“If asked to define Ignatian spirituality, the first thing out of [five hypothetical Jesuits’] mouths would most likely be finding God in all things…Ignatian spirituality considers everything an important element in your life. That includes religious services, sacred Scriptures, prayer, and charitable works, to be sure, but it also includes friends, family, work, relationships, sex, suffering, and joy, as well as nature, music, and pop culture.”
So writes James Martin, S.J., in his The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything: A Spirituality for Real Life. This excerpt gels with recent remarks I heard about rejecting dualism because it is a heresy of true faith. Dualism is defined here as the belief that the world is divided starkly into good and evil, mind/soul and body, the godly and the entirely ungodly. Zoroastrianism, as I understand it, seems to promote such a dualistic cosmology.
Friedrich Nietzsche, whose previous work Thus Spoke Zarathustra ironically name-checked the founder of Zoroastrianism, argued in Beyond Good and Evil that traditional moralities had crudely and misleadingly set the good man in direct opposition to the evil man. While Catholic theologians would strongly object to many of Nietzsche’s other ideas, they might concur with his opposition to the dualism of Zoroastrianism and Christian heresy.
This is the crude armchair theology of a lazy religious person, but to me the Catholic approach to elements of life that seem at first blush to be evil and ungodly might follow upon the ancient Greeks’ belief in the goddess Eris (Discordia from the Latin), the deity of strife or discord, who finds herself in opposition to the goddess Harmonia (Concordia from the Latin). Spiteful Eris sparked the Trojan war by presenting Paris with the golden apple and the choice of who among three goddesses was the most beautiful.
The idea is that God is present in discord and strife, but divine presence is less obvious and more mysterious there than it is in the harmonious. It might even be argued that the discordant and strife-ridden are more fertile subjects for the study of divine presence because of their complexity, possibly falling under the topic of theodicy. As Leo Tolstoy, a Christian, put it in the first line of the novel Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Or as the apparently atheistic narrator of Graham Greene’s the novel The End of the Affair puts it, “The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.”
Update: The preponderance of media stories about Ellen DeGeneres being a “mean boss” has me pining for those halcyon days of yore when Covid-19 was the only thing in the headlines.