By Gary Topping–
No doubt many of our readers have seen the short film clip of the actor and activist Martin Sheen, who claims to have been arrested more than one hundred times. Sheen and some colleagues have handcuffed themselves to a chain link fence around a plant making nuclear weapons or something. By the time the police arrive to cut them loose and arrest them, quite a crowd has gathered. As they lead Sheen away, someone in the crowd calls out,
“Hey Mr. Sheen, are you a Communist”?
Sheen says, “Oh it’s much worse than that: I’m a Catholic.”
I’m a Catholic, too. And my friends can tell you that my positions on most social, political and economic issues are way out on the far left. As our fellow blogger Jean Hill can tell us—elaborately and eloquently—the Catholic Church has a long tradition, dating back at least as far as the Epistle of St. James, of advocacy for the poor, the helpless and the oppressed. It is a fundamental part of Catholicism.
But just call me, like Martin Sheen, a Catholic; don’t call me a Communist or a Socialist or a liberal. Those secular ideologies are based on what I regard as a misbegotten optimism, a faith in the perfectibility of both human nature and society. Catholicism, by contrast, is grounded in a profound realization of fallen human nature, a deep pessimism about the perfectibility of either human nature or society. “Failure stalks everything you do,” says the novelist Michael Chabon. As Catholics, we are obligated to expend our effort into programs and policies that have a chance of mitigating the lot of the poor, the helpless and the oppressed. But we have to beware of expecting much success.
Lately I’ve been reading a biography of J. R. R. Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings, by the Augustinian scholar Joseph Pearce. Tolkien, from a very early age, was a ferociously devout Catholic, and Pearce describes Tolkien’s Catholic pessimism very concisely. Tolkien, he says, “believed that human history, rooted in a fallen world, was doomed to become little more than a succession of defeats and disappointments, and that even victories carried the shadows of impending loss.” He goes on to quote another Tolkien scholar, Verlyn Flieger, to the effect that “a Christian acceptance of the Fall of Man leads inevitably to the idea that imperfection is the state of things in this world, and that human actions—however hopeful—cannot rise above imperfection.”
So in calling you to a life of pessimism, am I inviting you into a state of gloom leading to despair? Oh, quite the contrary! No, in two ways I am inviting you into a life of great happiness. In the first place, Catholicism, though pessimistic regarding man’s attempts to perfect himself and his world, actually points us to a wonderful cosmic optimism. Pearce, once again: “history is temporary, locked in time as much as it is rooted in the Fall, and is itself but a shadow of eternity. Beyond the defeats of history there is always the hope of eternal joy.” Further, as one of my teachers always loved to point out to us, pessimists are the happiest people in the world because they are always being pleasantly surprised when, once in a while, contrary to their expectations, things do come to a happy conclusion. Optimists, who always expect things to turn out well, are always being unpleasantly surprised when they so rarely do.
Welcome to the joys of Christian pessimism!
