kind of denial, but then again, I wasn’t the one who was faced with a painful death, and leaving behind a husband and three children. I don’t think I could have resisted thinking and meditating at length on my own death, and the Meaning Of It All — this, even though I would have known by faith that God had a plan. I can’t imagine taking the path that Ruthie took — the path of pushing meditation on death to the margins of my consciousness by force of will — but I can’t fault her for taking that path. She knew what she needed to do to survive, or at least to make the days she had left full of joy and gratitude, not melancholy. It’s a hard thing for me to draw into focus, though. Was she so serene because she was genuinely at peace with her mortality? Or was she so serene because she was so terrified of it that she refused to look at it, lest it shatter her resolve to live her last months as she thought she should?

Is there a difference? How can you tell?

Next, this from the Jesuit priest Francis X. Clooney’s remarks about the film:

I suppose the theme is an old one: Justine is in tune with a reality others do not see, from which they hide themselves; she was depressed because reality is depressing; she felt, before knowing why, that the ordinary life of wealth and pleasure and business, partying and marrying, had no point at all, since everything was about to change, absolutely. By ordinary standards, Justine is simply clinically depressed. In a larger perspective, in light of what actually happens, she is right. She has seen what no one else can see.

The point of this tale? I do not have anything useful to say about depression or astronomy or the end of the world, but wish to make another kind of point. I suggest that there is a sensitivity to unseen realities that utterly, radically changes the way some people live, and that makes them seem weird — odd, marginal, useless, a bother — to those who have no inkling of what they feel or see. We need to take this intuition, invisible as it may be, into account, when we judge one another.

Perhaps the subtle intuition of what no one else can see or feel is what the saints are about; they live by a sense of God, the living God, that no one else sees, feels, notices. What is just words to others, is a burning mark on their souls.

True. This is a big reason why I feel deeply, and in a way I struggle to articulate persuasively, why the idea of IQ is misleading and even dangerous. In our scientistic age, we privilege science as a way of knowing above all others, which leads us to esteem cognitive ability and raw intellectual capacity most of all. But where does this leave the artist, the saint, the seer, the intuitive genius? IQ doesn’t measure moral worth, I know, but we tend to value people by what they know, and by what they can do and produce with their knowledge. St. Silouan, an Athonite monk, was one of the great religious geniuses of the 20th century, but he was a barely literate peasant. What would his IQ be? I know someone who was told by a psychologist his IQ was so high it couldn’t be measured. This guy can talk in the stratosphere about intellectual matters, but he struggles with everyday things, and from what I’ve been able to see, is pretty well emotionally crippled. Conversely, I know an author whom I used to think was incredibly intelligent in a conventional way, until I realized after some time that she was off-the-charts in intuitive (emotional) intelligence. I thought her profound analytical insights were something that came to her because of education and systematic thought, but it’s not true; this stuff came to her naturally, through her extreme intuition. And yet, the results were the same. I suspect she wouldn’t have be much above average if given an IQ test. She sees what not too many other people can see, or at least can’t see without a lot of training.

This is not really to the point, but I thought I’d mention it anyway. In New York this past weekend, we were talking with our friends about an old Catholic priest we all knew when we were back in Brooklyn. We shared stories about how Monsignor S. often exhibited deep insights, including things he couldn’t have possibly known. I learned things I hadn’t known about him. One of our group talked about how when she would go to confession to him, he would bring up things she needed to confess that she hadn’t thought to mention. He just somehow knew. Someone else at the table mentioned a time a recently ordained friend from out of town came to mass with them, dressed in street clothes, and how Monsignor S., who had never laid eyes on him before, spoke to the young man by name after mass, and asked why he didn’t concelebrate with him. Those may be small things, but I remember being told by an immigrant from the old country, where Monsignor had served in a parish there, that one night in a war when the parish came under bombardment, Monsignor opened the church in the middle of the bombardment, and remained at the altar, praying for the safety of the parish. When the bombing stopped, said this immigrant, not a single bomb had fallen in the parish, though they had fallen all around it. It was uncanny, he said.

You’d never know any of this to talk to Monsignor. He was, and I guess still is, very modest and humble. He just smiles and says God bless you. But that man knows things. He’s onto something. I have no idea if he is brilliant, if he is of average intelligence, or any of that. But I do know that that man knows things that the rest of us don’t.

Ever see the Russian movie Ostrov (The Island)? Take a look at the trailer.  It’s an amazing film about a holy fool, a familiar type in Orthodox Christianity (also present in the West, but more prominent in the East). Holy fools are saints who appear to be fools, or who perhaps really are mentally unbalanced, but who are believed to touched with the divine, and to have extraordinary prophetic insights because of that. In the film, at least for a while, you can’t be quite sure whether the central character is crazy, or saintly, or both. But he sees things others don’t, and as the film goes on, those who seek his counsel are humbled by what the fool reveals to them.

The point I want to make here is not that a fool is on the same cognitive level as an astrophysicist or an evolutionary biologist. The point is that we should judge knowledge not by the standards of academic knowledge, and scientific knowledge, but rather as someone who understands reality. It is much more difficult to judge by that standard. Some of the most obviously intelligent people I’ve ever known are, in some respects, fools, and not holy fools either. One of the most consistent messages of the Hebrew Bible, and on into the Christian Bible, is how God mocks the proud. I just finished reading the story of David to my younger children, and showed them how God, through his Prophet Samuel, brought the last son of Jesse out of the fields and into kingship. You see this over and over in the Bible, I pointed out. Think of Joseph and his brothers. And think, obviously, of Jesus of Nazareth. He must have sounded like a crazy person to most people of his time and place. And yet, Christians believe He was God incarnate.

Question: Are there any happy-go-lucky saints? Any great artists who are thoroughgoing optimists? I can’t see that.

Finally — aren’t you sorry you started reading this rambling post? — I commend to your attention Jody Bottum’s essay on the great pessimist E.M. Cioran, from a 2009 issue of First Things, especially this passage:

The difference between Pascal and Cioran cannot be reduced to a question of rhetoric, outbidding each other on whose thought allows the greater suffering and thereby shows more clearly the core of existence. Cioran remains Pascal’s greatest reader, and he strives throughout his work to account for Pascal—in a way that is possible only for someone whose sensibility is fundamentally religious, despite his antireligious demeanor. Cioran’s quarrel with Christianity is not that it is false but that it attempts to cancel the fear of death by the “abstract construct” of salvation.

Still, he admired Christian religion for at least recognizing the abyss. Much worse is philosophy, which is, he wrote, “the art of masking inner torment.” Death is particular to each of us, and the philosophers are wrong when they think that anyone can teach someone else how to die. “The irrevocability of agony is experienced by each individual alone, through infinite and intense suffering. . . . Only such moments of agony bring about important existential revelations in consciousness. . . . Most people are unaware of the slow agony within themselves. . . . Since agony unfolds in time, temporality is a condition not only of creativity but also for death.” Even if all philosophical questions were answered, we would still experience anxiety: “Nobody in despair suffers from ‘problems,’ but from his inner torment and fire.”

I would have loved to see what Cioran would have done with Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It would have been like a wolverine setting upon a cocktail wiener. Here, to circle back to the beginning of this post, is the opening of Cioran’s book about the saints. As Bottum says, Cioran was an unbeliever (though the son of a Romanian Orthodox priest), but he had a deeply religious consciousness:

As I searched for the origin of tears, I thought of the saints. Could they be the source of tears’ bitter light? Who can tell? To be sure, tears are their trace. Tears did not enter this world through the saints but without them we never would have known that we cry because we long for a lost paradise. Show me a single tear swallowed up by the earth! No, by paths unknown to us, they all go upwards. Pain comes before tears. But the saints rehabilitated them.

Saints cannot be known. Only when we awaken the tears sleeping in our depths and know through them, do we come to know how someone could renounce being a man.

… The difference between mystics and saints is that the former stop at an inner vision, while the latter put it into practice.

Advertisement

Comments

Want to join the conversation?

Subscribe for as little as $5/mo to start commenting on Rod’s blog.

Join Now