In the bath

In these days of madness and deceit, it pays to refresh ourselves at the best sources of all. To that end, I've recently started dipping into the Summa Theologica again after a hiatus of some duration. A teacher of mine many years ago gave me this golden rule: 'An article a day keeps the trick cyclist at bay.' Oddly enough, this rule didn't keep his trick cyclist at bay. Mind you, was it a rule or was it just a guideline, like the Pirate Code?

One of St Thomas's more amusing articles concerns whether bathing and sleep can alleviate sorrow. It is quite a thought, isn't it, imagining that vast bulk of a man trying out his hypothesis by slipping into a bath of Radox. 'Do you think he actually took a bath?' Mrs Carlyle asked me this morning. 'No,' I replied, 'but I think he might have read about it in Augustine.' 

Be that as it may, I feel St Thomas's preoccupation with bathing is becoming more and more important as our age descends into chaos. Or, to take another metaphor, the nearer we move to the edge of the cliff, the more we have to somehow develop our head for heights. We might be here some time after all. And if bathing makes us feel better, well, we have no less an authority than the greatest Doctor of them all to prove we're not just blowing bubbles.

In related articles, St Thomas also comments on how joy is the soul's repose. This is a powerful but neglected dimension of spiritual guidance. Joy is not consolation, and yet I fear too often the two are confused, and the former is tainted by association with the latter. Tainted? But of course. Consolation sits under a special, dark cloud in the climate of hand-me-down Ignatian spirituality left over by the Counter-Reformation. Yet that is no reason to be suspicious of consolation in its place and, a fortiori, no reason to fear joy.

I'm reminded at this juncture of two things that are joyful in themselves, as well as problematisations of my discussion. The first comes from Vaclav Havel who, for all I know, talked solemn nonsense the rest of the time, but who once said that 'Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.'  In this sense, joy is nothing so prosaic or naive as optimism; rather, it is associated with the certainty of already possessing the beloved and rejoicing therein.

The second thing I am reminded of is Chesterton's injunction, found towards the end of Orthodoxy, that we are most ourselves when the fundamental thing in us is our joy. I look up the quotation and its actual words are even more apposite:

Man is more himself, more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him and grief the superficial.

The challenge in these words, as in Havel's, have been beyond many of us in recent times. But what if, just what if, we were prepared to rise from our slough of subprime grumbling and leap into the bath with Summa Theologica in hand?

I admit we cannot all be as gifted as Eccles in this regard. But might we surpass perhaps the giddiness of Eyeore? We can but try.