03 March 2025 AD
Feast Day of St Arthelais
Dear Godson,
Today is the Feast of St Arthelais. She was the daughter of a proconsul in Byzantium, who came to the unwanted attention of Emperor Justinian, who desired her beauty. To keep her vow of chastity, she fled to Italy, but was kidnapped by robbers along the way. The robbers intended to sell their captive for immoral purposes, but an angel slew her jailer and freed her, while the other robbers were seized by the devil. She reached her destination safely, and lived in prayer and piety thereafter, working many miracles, but perishing of illness at a young age. She is the patron saint of abductees and exiles.
A prayer to the patron of exiles is fitting as we turn to the question of mortal life here on earth, and the question of what purpose it serves to crave the heaven, a realm of endless joy.
The sensation of being exiles here on earth, as if we were meant for another realm, another reality, is uncanny but commonplace. Various psychological or evolutionary explanations can of course be invented to explain this, or to explain it away, if one wishes not to adopt the most obvious explanation, namely, that the sensation is found in us because it is true.
The uncanny feeling of being ill-fitted here below is the appropriate and sane reaction to the reality around us. Man feel like an exile on Earth because we are. We walk in the valley of the shadow of death, and dwell in a vale of sorrows. Earth feels like this is not our home because it is not.
I will not bother to list or dismiss other possible reasons why this uncanny sensation exists, except to say that all other explanations involve mistrusting one’s emotions. All other explanations assume the base state of man is neurosis, that is, emotions that are false-to-facts, misplaced from where they should go, or not reflecting reality. Theories based on an unproven yet presumed mistrust of one’s own thought process are somewhat self defeating.
CS Lewis, the foremost apologist of our age, agues that nature instills in the human heart no natural desire which admits of no satisfaction. Whether we are designed to fit our environment or evolved to fit it, an eyeless creature made for a world of eternal darkness, would not crave light, for the same reason an amoeba can suffer no sexual desire, or a snail crave wings to fly.
There are, of course, extravagant desires which cannot be met — what boy does not want to fly like Superman, for example? — but these are usually based on some natural desire, such as the simple animal joy of running and climbing and leaping freely.
Unlawful desires would be lawful if properly understood, properly directed at a proper object, in a due time and place, or due proportion. The lust of an adulterer would be proper if directed with due temperance and prudence toward his lawful wife. Even the vainglory of Lucifer, the darkest of sins, would have been lawful if kept in its natural form, as gratitude to his Creator for the gifts and glories bestowed on this bright angel at the his creation.
But, again, neither adulterous lust nor conjugal love exist in asexual creatures. Likewise, neither vainglory nor gratitude could exist in a world of solitary beings, where glory could not be given nor received.
The mere existence of a natural desire, even if in corrupted form, implies an uncorrupted form of satiation exists.
So the homesickness of man for heaven implies that something satisfies this desire, namely, heaven. Either that, or men are neurotic by nature.
Of these two theories, the first has the advantage that it does not call one’s own judgment into question. Once one doubts one’s judgment, judging anything becomes doubtful, including the soundness of one’s own doubts.
But even if we are not persuaded by the proof of Professor Lewis that the desire for heaven, if natural, implies heaven must exist, let us step back an examine the larger question of why desire itself exists and what the existence implies.
Desires, by definition, aim at an object of desire. An object of desire is a perceived good. Some objects are desired as instruments or intermediate end to achieve some further or final end; and some are desired in and of themselves, as a final end.
An unlawful or unhealthy desire is one where the passions and appetites are turned toward a false good, or the reason mistakes a lesser good for a greater.
A false good is one that does not keep its promises. If oblivion in wine promises to banish sorrow and woe, the promise is false. In the morning the woe will still be with you, now accompanied by a hangover.
If an orgy promises love, or feasting promises joy, or wealth promises security from uncertain tomorrows, or worldliness promises to quell all fear of hell by ignoring heavenly things; or if envy promises revenge, revenge promises satisfaction, and pride promises fame and worldly glory, all these promises are lures and snares, mere cheese in the rat-trap.
A true good is honest and faithful. If marriage to a good faithful wife through weal and woe, for better and worse, produces a happy home, the promise made by the infatuation with betrothed and bride has been kept, for infatuation has led to romance, to friendship, to love, to selfless love.
This is not to say that all such promises when seeking true goods can be kept. Fortune and misfortune, blind and cruel, have been given the tyranny of rule over mortal life on earth. But a false good is called false because it never leads to the good it promises, except, perhaps, in the most temporary and unsatisfying fashion. The nibble of cheese might have a savory taste just as the rat-trap snaps shut.
But please not that even when a false good deceives us, the passions and appetites are still aiming at an intermediate good allegedly leading to an ultimate good.
Intermediate goods are good because they aim at that which is ultimately good. Food is tasty because it is salutary, and aims at health. The nuptial joy of the marriage bed is good because it is an ecstasy, a foretaste of heaven, and which aims at the union of man and wife, the growth of family, and the reproduction of the race. Speech is good because it is the instrument of reason, the tool of poets, the weapon of statesmen, the vessel of wit, the ornament of friendship. Freedom is good because slavery is wretched. Friendship is good because exile is hard to bear, for camaraderie is found in sharing danger, and joys are found in sharing joys.
None of these things are necessarily good in and of themselves. At times, certain men are called upon to fast, to abstain, to be silent, to obey, and to retire to the hermit’s cell, seeking loneliness from men in order to find friendship with God. Hence an instrumental or intermediate good is a good only insofar as it acts to bring one closer to the ultimate good sought.
It may seem that all goods sought in life are vanity, since time robs all of all. Darkness, death, and oblivion eventually quench every ambition of man.
The greatest world conqueror of prehistory is forgotten now. The finest poet or most wise philosopher of ancient cities whose mute ruins might be found in jungles or deserts now has no glyph nor rune nor letter remain to testify to his works, for all are covered over with vines or drowned in sand. The glory of Nineveh and Tyre is gone. Ancient astrologers who reared the primordial monoliths at Stonehenge, of them no name remains, nor what primal gods or devils the honored there.
Such is the lot of moral man. And yet does this mean we should not feast when harvests are full, nor wed in spring, nor march to war when danger looms, nor dance when peacetime smiles. It does not mean we should not rear monuments to honor heroes, till the soil, hunt the game, sail the seas, climb untrod mountains, study scholars, tell tales, make jokes, unriddle the secrets of nature, ponder philosophy, rear cathedrals, write canticles. It does not mean we should not work, sleep, play, and pray. It does not mean we should not clean a mess, tutor a child, vow a crusade, cure the sick, or pet a cat. It does not mean we should not write a letter to a godson.
Some say we should do these things in gay defiance of the inevitability of death, like the dance band of the Titanic, playing music to the last, since trampling a woman or tossing a child overboard to steal a seat on the last lifeboat likewise proves vain in the end: everyone who survived the famous drowning of that great ship by now is dead.
Millvina Dean was 9 weeks old when the RMS Titanic sank in 1912. She was the last living survivor of the ship and died in 2009 at age 97. She is as now no whit less dead as Methuselah, who was 969 or Abel who was 122 at death, not to mention Lazarus or Dorcas, who died twice.
The problem with mere defiance of the inevitable is that, as said above, it puts one’s passions and emotions into a position adverse to reality. Reality is the enemy. A neurosis is when one’s thoughts and feelings are disproportionate to reality or unrelated. A psychosis is a total break with reality. To eat and drink and make merry on the eve of one’s death is ignoring reality, hence neurotic. To live as if one were immortal when one is mortal is a contradiction of reality, hence psychotic.
To live with stoic resolve, preparing for death but not fearing it, or to retreat into the nirvana of the mystics, eliminating all fear and pain by eliminating all desire and all selfhood, may be heroic attempts, and successful in part or whole, but, logically, if all human aims are vain, so are these. The desire to rid oneself of undue desires, as a stoic, or to rid oneself of oneself, as a mystic, as with all desires, aims at an intermediate good mean to lead, in this case, to philosophical resolve or mystical serenity, that is, to flee grief and find bliss.
There are only two option:
First is the option that some malign demiurge, pagan god, blind chaos, or cruel process of evolution implanted in the heart of the first human being desires and passions and a instinct to survive and reproduce. These emotions and instincts perhaps serve a temporary purpose, but always ultimately lead to empty failure. Personal death, the failure of a bloodline, the extinction of the race, the end of life on earth, is as inevitable and ineluctable as the final flicker of the last dying star. Eventually entropy, like a blind god with empty skull-grin, sits with iron scepter over a realm endless night, void of energy and motion, and all particles decay to primal nothingness. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
There is no ultimate good. The happiness at which all desires and passions aim does not exist.
Two is the option that all desires and passions are rightly ordered to aim at intermediate goods with aim at an ultimate good, and that this ultimate good does exist.
In order for this ultimate good to exist, and not prove vain in time, it must be immune from entropy. That it, is must be a mental or spiritual good that exists without dependency on any object limited by extension in space or duration in time. The ultimate good, by definition, must be infinite and eternal.
Also by definition, all lesser or instrumental or intermediate goods must lead to a greater good of which the ultimate good is the greatest. To be the ultimate good, it must be a good of which no greater good can be conceived.
Love is the greatest good there is, for one will suffer any evil, include shame and wounds and death, to preserve and aid that which one loves more than oneself. And a reciprocal love is greater than unreciprocated. To love a woman who love another is tragedy, or to love an concept or abstraction which cannot return one’s love is sad.
To love and be loved by one who lacks strength or lifespan or wisdom or benevolence is less than if the beloved lacked none of these things.
Therefore the ultimate good is to love and be loved by one who is infinite and eternal, omnipotent in strength, ancient of days, omniscient, and ultimate in goodness. Only a being who was ultimate in goodness can be the ultimate good.
And this all men know to be God.
Yours,
John Charles Justin-martyr Wright
