Not Unto Despair

EDMOND La B. CHERBONNIER

                I should like to develop further the suggestion made by Hugh Tigner, in the February 19th issue of Christianity and Crisis, that the current intellectual climate of consternation, panic, and dread, can scarcely be called unequivocally Christian. Though the major part of his article is devoted to pricking the bubble of shallow optimism about man and his world, he also cautions against a reaction to the opposite extreme—the kind of reaction which sometimes calls itself “Christian cynicism.”

            Though the apparent opposite of the obsolescent optimism which it replaces, this cult of pessimism nevertheless shares important characteristics with it. First, and most obviously, both schools present themselves as Christian. In the pages of this journal, for example, one now and again encounters the opinion that Christianity implies a “tragic view of life”— notwithstanding the claim of the whole New Testament that the otherwise tragic aspects of existence have been overcome. A self-styled “convert to neo-orthodoxy” recently assured me that biblical faith makes a virtue of despair. In the light of such statements, how ludicrous a figure Christians must present to the reflective secular eye: now riding the tidal wave of optimism, now wallowing in the slough of despond—ostensibly on the basis of biblical insights, or perhaps in response to the kairos, but in fact merely on the band wagon of popular spiritual fads, whether evolutionary or existential.

            In the second place, the source of this tendency to make a fetish out of hand-wringing, like its confident counterpart, can be traced to the romantic movement. To revel in the self-defeating character of human freedom as such, in the inevitable frustration of all action, in the meaninglessness of life itself— what is all this but a refurbished version of the old romantic Weltschmerz? To be in love with the abyss, to derive a certain titillation from brooding on the “shock of non-being,” to cultivate the “sickness unto death”—all this has direct affinities, not with anything biblical, but rather with the common human temptation to discover a perverse fascination in prophecies of unmitigated doom.

            A third characteristic shared by these two kinds of romanticism is that of irresponsibility. While the one shuts its eyes to the precarious existence of human goods under the assaults of evil, the other would suffer instant death from exposure to a single ray of hope. Too sophisticated ever to conceive of God as the guarantor of progress, it prefers rather to think of Him as emptiness itself, as in such statements as, “We can do nothing but wait for the void.” Is it seeing too much to detect in such assertions the counterpart of the same complacency which they are at pains to expose in the more naive optimism?

            It is said that the ability to hold the tragic view of life is a test of one’s courage. Only a minority will have the fortitude to stand the stark truth. But since when are despair and defeatism associated with courage? On the contrary: there can be no courage where the outcome is a simple foregone conclusion, whether that conclusion itself be happy or tragic. Courage first becomes a factor when the ultimate issue is a matter of faith and hope. However useful an apologetic tool the current revival of tragedy and despair may be, both as a reminder that Christianity offers no short cuts with which to by-pass evil, and as an indication of what life is apt to be like apart from Christianity, it must not be allowed to pose as a substitute for the gospel. In place of the “good news,” it preaches the courage to face the bad news—a brand of “courage” which really takes no risk at all. Rather, it has simply exchanged the certainty of progress for the certainty of futility. It dares not stake its life on mighty acts of God whereby all things are made new, and tragedy denied the final word. One looks in vain among its utterances for the joyous assurance with which the early church was emboldened to declare in the midst of turmoil, “We are indeed perplexed, but not unto despair.”

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Christianity and Crisis II, No. 5, 1952, pp. 38-9.