On April 26th, I attended a presentation given by Dr. Ashley Dressel as part of the School of Arts and Letters Colloquium at the College of St. Scholastica. The title of the presentation was “Thomas Aquinas on Despair and Moral Wrongdoing,” and Dr. Dressel began with a brief introduction of the hugely influential Doctor of the Church, who lived from 1225 to 1274.
The first insight of the presentation, for me, was Dr. Dressel’s description of the Thomistic understanding of hope. Aquinas points out that hope in and of itself is not always good; it is perfectly likely, after all, that we should hope for things that are not actually good for us. Further, there are two categories of hope: “passionate” hope (for worldly goods) and “spiritual” hope (of heaven). This latter hope (in Latin, sperare) is certainly a valuable thing for Aquinas, and to despair (desperare) of it is among the gravest of sins. Interestingly, despair in Aquinas’ understanding does not come from unbelief, either in God or the possibility of salvation, but from a person’s inability to maintain hope in the midst of difficulty, often because worldly goods are beginning to look preferable to spiritual goods. As I understand it, despair is therefore more an “instance of wrongdoing” than is unbelief, because it is not done out of ignorance. But, and crucially, it is also a “source of wrongdoing,” because a person who has lost hope in heaven (like a person who has lost the fear of hell), will have significantly fewer reasons not to sin; it will be as if they were “freed from the bridle” of hope (Dr. Dressel’s presentation handout cites this phrase as coming from ST I.II. q.78, a.3).
Dr. Dressel pointed out that there are several places where despair could be especially destructive, as in the realms of parenting, teaching, or addressing climate change. The (lost) hope in these areas is presumably not spiritual, in Aquinas’ terms, but certainly there could be some immaterial goal associated with parenting, for example, that requires the sustenance of faith in the face of frequent difficulties. Dr. Dressel touched specifically on climate change, noting how despair really was worse than apathy in that situation, as an attitude of “we’re doomed anyway” might cause us to deepen our environmental woes through cavalier destruction.
This model of despair could have interesting implications for thinking about happiness, especially if we retain something like Aquinas’ conception of “spiritual goods” and “worldly goods,” but substitute authentic and inauthentic forms of happiness in their respective places. As in Aquinas’ model, both would be competing, as it were, for the allegiance of the individual. Supposing that authentic happiness is difficult to attain, I might lose heart occasionally and indulge in some inauthentic sources of happiness, even though I typically avoid them because I know they hinder my realization of the more authentic variety (opening that pack of American Spirits that a friend bequeathed to me might be in the less noble category). But so long as I retain my hope of true happiness, my digressions will remain somewhat “bridled,” and I will return to the straight and narrow. But if I despair of my lofty goal, and do not lose the taste for happiness as a category, I would have lost one of the principle constraints on destructive self-indulgence, and be more likely to embrace the shabby pleasures that constitute my remaining avenues to “happiness.”
WHAT IS HAPPINESS? 