Eric Scheske is a freelance writer in Sturgis, Michigan. His articles have appeared in a variety of publications, including The National Catholic Register, Our Sunday Visitor, Touchstone, The Detroit Free Press, and Detroit News. He is also the Editor of Gilbert!
(This book review is courtesy of Gilbert!, The Magazine of G.K. Chesterton.)
Serious things aren't serious and unserious things are serious. That's one way of summarizing James V. Schall's new book, The Unseriousness of Human Affairs. It is a paradox, of course, but what else would one expect from an ardent Chesterton admirer like Schall?
Schall's book is a series of essays that revolve around a basic question: How ought we to live our lives? He never tries to offer an answer, but he provides guidance in an array of areas, as evidenced by the book's subtitle: “Teaching, Writing, Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing.” To these one could add Writing and Receiving Letters, Watching Sports, and Wasting Time.
Schall laces his essays with quotes, facts, and stories from history and literature. For instance, he reminds us that, according to early Greek mythology, after the gods created the world, they realized there was no one to praise what was created—so they sent the muses, who inspired song, poetry, dance, and art.
Extracting the core truth from this early myth, Schall points out that “superfluous” activities, like singing and art, honor the Creator. Consequently, when our serious human affairs are completed, we must put them aside and turn to the unserious—but more important—things like singing, dancing and playing.
Chesterton looms large in the book. Schall lists Orthodoxy as Number 2 on his list of “These-People-Tell-the-Truth Books” (Josef Pieper's Anthology is Number 1). He pulls quotes from Chesterton to accent his points and in general presents a Chestertonian way of looking at things.
Among Englishmen, though, the most-cited person in the book is Samuel Johnson. Schall tells us that he reads something from Boswell's Life of Johnson almost every day, and his intimacy with Johnson and Boswell shows.
In one section, Schall recounts a dinner attended by Johnson and Boswell with a small group of friends at the home of Mrs. Violette Garrick, a woman who had just finished the mourning period following the death of her husband, the actor David Garrick. The group dined in Mrs. Garrick's elegant home, drank fine ale, and talked of her husband and his death—but with no morbidity, Mrs. Garrick at one point commenting, “death was now the most agreeable object to her.” Boswell was overcome by the whole evening, saying it was the one of the happiest days in his life. Schall explains this odd combination of death, friendship, ale, and joy:
We might, on reading Boswell's comment that this was one of the happiest days of his life, wonder about the appropriateness of the sentiment. And yet, as we read on, we realize that here we hear spoken of the ultimate, the fine, and the ordinary things of our human lot. 'We were all in fine spirits,' Boswell continued, for the death of their friend was now put into place in their lives, its mystery accepted. Boswell next turned to Mrs. Boscawen and whispered, 'I believe this is as much as can be made of life.' Was Boswell wrong that no more can be made of life? Ought we be perturbed that on this happy day, a widow spoke complacently of her late husband? Ought we be scandalized by the ale? No, I think here Boswell is right. He had sensed civilization at its best, where elegant things are served and the ends of life and transcendence have their place in the delight and joy we are allotted in this vale of tears.
This is just one passage of many in this book that puts our lives into proper perspective—the paradoxical perspective of joy and peace in a background of death and sadness.
Schall's book does not pull only from English-speaking writers and figures. Chesterton looms large and Johnson even larger, but the biggest figures are Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas—serious philosophers who understood the seriousness of unseriousness. We are, Aristotle said, homines risibiles, laughing animals. And because we laugh, we are natural metaphysicians: The ability to laugh results from seeing relations (or the lack thereof) and the ability to see relations is the first quality of the metaphysician.
Actually, the most important figure in Schall's book is Christ. Christ, as Chesterton concluded in Orthodoxy, is the source of joy: “There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.”
Pulling from this passage, Schall says: “It was Chesterton's view that the sort of joy for which we are made is so much more delightful than anything we can know, that it would only depress us if we were to see it before we were really prepared. The real crisis of our being is that we are given too much, not too little, that we are made for a joy we are tempted to reject because we cannot imagine it.”
It’s sometimes speculated whether sadness — the listless, bitter, sourceless type of sadness that we call depression — might not be the greatest sin because it is the antithesis of the joy and mirth that are supposed to be ours. It’s a speculation that gains intellectual credibility in this seriously-happy book.
