As an early morning walker in a heavily wooded area, I fear perhaps more than anything else, even more than Maine deer ticks, the dreaded neighborhood skunk. His aroma often wafts through the pre-dawn air, and neighbors and their dogs have been victims of a direct spray. So when I turned the corner at the end of a recent walk toward a street that would’ve given me a little more time to finish my podcast and saw a little tuft of black and white waddling my way, I made a panicked one-eighty and a beeline for home.
Fear is one of those negative emotions we often think about as something we need to conquer. A poor choice for a recent family movie night scared our two youngest children too much to sleep, so my wife and I tried to calm them down with explanations and strategies that would hopefully mitigate their fear. And heroes in the best stories usually have to overcome some fearful thing that stands in the way of their objective. Courage doesn’t presuppose fearlessness, but it does require that we not let fear get the better of us.
But fear can also be a great help, as it was for me when I saw the skunk. It alerts us to dangers we might be wise to avoid. In this way, fear can energize us to protect something that we love. “All fear is love that flees,” Josef Pieper writes in a short gem of a book on the virtues (The Christian Idea of Man, 27). And as he says elsewhere, “A person who does not love, does not fear either, and he who loves falsely fears falsely” (The Four Cardinal Virtues, 126).
Pieper follows Augustine, who explains in City of God that fear makes us aware of threats to the things we love and gives us the wherewithal to put those things out of harm’s way. Love forms the gravitational center for everyone, Augustine holds, so it’s always good to examine ourselves about the things that govern our hearts’ orbit. But if we’re unsure what those things might be, it’s helpful to ask: What do we fear?
It’s a question we really ought to ask nowadays because our culture seems awash in fear. “The words that define our age reek of menace,” David Brooks writes in a recent essay—words like “conspiracy,” “polarization,” “trauma,” “safe spaces,” and others we could add to the list. And ironically, he argues, the rise of today’s fear (and corresponding anger and meanness) came unwittingly alongside the triumph of a therapeutic culture.
Political and adjacent culture war commitments become extensions of a person’s deepest sense of self.
Over the second half of the twentieth century, inspired by humanistic psychology, large currents of people drifted away from traditional, morally formative institutions like the Church in favor of private means of self-actualization. If people can trust their inner goodness, the therapeutic ethos says, they don’t need the rigidity or crusty authority of rule-bound traditions. Individuals can achieve on their own (perhaps with a therapist) what matters most: “to get in touch with themselves.”
Likewise, sociologist James Davison Hunter argues that a therapeutic regime came to dominate every corner of culture from the ’60s onward, including within religious contexts. From secular psychotherapists to Catholic school principals to Presbyterian youth ministers to the evangelical James Dobson, Hunter finds the language of self-esteem, emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and self-realization becoming the dominant categories for how to think about the meaning and purpose of life.
Things like self-esteem, emotional intelligence, and therapeutic self-examination can of course have a place in a good and virtuous life. But on their own, Hunter argues, they can give way to a subjectivism “where the experiences, interests, and sentiments of the autonomous individual are enshrined as the standards defining the height, length, and breadth of moral hope and possibility.”
And so a banal, hyper-individualistic, soft moral relativism began to take hold through the ’90s and early 2000s. Surprisingly, however, it didn’t last, at least not in its individualistic mode. Without the traditions and social structures that the old communities offered to navigate life, the individual becomes brittle and isolated. “You do you” and the internal gaze offer too little by themselves to foster lasting depth and meaning. “A culture that leaves people morally naked and alone,” Brooks writes, encourages them to focus on themselves without a higher purpose, and it leads to a large-scale emergence of what psychologists diagnose as vulnerable narcissism.
Vulnerable narcissists suffer from the characteristic addiction of thinking about themselves but without the typical inflated self-esteem. Instead, they “often feel anxious, insecure, avoidant. Intensely sensitive to rejection, they scan for hints of disrespect. Their self-esteem is wildly in flux. Their uncertainty about their inner worth triggers cycles of distrust, shame, and hostility.” In other words, the vulnerable narcissist lives with a great deal of fear of not being seen.
Both fear and courage presuppose vulnerability. “What words like fear, fright, horror have in common,” Pieper writes, “is that they are all answers to different forms of diminution of our being, the most extreme of which would be our actual destruction” (Christian Idea, 26). Death looms as the most severe diminution we face as creatures, but Pieper’s point is that any injury or grievance we experience in this life prefigures this final and most extreme negation.
And when self-realization becomes a person’s highest good, to feel disrespected and unrecognized constitutes a grave injury, an almost ultimate rejection to be feared above anything else (even if subconsciously). When personal identities become brittle, people naturally seek security in social outlets that promise recognition and acceptance. In such a context, Brooks argues, politics becomes “a seductive form of social therapy.” It becomes a protective shell where the autonomous individual finds a safe resonance between his or her self-expression and the totalizing identity of the tribe.
Political and adjacent culture war commitments become extensions of a person’s deepest sense of self. “The person practicing the politics of recognition,” Brooks writes, “is not trying to get resources for himself or his constituency; he is trying to admire himself.” Because people so deeply fear a lack of recognition, involvement with this or that political movement becomes a way to say, to borrow from what Laurence Olivier said about why he loved acting, “Look at me, look at me, look at me!”
It’s not that the Christian doesn’t care about self-realization. But we find our highest good in the love of God, and God calls us to use our particular talents and the good things of this world to love him and to love our neighbor for his sake. And we also know that we are prone to misuse those things in an intemperate rebellion that is destructive to our own being. A Christian account of temperance, therefore, aims paradoxically at a kind of selfless self-realization, one that keeps watch against the sinful tendency to love the self apart from and more than God.
In this regard, the “Christian asks about the ordo timoris, the hierarchy of fear” (Christian Idea, 26). The terrible really does exist, and some things should inspire more dread than others. Maybe you should ignore this or that slight. But maybe to find yourself or others on the receiving end of a certain disdain constitutes a just cause to pursue. And politics presents all kinds of issues where the stakes ought to inspire some degree of fear and corresponding action.
It’s a healthy fear that guards us against idolatrous self-love and that girds us with courage and patience to endure whatever life throws our way.
But however high the stakes, all the evils of this world pale before the evil of separation from God. “The ultimately terrible,” Pieper concludes, “is none other than the possibility that the person, through guilt, willingly separates himself from the ground of being” (Cardinal Virtues, 127). It’s a healthy fear that guards us against idolatrous self-love and that girds us with courage and patience to endure whatever life throws our way. “He who fears the Lord will tremble at nothing” (Sirach 34:16).
J. R. R. Tolkien feared very much he would lose his son Christopher during the Second World War. In 1944, Christopher had left home to train as a pilot, and it’s clear from a touching series of letters that his father worried they wouldn’t meet again here on earth. “I miss you hourly,” Tolkien writes in one letter. “I cannot tell you how much I miss you, dear man,” he says in another.
And then in another, he reflects on the misery across the world, all the sadness and sorrow and worry, let alone all the pain and death and injustice. “If anguish were visible, almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapour.” Outwardly, everything looked grievous and evil. “But,” he continues,
the historical version is, of course, not the only one. . . . No man can estimate what is really happening at the present [under the aspect of eternity]. All we do know, and that to a large extent by direct experience, is that evil labours with vast power and perpetual success—in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in. So it is in general and so it is in our own lives . . . in the mercy of God.
With the outcome of the war very much in doubt, the nation in peril, and his son’s life in the balance, Tolkien nonetheless can write, “Our lot has fallen on evil days: but that cannot be by mere ill chance.” And he concludes, “We are in God’s hands.”
Tolkien expresses what Pieper describes as holding as “nought all the things of this world” in the love of God. Pieper doesn’t mean (in a book about the virtues!) that we care little about this world, about good and evil, or about the quality of our earthly lives. But by God’s grace, a person “may become one with God to such an extent that he receives, so to speak, the capacity to see things from God’s point of view and to ‘relativize’ them . . . without at the same time repudiating them or doing injustice to their nature” (Cardinal Virtues, 38–39).
To hold the world as nought is to let go of the anxious, suffocating, and ultimately fearful desire to posit our own good, to establish our own security, and to protect ourselves from harm. This egocentric quest can only exhaust itself in the never-ending rollercoaster of life’s ups and downs.
To see things from God’s point of view is to trust, like Samwise at the end of The Lord of the Rings, that one day “all the sad things will come untrue.” But in the meantime, dreadful things will happen. The need for courage, Pieper writes, “is incontrovertible testimony to the existence of evil in the world” (Christian Idea, 23). Jesus knows his disciples will face brutal temporal fates. “In this world, you will have trouble,” he tells them. But “take heart,” he says—or, depending on the translation, “have courage,” “be of good cheer,” “fear not”—“for I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).