O Wise One,
There’s an old story about a man, Leontius, who found himself walking one day through the rough part of Athens. At the harbor on the outskirts of town lay the corpses of executed convicts. They sickened Leontius, but all the same...they fascinated him, too. In the end his own eyes demanded to look, so that he screamed at them in a frenzy as he stopped and stared: “there, you wretches, a fine spectacle—have your fill!”
Plato tells this story in his Republic. His student, Aristotle, wondered years later why we go to the theater to watch plays full of suffering and gore. He observed that even “images of obscene beasts and dead bodies, painful in themselves to see, delight us when represented with minute fidelity.” It answers a desire at the core of our humanity, one that Aristotle put in unforgettable terms elsewhere: “all mankind by nature reaches out to know.”
We reach out to know the world. We long for it—all of it, gruesome as it can be. There’s even beauty in the knowing. This is the sorrowful wisdom of the artists who see, as you wrote, “the beauty in everything, good and bad, sanctified, chaotic and unholy.”
It’s possible to imagine a world that doesn’t ache so deeply, an uncomplicated world with no injustice and no pain. But the hardest teaching is that if such a world existed, we wouldn’t be in it. The Christian story goes that the archetypal man, endowed with free will and “sufficient to have stood,” chose instead this vale of torment. Not only are we descended from that man but, to paraphrase the ladies of Chicago: if we’da been there, if we’da seen it, you betcha we would have done the same.
Here, as near as I can tell it, is the Gospel: God chose the world of woe over the world of perfection, because it’s the world with us in it. He wanted us around—you and me—so badly that he took all the obscene beasts and disfigured corpses he knew we would bring with us into his creation.
It’s almost too much heartache to accept. In our opening essay on this site we mentioned Ivan, the tormented Brother Karamazov of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece. The saddest thing Ivan says in that novel is to his saintly brother Alyosha: “It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.” Ivan doesn’t want divine love if it comes on these unbearable terms.
And isn’t the impulse to look away—to deny that such a twisted world can possibly be beautiful, to scrub it clean of all its blemishes and call that good—just another way of handing back your ticket to life? The tracks run right through the darkness, it’s true. But they stretch on into the only eternity great enough to swallow up death forever. Straight is the path; there is no other.
Love,
Spencer
Image: Petar Milošević, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
‘Ivan was shouting. "I tell you, novice, that absurdities are all too necessary on earth. The world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen. We know what we know!"
"What do you know?"
"I don't understand anything," Ivan went on as if in delirium, "and I no longer want to understand anything. I want to stick to the fact. I made up my mind long ago not to understand. If I wanted to understand something, I would immediately have to betray the fact, but I've made up my mind to stick to the fact ..."
"Why are you testing me?" Alyosha exclaimed with a rueful strain. "Will you finally tell me?"
"Of course I'll tell you, that's just what I've been leading up to. You are dear to me, I don't want to let you slip, and I won't give you up to your Zosima."’
You have brought me to tears. Straight is the path.