“It’s our glory that we can rise to the dignity of despair.”

Last updated on: June 15, 2020 at 1:39 pm by Dan Peterson

“It’s our glory that we can rise to the dignity of despair.” 2020-06-15T13:39:50-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Sunset at Boston College, where Peter Kreeft teaches in the Department of Philosophy
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

Eric Metaxas, Life, God, and Other Small Topics: Conversations from Socrates in the City (New York: Plume/Penguin, 2011) includes, among others, a transcript of a 23 January 2003 New York City speech by the philosopher Peter Kreeft, of Boston College. One of the tasks that Professor Kreeft undertakes is to set forth six answers that have been given to the question of why we suffer. The passage below coheres nicely, I think, with the position for which I was recently arguing in a prior post here (“A hint from evil to God?”: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2020/06/a-hint-from-evil-to-god.html):

A second answer that comes from an older source, namely all the myths, just about all the myths of all the cultures of the world, is that something happened way back when before history. Things aren’t supposed to be like this. Once upon a time, Adam and Eve ate an apple. Once upon a time, Pandora opened a box. Once upon a time, the magic bird that was supposed to drop the magic berry of heavenly happiness into the mouth of primal man fell in love with himself and swallowed the berry.

There are various versions of the story, but it is astonishing how almost every culture has some myth of paradise lost. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s true, but it does mean that it’s in the collective unconscious, and to say that there’s no truth in it at all is to be a snob. This is my fundamental argument against atheism, by the way. If atheism is true, then the incredibly small minority of human beings — most of which are concentrated in our uprooted society — are the only ones who are wise, and everyone else is living their lives with a fundamental illusion at the center, exactly like Jimmy Stewart in Harvey. He believes in this thirteen-foot-high, invisible rabbit, even though he’s in his forties. That’s a pretty grim view of humanity. It doesn’t prove anything, but at least it ought to give you a bit of pause.

This universal myth that our present situation is unnatural seems to correspond to our present psychological data, that is, we all have a lover’s quarrel with the world. We can’t obey the advice of our pop psychologists to accept ourselves as we are and accept the world as it is. We just can’t do it, if we’re human. Animals can. There is a perfect ecological relationship between the animals’ instinctive desires and their environment. What they want they can get, but there is one thing we want that nobody in the world has ever gotten: complete happiness. It’s our glory that we can rise to the dignity of despair. Thus, a nihilistic existentialist like Nietzsche is nobler than a nice pop psychologist. He rises to this dignity of despair. (50-51)

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