Pleasure devours those who give themselves to it
when out of reasonable proportions.[1]
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
In This Chapter
How do you lose your calm? Pretentiousness and intemperance are among the most frequent causes.[2]
What exactly is pretentiousness? The word comes from the verb pretend. It is to pretend to have or wish to have a quality without possessing it. Consequently, to show ill-will toward others, sadness for the good that happens to them, joy for an evil that befalls them, and complete indifference to those outside one’s circuit of pretentiousness, that is, outside one’s little stage.[3]
Intemperance is a lack of moderation in the pursuit of pleasure. Indulging in sexuality and intrigue (endless “politicking” with one’s neighbors), among others, are forms of intemperance.
[1] 28-3-72.
[2] (see note 1 of chap. 9).
[3] 3-12-69.
The unpretentious individual is stable and serene and does not get agitated. Serenity is not simply calm; it is the opposite of restlessness.
Meaning of Pretension
What is pretension? The word comes from the verb pretend. Someone may think or pretend to have some quality. He believes, supposes, imagines, understands and affirms to himself that he has it and wants others to consider that he does.
There are two kinds of pretensions: founded and unfounded. For example, an individual may claim that he is a great painter. If he is, his pretension is said to be justified, that is, reasonable. He may claim a position for which he has the capacity, and his claim to occupy such a position is said to be justified or reasonable.
Considered as such, the word pretension can have a legitimate and even complimentary sense but has usually taken on a pejorative meaning. It does not designate a state of mind in its most legitimate facet but in its bad aspect. An individual is said to be pretentious when, by claiming something, even legitimately, he shows attachment, arrogance, petulance and a tendency to exaggerate the value of what he has. Although he does have what he claims to have, he exorbitates its value in his own eyes or before others. Therefore, a particular disorder is found within pretension.
Characteristics of Unpretentiousness
A characteristic of unpretentiousness is stability. The unpretentious individual is stable and serene and does not get agitated. Serenity is not simply calm; it is the opposite of restlessness. Serenity is more than calm. It is an exquisite, prolonged form of calm that includes well-being. Unpretentiousness propitiates this. The unpretentious individual does not pretend to be more than he is. He also knows that he is not less and presents himself as he is.
Unpretentiousness leads to affability. The unassuming person is affable and usually welcoming. When looked for, he tends to respond well; when asked for something, he is prone to give. He is prone to agree with others without being a jerk or a friendly idiot. He is no fool but is prone to agree when reasonable.
In contrast to wariness, the unpretentious person is keenly perspicacious without being startled. What is the difference between being suspicious and being perspicacious? The suspicious person is agitated. The perspicacious one is calm and tranquil and analyzes things coldly. He has a form of lucidity without fuss or scares. He looks at things calmly, normally. Moreover, he is prone to trust in Providence, which is the opposite of “rooting.” He thinks: “God will provide, and I will receive whatever is according to the ways of Our Lady. There is no reason to be rooting for it.”
The Disguised and the Ridiculous
The disorder of pretentiousness can be twofold: the individual either exaggerates the value of what he has or clings to a value he does not have. The latter would be the worst. Since it is pleasant for him to imagine that he has it, he lies to himself and others and takes the attitudes, airs, and manners of those who have that to instill a nonexistent superiority in the minds of others. In this case, it is a disorder taken to an apex. It is not just an exaggeration, but disorder turned into a lie.
There was a boy from the interior, from a city hardly visited by people from the capital. He said he was the son of a farmer who owned a large farm and bragged, “I feel sorry for my father, with that huge farm to carry. It is hard to own such a farm; it’s a lot of responsibility. I help him on my vacations. I am worried as I do not know what will become of us when we inherit such a large farm. We are still so young…” He disguised his pride by attributing to his father the quality he wished others to see in him.
His father had a modest little pharmacy in town and no farm, which might have existed only in his imagination. A person can boast such braggadocio, but most people lack the courage to go that far.
The Calm Repose of Temperance[1]
Delving deeper, we find that things capable of plunging us into disorder due to original sin are desired in a more unruly and intense way than reason would have it.
The circumstances in each person’s history and the ambiance in which he lives sometimes accentuate that unruly appetite even more. That gives rise to agitation, fears, doubts, shyness, daring, direct assaults from passion and the whole tumult of passion in man. Those are the sore spots. One person funnily said, “Some people have a kind of callus on their head, a sore spot. If an idea passes by and scrapes that callus, he shudders.”
On other points, every person is very balanced. This varies in each of us. Therefore, our nature has many wrong appetites but, at the same time, balanced and correct desires. In some of these points, we are temperate; we like something to the extent that it is upright, can drop it to the extent that it is not, and have no extraordinary or irregular attachment. We may even have a significant but not irregular attachment as it has no unhealthy vibration. On the other hand, intemperance is an unbalanced, agitated, lively and feverish taste.
From here, we draw a philosophy of pleasure. There are two ways of enjoying life: one comes from the things one likes temperately, and the other from things we enjoy intemperately. For example, there are extraordinarily greedy types whose greatest pleasure in life is to have money. They speak on five phones simultaneously, plunging into the modern economic turmoil. But at the same time, they may have certain temperate pleasures like cultivating a good garden, going for a walk, etc.
We could establish some categories of men from the standpoint of temperance: First, those who have mastered intemperance do not consent to any intemperate pleasure and can thus find pleasure in the temperate things that life offers us. For example, a man who used to be dominated by a desire for money but now has it with moderation and under control amuses himself with things that do not give him agitation and trepidation.
Another category of men has intemperate pleasures but still retains a particular taste for temperate things. There is a statesman who is, I suppose, along this line.[2] I have the impression that, as he has a rich personality and some terrifying intemperances, he also likes prodigiously temperamental things. He has all kinds of pleasures and horrible hours but then paints the room and goes to look at a shell by the sea. All that is a pleasure to his rich, exceptionally well-endowed nature.
There is also a weaker type with a poorer mentality and a weaker personality. He gives in to and only enjoys intemperate pleasure. Let us say that this intemperate pleasure is money. He ends up being one of those horribly stingy people whose stories we read or see in paintings, with a home full of cobwebs, rats running about, a corroded and torn curtain hanging over the window. He no longer cares for himself, has long fingernails, long hair and a delirious air, and stares at chests full of gold.
What are these stories and drawings supposed to express? The failure of a man whose nature is not rich enough for him to like to hoard money and appreciate other things. For him, life is just money. He is dirty, full of fleas and worms, and his house is a horror, but he does not even notice it because he has money.
Gossip and Sensuality
There are people for whom sexual pleasure is the only thing that matters. Deep down, they are only amused by sex or politicking. For them, intrigue in sports, politics, or any other subject is the only thing besides sex. They like nothing else. They are not interested in panoramas and have no taste for life. They spend their leisure time like drug addicts, digesting their drugs until they go on a carnival dance, agitated like monkeys.
There is also a kind of man given to dwelling on empty, unsubstantial and imaginary things. He is prone to daydream about what he likes best: ramblings, languid divagations, long silences, and disorderly verbiage. He is inclined to make that exacerbation, nervousness and quest the affective center of his existence. The health of people like that usually decays quickly; they lose their psychological balance and easily become apathetic.
Such people are intemperate, with all the excitement, irregularities and weaknesses that intemperance brings. It is proper for an intemperate person to find all that is not in line with his intemperance tedious. Everything that does not vibrate according to his vibration or is balanced and calm is tedious. Books become boring, even if exciting because the snake inside him leads him to the other side. The most pleasant conversation can be fascinating if the blue fly inside does not sting him with poison.[3] Boring is everything not aligned with his intemperance. He sees the position of calm and tranquility, where one enjoys some things soundly while accomplishing serious things with struggle, suffering and prayer, as dull.
This intemperance is likely to grow with man. Whoever was intemperate at age ten will be even more so at fifteen or twenty and have the maximum intemperance at fifty. As an intemperate person ages quickly, he will be old at sixty. One could say that in his sixties, the intemperance was already over. No, he was over, not his intemperance. It is like cancer or leprosy when they take over the whole body and a person dies. Did the leprosy end? No, leprosy won, as the man was finished.
What is the height of intemperance? Imagine an old man with sucked cheeks, lost gaze, wobbly legs, a remnant of lubricity for teenage girls passing by. He no longer understands the newspaper he reads or the words before his eyes but still has a little life left to turn on a radio between two naps, listen to a carnival song and think: ‘Those Rio people still know how to enjoy life.’
A Nation’s Intemperance
The intemperance growth phenomenon also occurs in a nation. Just as intemperance can take hold of a man and end up consuming him, all we have said of a man’s psychology can be said of the psychology of a people. But while man’s decay occurs over the years or decades of his life, the psychological and moral decay of a whole people occurs over centuries.
A people’s main point of intemperance grows through generations. Each generation becomes more intemperate than the previous one, and people are destroyed by intemperance in their old age. While man becomes old when he ages over many years, a people only grow old by intemperance. For a people, to become intemperate is to age.
When a people grow old, one can say they are at the height of their intemperance. There is no other form of old age for a people but intemperance. From excitement to excitement, a people’s intemperances can be guided as one guides a hungry donkey by walking ahead with grass in hand for it to follow. The donkey goes after the grass, which is how you set his itinerary.[4]
Notes:
[1] One of the four cardinal virtues, “Temperance is a supernatural, moral virtue that moderates the attraction towards sense-pleasure, especially the pleasures of the palate and the flesh, and keeps them within the proper limits of propriety” (Adolphe Tanquerey, A Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology, Society of St. John the Evangelist, Tournai, Belgium, 1923, p. 517, nº 1099).
[2] His name is not mentioned.
[3] Blue fly: reference to an old legend which says that people stung by a blue fly are innoculated with concentrated doses of ambition and vanity.
[4] Undated lecture given in 1954.