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It seems our world has contracted.
Locked in a seemingly surreal, collective house arrest we can no longer interact with loved ones, or only ‘virtually’, which is a poor substitute for the immediacy of bodily presence; travel is prohibited; socialising in pubs and restaurants has become a distant memory; health issues (sometimes life threatening) cannot be attended to; and within our homes our children make demands on our time that are both perfectly reasonable and yet impossible to meet if we still hope to get some work done.
And we are, of course, the lucky ones, for there are those ‘others’ who have to face lethal risks in caring for the sick, or even in commuting to work in over-crowded trains, where every encounter, every touch, every breath, may be a potential source of fatal infection.
I am aware that what follows is written from the perspective of one of the lucky ones; one of those whose life has been curtailed, undoubtedly, but who still has a job, and can get on with it from home. Let what follows not be a cause for offence; it is not a celebration of what is, undoubtedly, a very worrying and disturbing situation. Nonetheless, it seems to me that for at least some of us our present predicament opens up the possibility of cultivating a more contemplative outlook on things. The very contraction of our world may therefore be an opportunity for an expansion of our soul.
In the present context it may be useful draw on the Thoughts (Pensées) of the great French mathematician and religious thinker Blaise Pascal. I quote him with a sense of hesitation, as his words may come across as almost offensive in today’s context: ‘I have discovered that all the unhappiness of people arises from the fact that they cannot stay quietly in their own room. A person has enough to live on, if he knew how to stay with pleasure at home…’
To understand the sentiment Pascal expresses here I need to say a few words about his concept of ‘distractions’ (divertissements). As the word divertissement suggests, it refers to multiple diversions that scatter or distract the soul. (This scattering is the exact opposite of what spiritual authors used to call ‘a recollection of the soul’.) Distractions are the 1001 diversions with which we usually attempt to ‘fill’ the void at the bottom of our lives, such as attending a game of football, a concert, going on holiday, going to the gym,… Usually, we live from one distraction to the other (‘something to look forward to…’), with intermittent time perhaps being expended on ‘the job.’ Diversions keep us from standing still, from paying attention to reality (incl. others and ourselves), from facing up to profound questions about life and our finitude. They make life bearable and yet they entice us to live on the surface, which is why they are both a blessing and a curse. Pascal writes: ‘The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without this we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us and leads us unconsciously to death.’
In a post-Christian world there are two phenomena that we cannot relate to at all: suffering and death. Hence we prefer to ignore them (by pursuing distractions), we hide them away, or we attempt to master them (for better or for worse) through technological processes. The present crisis has eerily reminded us of our vulnerability to suffering and death. But it also discloses the void we always suspected was there but preferred not to acknowledge. In the midst of the weariness it creates it offers an opportunity for ‘reflecting upon ourselves’, become present to ourselves and others, and consider the searching questions that linger at the bottom of our existence.
Distraction also extends to our sense of temporality. Pascal notes that very few of us live in the present. Past and future offer their own (often imagined) pathways to potential happiness: the present is generally bothersome to us. If it is troubling, we conceal it from our sight (people who used to watch the daily news can no longer bear to do so) and even if it is joyful, we regret to see it pass away. Yet wandering into times which are not ours (i.e., past and future) is another manifestation of the escapism of distraction. Only the present is ours. Today’s crisis compels (or perhaps invites?) us to cease anticipating the future, for only uncertainty awaits. We can see it as an opportunity to attend to the reality of the present.
This is not to say that we should not hope. Christian hope is, however, different from mildly seasoned optimism, i.e., the expectation that in the end things will probably turn out alright. Christian hope is not so much characterised by a horizontal dynamic – i.e., toward some event in the future – but rather by a vertical one. It is the recognition that here and now, at this very moment, God’s mysterious power is at work and assists us in our journey from the nothingness out of which we have been created unto the ultimate fulfilment to which we are called. Christian hope therefore challenges two varieties of secular forms of hopelessness: both the presumption of naïve belief in a (pseudo)-scientific panacea (Trump’s hydroxychloroquine), which implicitly denies our finite, created status; or the paralysing sense of despair of those who have the courage to acknowledge our finitude but cannot discern, or dare to hope for, the divine mystery that is both present in, and awaits beyond, our present turmoil.
Professor Rik Van Nieuwenhove is Associate Professor of Medieval Thought in the Department of Theology and Religion, Durham University