Good, evil, ascetism and creativity

"Evil lust and evil passions are to a great extent generated by boredome and emptiness. It is difficult to struggle against that bordeom by means of abstract goodness and virtue. The dreadful thing is that virtue at times seems deadly dull, and there's no salvation in it. Cold, hard-set virtue, devoid of creative fire, is always dull and never saves. The heart must be set aglow if dullness is to be dispelled.

...Lust is a means of escaped from boredom when goodness provides no such escape. This is why it is very difficult -- almost impossible -- to conquer evil passions through negative asceticism ... and prohibition. They can only be conquered positively, through awakening the positive and creative spiritual force opposed to them.

...Purely negative asceticism, preoccupied with evil and sinful desires and strivings, so far from enlightening the soul, intensifies its darkness. We must preach, therefore, a morality based not upon the annihilation of will but upon its enlightenment, not upon the humiliation of man and his external submission to God, but upon the creative realization by man of the divine in life -- of the values of truth, goodness and beauty."

-- Nicholas Berdyaev, from "Ultimate Questions: An Anthology of Modern Russian Religious Thought" (ed. Fr. Alexander Schmemann)

This is why I think the lives of the saints are so important to us, as well as true art -- this, as distinct from moral exhortation and abstract reasoning (which, don't get me wrong, have their place). We need to see what it is like to live out the truth of our faith as a source of true life. T.S. Eliot remarked once that "If we learn to read poetry properly, the poet never persuades us to believe anything. ...What we learn from Dante, or the Bhagavad-Gita, or any other religious poetry is what it feels like to believe that religion." If you've ever met a saintly person, and many of us have, you know what it's like to be powerfully attracted to the light shining forth from him.

The reason I bring any of this up now is that I can't stop thinking about that Lindsay Palmer, the four-year-old who saved herself and her baby sister from the murderers who beat her mother to death, and slashed her little brother's throat, and then hers. She was four, so presumably she was acting only on instinct, not as the fruit of moral deliberation. Still, though, at that age, all she knew was that she loved her sister, and she was going to take care of her. That if they were going to live, it was going to be up to her to be brave, and to endure.

I spoke today to someone at the East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff's office about the case. She told me that they have a deputy who debriefed the child in the hospital. The woman deputy spent the night with Lindsay in the hospital room after surgery to repair the damage to her neck. The spokeswoman told me the deputy held Lindsay all night to calm her, and that Lindsay wouldn't go to sleep until nurses brought her sister, the little baby she carried out of the woods to safety, to her to cradle.

I can't get that child's deeds off my mind, and you know, I'm grateful for that. Demons were in the woods that afternoon, but so were the angels. What a powerful sign of hope is it to us to contemplate the courage and resilience of that child! I wish I were more like her, obeying the humane instinct to comfort the suffering and carry them to the light in the clearing instead of being too often mesmerized in the forest's shadows by grief and despair.