Socrates and the Cure

We’ve all heard of wise Socrates. Greek philosopher, Plato’s teacher, executed in 399 b.c, sometimes called the pagan Christ. His friends loved him dearly; students knew his virtue.

His enemies, on the other hand, thought he was a fool and a subversive. They made fun of him, warned their children to stay away from him, and eventually forced him to drink hemlock—all because he sought the truth, or perhaps more accurately, because of his persistence and the way he sought it.

He sought it with questions. Today we call it the Socratic Method, but it wasn’t a “method” for Socrates; it was no wily pre-calculated trick he used to make his interlocutors look stupid. It was merely a straightforward and sincere bunch of questions that Socrates asked as the conversation progressed. The sincerity and good faith of Socrates’ questions is evident in Plato’s works, which make it clear that Socrates was something like a child, asking earnest questions of men who were supposed to be smart in hopes of finding answers to the things that perplexed him. Like Zen that “just looks” or St. Therese who “just did,” Socrates was “just asking.”

But here was the problem: The questions struck deep, diving into long valleys of wisdom. The questions stumped the esteemed men of Athens, who were too concerned with their money and reputation to think about such things. As a result, they looked stupid. And people with power don’t like to look stupid. In today’s world, you end up losing your job if you do such a thing. In Socrates’ world, you ended up drinking hemlock.

In addition to being wise, Socrates was intensely unconcerned with himself. He just walked about, poor as dirt, contemplating and conversing, working just enough to live. In a way, his life resembles St. Therese’s Little Way. It was such a holy and virtuous way that the sixteenth-century Catholic humanist Erasmus was known to say, “Saint Socrates, pray for us!”

I don’t think I’m stretching it to say that Socrates is the earliest existentialist. And I’m discussing him because he is an excellent example of a fundamental fact: an unassuming existentialist personality is often found in wise people. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for instance, was one of the most-learned and wise men in history, but a simple man who never wanted any attention thrown on himself. There’s also the example of St. Therese; she had little education, but her Little Way was so jammed full of wisdom that she was subsequently declared a doctor of the Catholic Church. Great thinkers like Blaise Pascal, G.K. Chesterton, Etienne Gilson, Edith Stein, to name precious few, also had unassuming and self-effacing characteristics.

And there’s St. John Vianney, the Cure d’Ars, one of the most compelling pieces of evidence that wisdom tends to descend on the unassuming.

John Vianney

I think it’s safe to say that John Vianney was not an intelligent man and may have had an intellectual quotient lower than average. While a seminarian at age 19, the other students (adolescent boys) giggled at his intellectual inability and grew frustrated when he delayed lessons with his slowness. He couldn’t meet the intellectual requirements for becoming a priest, even though the requirements were relaxed at that time in order to alleviate a priest shortage following the Napoleanic Wars. He failed his examinations at major seminary and was asked to leave. Given another chance and a vigorous 3-month tutorial by a learned friend, he failed again. He finally passed, after being allowed to take the exam in special surroundings (a relaxed atmosphere, so he wouldn’t get too flustered).

But he was also a simple person. As a boy, he worked hard for his father with no thought—much less complaining—about the difficult labor. As a 19-year-old seminarian, John kneeled at the feet of a 12-year-old fellow student who became exasperated with him, and asked the boy to forgive his slowness. As a new parish priest, he declined the help of a household servant. As pastor, he showed little, if any, regard for his own well-being, opting to pray constantly for the salvation of his parishioners’ souls and listening to confessions for over eight hours a day. He left his parish only twice during his 29-year stint as pastor of Ars, and spent one of the stints caring for the souls of hundreds of pilgrims who found him as he tried to take a brief, well-merited break from his duties.

His simple self-effacement was combined with a penetrating wisdom (actually, if I’m right about this, his self-effacement resulted in a penetrating wisdom). This was apparent in his early years at the seminary, when, although he couldn’t articulate the lessons well, a teacher said his application of the lessons was superb. As Pastor at Ars, his constant teaching (he is known as the man who out-talked the Devil) converted a spiritually-moribund village into a sphere of piety. Today, he is widely quoted—his words are fetched by priests hoping to give insight and assembled by publishers hoping to sell wisdom.

He was able to pass along truths in words that the simplest person can understand—strong evidence of deep understanding. He did not, for instance, need a lengthy exegesis to explain the philosophy of death and justice (embodied in the Greek word Thanatos). He merely told listeners, “To die well we must live well.” He did not need to understand psychology to note that the “way to destroy bad habits is by watchfulness and by doing often those things which are the opposite to one’s besetting sins.” He did not need to study and read the Stoics, Plato and Aristotle to understand the oneness of virtue: “It is only the first step which is hard in the way of abnegation. When we are once fairly entered upon it, all goes smoothly; and when we have this virtue, we have every other.” He understood the principal of connaturality (which says that sin muddles thinking) so well that he could summarize it for his rowdy parishioners as “It is just those who have the least fear of God and his judgments in their hearts that have nothing but pleasure in their heads.” The examples of his simple wisdom could go on and on.

The reason for the combination of simplicity and wisdom is not easy to understand. It lies in a theological problem that starts with the book of Genesis. But the problem has an explanation and its explanation helps reveal the importance of spiritual existentialism.

The Theology of Existentialism

The book of Genesis tells us that this world is God’s creation. As a result, the world is related to God and, at some level, reflects Him, just as this book, at some level, reflects my personality. This world bears some likeness to God, or, to use the terminology of theologians, this world is “analogous” to God. This is especially true of humans, creatures made in His image.

It is crucial to understand that humans are analogous to God in their existence, not through their essences. Essences are characteristics that give form to a thing. If a person is described as six-feet tall, ill-tempered, quick-witted, and a good typist, his existence is not described at all; only his characteristics are described. It would be ridiculous to attribute these characteristics to God through analogy.

Moreover, our essences can cloud our existence to the extent their forms, like greed and ambition, emanate from excessive self-regard. A spiritual existentialist like John Vianney lives a life that strips away the forms. When a person stops thinking about himself—when he starts to just exist, to just look out—he sheds the various forms that gratify the self because he’s not thinking about himself. As a person sheds the forms and returns to the simple act of existence, he becomes more analogous to God, which—because God is the source of all things and the font of wisdom—tends to make the person wiser.

A radical spiritual existentialist like John Vianney who lives a daily life of simplicity tends to cultivate deep understanding because he lives a life as analogous to God as possible. That simple life inevitably issues forth in a stream of wisdom, regardless of earthly limitations or characteristics because wisdom issues from being, not characteristics. Raw intelligence becomes a secondary concern and wisdom can shine forth in an otherwise-unintelligent person.

At the Root of Existentialism

Satan successfully tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden with the prospect that, if they followed his advice, they would become like gods. Regardless of the actual device used by Satan—a fig or apple or whatever—the key is that they sought to add something to themselves in addition to the divine image that was implanted in them at creation. The crux of their sin was a violation of existence: They sought to change—deviate from, change, improve—the existence bestowed on them by God.

Before that first sin, man’s essences worked harmoniously with existence. Essences, in a sense, obeyed man’s highest attribute as a being who participates in God through the act of existence. The forms, endowed with perfect virtue, did not disrupt that participation, but rather furthered it.

But as a result of our first parents’ sin, we became fallen creatures with our goodness (our being as bestowed by God) splattered with a cancerous growth: excess essence. Excess essences, like the passions, became part of man’s make-up and were twisted together with the good and immutable essences implanted by God at creation—like the ability to love and to act virtuously. The new conglomeration of essences could no longer be counted upon to work harmoniously with existence. Sometimes the essences work harmoniously with our existence, as when we act virtuously, sometimes they disrupt existence, as when we indulge a sinful passion.

The Fall brought about another, related problem as well: Radical, primordial, incompleteness—an incompleteness that cuts to the core of our nature. With this incompleteness, we also have, unsurprisingly, a sense of our incompleteness (like a one-armed man is aware that he is physically incomplete) and an innate desire to get over the incompleteness (like a one-armed man has a tendency to visit prosthetic websites).

It’s because of this incompleteness that Aristotle began his book Metaphysics with the statement, “All men by nature desire to know.” Due to our innate ignorance (incompleteness), we have an innate desire (a primordial itch) for knowledge or understanding that will make us complete and quell the intuitive sense of anxiety that our incompleteness causes. The best way to scratch that primordial itch: wisdom. Wisdom is what all people want.

Consequently, if wisdom walks hand-in-hand with the act of existentialism, as it did in the lives of Socrates and St. John Vianney and many others, then we have a natural inclination to pursue existentialism and to live an existentialist kind of life. It’s what we want, whether or not we’re aware of it. It may not be the only thing we want, but it is the deepest and most solid desire in our human make-up.

And if this desire is smothered, then our highest, or deepest, desire is buried and we find ourselves living a repression. And in a repression, the thing repressed, once freed, jets out with great energy. This phenomenon—repression and release—is the reason existentialism has been so popular in modern times because modernity is full of excess essences that bury our natural inclination to existentialism.