The Hope Toward Which We Are Driven
What is it we are wanting, anyway, when we want our best life now?
We are poised to enter the Season of Hope.
Hope is a kind of stretching forth of the spirit into the future.
Hope comes down to an expectation of “more than what is effectively attainable at any given time, or more than is promised by political or economic realities.”[1]
Yes. But what is it that we are expecting in the future? What is it that we are hoping for?
Simply: an escape from slavery.
Slavery?
Listen now to Bishop Barron, as he meditates on the Canticle of Zechariah (Luke 1:67-79):
“The God of Israel, Zechariah prays, ‘has come to his people to set them free.’ This is what God always wants to do. He hates the fact that we’ve become enslaved by sin and fear, and accordingly, he wants to liberate us. The central event of the Old Testament is liberation from slavery. We are, as sinners, enslaved to our pride, our envy, our anger, our appetites, our greed, our lust—all of which wrap us up and keep us from being the people that we want to be.”[2]
Our enslavement to sin and fear keeps us “from being the people that we want to be.” And so, our hope is in a “mighty Savior,” a great warrior, who will free us from this enslavement. This warrior, of course, is Christ, the descendent (as Bishop Barron observes) from the house of Israel’s greatest soldier, David.
This is the secret and deepest meaning of the often rich, often misguided, conversation in today’s “personal development space.”
Of course we have a sense that something is keeping us from being the people that we want to be.
Of course we desire, desire fervently, a kind of liberation—so as to grow, so as to become the best version of ourselves.
But do we understand the nature of our own desires?
“We do not know what we would really like; we do not know this ‘true life’; and yet we know that there must be something we do not know towards which we feel driven.”[3]
The Chinese Handcuffs of Our Desires
This much, however, seems clear. We want (1) greater control over things; (2) a greater impact upon the world; and (3) expansion of our creativity.[4]
Yes. Yes! All well and good.
But what is it that really brings us this control, impact, and creativity? The exercise of our own powers? Yes, to a certain extent. We cannot remain quiet in our servitude. We must act. We must struggle to become free. To become great.
Yet we must also realize that control, impact, and creativity are not treasures that we alone can concoct. If our hope is only in our own natural abilities, our “free” use of them will inevitably become, in Walker Percy’s memorable image, like a pair of Chinese handcuffs, locking us more tightly into our servitude with every desperate effort to escape.
Our natural abilities, in other words, are part of the problem. In one sense they are our captors, not our liberators. For left to themselves, our natural abilities lead us ever deeper into sin and fear, usually in the form of a rather banal egoism marching under the banner of “progress.”
The Shallows and the Hope of Depth
I’m a big fan of Cal Newport’s work on the “deep life,” even to the point of incorporating his books into my courses and recommending them to my kids. So Good They Can’t Ignore You (to which I am especially indebted in this post), Deep Work, and Digital Minimalism, along with Newport’s podcast, Deep Questions, are absolute musts for anyone seeking to escape the “shallows,” or what one might call the servitude, of our technological age.
The desire for personal development, for a deep life, is a form of hope. And Newport’s work is valuable because it offers us ways to attain more than what is effectively attainable in our present condition and circumstances.
Yet when we zoom out, we must acknowledge that Newport’s approach to the deep life is radically incomplete. It is a merely instrumental or technocratic approach to depth, one that offers people certain tools needed to pursue depth, but without ever inquiring into the real source of depth in human lives.
No doubt, the strategies Newport discusses, such as deep work, deliberate practice, slow productivity, and deep leisure, are important for any adequate approach to a deep life, and I have no intention of stopping learning about them and incorporating them into my own life.
But without being informed by an understanding of what is truly worthy of our hope, Newport’s strategies lack satisfying content and direction. Nietzsche, no doubt, spent many hours in deep work. But is what motivated that work—a grotesque understanding of personal development—what we want in a deep life? Is it the Übermensch that we hope for?
My point is not that Newport advocates Nietzschean will-to-power. My point is that his tools and strategies lack direction toward the Good—a source of greatness that transcends and calls forth our frail natural abilities.
“Man was created for greatness—for God himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched. ‘By delaying [his gift], God strengthens our desire; through desire he enlarges our soul, and by expanding it he increases its capacity [for receiving him].’”[5]
Newport does not speak about God. He does not speak about the Good. He (more or less, within the limits of his strategic advice) leaves it up to his audience to decide what is good for them. Which is to say, he leaves them to the servitude of their preferences and desires. This is what the technocratic approach does. It “politely” keeps its mouth shut, at least in public, about the question Socrates thought the most important question of all: how should one live?
Such an approach cannot lead to genuine personal development.
It cannot lead to a hope that abides, to an escape from the slavery of the shallows.[6]
The True Art of Living Deeply
What Newport does not offer his audience, in brief, is a philosophy, and it is impossible for me to understand what a “deep” life could be without that practice which, from the cradle of ancient Greece to our own day, has been honored as the very art of deep living.
I am well aware that philosophy is, for many today, only an arcane and forbidding academic discipline. But this is a distortion. In its origins, philosophy was the art of living well, of living wisely, of living the best and most fulfilling life. In the West, Socrates was the first personal development guru.
One can find on ancient sarcophagi images of Christ as philosopher, holding the Gospel in one hand and the philosopher’s traveling staff in the other. Christ was seen as the ultimate wise man who promises the definitive truth about ourselves, and who serves as the Way toward greatness and fulfillment in a life that transcends death.[7]
Beauty as Personal Development
So: Christ is the Warrior-Philosopher who frees us from the servitude of sin and fear. He does this through his grace, through the exercise of his supreme Control, Impact, and Creativity.
We access his grace, above all, through the Sacraments, but also in the silence of our prayerful conversation with him, and in the magnanimous, that is “great,” actions dedicated to the service of him and his people.
We are attracted to Christ and to the workings of his grace by their beauty. The ancient Greek word for beauty literally means a “calling.” Beauty’s beckoning, its attractiveness, calls us out of ourselves, out of our servitude, out of the shallows, into the depth and richness of a Good that is infinite.
Sub-created beauty (as J.R.R. Tolkien called it), the beauty fashioned by human artists, is an imitation of the Divine Control, Impact, and Creativity. At its best, it, too, calls us out of ourselves and our servitude, toward the hope of a Good that genuinely and everlastingly satisfies.
Pace Ted Gioia, beauty is not “in the eye of the beholder” in the sense that “the locus of power in determining beauty” resides in the “onlooker.” This kind of crude subjectivism simply gets us back to fiddling with our Chinese handcuffs. St. Thomas Aquinas refers to the beautiful as id quod visum placet, as “that which, being seen, pleases.” But in no way does Aquinas mean by this that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” in a subjectivist sense. He is speaking, rather, of something beyond our natural abilities, beyond our natural likes and dislikes, that arrests us with pleasure, and so calls us out of ourselves, when we behold it.
Gioia makes his remark in a recent essay on his Substack, an essay entitled “The Most Dangerous Thing in Culture Right Now is Beauty.” I am sympathetic to his cultural thesis, if not to his relativistic definition of beauty. Beauty is indeed the most dangerous thing in culture, in that it is, as Gioia argues, that which most ably escapes manipulation by the decadent institutions of our Technopoly.
Championing Beauty
First and foremost I champion the ideal of beauty outlined above through my own sub-creative work. The Comic Muse serves that same ideal in a supplemental sense. It is dedicated to a fresh blossoming of artistic beauty in our technocratic age by way of contemplating philosophically how beauty functions as a kind of personal development by calling us toward a life of authentic growth, fulfillment, happiness.
In the winter-spring of 2024, I aim to focus my writing here on The Comic Muse even more tightly on the nature and role of artistic beauty in personal and cultural renewal.
Sounds nice, but what does it mean? How does artistic beauty relate to personal and cultural renewal?
By affording us the opportunity to contemplate the beauty of the authentically good life.
Works of artistic beauty show us, in their various ways, “picturings” of the quest for human happiness, and in “chewing” on these picturings in our minds and in our hearts we effectively inquire into what happiness truly means.
And in so inquiring, we continue to grow in our efforts toward our best life.
I develop the argument for this unfashionable thesis in my forthcoming book, Beauty & Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts, which will be released in June 2024 by Word on Fire Academic.
But I will continue to develop it in my writing here on The Comic Muse. And given that I will be teaching at Christendom College this upcoming spring semester my undergraduate elective on the Philosophy of Art & Beauty, this will help me more efficiently coordinate my thinking, my teaching, and my scholarly and Substack writing.
I thank you so very much for joining me here on The Comic Muse. And I hope you will come along with me on this next stage of the adventure!
I also hope you will consider supporting my work, in either one or both of two ways:
1. By taking out a paid subscription to The Comic Muse (now $5 per month or $80 annually).
2. By sharing The Comic Muse with a friend.
In 2024 more of my posts here on The Comic Muse will be offered behind the paywall, as I want to honor the value of the time, effort, and expertise I put into this project. So now is the time to become a paid subscriber so as not to miss a post!
I also hope you will consider supporting my artistic work by purchasing my novel, The Good Death of Kate Montclair. One of the latest 5-Star Amazon Reviews of the book had this to say:
“It is difficult to explain just how Daniel McInerny does it. In a mere several hundred pages, he grants us colorful characters, entrancing landscapes, and captivating history and achieves it through beguiling conversation, pregnant pauses, and gallows wit. The Good Death of Kate Montclair grapples with enduring faith and nagging unbelief, personal autonomy and the greater common good, the ache of sacrifice and the intoxication of self-assertion. We've all read novels that attempt too much and fail gloriously. In The Good Death of Kate Montclair, McInerny, in fact, achieves far more than he aimed for—a novel with panache and interiority, a work of faith and ideology, a story suffused with fallibility and redemption. Don't waste time with the narratives pretending to plumb the depths of what it means to be human in the modern world. Spend time with a novel featuring gritty humanity grappling with matters of the divine. Spend time reading The Good Death of Kate Montclair.”
Or, you might enjoy one or more of the books in my humorous Kingdom of Patria series for middle grade readers. Find out more about Patria here.
In any event, know that all subscribers, whether paid or not, will receive, compliments of the chef, my soon-to-be-released short story, “Pursuit Among the Ruins,” a prequel of sorts to The Good Death of Kate Montclair.
Meanwhile, please accept all my best wishes and prayers for a most blessed and fruitful Christmas Season, our Season of Hope. May you experience the full joy of liberation by that Warrior-Philosopher-Child who has come to rescue us!
Daniel
[1] I quote here from Pope Benedict XVI’s 2007 encyclical, Spe Salvi (Saved by Hope), no. 35 (p. 73 in my Ignatius Press edition).
[2] This is from Bishop Barron’s Advent Reflection for Saturday, December 23, 2023, on the Word on Fire website.
[3] Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, no. 11 (pp. 32-33 of the Ignatius Press edition).
[4] These are the three traits of deeply satisfying work as discussed by Cal Newport in So Good They Can’t Ignore You (London: Piatkus, 2016).
[5] Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, no. 33 (p.p. 68-69 of the Ignatius Press edition). Benedict quotes a homily from St. Augustine on the First Letter of John.
[6] In his most recent piece for The New Yorker, “It’s Time to Dismantle the Technopoly,” Cal Newport draws upon an author I often quote here at The Comic Muse, Neil Postman, specifically Postman’s book, Technopoly. Newport’s thesis is that he sees signs in our culture of Technopoly, i.e. the tyranny of technology, breaking up. Would that it were true! But despite the welcome developments Newport talks about, the real breaking up of our Technopoly would require a deep theological and philosophical transformation.
[7] This theme is developed by Benedict XVI at Spe Salvi, no. 6.
Looking forward to your soon-to-be-released book on beauty and the arts. As someone teaching myself to oil paint, the search for the beautiful always undergirds my every effort.
So excited to read more from you on beauty in the new year, Daniel!