The way of desire

“It is certainly clear that the Summa Theologica can only be the work of a heart fundamentally at peace.”¹ So begin Josef Pieper’s stunning reflections on St. Thomas, which dive beneath the pristine surface of the latter’s scholastic Latin—so completely free of self-referentiality—to see the living, breathing, loving man beneath. Pieper’s Thomas is “a man of tall and erect bearing, at once strong and sensitive; with a mighty and commanding forehead, his skin gleaming like golden wheat, his face shining with a radiance that was never extinguished.” Unfazed by the combative ruckus of university life, Thomas could be glimpsed gliding through the hushed cloisters of the monastery in the still hours of the day, totally absorbed by thoughts of God. Those who knew him “testified that Thomas loved peace… He was a lover of poverty and his heart was entirely directed toward the divine.”²

Out of the oceanic peace of his heart flowed Thomas’s doctrine of creation, which for Pieper is “das im Sagen Ungesagte, the unexpressed in what is expressed” in all of Thomas’s writings. Everything that exists is either Creator or creature, and therefore, everything that exists is good. Natura possesses an inviolable order, integrity, and goodness precisely insofar as it is creatura. This exuberant affirmation of finite reality, which constitutes Thomas’s special insight, gives him a place of eminence in the history of Christian thought. Pieper notes carefully that Augustine’s theology, by contrast, “falls more easily into the danger of being construed or, rather, mis-construed in the sense of a de-actualization and de-valuation of the visible reality of creation.”³

From here the reader might leap to familiar caricatures. St. Thomas, locked in his cloister, is the rigid theorist of Nature and its Laws who overlooks the devastation wrought by original sin; St. Augustine is the gloomy pessimist who gained back his soul from concupiscence and jettisoned Nature and the World in the process. But, as Pieper forcefully argues, this is not the true Thomas—and neither is this the true Augustine.

Maybe these two saints illuminate two different ways of being in the world: the way of contemplation and the way of desire. Those who walk on the way of contemplation see the beauty and order of the world and the smallness of their place in it. They know the world does not exist as “an udder to feed our supreme selves,” so they can behold and receive it with equanimity.⁴ They are people “fundamentally at peace.” Those who are not fit for this path, who know only the way of desire, are not so easily contented; the world presents itself to them less as a harmonious order to be contemplated and more as a kaleidoscope of enchantments, dazzling and elusive. Sojourners on the path of desire yearn to possess all the goods of the world, or rather to be wholly, permanently, and intimately united with them. It follows that they are well acquainted with anxiety, with sorrow, with a heart torn and divided.

Pieper relates a telling anecdote from Thomas’s youth. His brothers, to dissuade him from becoming a Dominican, sent a female courtesan to his room to tempt him. Having overcome the temptation—after a fierce struggle—Thomas fell asleep before waking with a scream. “The scream was caused by an exceedingly painful operation. An angel had girdled him tightly with a cincture in order to make him inviolable against all future temptation to impurity.”⁵ Perhaps we should not congratulate Thomas too much for his serenity, seeing that he was the beneficiary of divine intervention. The author of the Summa, we must not forget, was secured at the tender age of twenty against concupiscence and (to take some creative license) against every aching and burning desire whose consummation lies outside the constraints—ethical, practical, or existential—that define our lives.

Augustine was not so fortunate. Well into adulthood, he floundered in a “cauldron of illicit loves,” afflicted by the torments of unsanctified desire:

I sought an object for my love; I was in love with love, and I hated safety and a path free of snares… I therefore polluted the spring water of friendship with the filth of concupiscence… I rushed headlong into love, by which I was longing to be captured. ‘My God, my mercy’ (Ps. 58:18) in your goodness you mixed in much vinegar with that sweetness. My love was returned and in secret I attained the joy that enchains. I was glad to be in bondage, tied with troublesome chains, with the result that I was flogged with the red-hot irons of jealousy, suspicion, fear, anger, and contention.⁶

For this loving saint, conversion did not mean the attainment of peace, even if it freed him from a life of lust and cleared his eyes to see “the splendour of the providential order” more truly.⁷ Augustine’s insight is that the more deeply a man longs for holiness, “the more abundant is his weeping when he prays.”⁸ The context is a reflection on the day when the City of God will be revealed in her glorious splendor. There is a monstrous gap between the happiness of that City and the trouble of this mortal life, and those who are so willfully proud as to deny it, who “display an empty complacency,” “rather lose every shred of humanity than achieve a true tranquillity.”⁹ In this vale of tears, a heart at peace is almost suspect, for this is all too likely the false peace of those who have surrendered to the tyranny of sinful loves or who, fainthearted and faithless, have resorted to ridding themselves of desire—and with it full humanness—altogether.

As Pieper did for St. Thomas, so Jean Bethke Elsthain has tried to do for St. Augustine, setting aside the cliches of “Augustinians” and their critics to show us the man himself. Elshtain concedes that Augustine surpasses even the infamously grim Hobbes in his litanies of worldly miseries. But, she argues, Augustine was not simply melancholic. Rather, “Augustine was in love with the world, a world he called ‘a smiling place.’ His biographer tells us he loved the world immoderately, and one senses the truth of this. Only someone caught up in a love affair with the world would describe so deliciously its many delectations and articulate so artfuly its temptations.”¹⁰

The trouble Augustine has with the world is the trouble of a romance: such an ardent love of the world makes one exquisitely sensitive to the perils that haunt it at every moment. The experience of frustrated and disappointed desire gives rise to the Augustinian sense of alienation and the imperatives of renunciation and self-denial.

Another great philosopher of desire, Marcel Proust, painstakingly documents the experiences of the desiring creature who discovers he is dispositionally incapable of happiness. The protagonists of In Search of Lost Time reveal that to desire is to suffer, to be thwarted, to be divided from the objects of longing and from oneself.

In Proust’s world, we are moving targets, constellations of ineffable longings and desires that bear a tenuous and opaque connection to the actual things beyond our heads. We are bewitched by we know not what: the scent of a flowering tree, a fairy-tale read in childhood, a milk-maid seen from a train window whose face seems to promise eternal beatitude. By some mysterious alchemy, our secret dreams of beauty take on the forms of things that seem susceptible of possession—a town that might be visited, a person that might be married. But what is it that we really desire? If it happens that (miracle of miracles) the object of our desire comes into our possession, we are revealed as the fool. The beloved is not what we thought; the illusion is dissipating; the dream of beauty is already fleeing to set up camp elsewhere, teasing us from the distant horizon. To quote Proust himself:

But happiness can never be achieved. If we succeed in overcoming the force of circumstances, nature at once shifts the battle-ground, placing it within ourselves, and effects a gradual change in our hearts until they desire something other than what they are about to possess. And if the change of fortune has been so rapid that our hearts have not had time to change, nature does not on that account despair of conquering us, in a manner more gradual, it is true, more subtle, but no less efficacious. It is then at the last moment that the possession of our happiness is wrested from us, or rather it is that very possession which nature, with diabolical cunning, uses to destroy our happiness. Having failed in everything related to the sphere of life and action, it is a final impossibility, the psychological impossibility of happiness, that nature creates. The phenomenon of happiness either fails to appear, or at once gives rise to the bitterest reactions.¹¹

Is human existence forever constrained by the antithesis of contemplative peace and passionate desire? Or can these two ways of being somehow kiss?

C. S. Lewis tries to imagine such a meeting in his tale about the planet of love. The Green Lady, the mother and queen of Perelandra and the paradigm of sanity, declares, “How could there be anything I did not want?” Infinite desire pours from “the ocean of her peace” without tension or contradiction.¹² The young, earthbound Lewis, for his part, caught sight of a currant bush in summertime and wept spontaneously for the loss of paradise. His Proustian sigh was Ἰοῦλίανποθῶ: “Oh, I desire too much.”¹³

For Lewis, as for Proust’s protagonists, the greatest joy lies in the agony of longing. This is the existential condition of happiness, keenly felt by youth and soberly acknowledged by maturity. At the limits of human experience—limits which we run up against daily, even hourly—desiring is better than possessing, pain is better than satisfied pleasure, restlessness is better than rest. These are the terms that rule our encounters with beauty and transcendence in the world of time.

Is this the truth of the human condition writ large? Or does it hold only for Augustine, Lewis, Proust, and all their spiritual kin? Who is Pieper’s Thomas—is he more a god than a man, or is he a representative of a particular human type (good because created, but taking its place among a legitimate diversity of human types), or is he a model of contemplative virtue to which we all can and ought to aspire? Must the lover renounce the amorphous bewitchments of the world—those that seem to hover between the sacred and the profane—in order to love God soberly and truly? Or can the mysterious currents of desire, no less than the pure ascent of contemplation, somehow carry the soul to heaven?

The prayer of the pilgrim is that desire, when it passes (as all things must) through purgatorial fire, might not be destroyed but transfigured:

O do not kill, but quicken my desire,
Better to spur me on than leave me cold.
Not maimed I come to you, I come entire,

Lit by the loves that warm, the lusts that scald,
That you may prove the one, reprove the other,
Though both have been the strength by which I scaled

The steps so far to come where the poets gathered
And sing such songs as love gives them to sing.¹⁴

1. Josef Pieper, The Silence of St. Thomas: Three Essays (St. Augustine’s Press, 1957/1999), 4.

2. Pieper, Silence of St. Thomas, 18.

3. Pieper, Silence of St. Thomas, 30.

4. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Wordsworth, 1994), 175.

5. Pieper, Silence of St. Thomas, 19.

6. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford, 1991), 35.

7. Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (Penguin, 2004), 453.

8. Augustine, City of God, 929.

9. Augustine, City of God, 566.

10. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Augustine and the Limits of Politics (Notre Dame, 2018), 89.

11. Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (Modern Library, 1992), 274.

12. C. S. Lewis, Perelandra (MacMillan, 1944), 67, 70.

13. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (Harcourt, 1955), 16.

14. Malcom Guite, “Dancing through the Fire,” Word in the Wilderness: A Poem a Day for Lent and Easter (Canterbury Press Norwich, 2014), 99