Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth

Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth.  By John C. Wright, Castalia House, 2014.

 

Some critics have argued that science fiction is an inherently atheistic genre, but there are many people who completely disagree with that perspective.  John C. Wright is one of the most outspoken and eloquent proponents of the opinion that great science fiction can express religious themes, especially Christian, particularly Catholic perspectives. Wright came to writing science fiction after careers in journalism and law.  A longtime atheist, Wright converted to Catholicism after a period of exploring major questions, followed by a supernatural experience.  There is no better person to explain this process than the man himself: Wright’s personal account of his conversion can be found here: http://www.strangenotions.com/wright-conversion/. 

 

Wright writes with force and conviction, and speaks as a man who is firm in his opinions and has little patience for the foolish and intellectually dishonest.  The anthology Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth is a collection of pieces, many of which are revised from postings on his blog (http://www.scifiwright.com). Transhuman and Subhuman is a collection of sixteen essays, most of which address science fiction themes, with special stress on spiritual and theological matters.

 

The famous science-fiction Arthur C. Clarke’s book Childhood’s End features a scene where aliens show humanity a series of “revelatory” images on a television screen, and the supposed truths of these images convince humanity to give up on religion completely.  In “Childhood’s End and Gnosticism,” Wright pours scorn upon the puerility of this scenario, noting that it the situation that Clarke describes would be hardly enough to destroy the faiths of a planet.  He writes:

 

“It is with a sensation of unutterable disbelief that I read a passage saying one or two days of looking at a picture on a screen provided by the “magic” produced by creatures who look like devils, (whose mission, remember, is to facilitate the extinction of mankind), would be believed without reservation or complaint by everyone from Moscow to Bombay to Lhasa to Rome to Mecca. In the world I live in, people are stubborn and cantankerous. Some have faith that will not be swayed and some of us are nuts.”

 

In order to believe that faith is so fragile and easily destroyed, one must have a very poor understanding of how many people come to embrace religion.  Throughout these essays, Wright attacks the view apparently held by many science fiction writers that people of faith are sheeplike buffoons, or that faith itself is inherently a form of mental weakness.  Wright addresses another blithe smear against Christianity in “Storytelling is the Absence of Lying.”  In that essay, Wright takes on the story “Hell is the Absence of God” by Ted Chiang, a tale describing a world where pure faith leads to physical maiming and the abolition of free will.  Wright writes:

 

“Christians say virtue is its own reward; they also say to love God is good; they also say heaven rewards virtues not rewarded on earth, and martyrs are glorified. They propose the paradox of an omnipotent God who grants man free will. So all Ted Chiang does is propose an omnipotent God who removes a character’s free will, and martyrs him, cheating him of any glory, but without rewarding him either on Earth or in heaven. Oh, the irony! The girl born crippled was able to stir men’s souls back before she was touched with bliss, because, once blissful, the heavenly creature knows no suffering or empathy for suffering. More irony! (And we all know the Christians believe God never became flesh and never suffered, right? Of course right!) Virtue is its own reward, so the one virtuous man is stuck in Hell forever, and he is the only one to whom it is a torment! Irony upon irony! Yuk, yuk, yuk, and ain’t the Godbotherers stoopid?... 

 

That was what offended me when I first read it, by the bye. Back then I was a hard-core Xtian-bashing atheist and was therefore on his side, so to speak, but the blatant propaganda of the story nonetheless offended me. (I am less offended now that I believe in God: I figure He can take care of His own reputation.) My reaction back then was: Does he even know any Christians? Doesn’t he know what they say? The story reads like it was written for an audience of utter ignoramuses, who have never read a word of Christian theology, and never cracked a history book.”

 

It is important to note that Wright does not attack certain fictional works simply because they promote an antireligious perspective.  Wright does not condemn writers just because they disagree with his faith, though he does not hesitate to disparage the ideas and worldviews, not the writers themselves. Philip Pullman, a critically lauded writer best known for the His Dark Materials trilogy, often seen as an atheistic rebuttal to C.S. Lewis’s Narnia novels, is very well regarded in any circles, but in “The Golden Compass Points in No Direction,” Wright lambasts Pullman, not for atheism, but for poor storytelling:

 

“The first rule of storytelling is the same rule every child learns in kindergarten, every merchant learns when generating customer good will. Abide by your contracts. Keep your promises. 

 

There is an unspoken contract between a writer and his readers. Plots and characters and themes make promises. Prophecies in epic fantasy stories are blatant promises. When you are told that there is a prophecy that one and only one knife can kill Almighty God, and that one little boy is the one to do it, it breaks a promise to have God turn out to be a drooling cripple who dies by falling out of bed. 

 

Character development makes a promise. If you start your series with a selfish little girl who tells lies, the climax of her character arc must be when she either gets a come-uppance for being a liar, or when she reforms and starts telling the truth. If you give her a magic instrument that only she can read called an Alethiometer, a truth measurer, it breaks a promise to have simply nothing at all come of this.”

 

Arguably the funniest essay in the collection– and my personal favorite– is “The Hobbit, or, The Desolation of Tolkien,” where Wright voices his abhorrence of the second movie in the recent The Hobbit trilogy, due to its divergence from the source material and striking gaps of logic.  Wright writes with the disgusted fury of a Tolkien fan who is blindsided– even enraged– by Hollywood’s treatment of the source material.  Midway through the movie, Wright responds to the many changes, additions, and ridiculously tacked-on action scenes, writing that:

 

“Well, things go from bad— no, excuse me, they were already WAY past bad. This dial had been cranked up to eleven when the meter only goes to ten— things go from inexcusably stupid to indescribably stupid. I should not attempt to describe it. The pain… the pain…. And yet I must! It is my penance for having spent real money on this turkey and inadvertently aided the forces of brain-gag by rewarding them for this craptastic jerktrocious smegbladder of a film. My money crossed their palms! Peter Jackson went out and bought himself a Starbucks cup of coffee with the four bucks he got from the forty dollars I spent on tickets! Forgive me, O Muses! I MUST SUFFER! (And you shall suffer with me, dear reader).”

 

Wright is one of the sharpest and most interesting cultural commentators working today, but he does more than just comment on other people’s work– he creates work of his own, reflecting his ideals of what constitutes good writing through fiction, and addressing issues of society and religion through his non-fiction essays. People might not expect to gain a better understanding of religion through science fiction, but Wright shows how God is always present, even in the writings of people who deny that He exists.

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

Church of Spies & The Lost Mandate of Heaven

Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler.  By Mark Riebling, Basic Books, 2015.

 

The Lost Mandate of Heaven: The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam.  By Geoffrey Shaw, Ignatius Press, 2015.

 

Church of Spies and The Lost Mandate of Heaven are both revisionist histories, focusing on a prominent Catholic leader who is the victim of a historiographical bear market.  Pope Pius XII is frequently attacked as being indifferent to the Holocaust, and is commonly smeared as a Nazi sympathizer.  Ngo Dinh Diem is referred to in many history books as being a corrupt and ineffective leader, who persecuted Buddhists and whose government was rife with cronyism. Mark Riebling and Geoffrey Shaw respectively argue that the widespread perceptions are completely incorrect and that a major revision to the standard viewpoint is necessary.

 

Riebling describes a Pope who decided that it was morally right- and necessary– to assassinate Hitler, and his book is devoted to the Pope’s efforts to recruit men to carry out that task.  Based upon recently unsealed documents from the Vatican Archives, Bridge of Spies reads like a thriller, as we learn how the Vatican set up a secret network of agents in order to bring down the Third Reich.

 

Riebling describes Pius XII’s ascension to the papacy, writing that:

 

“As Pacelli prayed in the Vatican crypt, lights burned late at the most feared address in Germany.  The five-floor mansion at 8 Prinz-Albrecht–Strasse, Berlin, had once been an art school.  The Nazis had turned its sculptor’s studios into jail cells.  At the grand front staircase stood two guards with pistols and nightsticks.  On the top floor worked Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffell (SS), Hitler’s terror corps.  In an adjacent office, Himmler’s Vatican expert toiled at a typewriter, preparing a dossier on the newly elected pope.”

 

Throughout the book, Riebling makes it clear that the theory that the Vatican and Hitler’s Germany were allies is utterly misguided to the point of ludicrousness.  Numerous powerful Nazis are profiled, and revealed to be fierce enemies of the Vatican, pursuing its ultimate destruction.  In the end, though the efforts to assassinate Hitler failed (the reasons for the lack of success form the backbone of this suspenseful narrative), Pope Pius XII clearly took steps to attack Nazism from its very top.  

 

After the war, Pius XII spoke about the need for moral and spiritual renewal: 

 

“The task of this hour is to rebuild the world,” the pope said in a 9 May radio speech, as the guns fell silent in Europe.  “On our knees in spirit before the tombs, before the ravines blackened by blood, before the countless corpses of inhuman massacres, it seems to us that they, the fallen, are warning us, the survivors: Let there arise from the earth, wherein we have been planted as grains of wheat, the molders and masters of a better universe.”

 

The Pope is not the only character in this study.  During the latter portions of the book, most of the attention is devoted to the study is devoted to the spy career of Josef Muller, who was involved in various attempts to bring down Hitler, and suffered many hardships, including imprisonment.  After the war, the spiritual lives and journeys of men like Müller are explored.

 

“At this point in the audience, Müller recalled, the pope became philosophical.  For Christians, nothing in life lacked purpose.  Therefore, he contended, the war must have had some meaning.  Pius himself had struggled to find that meaning in his recent encyclical, Interpreter of Universal Anguish, Müller must have thought about it in his dungeons– his purpose on earth, on why people had to suffer so much.  What did Müller think it all meant?

 

He had learned a lot and unlearned a lot, Müller reflected.  He had unlearned how to hate, because he had experience hatred in all its forms.  He had pondered the uniquely modern power to mobilize mass hatred.  It all boiled down to “collectivism,” he decided.  The good of the group trumped the rights of the individual, regardless of the banners by which men marched.  To guard against this, Europe must find renewal in a concept of personhood that elevated the individual above the herd.  The spirit of early Christianity offered a base on which to build; for Christ had made his subjugated, discarded, rootless disciples feel as inherently good and worthy as the emperors who decided with their thumbs whether they lived or died.  That concept of sacred selfhood, Müller vowed, would shape his own postwar political activities.  “I told Pius of my plans to fashion a new bloc from strong Christians, regardless of denomination, in order to confront collectivism.  That he agreed with this idea brought me great joy.”

 

Notably, though Riebling addresses the work of Pius XII’s detractors, he largely ignores many of the works produced by the Pope’s supporters.  For example, Rabbi David G. Dalin, author of The Myth of Hitler’s Pope, is nowhere to be found in the bibliography.  Furthermore, Riebling spends virtually no time exploring how Pope Pius XII’s public image, which was widely positive in the years immediately following the war, took a public relations bath after a communist-sponsored misinformation campaign, including the widely-produced play The Deputy, which presented Pius XII as frigidly indifferent to the plight of Jews, and was the crucial event that savaged the Pope’s reputation.  Riebling’s analysis of the situation is therefore incomplete– it gives a compelling picture of the Pope’s heretofore unknown actions in attempting to covertly bring down the Nazis, but it only provides a sliver of a glimpse into what shaped public opinion of the Pope.

 

Furthermore, Riebling criticizes Pius XII early in the book for not openly speaking out against Nazism.  This is a valid point, since the Pope’s open criticisms might have been a powerful rallying point for the Allies.  Yet Riebling needs to do more to explain why he believes that this approach would have been better overall than the Pope’s chosen tactic of bringing down Hitler through more secret methods.  Pius XII acted as he did because he was concerned that open verbal attacks would lead to a Nazi invasion of Vatican City, and harsher words could potentially endanger the clergy in Nazi-controlled areas.  Riebling needed to provide further justification for his assessment of the Pope’s strategy.

 

Like Pius XII, Ngo Dinh Diem has been treated negatively by many historians.  When studying the Vietnam War, textbooks and monographs are mostly dismissive and contemptuous towards Diem, who was seen as a particularly ineffective and untrustworthy leader.  Shaw’s image of Diem as a sensitive, devout, intelligent, decent man is therefore a flat-out denunciation of the portrait of Diem commonly found in Vietnam War studies.  Throughout the book, Shaw attacks many of President Kennedy’s military advisors as being ridiculously misguided and misinformed, with a completely skewed perception of Diem and a misplaced sense of surety in their own perceptions.  About the only group that receives even harsher criticism from Shaw are the reporters who covered Vietnam through their own tinted lenses and preconceived narratives, which proved disastrous for Diem’s reputation.

 

In a recent interview for Mercator.net, Shaw discussed the historiographical implications of his work:

 

“MercatorNet: Most Americans believe that Diem was inept, corrupt and deeply unpopular. Was that true?

Geoffrey Shaw: Americans have been poorly served by this description of Ngo Dinh Diem. The above portrait was created for public consumption mostly by young reporters (in their 20s) who had little experience of the world at large, no expertise in Southeast Asia and a desire for sensational stories.

 

As New York Times reporter David Halberstam admitted after the death of Diem, he and his colleagues had created popular political fiction so as to sell papers. Their spin also served the purpose of Averell Harriman, an American senior diplomat with tremendous influence over President Kennedy, who had an intense dislike for and a lack of confidence in Diem.

The real Diem was so admired by patriotic Vietnamese of all stripes (including many Communists) that he was considered a prize to be won over; Viet Cong leader Ho Chi Minh tried this at least once, and Vo Nguyen Giap on many occasions.

 

Diem’s devotion to his country was so ardent that the French colonial rulers of Vietnam jailed him a few times for his refusal to play by their rules. They kept releasing him because of his talent for governing villages, and then provinces, was superior to that of any other Vietnamese in their administration. Early in his civil service career (his mid-20s) he earned the Mandate of Heaven amongst Vietnamese peasant farmers. This title is granted to leaders who exhibit the civic and personal virtues valued by Confucius.

 

As for his credentials as a war-time leader, when his first government of Vietnam was formed, the French and the Americans urged him to reach a live-and-let-live accommodation with some powerful South Vietnamese militarized sects, the most notorious of these being the Binh Xuyen, a military formation of gangsters and river-pirates. But Diem ordered his fledgling army to root them out.” (http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the-man-who-held-the-mandate-of-heaven/17285#sthash.k6fr1Fvk.dpuf)

 

Throughout the book, Shaw debunks each of the standard allegations against Diem, ranging from corruption to mistreatment of Buddhists, drawing upon assorted sources ranging from government documents to contemporaneous accounts.  Just as interesting is the look into the dysfunctionality of the Kennedy foreign policy team, which sometimes appears to have been drawing conclusions out of thin air and tainted newspaper reports.  Continually, Shaw contends that Diem was a pious and deeply religious man whose faith permeated every action.

 

Both Church of Spies and The Lost Mandate of Heaven make the point that sometimes what “everybody knows” is wrong.  They also show how history is not a static discipline, but a process by which views are challenged, restructured, and revised.  

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

Behold the Man: A Catholic Vision of Male Spirituality and Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement

Behold the Man: A Catholic Vision of Male Spirituality.  By Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers, Ignatius Press, 2015.

 

Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement.  By Sue Ellen Browder, Ignatius Press, 2015.

 

The intertwining of gender and religious issues is increasingly discussed in both scholarly and popular circles.  In two recent books, Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers and Ellen Browder both address religious and gender issues, but in very different ways and from distinctly contrasting perspectives.  Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers, affectionately nicknamed “the Dynamic Deacon,” is a popular Catholic speaker and writer.  He lives in Oregon with his wife and four children, and speaks extensively on family life.  Ellen Browder is a freelance writer who worked for publications such as Cosmopolitan, and wrote extensively about the women’s movement and the sexual revolution as they happened.

 

Behold the Man is directed towards men, but women will be interested in reading it to hear Burke-Sivers’ message of how men can be better fathers and husbands.  This book is meant to challenge its readers, and to stimulate men behave in a better, wiser, and more holy manner.  Burke-Sivers writes about the pernicious and ultimately damaging effects of the culture created by the social shifts covered by Browder, and determines that men increasingly have to believe in a counter-cultural manner in order to protect those closest to them and to be the best possible versions of themselves that they can be.

 

Early in his book, Burke-Sivers writes:

 

“When men allow the culture to shape their consciences in accord with its false truths, the results within the family and society are devastating…

 

A culture rooted in subjective truth says that love does not mean commitment, self-gift, and sacrifice.  Instead, love means whatever you decide it to mean.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the classic cultural affirmation “If it feels good, do it.”  Marching to the anthem of relativism, men “play the field,” fornicating frequently with multiple partners and engaging in extramarital affairs, sometimes resulting in the birth of children that these men, for the most part, have no interest in raising or financially supporting.  There exists an entire generation of fathers who have physically, emotionally, or spiritually abandoned their wives and children.  Thus, in the absence of fathers to lead, support, and nurture their families, women have compensated either by assuming masculine roles within the family or by constructing innovative support networks for themselves and their children.   This changing dynamic has brought us to a critical juncture as men: we are at the genesis or a systematic and fundamental shift in family life where in the near future, if we continue to live as men of the culture, fathers in the family may be considered optional and, in many cases, unnecessary.”

 

Burke-Sivers uses a wide variety of sources to bolster his points.  Scripture is cited many times, and he turns to scientific studies as well to show the effects of the breakdown of the family.  He also references popular culture, such as episodes of Two and a Half Men, in order to gauge the current state of society and how Hollywood shapes the ordinary person’s opinions on sex and behavior.  By far, however, the most poignant and meaningful passages come from when Burke-Sivers draws upon his own life, such as when he describes how his relationship with his father, who abandoned the family, was healed by his father’s conversion; or how Burke-Sivers counseled a parishioner whose marriage was being destroyed by a pornography addiction.  The book’s greatest scene contains a gift and a moral that has been most popularly depicted in Les Misérables, as we see Burke-Sivers describe a crushing sacrifice that might have derailed his career, but ultimately wound up helping to repair his brother’s life.

 

Throughout the book, Burke-Sivers insists that to be a real man, a man must live his life rooted in a strong sense of morality, and engage in an unceasing struggle to continually improve himself and to consistently strive to achieve holiness.  Therefore, faith and spirituality are crucial to men’s lives.  He writes:

 

“What, then, is Catholic male spirituality?  It is a man’s response to God’s invitation to life-giving communion through an ever-deepening revelation and discovery of Him via a life of sacrifice and service that imitates Christ crucified, meditates on God’s Word and responds to that Word in faith, and, through the Holy Spirit and in the sacraments, makes him truly a son of God and part of the Mystical Body of Christ.  An authentic male spirituality is first and foremost an encounter, that is, an encounter with the Living God in the person of Jesus Christ, who is the quintessential example of what it means to be a man.  Catholic male spirituality is truly genuine when it is “a spirituality centered in Jesus Christ and through him to the Trinity…”  To be authentically spiritual means that we must enter into the life of Christ and transform our hearts, minds, and wills to that of the Lord’s;.  Since it is only through Christ that we can receive salvation, a truly genuine Catholic spirituality for men must be Christ-centered at its very core, faithful to the deposit of faith, and obedient to the Church’s Magisterium.”

 

If Burke-Sivers writes to a general audience about how spirituality affects men and how a lack of it can leave men and their families damaged and adrift; Browder uses her memoir to explain how her years of writing sex and relationship-advice columns during the sexual revolution, along with insufficient religious grounding in her life, affected her and her family.  Had her marriage not have been so strong, her relationship with her husband and children might have been destroyed, like many others were.  At its heart, Subverted is a love story between Browder and her husband, both in professional writing careers that take major tolls on them.  Indeed, Browder started her journalism career expecting excitement and glamour, and in retrospect views much of her work without any affection or warm nostalgia.  She writes:

 

“I can give you no justification for what I did in my former life.  I will only say this in my weak defense: I was a young woman searching for truth, freedom, and meaning in the world, but I had no clue where to find them.  I grew up as a small-town Iowa girl and passionately desired to escape from the prison of small-mindedness I perceived around me.  My dad owned a small family show store, where my stay-at-home mom worked part-time.  I was baptized at age nine, and we went to church every Sunday.  Once a year or so, parishioners at my little white Congregational Church passed around tiny thimble-sized glasses of grape juice for what was called “communion.”  I didn’t know what that was, and nobody told me.  If New Hampton (population 3,456) had its virtues, and I’m sure it did, I couldn’t see them.  Something or Someone bigger was calling to my heart, but I had no idea who or what it might be.”

In this autobiography, Browder explains how her role at Cosmopolitan initially seemed like a dream job.  Led by Helen Gurley Brown, whose work championed women having sex without consequences, life in the big city seemed like the most exciting thing possible.  Like many dreams, it eventually turned nightmarish.

 

“The position paid only $105 a week.  But the pitifully low pay, even for those days, mattered not a twit to me.  In my mind, the job– assistant to the articles editor of Cosmopolitan!– was a small-town girl’s dream come true.

 

Only later would I realize how dark the dream had become.  Eventually, it would lead to a cacophony of mixed, confused messages in our culture about women, work, sex, marriage, and relationships– errors that have divided our nation and continue to haunt us to this day.  It would lead me to make disastrous decisions...

 

From 1970 on, I was right there in the heart of the sexual revolution in New York City, working first on staff at Cosmopolitan and for the next twenty-four years as a freelance writer for the magazine, where I told lie upon lie to sell the casual-sex lifestyle to millions of single, working women…

 

My small observation was this: In the beginning, the women’s movement and the sexual revolution were distinctly separate cultural phenomena.”

 

Subverted contains a concise history of the postwar women’s movement and the push for legalized abortion.  Many people may not be aware of the details of how some of these movements were controlled by a small group of well-funded, well-organized, well-connected people, and this book illustrates that such social changes were not inevitable, and were fueled in part by bad scholarship and the credulity of the media and people in power who really ought to have been far more skeptical of the declarations made by the proponents of the sexual revolution.

 

As with Burke-Sivers’ book, the strongest parts of the book come from personal experience.  We see Browder’s increasing dissatisfaction with her job and her husband’s struggles with his novelist and screenwriter careers, her relationships with her children, and how she gradually lost faith in the words Cosmopolitan insisted that she write.  The defining emotional moment of the book comes from a decision Browder and her husband made that would ultimately alter the direction of her life and mental health, but it also became a driving force in helping her redirect her life and led to her religious conversion.

 

Browder’s book is a cautionary tale and a convert’s journey.  Burke-Sivers’ work is a call to action and a demand that his readers do better as men and family members.  He writes:

 

“Where do we go from here?  What changes are you going to make today, next week, next month?  Men of God, the Catholic man is not an endangered species!  Let us clean out the caverns and dark places of our lives so that Jesus may come and make His home with us.  Let us get past our preoccupation with the materiality of the world and allow God’s power and peace, God’s love and life, to draw us into a place where there is nothing standing between us and Him.  Let us give ourselves over to God’s will and have the courage to prefer absolutely nothing to the love of Christ.”

 

Though these books are very different, they both boil down to a man and a woman explaining just how crucial faith is to people’s lives and how horribly society can suffer by a lack of faith.  Though Ignatius Press has not been promoting these books in tandem, they make for excellent companion pieces, and reading one enriches the experience of reading the other.

 

 

–Chris Chan

Finding True Happiness: Satisfying Our Restless Hearts (Happiness, Suffering, and Transcendence)

Finding True Happiness: Satisfying Our Restless Hearts (Happiness, Suffering, and Transcendence).  By Fr. Robert J. Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D., Ignatius Press, 2015.

 

Note: This book is not to be confused with Archbishop Fulton Sheen’s book Finding True Happiness.

 

Everybody wants to be happy, but many people seem incapable of actually achieving happiness.  In Finding True Happiness, Fr. Robert J. Spitzer explains how faith is at the heart of genuine joy, and discusses the distractions, unhealthy thinking, and other problems that potentially leave people in misery.  This book is more than just a facile declaration that happiness is a “state of mind.”  It is also a declaration that one has to make a conscious effort to achieve and maintain happiness, and also to avoid actions and thought patterns that may lead to unhappiness.

 

Finding True Happiness is part of a series.  Fr. Spitzer plans a quartet of books on related subjects, covering happiness, suffering, and transcendence.  When explaining the purpose of this series, he writes:

 

“I have written this quartet not only for committed Catholics and Christians, but also for young adults who are beginning their faith journey, and especially for those who feel themselves to be at an impasse– not knowing whether to take their faith seriously or to let it slip away.  Many in that latter group may have experienced being attacked for their beliefs– perhaps accused of wishful thinking or naiveté.  Some may have been confronted with misleading arguments about a contradiction between science and faith, between suffering and the loving God, or between science and faith, between suffering and the loving God, or between “Jesus in the Gospels” and “Jesus in history.”  Others may simply be confused by the mixed signals given in schools and the media.”

 

This book is meant to help people, but it’s not just a self-help book.  It’s meant to answer questions about the root causes of unhappiness.  The book opens with Fr. Spitzer asking questions about why people believe themselves to be unhappy, how people who seem to have everything can be miserable, and why positive feelings can be so ephemeral.  Throughout the book, Fr. Spitzer implies that people make their own unhappiness, either by bad decisions or by poor attitudes.

 

“Our hope in this quartet is to confront what might be called the “Freudian illusion” about the unreality of transcendence by showing the evidence of our spiritual and eternal nature, studying the revelation of Jesus Christ about God’s unconditional love, probing the power of God’s grace working in us through inspiration, protection, and guidance, revealing the importance of these graces in times of suffering and confrontation with evil, and shining a light on the eternal destiny that awaits us in the unconditional love of God.  In brief, our objective is to lift the veil of superficiality and materialism that has not only been proposed to us but even imposed on us through contemporary media, academics, and popular culture, so that we can see the true mystery of our being, our highest purpose in life, and the divine destiny to which we are called.”

 

 

Fr. Spitzer draws heavily from his personal experiences in this book.  He discusses the deep religiosity of his early life, remembering how his mother attended Mass daily and guided her son’s religious education.  In one particularly touching scene, Fr. Spitzer recalls a feeling of deep euphoria that came from Christmas, but he knew that his feelings of elation did not come from presents or anything material.  With his mother’s help, the young Robert Spitzer realized that it was the spiritual aspects of the holiday that made it fulfilling and joyous.  It was the love of God and God’s love that made Christmas joyous, as opposed to the tinsel and trappings.  

 

“In sum, if God is loving, (which is common to the interior experience and exterior expression of all religion) and God is unrestricted being and thinking (proven in Volume II), then the unique revelation of Jesus Christ (that God is unrestricted love) is the best candidate we have for the ultimate and personal self-revelation of God.”

 

It is important to remember, nonetheless, that religious belief and faith are not necessarily guarantees of happiness.  Fr. Spitzer notes that people who ostensibly have every reason in the world to be happy are in fact miserable.  For example, people may have plenty of wealth and material possessions, or success in their careers, and still feel unfulfilled.  Plenty of people with an overabundance of blessings find it necessary to use alcohol or drugs to numb their feelings of sorrow.  Why are some people ready to kill themselves over what seem to most observers to be minor trifles?  Why do people who are happy themselves take pleasure in denying happiness to others?  And why is happiness so ephemeral sometimes?

 

“All of these questions are articulations of what we mean by unhappiness.  But notice that in all of these questions, there is an element of surprise– of not expecting the unhappiness or emptiness, which makes the unhappiness even worse, causing one to think, “I thought this would make me happy, but surprisingly, I’m still empty (or jealous, resentful, fearful, cynical, self-pitying, lonely…)  I have no idea why I feel the way I do.  Why is it that I had a great bolt of happiness for a while, and now I feel as if somebody or something snatched it away from me?”  This surprise, this nonanticipation of unhappiness, is, in part, what this book is meant to address.

 

The reason for the surprise is that people often lack a deeper insight into happiness.  Despite their best efforts, many people seem to be partially or even completely unaware of their complex selves– selves that seek truth, fairness, love, beauty, home, creativity, and even transcendence.  If these people are to find a deep and efficacious happiness (and avoid the “unhappiness surprise”), they will have to know themselves in their complexity, and this will take a little time to explore.  But at the end of the day it will be worth it.  

 

This is not going to be an easy “how-to” book.  If I were to write a book like that, or give you a collection of aphorisms (which would fail to explore the depth of your being and meaning), all I would give you is a superficial (and in the end, unsuccessful) answer to your search for happiness.”

 

There are certain forms of unhappiness that cannot be avoided, such as grief over the loss of a loved one, but that sort of sadness becomes easier to bear with time.  Mental illness such as depression may need professional help to be alleviated.  Such forms of unhappiness come naturally and cannot be fixed simply by positive thinking and similar actions.  The happiness Fr. Spitzer encourages is not some kind of unshakeable Pollyanna-like euphoria that never wavers or fades.  It is not permanent pleasure, but something far less flashy and ultimately, of more constructive use to individuals and those around them.

 

Throughout the book, Fr. Spitzer seems to be saying that happiness, like virtue, is not something to be achieved once and then maintained forever.  It is something that must be earned every day for as long as one lives.  Achieving Fr. Spitzer’s form of happiness is not a contest, where the person with the most money or the most attractive spouse or the most powerful job wins.  True happiness can be easily lost, yet also regained without too much difficulty.  It simply takes a clear and determined mindset of the kind advised by Fr. Spitzer, who suggests that the truest happiness is not only a gift, but a reward for something that is is earned with difficulty.

 

 

–Chris Chan