Political Philosophy and Revelation

9. On Praise and Celebration

93 9. On Praise and Celebration For praise is given to virtue, since it makes us do fine actions, but celebrations are for successful achievement, either of body or of soul. Aristotle I • Ultimately, the end of the rational animal, as well as the end of liberal education, is nothing less than the capacity to praise and the incentive to celebrate what is. If we so choose, we can reasonably approach what Catholicism is about from the angle of the Fall, of original sin, of the dire consequences of both natural and human disasters. Such things abide and repeat themselves over the centuries. Much ideology arises out of the claim to be able to eradicate either natural or moral disasters. Yet they recur in most times and places, even under the best regimes, certainly under the worst. Any careful reading of Scripture, moreover, can be a sobering exercise, making us aware of the dark side of human existence. It is not something from which we should completely hide ourselves. We recall the chastisements of the Hebrews, the “Woe to you, Capharnaum” of the New Testament. We are not spared God’s warnings and His wrath, however much these are downplayed, ridiculed, or not even mentioned these days. No doubt, we must ask questions about the prevalence of evil in the world; about God’s, at times, seeming indifference to human fate; indeed about His anger over the deviant deeds of men. On the other hand, we do not want a determinist universe in which our deeds, good or bad, mean absolutely nothing and cannot be properly attributed to us. We can also read in Thucydides, or Augustine, or Machiavelli, or even in Aristotle and Aquinas for that matter, just how disordered huAn earlier version of this chapter was published online in Ignatius Insight, September 5, 2005. Epigraph is from Aristotle, Ethics, 1101b32–33. 94 Sufficient Understanding man life can be, not only at a personal level but also at a social and corporate level. Any reading of almost any major newspaper anywhere in the world during any day of the whole modern era would reveal, in spite of “enlightenment,” a steady diet of wars and rumors of war, of economic and natural disaster, of corruption, inefficiency, and downright degradation. No doubt glimmers of light exist, but no sober reading of the history of our race at any period or in any place or culture can ignore the more puzzling pessimistic side. Initially in this chapter, then, I emphasize that no part of the Catholic tradition denies or minimizes this distressing reality. We are warned to prepare for it, to expect it, to suffer under it, to see how we ourselves contribute to it, and indeed to see God’s providence in it. A naive utopianism that refuses to see these possibilities, that thinks that they can be totally and permanently eliminated by some rearrangement of property , family, or state is probably the most dangerous ideological background we can imagine. This overconfidence in human power causes more grief and sorrow to mankind than any other single view. Second, Catholic tradition also insists that this bleak picture is not the only side of reality, far from it. But this contrasting, more positive affirmation of ultimate human purpose is not to be seen as obscuring what happens in the history of our kind. The other side of this realistic approach, however, is to wonder about the happier aspect of things, about, as I like to say, “What is to be done when all else is done?” As we have seen earlier, Aristotle, in using a medical analogy, noted that the purpose of a doctor is defined by health, which the doctor does not himself create or define, but only restores or serves, according to what health already is. The last person we want to see when we are healthy is the doctor, qua doctor. Still, if we were not subject to accident or illness, we would not need doctors to assist in curing us. The more important question is not what is it to be healthy when we are sick, however admittedly important this question is. Once we are healthy, we want to know: What are the “activities” of health and of normalcy? Indeed, I would suggest, that it is perhaps more important to be right about what are these higher activities than it is to have an adequate understanding of evil, disaster, and pain, or even of what it is to be...