With the rise in social media and ease of virtual communication, people have become increasingly isolated. People no longer go out to greet their neighbors. Even close friends prefer texting to calling. Dating is now behind screens rather than over a dinner table. Instead of striving to overcome our anxiety or ride above our lazy disposition to talk to others in-person , we hide behind a textbox.
At best, us moderns attempt to simulate the experience of authentic human interaction, preferring “Facetime” to genuine face-to-face interaction, and “Snapchat,” to chatting over goofy pictures of times past. In sum, the most basic and fundamental human experience—that of communion with others—is not being undermined and replaced by pervasive simulacra.
For many people, this is problematic: we are political animals, and need community in order to grow, flourish, learn, and love. Even introverts are facing problems due to the ever-expanding isolation of our times, destining them more thoroughly to a life of loneliness. As the Metaverse grows ever closer to replacing the Universe, a number of questions arise that should send ominous chills through the bones of any person who values the sincerity and intimacy that we were made for. Are we not meant for community, rather than individualism? Did Aristotle not disprove Rousseau? If so, why are we living in Rousseau’s solitary world? (1)
To answer these questions, we must be willing to confront some oft overlooked facts about our religion. Solitude, admittedly, is not in itself a bad thing. We often forget that there is a deeply solitary tradition within the Church: many, many saints have been made by choosing the life of the hermit, living in radical isolation with the world so that he can live in constant communion with God without distraction. Indeed, St. John the Baptist himself, though he preached to the masses, lived a largely reclusive life in the woods dressed in animal skins, feasting on only locusts and honey. These holy men and women—who would appear to most moderns as schizophrenic recluses—strove for sanctity by embracing a path that seems—at least at first glance—quite contrary to the communal love taught by Jesus and social striving encouraged by Aristotle. And yet they proved that solitude is not necessarily lonely, nor indeed a path that takes one away from Christ.
Clearly then, there must be some benefit to solitude. But what is it then that makes solitude so conducive to drawing closer to God? And what steps can we take to pursue this spiritual path? To answer these questions, we must first look at how humans approach life after the Fall. Let us turn to a respected—albeit oft misunderstood—thinker to shed a bit of wisdom on our plight, and find some answers to the question regarding the tension between the solitary individual and the communal citizen.
The Catholic theologian Blaise Pascal can help us answer these questions. Though tempted by Jansenism (an Augustinian denomination with a Calvinist tinge) for a time, Pascal upheld belief in real presence, apostolic succession, and the sovereignty of the Church. After leading a miserable, restless, and even worldly life for a time, he experienced a mystical conversion experience called the “night of fire” in which he decided to rededicate his life to Christ and examine his own soul in light of the Divine Mercy that he deeply yearned for. (2)
According to Pascal, each person’s life is characterized by a divided self, whose tensions only multiply in the midst of society. To understand this, we need to take a step back and pause before jumping to conclusions about false teachings and reaching for our copies of Nicomachean Ethics to beat Pascal over the head with. Let’s hear him out.
The human condition, Pascal tells us, “hold[s] the midpoint between two extremes:” (3) Simply put, we are too small to acquire all our wants, but bold enough to demand everything. The result is that we are doomed to perpetual duality: seeing our smallness, we seek to fill the void with mindless activities, knowing that without distractions we would be forced to sit quietly alone and wrestle with our wretchedness. “Wholly occupied with the past or future,” we anxiously seek the company of yes-men so we can reaffirm our own conceit, when instead we should “maintain silence as much as possible and speak with ourselves only of God.” (4)
Our pride makes us “averse to the truth.” (5) Without God, we are hopelessly miserable, but even with God, if we are not routinely engaged in prayer, we fall victim to pridefulness and ignorance. Hoping to avoid acknowledging how sinful we truly are, we flock to people and institutions who will flatter us wildly while condemning our enemies. “We are treated as we want to be treated,” Pascal writes, “we hate the truth, so it is hidden from us; we want to be flattered, so we are flattered; we want to be deceived, so we are deceived.” (6) Amidst a skeptical culture, both progressives and conservatives turn to populism in a search for meaning, identity, and self-aggrandizement. And it is in such groups and identities that we seek to divert ourselves from the truth of our depraved conditions and our self-serving souls.
There is, as Pascal points out, a close connection between diversion and misery. (7) While as Christians, we have an enduring hope in Christ that prevents us from despairing, we still must admit the sad, unspoken mortal truth: by and large, the human condition is sorrowful and sinful. We cannot simply sit still in our rooms and be content with ourselves; we have a void in our hearts that we fill with mindless activities. During any activity—from academic extracurriculars to community outreach—we are distracted from life’s troubles. When one activity concludes, we move restlessly to another, hoping to divert ourselves from contemplating our moral failings. As Pascal writes, “We never keep to the present time. We anticipate the future as too slow in coming, almost to hurry it up, or we remember the past, to stop it as having gone too fast.” (8)
The reason for this is obvious: “it is that the present is usually painful.” (9) Distractions allow us to avoid confronting the truth of our own misery. So long as we avoid reflection, we don’t have to complete the dreaded and painful examination of conscience each night. “We hide it from our sight because it distresses us.” (10) Distractions help greatly with this: if we watch just one more episode of The Office, play one more level in Call of Duty, or even read one more chapter in The Hobbit, we don’t have to reflect on our sins and confess them before God.
But the abyss goes deeper: thanks to free enterprise and the scientific revolution, modern society offers a vast array of new opportunities. (11) Its benefits, however, come with a price: not only is gaining self-awareness more difficult, but it also becomes both less desirable and less available. With such an abundance of career options, we simply do not want to sit still and make time for self-reflection. And, since many jobs require prior experience, one has to build an extensive resume to reach their lofty goals. Each new line of the resume compounds our pride, making prayer-time not only undesirable but genuinely detrimental to reaching our dreams. Since we never confront our sinful ways and talk with God, our souls never find rest, and so we seek even more diversions to fill the vacuum, unknowingly making it deeper. (12)
But though diversions help us escape the pain of reflection, they harm our souls and prevent us from experiencing the deep healing through our spiritual reflection. Alone in our room, we are forced to confront our wretchedness, but though we wish to avoid coming to grips with our fallen nature, it is the only way we can achieve true knowledge. (13) So long as we are unable “to remain quietly in” our rooms, we will be anxious and unfulfilled. Without personal time with God, spent acknowledging not only our blessings but also our faults, we don’t have time to delve into the contradictions and shortcomings in our own soul and reconcile them so we can grow in virtue and holiness. (14)
God’s preferred language is silence, for only in silence can we actually turn our ear to hear Him. Modernity creates a great deal of noise: beeping car horns, blaring traffic lights, blasts of bad music, the list goes on. Postmodernity even enhances these sounds with tempting visuals: mindless Tik-Tok videos, soul-sucking Youtube channels, and money-grabbing Netflix videos. Indeed, it seems that our society was designed by someone who wanted to keep us as distracted as possible from the things in life that really matter. If we’re trying to beat a boss battle in Assassin’s Creed III, then we probably aren’t praying the rosary; if we’re tuning-in to a cooking podcast, we probably aren’t actually cooking with our family members; and if we’re “binge-watching”—a word which in itself reveals its soul-tearing nature—then we certainly aren’t philosophizing about the true, the good, and the beautiful.
But all these distractions, though often isolating in themselves, are the direct products of community. There are discord servers built around “fandoms”—a word which essentially means a cult built around some material or pop-cultural idol—where people can connect and discuss their shared interests. Video games are often multiplayer, and most kids play with their friends in a “party-chat” on the Xbox. The phenomenon called Twitch is literally a medium by which hundreds of people strangely watch another person play video games (since apparently playing the video game yourself is too much effort). I do not mean to come off as a Luddite; I do not necessarily think all of these are unequivocally bad, and I even think they are important for some people who have a more difficult time making friends. Indeed, I even engage in a few of these “fandoms” myself; that said though, it’s still undeniable that these distracting “activities” take time away from God, and prevent us from pursuing one-on-one prayer time with the Almighty.
Accordingly, God will occasionally remove these things from our life, hoping we will draw near to Him. Sometimes, He will even remove everything from our life. This is often very painful, and we question God, wondering why He would do such a thing. It is all the more painful when we base our entire personalities and even our lives around the things that He takes away from us. Yet it is precisely because we have put so much of ourselves into these objects, people, and ideas, that we have been unable to give any of us to Him, when in fact, as Christians, we are supposed to give ourselves wholly to Him.
During these times that God removes people and things from our lives, it is helpful to consider an early scene from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. Gandalf knows that the ring—which he suspects may be the One Ring—is not good for Bilbo. (15) It keeps him well-preserved physically, but is slowly corrupting his heart, keeping his eyes facing downward rather than upward. Gandalf—and the reader—is fully aware that the ring is altogether evil, and cannot be used even for God; yet it is so tiny, so tempting, so beautiful, and so precious. (16)
When we read this scene, it is easy to forget how much like Bilbo we are; we often watch it and feel frustrated or even angry at Bilbo for not simply listening to Gandalf and giving up the ring. (17) We consider him foolish and even sinful. Yet if we do this, we are failing to realize this is how God views us: He knows full-well (since He is, after all, an all-knowing being) that the material goods in our life or even the people we think are good for us are actually harmful. We so often put so much stock into such goods—or even people—and ruminate over them constantly, turning them over and over again in our minds, and focusing all our thoughts on them, that we no longer feel we can live without them. Eventually, the preoccupation we have with such things becomes habitual, and not only can we not shirk the desire off, but we no longer even want to. Our wills become corrupted: over time, we will cease to be Bilbo, and become more like the pitiful creature Gollum. (18) And, if we stay on that path, we will eventually become even less human than Gollum: we will become wraiths, mere shades who can no longer sense the goodness of air, earth, water, and sky. (19) Should we stay on the path of materialism, we will lose even the ability to truly love others, as our ability to love will have been replaced by an unceasing craving for the material objects that have taken hold of our souls.
This is why God wants us to flee from diversions: He knows they are distractions, just like the One Ring. Although we consider them precious, they still draw us away from Him. Even the diversions that are “good”—such as hanging out with genuinely virtuous friends—still prevent us from going into quiet adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, or performing an examination of conscience. Thus, God sometimes has to remove the distractions from our life, and oftentimes, it is quite painful. But even when it feels like the world is too great a burden to bear, when we look around with tears in our eyes and see that we have no friends to converse with, God is always there for us. Moreover, we must always remember that it is precisely because He wants to talk to us that He takes everything away from us. But why is this?
I cannot stress enough: none of these are a cause for despair; indeed, the pain of inward reflection is actually God’s invitation for us to have hope. But how precisely is this the case? After all, how could a God who, as Pope Benedict XVI says, “call[s] us to communion,” (20) want to take us away from society, and focus on ourselves? The emphasis on the self and retreat from community seems like the opposite of what God wants. Is there some grand deception going on?
To answer these questions, we must first remember how God works. Because He wills our good, and wants us for Himself and His perfect Love, He also wills the means to obtain our good; put more simply, He will never do anything that could truly harm us, even if at the moment it feels like it. We must remember that the pain we feel over the loss of such goods is often the same pain Bilbo felt: it is a genuine feeling with a misplaced cause; it is a pain that results because our hearts desire sin rather than goodness. Thus, though it may seem painful, unappealing, tragic, and even frightening, it is often through retreat into ourselves and exploration into our own souls in the quiet of our bedrooms that we draw nearer to God.
But the question remains: isn’t community important? Shouldn’t we spend time with our friends? Such concerns are important, but one who raises them likely overlooks a crucial aspect about solitude with God: when we commune with God, we actually have more friends than we could possibly imagine. For not only is God the greatest of all friends—the friend who always listens and never abandons us no matter how badly we mess up—but within His Body, the Body of Christ, are all the saints who rejoice that we turn our voice to them and let our souls sing of our deep need for both their support and the love of Our Savior.
The saints, contrary to what some may think, do not make for lonely company: if we truly think we cannot hear them, then we just aren’t listening hard enough. One who cannot speak cannot communicate; and to speak is not to be limited to words of the mouth. The saints and Christ make their presence known in numerous, dazzling, and often very personal ways that, once we recognize them for what they are, make our lips smile and our souls leap with that inner voice as if to say, “Ha. I see you there, St. Faustina. Thanks for that reminder, now keep me on the path!” While God wants us to have earthly friends, He also wants us for Himself: only the Enemy wants us to think we don’t have a friend in the saints, and that Christ doesn’t want us. In fact, friendship with Christ is an infinitely more worthwhile love than even Samwise and Frodo—and that’s saying a lot!
Indeed, it is precisely because the saints are the best of company that we find ourselves stuck in Rousseau’s world: the video games, the Netflix, and the sporting events are the things that make us truly lonely. By pursuing diversions instead of prayerful intimacy with God, we are depriving ourselves of the greatest communion with all. Thus, though we pursue diversions to distract us from the bitter loneliness we know we have deep down, it is actually precisely because we embrace these distractions that we are alienated from the perfect and true communion with God and His saints. Aristotle was correct that we are made for communion: but we need to remember that communion with heaven is immeasurably greater and lasting than communion with the finite mortals here on earth. By choosing solitude from the world, we are actually choosing profound communion with God.
Now, this is not to say that one-on-one time with God is all fun and games: it is not. In fact, it is often a dark night of the soul. We cannot overlook this fact: Christianity is hard and lonely. But so is a root canal. If we want to truly eat real food without pain, we’re going to need to go to the dentist. True, the dentist may pull out your tooth—or teeth, if you don’t brush frequently enough—but you’ll thank Him later when you taste that sweet manna from the overflowing feast that He has prepared for you.
Ultimately, it is true that we are meant for community, but only one of a particular type: that is, communion with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Community is merely one possible means to achieving the true goal, which is entry into the Body of Christ. Aristotle was right that humans are political animals; but to stop at Aristotle without reaching St. John of the Cross is to stop with John the Forerunner before reaching Jesus the Messiah. We live in Rousseau’s world of Solitary Walkers not because we have neglected the importance of community, but because we have actively and eagerly constructed a false community, one built around serving vice and illusion rather than virtue and truth. Rather than rightly ordering ourselves with the truth, we seek to create small communities that serve as echo-chambers to our own base passions. The cure for this, as Pascal shows us, is not more communion, but solitude, for only alone can we truly listen to God. There, without distraction, noise, and vanity, we can tremble in the wake of the living God, and communicate with Him through His preferred language: namely, silence. For only by silence can we listen to our heart reveal our sins to us in our examinations of conscience, and reveal to us our shortcomings so that we may overcome them and strive to better love our neighbor and Our Lord. All things considered, solitude is not a state to despair, but a call to hope, and invitation to personal friendship with Christ Our Lord.
Citations:
Pascal, Blaise. Pensees., Trans. Roger Ariew. Hackett Publishing Company, 2004.
Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal. Called to Communion. Ignatius Press., 1996.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Trans. Charles Butterworth. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1992.
Royal, Robert. “Pascal’s Fire.” The Catholic Thing, Wednesday, July 6, 2016. https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2016/07/06/pascals-fire/.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Ring. New York: Del Rey Mass Market Edition, 1954/2018.
(1) Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Reveries of a Solitary Walker. Trans. Charles Butterworth. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1992, 1.
(2) Royal, Robert. “Pascal’s Fire,” The Catholic Thing, Wednesday, July 6, 2016. https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2016/07/06/pascals-fire/.
(3) Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Trans. Roger Ariew. Hackett Publishing Company, 2004, 61.
(4) Pascal, Pensees, 16, 29.
(5) Pascal, Pensées, 268.
(6) Ibid.
(7) Pascal, Pensees, 16.
(8) Ibid.
(9) Ibid.
(10) Ibid.
(11) Pascal, Pensées, 111.
(12) Pascal, Pensees, 25.
(13) Ibid, 38.
(14) Ibid.
(15) Tolkien, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Ring. New York: Del Rey Mass Market Edition, 1954/2018, 35.
(16) Tolkien, Fellowship, 51-53.
(17) Ibid.
(18) Ibid, 60.
(19) Ibid.
(20) Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal. Called to Communion. Trans. Adrian Walker. Ignatius Press., 1996, 76.