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
In 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.
Wordsworth tells us that, in our youth, “we begin in gladness” if we are poets. I would not limit such glad beginnings to poets alone. We speak of the “joy” that comes at the news that a child is born unto us. The very meaning of the sacrament of marriage affirms that each of us is, in principle, to be “conceived in gladness.” It is good that things exist apart from anything we might have to do with their essential reality. We are glad to participate in the reality of what we are, of what is. We say, “I am glad to see you,” or “I am glad you are alive,” or “I am glad you exist.”
But in a more sober sense, Josef Pieper reminds us, as did Dorothy Sayers, that we can be in conflict with ourselves.6 We can reject what we are, this good that we are. Indeed, we can choose not to know or develop what we are. We can fall into a kind of sloth that does not want to know the gladness in which we exist, not of ourselves. We want autonomy, so we tell ourselves. We want to “self-realize” ourselves, define by ourselves what it is to be ourselves. When we do define ourselves, we are annoyed because what we already are from nature does not originate in ourselves. From our very beginnings, we are a something, not a nothing. If we make ourselves to be what we are, we then logically want to make others what they are, otherwise our self-making is defeated by something not ourselves. We end up with ourselves. Lonely.
The liturgical refrain most often heard during the Easter season is the lovely, “This is the day the Lord hath made; let us rejoice and be glad, alleluia.” It is not, be it noted, the day we have made. Acts 2: 28 speaks of “the gladness of the risen Lord.” In Psalm 49 in the Book of Common Prayer we read, “Thou shalt make me hear of joy and gladness…” Christmas is associated with “glad tidings.” The St. Olaf College choir in Minnesota has an album entitled, “O Yule Full of Gladness.” William Dix’s 19th Century hymn refers to the Magi, “As with gladness, men of old, / Did the guiding star behold.” Shelley asks the skylark to “teach me half the gladness that thy brain must know…” George Eliot concludes, “so shall I join the choir invisible / whose music is the gladness of the world.” Psalm 100 tells us to “serve the Lord with gladness.” And Tennyson, in “In Memoriam,” speaks of “a solemn gladness” that crowns even Olivet. Oh, felix cupla.
Dictionaries indicate for us that gladness is “a condition of supreme well-being and good spirits, beatitude, blessedness, bliss, cheer, cheerfulness.” Like pleasure, it refers to the effect of what is good on us. Indeed, gladness is itself a pleasure, perhaps the highest pleasure. We notice the word gladness in all sorts of contexts. There is a “Gladness Band,” an “Oil of Gladness” shop that sells, what else, holy oils! The phrase “oil of gladness, itself seems to refer to the oleo exultationis” of Hebrews 1:9. We find in April a “Gladness Stakes” at the racetrack at Curragh in Ireland, a “Deep Gladness” motel in Texas, a William Gladness who once played basketball for the University of Indiana Hoosiers, but later for Le Basket Français. “Nights of Gladness” is a magnificent black/violet iris. Indeed, the beautiful iris itself is sometimes called the “gladdon.” Finally, and most absurdly, I saw reference in a British paper to “Reefer Gladness” which is not the name of a rugby player but describes the loosening up of English laws against marijuana.
Gladness obviously refers to something ultimate in all its uses. Psalm 4:7 reads, “Thou hast put gladness in my heart,” as if we could not put it there by ourselves even though it is really ours, really there. We hear sung, from time to time, the poignant, “Oh the days of the Kerry dancing; / Oh the ring of the pipers’ tunes; / Oh, for one of those hours of gladness; / Gone, alas, like our youth too soon.” One of those Hours of Gladness… Psalm 51: 8, asks us, “Do you have real gladness…?” We would certainly like to think so, or at least like to think that it is available to us. We know that what gladness we have is real while, at the same time, we suspect that all gladness itself points to a gladness we do not ‘till now possess, yet which we anticipate.
Obviously, gladness is a word of many contexts and overtones, of delight when we have it, of nostalgia, when we once had it, of sadness when we do not have it at all. Scripture alone contains literally hundreds of words or phrases that could be translated by the English word “gladness.” The Latin, Greek, and Hebrew words that translate into English as “gladness” vary – jocunditas, exultatio, gaudium, felicitas. The English word seems to come from an Icelandic word meaning “bright,” or a Latin word meaning “smooth.” But essentially gladness is always (like joy, its most frequent synonym) a blissful response to something that is given to us and which we now freely possess in response to what is given, with the added sense that it is really ours, really directed to us. We are not merely glad just to be glad, though there is nothing wrong with our reflective awareness of our delight in what is.
Indeed, I recall an old song with the refrain, “glad just to be sad thinking of you.” In fact, I looked the words of this song up on Google. The phrase, “glad just to be sad thinking of you,” is from “It Had to Be You,” of Gus Kahn and Isham Jones. Josef Pieper says that we cannot even be sad if we love nothing.5 The direction of our attention in gladness is outwards not inwards; the gladness is surely ours without being selfish. The whole experience of gladness needs to be one experience. When present, gladness also looks inwards. Indeed, this is its primary emphasis. We are glad to have what is good and to know that we have it in the only proper manner in which we can have it.
Near the beginning of his Apology, Socrates has to explain why he seems such an odd character in Athens, going around conversing with and even bothering everyone and anyone who would listen to examine his soul. Socrates explains that a young man by the name of Chaerephon had once gone to Delphi to inquire who was the wisest man in Greece. He returned with the astonishing news that Socrates himself was this “wisest man,” something that was news to Socrates. But being the curious man that he was, and not believing that the Oracle could be wholly wrong, Socrates decided to see if there was any truth in the Oracle’s affirmation about himself. Yet he could not be sure without further examination of those popularly said to be wise. Watching Socrates in this enterprise were the young potential philosophers, the sons of the Athenian citizens who were accusing him, accusing him of, among other things, corrupting these same youth. These same youth had not yet decided how they were to live – the only thing that Socrates thought worthwhile to decide.
This affirmation of the Oracle is the beginning of Socrates’ famous philosophic vocation. He begins to question those who are said to be wise, only to find out that they knew nothing, at least nothing of the important things. They vainly thought that by knowing one thing they knew everything. Socrates, for his part, modestly claims that he himself knows “little or nothing,” a claim that always seems a little disingenuous to us on first hearing it. But since he knows at least this fact about himself, he is wiser than those who think they know something but do not. Socrates next attempts to puzzle out what the Oracle must have meant, as he did not think it would err. He knew that his quizzing the local gentry had made him “unpopular,” if not hated.
The folks who listened to Socrates while he embarrassed the local wise men naturally held that he must have known the wisdom that he found lacking in others. But this was not the case. Finally, for his own comfort, he is incited to explain his own opinion of what the Oracle must have been getting at:
What is probable, gentlemen, is that in fact the god is wise and that his oracular response [that Socrates was the wisest man in Greece] meant that human wisdom is worth little or nothing, and that when he says that this man, Socrates, he is using my name as an example, as if he said, “This man among you, mortals, is wisest who, like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is worthless.”
Thus, in this fundamental document of our culture, we already have the idea that human wisdom itself is worth, as Socrates quaintly puts it, “little or nothing.”
Later on in the Laws, Socrates will further explain that he did not mean to deny human wisdom of any worth, but merely that, by comparison to knowledge of the seriousness of God, all human life and wisdom are relatively insignificant and unserious (803b-c). It is to these divine things that Aristotle would later tell us to devote our attention as much as we could and not to the human things of politics and economics (Ethics, X, 7).
When we “moderns” hear such words we are often uncomprehending, even scandalized. We still hear the ringing accusations of, say, a Marx or of his ancient source, the Epicureans, who charge that the world is so disordered because believers and philosophers waste their precious time and money on worthless practices connected with what they call worship or devotion to the divine. What they need to do is redirect their energies to this world, to the pressing needs of mankind, to “serious” things like economics and politics. Atheism alone is humanism.
Socrates’ “atheism” consisted in not believing in the gods of the City. And he too did not like the idea of buying off the gods with gifts and votive offerings. The whole of modernity, it seems, has been one long effort to proclaim that man’s only serious concern is with himself, with his “human estate.” He must “lower his standards” from the “highest things.”
Even religious people today seem to talk of little but poverty and want and their need to address them. Though probably a minority opinion, I sometimes think that there can be a kind of “atheism” lurking behind such a concentration on this worldly cares on the part of religious people, especially Christians. It is a kind of desperate escapism from what revelation clearly tells us is our primary concern. Much modern ideology, liberal, Marxist, and even conservative, ends up by divinizing the poor as the main motive for addressing the poor.
Someone might observe, moreover, that the notion of “the unseriousness of human affairs” is a perfectly good Greek or Platonic idea, but hardly a Christian idea. Chesterton observed that Christian revelation has a peculiar impact on classical ethical and metaphysical philosophy. In this light, I want to suggest that the effect of revelation is to stress both the importance of God as Trinity and to stress the importance of the world. Or to put it another way, if someone wants to change the world, he best not change his idea of God, particularly if he has the right idea of God. This is how Chesterton put it: “Let beliefs fade fast and frequently, if you wish institutions to remain the same. The more the life of the mind is unhinged, the more the machinery of matter will be left to itself…. As long as your vision of heaven is always changing, the vision of earth will be exactly the same. No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized.”6 We ought not to be interested in changing the world just for the sake of changing it. We ought to change it only if we can make it better as world, and more importantly, only if our changes contribute to the ends for which we exist in the first place. The first change in the world, as Plato hinted, is always a change in ourselves.
In Charles N. R. McCoy’s book, The Structure of Political Thought, we can find a passage, commenting on Augustine, that I have always found essential in understanding the relation between the worship of God and its relation to the affairs of men. We are told in Scripture to seek first the Kingdom of God, then, and only then, “all these things” will be added unto us. We are also told by Dostoevski that in the end men will want only bread, only this world, not God. McCoy understood that
For St. Augustine, then, social justice should receive its initial movement from the most final of causes, eternal beatitude, the just distribution of temporal goods making us proportionately like God, “the most just Dispenser … of all the adjuncts of [temporal peace] – the visible light, the breathable air, the potable water, and all the other necessaries of meat, drink, and clothing.” This is the root of Christian social justice.7I take this passage to mean that Christianity is not indifferent to what are called social goods or even a good life, quite the opposite.
But neither Plato nor Aristotle would have doubted that human beings needed some material well-being. The mystery of the classics, in McCoy’s view, was not their understanding of the goal but the lack of a proper motivation to achieve it. And that motivation only came with the proper understanding of man’s relation to God through the Incarnation and Redemption. Christian worship provided a proper way to address “God alone” in the Memorial of the Sacrifice that was to come in commemoration. It was also seeing that the eternal importance and destiny of each person lead back to what Augustine emphasized in the order of social justice.
The “unseriousness” of human affairs, moreover, refers not merely to the fact that only God is serious, but to the fact that we are created in the un-necessity of God. The kind of being we are need not exist in the sense that God did not need anything but Himself for his own happiness or completion. This lack of need is, in one sense, what the doctrine of the Trinity is about. There is no loneliness in God, something the Greeks could not anticipate and about which they worried. But in the highest things, whether we be rich or poor, philosophers or ordinary folks, our very presence before the Lord in worship is best described, again to cite Josef Pieper, not as something serious, though it is, but as something “festive.” Once we know the sort of act in which the Lord is made present among us, we can only be festive, we can only be joyful, we can only be, yes, glad.
In the end, what we long to see has been made known to us. St. Paul said in Athens that the unknown God is made known to us. We see Linus and Charlie Brown leaning on a stone wall. Both have puzzled looks on their faces as if they were pondering something really big. Both stare directly ahead. Linus remarks, “If we understand something, we usually aren’t so afraid…” In the next scene Linus, still concerned but perked up a bit, continues, “I think we all fear the unknown.” Charlie continues to stare straight ahead, with his head on his hands, elbows on the stone wall. In the third scene, Linus turns directly to Charlie to ask, “Don’t you think so?” In the last sketch, Linus, with a sort of hopeless look on his face as if he knows something wishy-washy is coming, hears Charlie answer these most universal of questions – “do we fear if we understand?” “don’t we all fear the unknown?” – with his pathetic “I don’t know.”8
John Paul II’s whole life was a reminder of how many times we read in Scripture that we are to “fear not,” “not to be afraid.” The unknown God now makes Himself known, and we are glad of it. Socrates is right that the philosopher knows little or nothing. Charlie Brown is right, of ourselves we probably would fear if all we knew is what we concoct ourselves. Everyone does fear the unknown. The “beginning of gladness” arrives when we need no longer to say “I don’t know” when we are asked about our response to the seriousness of God.
Plato answered this question of what we do before God by saying that we are to “sing, dance, and sacrifice.” Give or take a few clarifications, this is about what revelation also tells us. We can rejoice and be glad because our doctrines are not dull. They teach us that there is indeed something to be glad about. We are, from the beginning, if we choose, or even if we don’t, intended for gladness. It is precisely “in gladness” in which we are to serve the Lord and one another.
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