The Problem with Comfort and Joy

The Catholic Thing

by Francis X. Maier
But first a note: Just four more days until the end of this fundraising campaign. We're very close now and need to finish strong. It's all up to you.
And now for today's column...
Year in and year out, the weeks of Advent and Christmas are a time for carols. In our home, they begin the day after Thanksgiving. They continue, more or less constantly, through the Baptism of the Lord. We never tire of them. We're Christmas addicts. Over the past few years though, one particular carol - "God rest ye merry, gentlemen" - has caused an escalating itch in my Santa suit. Kindly note the comma in the carol's title. Why the comma, and why place it exactly there in the wording? The carol is God rest ye merry, gentlemen. Not God rest ye, merry gentlemen.
Serious questions arise therefrom. Aren't we "merry" every December already? The retail industry certainly tells us we are, and if not, how to get there. And what does "merry" even mean? After all, this is the carol that claims to offer us "tidings of comfort and joy." But doesn't that smack, just a bit, of fraudulent marketing?
Based on empirical data, those two words - comfort and joy - don't even belong in the same sentence. We live in the most materially advanced culture in history. Even our poor are well-off by half the world's standards. Compared to other advanced nations, we're also still (if too often tepidly) a "religious" people. We have a wide range of liberties and opportunities. Our lives are stuffed with emollients, distractions, mood lifters, painkillers, and comforts unimaginable just a century ago.
And yet at the same time, U.S. rates of loneliness, porn usage, sexually transmitted disease, and suicide, along with gender dysphoria among young people, have all increased. More than 20 percent of American adults now seek some form of mental health assistance each year. A presidential candidate claiming - implausibly - to represent "joy" just got jackhammered. Our public life is a civil war of irreconcilable convictions, and joy is clearly not the mood of the country. In fact, given the evidence, "comfort" seems eminently compatible with frustration, anger, and psychic misery.
In his 1950 essay "Three Riders of the Apocalypse" (collected here), the philosopher and political theorist Aurel Kolnai, a Catholic convert from Judaism, described what he saw as the primary modern forms of totalitarianism: Communism, Nazism. . .and "progressive democracy." While the differences among the three systems are striking, Kolnai wrote, so are certain similarities.
Each tends to destroy or render irrelevant the transcendent dimension of life. And each tends to cocoon the individual, and society at large, in an all-consuming set of materialist ideas or appetites to the exclusion of everything else. He further argued that the "progressive" element in the triad:
really outstrips the totalitarianism not only of the Nazis but even of the Communists, assimilating as it does (under the deceptive verbal cloak of liberalism and tolerance) the thinking, moods, and wills of everybody to a wholesale standard of the "socialized" mind more organically and perhaps more durably [than its rivals]; eliminating all essential opposition to its own pattern by incomparably milder methods, but so much more effectively and irrevocably.
Put simply, for Kolnai, "progressive" democracy in its purest form ends in Huxley's Brave New World rather than Orwell's brutish 1984 - a world full of comforts, but absent any higher purpose to life, and thus empty of hope and joy. The result is a crippled soul, because pleasure is not joy. Contentment is not joy. Material abundance is not joy.
When C.S. Lewis described his own Christian conversion as "surprised by joy" he captured the real nature of the word. Joy is numinous, a taste of the merriment of heaven. It's an experience of unexpected, transforming beauty and unearned, transcendent meaning. And these, in turn, are the qualities that provide the only tru...