No. I’m not that sort of Cynic (though sometimes I wish I were). I don’t live in a barrel, defecate and masturbate in public, or ask the emperor to stand out of my sun. Alas, I’m no Diogenes.
No. I’m the much worse sort—incredulous, sarcastic, broody.
It’s been with me all my life. Internally, anyway. A good idea? I have a better one. A well-written piece? I’ll have identified every problem in minutes. Your dog is cute? I’ve not only seen cuter, but yours is a purebred, and why didn’t you adopt anyway? Uncaring heathen.
In the short version of the story, the answer to the problem has been Christianity—healthy doses of prayer, charity, and perhaps not-so-Diogenes-like mortification.
But the longer version is a bit more complicated. Just because you convert, you confess, you go to daily Mass, you have your good days, none of that means the struggle disappears. In a way, it becomes more acute, because you might have a wonderful stretch filled with love for others, richness of spirit, and intense experience of the divine presence quickly superseded by Juvenalian misanthropy, spiritual aridity, and a stubborn refusal to take more than the bare minimum for prayer.
What’s even worse perhaps is how much power other people have, even if they don’t realize it. In the periods of great spiritual joy, it’s easy to deflect criticism, but when you’re teetering on the edge, a smaller challenge can elicit a response almost unbelievably caustic. And then there’s the shame that follows on the heels of knowing you’ve overreacted, of knowing you’re, well, regressing—a shame of distance, of separation, a feeling that you’ve hurt others when you want their love as much as you can’t accept it.
I’ve struggled with this for a long time. Recently, however, I had something of a realization. I was reading Dante’s Purgatorio. And bam, as they say, something struck me.
Dante is on the Cornice of Envy, speaking with Sapìa of Siena, when she, in anguish, eyes sewn shut, yet filled with tears, forced to sit about in rags all day like a beggar, cries:
Though I was called Sapìa; my heart conceived
More joy from others’ loss than my own gain.Does that sound too absurd to be believed?
Nay, hear and judge if I o’erstate my folly.
For a long time, I had thought my cynicism came from pride. I thought I was better than others; I could show them that by demonstrating my superiority with my wit, my writing, my criticism—whatever. But that never explained the desire for others, the shame I described above.
Sapìa’s words cut to the heart of that. She recognizes the absurdity of her problem for most: how can someone look upon others with such disgust, yet, at the end of the day have supporters, lovers, friends, and, moreover, desire their love and affection. She clearly did. In fact, Sapìa tells us that she’s only in Purgatory already because of the prayers of a humble man named Peter Combseller (all the more remarkable because she was a noblewoman).
How could her heart remain so icy in the face of anything like love?
And yet, for the cynic, her case makes perfect sense.
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