a small note on despair
In my greater moments of despair, I see in front of me a world where reason is so obscured that the person, drifting in a moral abyss of sorts, cannot make their way out of the dark wood. For many, even, the possibility of being on the wrong side of right isn’t conceivable, nor are these even categories in which they necessarily conceive of their action, others, or their relation to the whole. Some use the language of ‘right’ to justify themselves, the last vestiges of a bygone era, but it functions only as a hollowed-out husk of moral imagination, an exercise in power, a technology for justification. They don’t actively or consciously deny the Truth or the existence of a ‘truth’ – to ask the question doesn’t even appear in their mind. What was for ages understood – all the while imperfectly exercised societally – as wrong, taboo, unnatural, obviously gross, and debased, is no longer. At an accelerated pace it seems new taboos are overturned, new natural limits are transgressed with the aid of technologies, and yet no popular backlash appears on the horizon. There is no consequential mass mobilization, protest, or counter-revolution. There is mere acceptance, manufactured assent to the rigid dogmas of an anarchical morality, and the new (im)moral order that is formed in its place. Society has largely lost the ability to be shocked by itself, it floats in this moral abyss, sometimes seizing, like a body whose soul has already departed yet its flesh has its final throes, from time to time gesturing towards the Truth that we are told is accessible to us by nature and inscribed in the hearts of all men, and yet straying further from God’s light. In such moments, I despair that it is the person has lost a link to the Truth. Detached and floating weightless. This isn’t to say that God has abandoned His creation – that, I pray, plead, and believe isn’t the case. But the person who has willingly thrown off the shackles of Truth, has now become a social order that is so manifestly separated from the good by ‘structures of sin’ that human nature is irreparably destroyed in this world. So obscured is the Truth in all this that reason cannot point to the good, much less cannot lead one back.
As severely un-Thomistic as this may sound, to my own admission, these worries I can hardly forestall when in conversation with the vast majority of people molded in the society we inhabit, inculcated by its laws, media, mass marketing, peers, entertainment, professional classes, and academe, all pushing in a constant direction of unsatiated ‘progress’ and transgression. The person is inundated from childhood with dopamine-laced messages and unrelenting pressures to become a rank utilitarian and hedonist. Every hit song, every film or TV show, through medicated sterilization beginning with doctor’s appointments in adolescence and then reinforced by peer effects in schools, a culture of obsessive achievement for its own sake, molding one to be the ideal consumer, the perfect ‘professional,’ all by design pushing and pulling away from the virtuous life. And even for those that manage to grasp in the intellect what is right against the odds, the will, ever weak, is pummeled by all that time and time again.
These, to me, seem like the ‘structures of sin’ that have become popular to speak of in recent pontificates. Pope John Paul II elucidated this in Sollicitudo rei socialis (36), “It is important to note therefore that a world … in which instead of interdependence and solidarity different forms of imperialism hold sway, can only be a world subject to structures of sin. The sum total of the negative factors working against a true awareness of the universal common good, and the need to further it, gives the impression of creating, in persons and institutions, an obstacle which is difficult to overcome.” For John Paul II, structures of sin are rooted in personal sins, that is to say, they have their ultimate source in an act, they are not entirely amorphous. He also seems to want to concretize it further, often applying it to specific institutional arrangements, nations, or governments. That’s true, of course, but what happens afterward, after these structures of sin percolate and corrupt and fester further? The tower of Babel continues to be built. The sense in which I fear structures of sin have become so endemic goes beyond simply institutional exercises of unjust action (and I suppose is partially connected to modern regimes more closely resembling what Bartolus described as a ‘monstrous’ regime, whose “core evil… is a kind of incoherence, a political chaos, in which there is no purposive rule of any kind.”) From that develops a deep and entrenched moral chaos, one that inevitably molds the citizen and makes the debased not just the norm but the instinct. Social sin here becomes something more than personal sin with social character on account of its repercussions (although it also remains that) because it enters into the weltanschauung – and it could not develop to the degree of normalcy it enjoys if not for structural forces (not speaking purely sociologically).
Despite my ostensible rejection of the symbiosis of faith and reason as the aids of the worldly pilgrim, echoes of my worry can be found in St. Thomas on the question of the effects of sin. He writes, “But since the inclination to the good of virtue is diminished in each individual on account of actual sin …through sin, the reason is obscured, especially in practical matters, the will hardened to evil, good actions become more difficult and concupiscence more impetuous” (ST I-II, q.85, a.3 co.). At the same time, in the previous two articles, St. Thomas grapples with the question of whether human nature can be diminished by sin – the answer is both yes and no, depending on the sense one means by nature, but human nature cannot be entirely diminished by sin. What that means for St. Thomas, is that the inclination to virtue continues to persist despite the wounding of human nature through sin, and for the Angelic Doctor that is an unchanging truth. Yet, in the third article, he stakes out a middle ground. Through sin, “reason is obscured,” “the will hardened,” “good actions become more difficult,” “concupiscence more impetuous.” Now, when these truths of human nature and sin are brought into the world of structures of sin, one may easily begin to imagine a spiral downward, sin perpetuated and abstracted further from its original and personal source, all the while continually fed, of course, but impetuousness becomes the rule for the vast majority.
Some of these vague thoughts lurked back while looking at Crivelli’s panel of Christ supported by two baby angels, once adorning the top of an altarpiece. I found myself enamored by the angel’s face. The profound sadness and exhaustion depicted, alongside the tenderness of the baby angel’s loving embrace… is the angel meant to be suffering with Christ? Or is he reflecting the pain of the mere human being, the crucifiers of Christ, after seeing what they have done? With the humanity and frailty of the image, the viewer cannot help but share the pain and the burden, and hopefully drop to their knees to beg for forgiveness, too.
And to avoid total scandal by the close of this, I ought to end with these lines from the Exsultet, for the reason that no matter whatever fleeting despair (a sin, too, I need to continually remind myself) the death of Death is found in the Resurrection.
By His perfect grace may we be saved and delivered to eternal life.
O certe necessarium Adae peccatum,
quod Christi morte deletum est!
O felix culpa,
quae talem ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem!