Only a tranquil lake reflects the stars
(Chinese proverb)
In This Chapter
Calm is not rest or relaxation but a state of soul in which one reacts proportionately to what is before him.
Life’s true and legitimate enjoyment begins when a person understands the delight of calm. When he realizes that calm is the greatest pleasure in life, he understands what life is and that life is a game worth playing.
There is also a false calm, a passive or absent attitude, lacking energetic reactions. But true calm has nothing to do with lethargy; it is altogether different.
What Calm Is
What is true calm? What is a genuinely Catholic calm? What does it consist of?
I will discuss good calm and compare it with bad calm. One cannot do a good job of describing bad calm without first addressing good calm. Today, hardly anyone knows what good calm is. There are countless distortions of the word’s meaning. Many have lost the notion of true calm.
The current notion seems to be associated with relaxation. When an individual is relaxed, he is calm. Conversely, when he is tense, he is not calm. Is this notion accurate? I do not think so. I believe it is false because it is insufficient and incomplete. According to this notion, a person would not be calm at the peak of his vitality, and I dispute that.
Imagine you were invited to go on a boat ride on the Loire, the Rhine, or Venice. The ride on the Rhine would seem particularly attractive to me. It is a fantastic river with verdant mountain hillsides planted with vineyards, pretty villages, and tiny or large castles from time to time, slowly passing by as the person rides up the Rhine toward its source in Switzerland.
During the whole time, the person sees things that can significantly arouse his vitality. He can become satisfied and happy, laugh, take pictures, or do anything else. Will he thus lose his calm? Someone might, but when a person legitimately experiences all these impressions, he does not lose his calm.
So, just what is calm? Calm is not relaxation. It is a state of the soul by which a person’s temperament, instincts, and sensibility react in a way fully proportional to what he has before him. This is the meaning of calm.[1]
Marechal Ferdinand Foch (1851-1929)
Two Levels of Calm
The word calm has two meanings. One is being calm when not faced with an object of anger, fear, panic or apprehension. Another is a way of being angry or apprehensive, whereby an individual does not lose self-control. This can also be called calm but in another sense.
Since calm is complete self-government, one can call calm the fact that an individual retains his self-government in a situation that places him in shock or tension. In that struggle, he is no longer calm in the complete sense of the word but preserves some calm within the noblest part of his soul: his entire proportion with truth. Yet this is no longer calm, properly speaking, only after a fashion.
The person is placed in a situation where his sensibility boils, but through sheer willpower, this effervescence is strictly reduced to its initial bubbles. His willpower prevents it from going any further.
For example, in the General Staff of Marshal Foch in World War I, there was calm par excellence, but it was not calm in the complete sense of the word.[2] It was calm in its noblest aspect: retaining balance and objectivity in an adverse situation. But it was not calm in the sense of avoiding tension, fright, or anger.
There is something that, depending on the circumstances, an individual cannot overcome because it is not natural for him to overcome. Nevertheless, he remains victorious over it to the full degree possible humanly.
Here is a typical but illustrative example: a martyr who enters the arena and sees the lion that will devour him. Save for a higher action of grace, his instinct of self-preservation immediately reacts and produces a specific effect that he can nobly prevent from taking over, but he will unavoidably feel some initial disturbance. What he can do is to keep that initial disturbance within limits. Then, he has calmness par excellence: standing before a lion and remaining calm. But that is not calm in the complete sense of the word.
Happiness and Calm
Life’s genuine and legitimate fruition begins when an individual understands the delight of calm. When he understands that calm is the greatest pleasure in life, he understands what life is and that it is a game worth playing. If he does not understand this, he understands nothing and does not know how to live. He has lost life’s greatest delight.
Imagine, for example, the doge of Venice embarking on the Bucentaur for Venice’s nuptials with the sea.[3] If he did not have the calmness to enjoy it, he would fail to do so, for fruition would be accompanied by anxiety, which brings an element of pain. And joy is not as perfect in the presence of pain as in the absence of pain. From very early on, I discerned in me a taste for calmness. I think it was a grace, as I intensely enjoyed calmness.
I remember our house had a garden and a large, unoccupied area. It was a good-sized garden for that neighborhood, well taken care of, and had many sparrows and other birds. They would come to the wide parapet of the terrace where I was and jump up and down, and after a closer look, I noticed their joyous and happy frolicking. After a moment, I began to pay attention to the sparrows’ feathers. I found the set of feather colors charming and began noticing how their movements were graceful and small but well-proportioned, real gems.
I had heard that sparrows are very common birds and hardly worth anything, and suddenly, I realized how wrong that opinion was. They did not have the independence or criteria to realize how interesting and cute sparrows can be.
An Animal that Exemplifies Calm
I will give an example of an animal I know is liked by many, but it is the most adequate image of calm I find in nature. It is a mixture of vigilance and shrewdness, on the one hand, and calm on the other: the jaguar and its miniature, the cat.
I know a lot of people dislike cats. It is a selfish animal, but I like it because it has several interesting sides. Even any ordinary gutter cat has a certain prestige, and this is one aspect that pleases me a lot. So to speak, it is an animal that knows to respect itself; it is always clean, keeping its head high. You do not see a cat with a relaxed face. He is worried but calm. You never see a nervous cat. This mixture of vigilance and calmness attracts me most to the cat. Any cat is ready to jump anytime. But nervous, never![4]
A cat may be in a most challenging situation but retains a perfect mastery over the flexibility of his muscles. He carefully measures the distance before jumping. If someone pursues him, he takes a giant leap. And the first thing he does when out of danger is to restore calm. Another nice thing is that the cat is smart. Even his tail works like an antenna, like radar.
What is not at all sympathetic in the cat is his falsehood. He is kind in his feline way, but suddenly he claws you. Then he retracts his claws and returns to his round little paws.
The cat is a living bibelot created by God. All animals are bibelots that God created to entertain man. God makes bibelots much more beautiful than those made of porcelain, although good-quality porcelain bibelots are very beautiful.
A Sublime Example of Calm
I do not know how high the human race would reach if so many people’s capacities were not lost in useless “rooting.” It would be fantastic if their resources were all taken advantage of calmly.
In fact, within calm, respect as such is the acknowledgment of a higher value; it pays homage.
Respect is, within calm, the realization of a more excellent value because it pays homage.[5] Every solemnity implies calm. This is one of many reasons why the Revolution revolted against solemnities.
Our Lord Jesus Christ is the communicative figure of calm par excellence! It can be said that He is calm par excellence in every possible sense and gradation of the word. He never ceased to be calm. His figure, especially on the Shroud of Turin, communicates calm—that prayer: “Anima Christi, sanctifica me,” communicates ineffable tranquility.
False Calm
The calm I am describing is full of vitality and mobility, with a disposition to accept various things and not get sickly tied up in one thing to the exclusion of others. It is a flexibility of the soul proper to the joints and vitality of a living organism, whereby facing everything that happens, it gradually accepts, molds itself, refuses and so on, in life’s goodness and well-being.
Bad calm tends to a melancholy, closed-up, and wary attitude towards life as if saying, “Life, you are such that concerning you, I only have one position: to defend me and to close the windows. I do not want you to enter my impassivity because you make me suffer. And this is the only way I can live. I feel nothing, suffer nothing, rejoice over nothing not to play the evil game of existence but live in my own Olympic atony, despising other men who let themselves be carried away by your vicissitudes.”
Deep down in this false calm is a refusal of self, life, and God, as if saying, “I refuse it all!” This is wrong. The usual thing is to accept a good thing; if a bad one comes, to be displeased; if nothing happens, not to sulk. One needs to be flexible in all these ups and downs.
False Calm Results from a Heresy
I can expound in a few words on the connection between this cold conception of life and the Gnosis heresy.[6] The Gnostic idea is that Creation was evil and that man should not have been created. The Gnostics do not accept the concept of Creation; they think that man is a particle detached from God because of a disaster that occurred in God. They conclude that “since I was born of an error of God, I must remain in a kind of nirvana or nothingness until the happy moment when I can reintegrate with God. I will be sulking for the rest of that time. To reincorporate oneself in God means to cease to exist, and therein lies the perversity of gnosis.[7]
If we imagine a gradual despoiling of everything people cherish as the pleasure of their life, we would have something like contemporary Russia, where any reaction has become impossible.[8] So, people resign themselves to the futility of doing anything and moan stupidly. They have nothing that could give them joy; joy has disappeared. Beat up along life’s journey, they lose entirely their reactivity.
What will their children and grandchildren be like? What does this whole situation produce on people’s collective mentality? It is like an empty, dead spot in which a pseudo-pleasing inner sensation is still a ray of light.
Losing and Recovering Calm
Can one keep calm facing something highly desirable?
Yes, but note that highly desirable things later lead people not to want less desirable ones. Some caution is thus required. Highly desirable things cause fatigue when they last for a while. As a result, albeit feeling powerfully attracted to them, the person feels like returning to normalcy.
The loss of calm usually occurs due to the erroneous idea that the person would enjoy more intensely by exaggerating fruition to a paroxysm. We had calm and would have everything if we did not force it. By forcing it, we blow it.
Can calm be recovered?
The answer is simple: with prayer, yes; without it, no. But calm should be deeply desired and considered a life goal.
Notes:
[1] 9-25-86.
[2] See further on, Calmness During War.
[3] Bucentaur: official galley of the Venetian doge, who used it on the Ascension feast to celebrate Venice’s marriage with the sea. Napoleon had it destroyed.
[4] 6-22-74.
[5] 9-25-86.
[6] Gnosis: system of religious philosophy whose adepts claim to have a complete science of God’s nature and attributes. The Gnostics existed in Antiquity and made up about seventy sects.
[7] 9-25-86.
[8] Lecture given in 1986.