{"id":33764,"date":"2018-05-08T06:00:56","date_gmt":"2018-05-08T10:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=33764"},"modified":"2018-05-07T15:11:05","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T19:11:05","slug":"the-different-kinds-of-despair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2018\/05\/the-different-kinds-of-despair\/","title":{"rendered":"God and the Different Kinds of Despair"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

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There are all kinds of negative emotions.\u00a0 Not all of them are morally or spiritually bad, as such.\u00a0 Depression, for example, can come upon a person for good reasons or because of a medical condition.\u00a0 Depression is not the same thing as despair, which implies utterly giving up on everything.<\/p>\n

Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option<\/a>, has written a fascinating essay on the subject in American Conservative<\/em> entitled\u00a0\u00a0\u201cThat\u2019s Despair?\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 In it, he draws on both the Christian existentialist\u00a0S\u00f8ren\u00a0Kierkegaard and the Christian novelist Walker Percy.<\/p>\n

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\u201cKierkegaard had a specific idea of despair,\u201d says Dreher.<\/a>\u00a0 \u201cIt is not an emotion, but a state of being. You can read more about it\u00a0here<\/a>, but in brief, to be in despair is to live alienated from God, in relation to Whom one can only know oneself. There are, in Kierkegaard\u2019s thought, three kinds of despair\u201d:<\/p>\n

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  1. Not knowing that you are alienated from God, and that you need to be reconciled with him to know who you are, and to live a fully human life; in other words, to be a complete stranger to yourself and to the world, and therefore not aware of one\u2019s own Selfhood (which can only be known in relation to the infinite God); you can be in despair and still think of yourself as happy; this is the most common kind of despair;<\/li>\n
  2. Knowing that one has a Self, and that that Self is incomplete without God, but arranging one\u2019s life in such a way as to keep God at a distance; the despair is the anxiety of knowing that one is living inauthentically, but lacks the will or the courage to live in truth (this was basically me from ages 17 to 25);<\/li>\n
  3. Knowing that one has a Self, and that one is in despair, but refusing to accept that God loves one, and that one abides in that love; it is the kind of despair that loves itself, and in which one identifies one\u2019s own Self through the Self\u2019s relationship to that hopelessness.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I hadn\u2019t realized that Kierkegaard was so theocentric!\u00a0 Despair as a state of being\u2013not an emotion\u2013in which one is alienated from God, whether knowingly, unknowingly, or willfully.\u00a0 Dante described Hell as a realm, above all, of despair.<\/p>\n

    Dreher also quotes Walker Percy<\/a>, a Christian, Catholic author whose novels are comic, and yet dark.\u00a0 An interviewer asked him why he seemed so despairing.\u00a0 Percy<\/a>, who enjoyed living in New Orleans, said that he doesn\u2019t despair at all!<\/p>\n

    Q: From the outside looking in, one might raise the question: you\u2019ve lived a fairly privileged life: why such despair?<\/p>\n

    A: Who says I despair? That is to say, I would reverse Kierkegaard\u2019s aphorism \u2014 the worst despair is that despair which is unconscious of itself as despair \u2014 to: the best despair and the beginning of hope is the consciousness of despair in the very air we breathe and to look around for something better. I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That\u2019s despair?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Despair that is the beginning of hope.\u00a0 The despair in everything that leads to the discovery of \u201csomething better.\u201d\u00a0 That is reminiscent of Luther\u2019s Law and Gospel talk, the way Christians are brought to the point of despair by sin, death, and the devil\u2013as exposed by the Law\u2013which leads them to the promises of Christ in the Gospel.\u00a0 (Read Mark D. Thompson, Luther on Despair<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

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