The Great Good Thing

Author: Andrew Klavan

“I don’t know how to live.” So began the turning point in Andrew Klavan’s life. He was a smart guy, a writer, from a Jewish family, and married to wonderful woman. He tried to convince himself that he had all the answers. He wrote a book he was sure would change the world.

Having begun with the unquestioned certainty that material reality is all there is, he saw faith as a cheap salve for those who couldn’t accept life as it was. And yet his own mind wouldn’t let him rest, as if subconsciously aware that he was feeding it falsehoods — trying to force reality into clothes that didn’t fit.

So he drank to ease the pain: the pain of wanting his father’s approval, the pain of his compensatory grandiosity, the pain of having all the answers while not being able to fix even himself. He drank until he realized that the pain itself was preventing him from being able to trust his own reasoning.

That’s when he decided to get professional help. He realized that in order to trust his mind, he needed, at minimum, a foundation of psychological health. For otherwise, as he wrote, “We transform our dysfunctions into philosophies.”

Klavan’s story echoes themes from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. Both men tried to formulate their own philosophy, and both came to recognize the futility of materialistic thinking. As Chesterton wrote, “The materialist understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding.”

Quotes & Concepts

• What is madness but the burden of genius in a world of fools?
• Some see faith as the death of thought.
• Hamlet: “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” (At first blush, this may seem like an endorsement of moral relativism, but it can also be understood as a nod to the primacy of perception, attitude, and belief.)
• The human heart is so steeped in self-deception that it can use even meticulous honesty in the service of its lies.
• Sigmund Freud: “The psychotherapeutic process is a journey from hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness.”

Extended Observations

Joy & Realism

By “joy” I mean a vital love of life in both sorrow and gladness.

The hungry can’t eat your tears. The poor can’t spend them. They’re no comfort to the afflicted. And they don’t bring the wicked to justice. Everything useful that can be done in the world can be done in joy.

Through prayer, I came to see both pleasure and sorrow in real life as one does when reading a good book or watching an engaging movie: whatever happens, whether good or bad, you go right on enjoying the story. In God, the life of the flesh became the story of the spirit. I love that story no matter what.

The Symbolic & The Real

I had seen beyond the scrim of the physical world, and it was all love — love of which our human lives are only a manifestation and a symbol. Why should physical things be the ground floor of our interpretations? The physical world is a symbol. Love is what’s real.

The ultimate irrational prejudice of the human mind: The belief that the symbols of reality are more real than the reality they symbolize. One by one, we let idolatry ruin each good thing. Without faith, we can’t help ourselves. The one choice we have to make is the choice between idolatry and faith, which is ultimately the choice between slavery in the flesh and freedom in the spirit.

If you start with the assumption that material reality is all there is, you will have to surmise and unearth a material cause for every phenomenon. And as long as we live in a material world, proximate physical causes will always be involved — which, like ontological red herrings, can keep us from looking for the cause behind the cause. We must always remember that labeling the parts of a system, and even understanding the mechanics of such systems, does not exhaust the mystery of thing itself.