Anyone who questions the usefulness of literature might want to reflect how often every day we try to fit people’s actions into a cogent narrative. What happened exactly? we ask. What choice was made, and who made it? What were the consequences? Given these consequences, what conclusions about the character of the person who made the choice should we make? Which was more important, the character of the person making the choice, or the circumstances that made the choice necessary? Such questions come into play on the global scale—say, the withdrawal from Afghanistan—or on a backyard spat among children.

When he was thinking about the nature of tragedy, Aristotle wrote that an action has a beginning, a middle, and an end: it starts with a choice made by a person with a particular character; it unfolds through the consequences of that choice; and it ends with a hard and definite result. Proud Oedipus, for example, treated almost as a god by the people of his city, chooses to seek out the murderer of the previous king in order to end the plague afflicting Thebes. The more he investigates, the more he finds the evidence pointing directly at him, and when the last pieces fall into place, he recognizes that not only has he killed the previous king, but that the king was his own father and that he has married his own mother, who has borne him four children. The tragedy ends in his wife’s (mother’s) suicide and his own self-blinding. In the course of a few hours, he goes from being the revered king to being a monster of impurity, an outcast.

Oedipus Tyrannos has the most coherent and unforgettable of actions, but very often we find ourselves in circumstances in which putting together a cogent narrative takes time and patience. For example, people often have to wait months, even years, before a case comes to trial and all the details can be revealed. In his most famous soliloquy, Hamlet includes “the law’s delay” (along with “the pangs of despised love”) in a list of things that might lead one to consider suicide. There are reasons, of course, for delay. Key elements of the story might be missing or incapable of being discussed for legal reasons. What happened and who did it and what the consequences were and what the implications about the character of various people might be—all these things remain in uneasy suspension until the moment can come when the story becomes transparently coherent and judgments can be made. Sometimes, that moment will not come in this life.

In the meantime, uncertainties prevail. What is the best way to live with these uncertainties? In the second semester of Junior year at Wyoming Catholic College, students in Humanities encounter the English poet John Keats, who had something to say about this situation. In a letter to his brothers when Keats was only 22 years old, he wrote about a conversation in which “several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This passage has elicited numberless commentaries, even whole books, but the upshot seems to be this: a man of achievement does not reach after “fact and reason” when the circumstances do not permit it. He does not “irritably” and prematurely generate an explanatory narrative to make sense of a situation when many things about it remain obscure. For a great poet, this restraint might mean leaving open real mysteries of character and motive.

Keats is writing about a quality in the “man of achievement” that also applies, a fortiori, to the man or woman of faith. Yesterday’s Memorial of St. Cornelius and St. Cyprian reminds us of the extraordinary uncertainty that prevailed at times in the early Church. St. Cornelius, made Pope in 251, was bitterly opposed, not only by an anti-pope (Novatian, who promoted a popular heresy), but also by the Roman emperor, who had him arrested and sent into the exile where he died. From Pope to outcast: he had no way, outside faith, to see beyond the “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” he endured. Even a moment’s thought about his situation will reveal why hope is a theological virtue.

Such stories remind us how little we know of the whole coherence of the unfolding story in which we find ourselves. We are urged to act in faith, hope, and love, which transcend the cardinal virtues that govern our civil lives. Why do we have the capacity to do so? Because the Son willingly descended from Godhead Itself to take on the ignominious punishment for our plague, which He did not cause. As part of this story, we are asked not to judge others, because we do not know the whole truth, even about ourselves.

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College‘s weekly newsletter.

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