...not to mention the tree
Saint Augustine and our Founding Fathers share more
in common than I at first thought.
Augustine says that the search for happiness is hard-wired into our nature.
Jefferson says that it is not merely our nature but our right.
Well-being and optimism should thus be the defaults of the human
situation. I believe this accounts for
the sense of grievance we feel—or at least I
feel—when life is intruded upon by oppression, hurtful accident, or sudden
medical emergency. All of us, surely,
face moments equally disturbing and clarifying in which we are forced to think
about such things.
It was a choice Ozark
morning in early summer, radiant but not yet hot. There was not a cloud in the sky. The only evidence that there had
been a light shower in the night was the sparkle from every bright leaf and
blade. I was fourteen or fifteen, and
my moral and physical being matched the brightness of the day I rushed out to
meet. What a great day to be alive! As I
hurried through the screen door I crushed down upon my head my well-worn straw
hat. What happened next began an
unresolved theodicy of seven decades. Theodicy, fancy word: “a defense of God's
goodness and omnipotence in view of the existence of evil.” I reeled before an explosive pain in my right
temple. I actually imagined I had been
shot. Quite unbeknownst to me my hat,
acting like a butterfly net, had caught a wasp between its leather sweatband
and my hairline. Never before nor since
has an insect bite been so dramatic. The
pain was not merely excruciating but nauseating. The right side of my head ballooned. Within minutes the right eye was swollen shut. Within an incomprehensible instant an
effervescent youthful optimism was overcome by a confusing agony. I was ill for three days.
It
would be nearly another decade, anyway sometime when I was at Oxford, that I
picked up Goethe’s spiritual autobiography, Truth
and Poetry. In 1755, when Goethe
was six years old, the major church festival of All Saints’ Day happened to
fall on a Sunday. For that reason the
heavy stone churches of Lisbon were more crowded than usual when about ten in
the morning the city was flattened by a monster earthquake—soon followed by a
tsunami and uncontrollable fires. The
loss of life was appalling. The impact
of this event on the European intelligentsia deserves a chapter in the history
of modern thought. Goethe, who was a genius, could already at the age of six
intellectualize the dilemma of the Enlightenment philosophes. “By treating the
just and the unjust in the same way, God had not behaved in the fatherly manner
that I had been attributing to him in my catechism,” he later wrote. “The
wise and learned people around me seemed to be unable to agree on the way in
which the phenomenon should be described….”
Of course the
“problem” was an ancient one, and it is beautifully treated in several ancient
texts. In those most familiar to me, the
Scriptures compiled by the Hebrew theologians and the poetry of the Greco-Roman
ancient world, there is a striking thematic convergence seized upon by the
earliest Christian humanists, those ancient ascetics, many of them unknown to
us even by name, to whom we are indebted for the preservation of practically
everything we have of “classical literature”.
According to the myth of the Fall in the book of Genesis God created our
race for immortal bliss in a magnificent garden. But human perfection required the freedom of
the will to choose moral imperfection.
That choice, proposed by the serpent, endorsed by Eve, and executed by
Adam “brought Death into the world, and all our woe, with loss of Eden”
(Milton). The actual cosmogony or
creation story is less central in Greco-Roman mythology—but the idea of a fall
from perfection, gradual, episodic, perhaps continuing to this very day—is
enshrined in the story of the violent ending of the Golden Age, effected
through the revolt of Jupiter against his father Saturn, and emblematized by
the birth of Venus, goddess of passionate desire.
Ovid and Virgil both
deal at some length with the sad implications of the end of the Age of
Gold. In the pastoral world of the Eclogues, in which shepherds and
goat-herds pursue their rustic amours and poetry slams, hidden dangers
abound. “You lads who gather flowers and
strawberries that grow in the earth,” says Damoetas, “fly hence! A cold
snake lurks in the grass.” To which
Menalcas adds: “Take care, my sheep, that you advance not too far; it is not
safe to trust to the bank.” In other
words, don’t go near the water.
Disaster intrudes
when least expected—and least comprehensible.
Proserpina (the Latin version of the Greek Persephone) is in a carefree
instant snatched down to hell. Avoid
that field of Enna “where Proserpin
gathering flowers / herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis / was gathered…” (Milton again). Our old folklore is full of tales of sudden
danger descending upon the innocent: the Babes in the Wood, Hansel and Gretel,
Little Red Riding-Hood. The Greeks had a
proverb: “Under every stone a scorpion”—as if to say “In every porch awning a
wasps’ nest.”
