the New Pantagruel

On Beginning in Gladness

by James V. Schall, S. J.

The enjoyment of the Divine Comedy is a continuous process. If you get nothing out of it at first, you probably never will; but if from your first deciphering of it there comes now and then some direct shock of poetic intensity, nothing but laziness can deaden the desire for fuller and fuller knowledge. –T. S. Eliot¹

We poets in our youth begin in gladness…. –Wordsworth²

Through the sloth that is sin, man barricades himself against the challenge handed to him by his own dignity. He resists being a spiritual entity endowed with the power to make decisions; he simply does not want to be that for which God lifted him above all natural potentiality…. He who is in conflict with himself in his inmost dwelling, who consequently does not will to be what he fundamentally is anyway, cannot dwell with himself and cannot be at home with himself.” –Josef Pieper²

I.

n the three short citations with which I begin, I want to stress certain basic ideas that will govern these reflections on the basis of gladness, a topic that seems to me to deserve special attention. Somehow, the very sound of the word “gladness” gladdens us, makes us glad. It does not itself define for us that because of which gladness comes about in us. But it intimates to us that we are gladdened because of what is, because whatever is, is good. We are gladdened because of the existence of something that flourishes beyond our own reckoning and towards which we strive and direct ourselves in all that we do, or even think.

We suspect in the beginning, in other words, that what ultimately makes glad is not something we give ourselves, not something that is in our own powers of making or doing, even though there is a proper pleasure in our own proper activities. What causes gladness in us may be given to us, but we do not create it or cause it to come to be by ourselves. Even what we do presupposes a power “to do” that we do not give ourselves. Indeed, we are “glad” that we exist, all the while recognizing that this initial gladness itself points beyond itself to another, fuller gladness. “Grace upon grace,” as the Prologue of St. John states.

First of all, T. S. Eliot says that The Divine Comedy, that most concise description of our lot, is to be “enjoyed,” almost as if we may not know that we should enjoy it, or how, or why. He also implies, as the very title of Dante’s great poem – precisely a “divine comedy” – also indicates that there is a greater mystery in comedy than in tragedy. A greater mystery is found in joy than in sadness, a greater mystery in laughter than in tears, granted the mystery in both.⁴

Once we acquire a first-hand “taste” for this joy, we cannot let it go. It drives us not because it “forces” us but because it fascinates us. We seek because we are drawn. We seek, as Augustine says in his Confessions, because we are first sought. But we must seek, choose. We must be piqued, provoked, as it were, called to the attention of something that is not ourselves. Ubi amor, ibi oculus. Where there is love, that the eye beholds.

Dorothy Sayers once set down the principles underlying The Divine Comedy, underlying our lot in the world:

We must abandon any idea that we are the slaves of chance, or environment, or our subconscious; any vague notion that good and evil are merely relative terms, or that conduct and opinion do not really matter; any comfortable persuasion that, however shiftlessly we muddy through life, it will somehow or other all come right on the night. We must try to believe that man’s will is free, that he can consciously exercise choice, and his choice can be decisive to all eternity. For The Divine Comedy is precisely the drama of the soul’s choice.⁵

Nothing glad can be ours unless we both have the power to choose it for its own sake and, in fact, do choose it.

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