Sunday Night Journal — August 14, 2011
Some months ago in a Sunday Night Journal I talked about the melancholy person’s view of this world as being substantially correct, in that we must ultimately lose everything:
The melancholic doesn’t celebrate the seasons so much as accept them, knowing that each brings its pleasures but that none of those will last. He prepares himself to let each one go even as it arrives. And he does this with everything in life. …
…he will no longer give his heart to a lover who has betrayed him more than once and will certainly do so again.
(The entire post can be found here.) A couple of the comments that followed made me realize that I had left some important things out of this reflection. In particular, someone quoted C.S. Lewis:
Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he has not. We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the suffering inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armor. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.
I’ve been meaning to get back to this topic. “He will no longer give his heart” was not the best way of putting it; what I really wanted to say is that he will no longer trust the world; he will no longer give his weight to it as a boy climbing a tree gives his weight to the next branch that seems to be sound. I didn’t mean that he will no longer love, but that he will not have illusions about the permanence of what he loves.
In fact I’ve always been troubled by the conventional spiritual counsel against loving the things of this world. When I say “conventional” I don’t mean that it’s false or shallow, but that it is widely given (though not nearly so widely accepted). I don’t have any specific examples ready to hand, but certainly any Catholic has encountered it, and there is plenty of support for it in the words of Jesus himself.
I love the things of this world very much indeed, and am troubled in both my conscience and my intellect by the thought that I should not. The problem for conscience is obvious; the problem for intellect is that I don’t know how one is to love at all without loving the things of this world. We know, of course, that we are to love each other. But as a matter of practical psychology I at least am unable to love people without also loving a great many other things, because the wellsprings of both loves are the same, having their source in delight. I don’t mean here the sort of distant benevolence, or even (somewhat paradoxically) compassion, that one might have for people whom one does not know personally. I mean a kind of love that at its best encompasses both the most mundane and the most exalted response to the other, with the mundane being the simple pleasure of seeing and knowing, of liking. I try to love in the proper degree: I don’t love my books nearly as much as I love my children, and although I often think of my little bit of bay shore as a woman, I don’t love her nearly as much as I love my wife.
I think we must distinguish between appreciation and possession. The love for a passing sight can be our model—the love for something we can see but cannot possess, not because we aren’t allowed to but because possession is impossible. One of the things I love most is a moonlit night: I love the moonlight on the water and the shadows made by moonlight shining through trees. I don’t just mean that I love them in the sense that they give me pleasure. It’s somewhat more than that. It’s sensual pleasure first, but it also includes something like admiration, and reverence, and affection, and a great deal of gratitude. You might argue that what I am really reacting to is the beauty of God in these things, that they are pointing to God, and that it is he whom I should love instead. And that’s more or less true, except that I would say “more” rather than “instead.” I also love these things in themselves, and for themselves, for what they are. And I really don’t think there’s anything amiss in that. The essential thing is to keep things in their proper rank, and not to let appreciation turn into the desire to possess. In this case the latter is relatively easy, because I cannot possess these visions. I can’t even capture them with a camera, though someone with the right equipment and skill might be able to. And anyway a picture is not the same: it may be a useful memorial of the thing itself, or a thing of beauty in its own right, but it isn’t the thing and can’t give me the same experience.
C. S. Lewis has a great illustration of this principle in Perelandra. The floating islands on which the King and Queen live are sources of great pleasure which the Queen receives gladly (if you’ve read the book, you know we see little of the King). But it has never occurred to the Queen to try to stay on one island, and have continual access to its particular beauties. There is fixed land on the planet, but the King and Queen are forbidden to stay there, lest they begin to think that they have more control over the world than they do. I wrote about this some years ago, so I won’t repeat myself—the piece is here.
Something like that should be our model; at least that’s the way I resolve the difficulty. I’m not sure how much this resembles the Buddhist concept of non-attachment, but I think it’s more passionate. It’s vastly easier said than done, of course, especially when there is at least the promise of holding on to the thing we love, or of repeating the experience whenever we like. Surely this is part of the reason why it is difficult for a rich man to be saved.
I confess that I can’t accept the thought that the things of this world are lost forever when time takes them away from us. If I really believed that they were, I would be…well, I started to say I would be tempted to despair, but that’s overstating it, I hope; suffice to say I would be greatly disheartened.
I suppose this means that I’m not where I should be spiritually. But I can’t see God, or conceive of him in any very definite way. The Lewis quote above alludes to I John 4:20: “…for whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.” I admit my love is more eros than agape, but I hope that’s all right. I’ll continue my monthly assignations with Lady Moonlight, though I know she can never be mine.
Light On Dark Water 
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