A younger person may ask: “Is it possible to live a whole life and attain this age to become like that? This is a dreadful thing; I would never want it!”
Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
Battle of Lepanto (October 7, 1571), in which Christendom defeated, through the miraculous intervention of Our Lady, the Mohammedans who were invading Europe.
In This Chapter
An ardent and idealistic youth, a pondered and venal maturity, a dragging old age: this is the most common view about the ages of man.
Is this conception true?
Sebastian Veniero, aged 70, was one of the victorious heroes of the Battle of Lepanto…
…with Andrea Doria…
…and Don John of Austria. A fine example of the sum of ages.
Age and Ideal
Napoleon has a famous saying on the venality of mature age.
He appears to insinuate that every mature individual is necessarily venal, devoid of flight, of ideal, and that every young person is selfless and altruistic.
He believes that elderly people neither see the marvelous nor perceive imponderables.[Imponderable: “pondus” in Latin means weight. Imponderable would literally mean weightless: subtle, indefinable, impalpable. For example, a sunset can have a joyful, melancholic, tragic, uplifting, splendorous imponderability]
Their material sight becomes weak, while at the same time, their mind becomes increasingly circumscribed by immediacy, concerned with this moment and practical and concrete things.
A married couple, old acquaintances of mine aged about 60 or so, has only two concerns. One is to care for the small farm where they live, with chickens and a water pump. Another is their health checkup. In the morning, they comment on whether the heart throbbed at night; they dread the next surprise that disease can have in store.
Seeing old age arrive with disease and the shadows of death, they frantically defend themselves and worry about nothing else.
A younger person might ask: “Is it possible to live a whole life and attain this age to become like that? This is a dreadful thing; I would never want it, but I am gradually sinking into horizons and things that end up in this.” [Feb. 2, 1972]
Struggle between Classes and Ages
There is a class struggle-like conception about the various ages of man.
As a person goes through his life’s various ‘eras,’ he changes by losing the qualities and defects of the previous one and acquiring different qualities and defects.
In childhood, the person dreams about the marvelous: he is weak, frail, small, and pure. So, purity and marveling are proper to a boy.
Then, the boy becomes a lad. I no longer dare to say he’s still pure, but he is idealistic, intense, romantic, and loving. Bad tendencies seep in with his romantic and affectionate side.
Then maturity begins. He has lost his idealism and his élan. His strength is one of stability and fixation. He sees the more concrete reality: he commands and governs. He no longer has the strength of a leading soldier but the vigor of a general.
Then old age begins. It’s another form of “wisdom”: disenchantment. “Nothing matters. My selfishness is everything. I simply
suck my toothless gums, tolerate my head empty of ideas and carry my eyes empty of light and my ears empty of sound. I sit in my chair with my slippers, temporizing with death but enjoying life a bit until death comes. When the end arrives, I can do nothing but die blaspheming.”
This is the story of a life. It was the class struggle of one era against another.
This concept is part of evolutionism, which always posits the destruction of something on behalf of another and calls it continuity, although it is discontinuity par excellence.[Feb. 2, 1972]
Ages Do Not Clash, They Add Up
The correct theory about the various ages is that in a faithful man, the qualities of his various ages add up.
He must keep all the qualities of childhood in his old age.
In his youth, he must have the qualities of childhood. In his mature age, he must maintain the qualities of childhood and youth. In his old age, he must attain refinement, with all the qualities of earlier ages.
When he dies, he gives his soul to God with the riches of his whole life.
This is a much more beautiful way of breathing one’s last. The person surrenders himself to God as one who transfers the ensemble of treasures God gave him, begging for mercy regarding what is incomplete.
This is what the death of a Catholic man is like. [Feb. 2, 1972]
The Qualities of Earlier Ages Enrich the Present
In our various ages, we must have the gifts of our previous age as a premise.
We must retain the qualities of our childhood throughout our life as a basic initial premise.
A good child has a kind of openness of soul whereby he has very little self-interest.
He is selfless, sweet and affable and quickly gives what he has. Every good child makes little drawings to give to others.
He admires older people greatly. He tries to find their best qualities and is enchanted by them.[Feb. 2, 1972]
Childhood Idealism
A good child is driven by the principle that life works out and is worth living because it is something great. Although he goes through trials, everything ultimately has a proper explanation.
This is where the kind of optimism that characterizes childhood stems from.
The child is full of hope, easily believes in what he is told, and is geared to self-giving, serving and admiring.
Its opposite is the stingy man in his fifties who says, “The time of disability is coming; now I want to amass much money, so I won’t run the risk of falling into poverty.” [Feb. 2, 1972]
A Good Child Does Not Believe in Disbelief
A good child has nothing to do with a stupid, asinine one.
Being very pure and honest, he always refuses evil whenever it appears. He becomes a challenger of evil.
He does not believe in disbelief. If someone says, “Come on now, God does not exist…” the child will not believe him.
Deep down, the child has a virginal sense of distinction between truth and error, good and evil, a sense that can become dull over time.[Feb. 2, 1972]
Apex, Vortex
Thanks to the graces of Baptism, childhood is an apex. The question is whether, later in life, man grows from apex to apex until old age or goes through “vortexes.”
This is why people retain a nostalgia for their childhood, which they miss as a lost paradise.
Nobody misses his twenties as much as he misses his childhood times![Feb. 2, 1972]
The Idealistic Old Man
If a man knows how to grow throughout his life not only in experience but in penetration of mind, common sense and wisdom, in old age, his mind will acquire a kind of splendor and nobility that will shine on his face and be the true beauty of his final years.
His physique may recall that death is approaching, but his soul will have glimpses of immortality.[Catolicismo n° 12, dez. 1951]
People in their fifties or sixties might think:
“How beautiful youth is! I miss my innocence, that sincerity of soul, that freshness.”
“I do not want to die without having recovered my childhood so that when I present myself before Our Lady, I may say:
“My Mother, my whole life is placed in Thy hands. Of everything Thou hast given me, I lost nothing. Thou madest me fortify all that Thou hast given me. But I lost a few gifts from an early age and need to recover them.”[Feb. 2, 1972]
Medieval Innocence
The Middle Ages was the era when men kept this childhood spirit.
They were courageous, loyal, honorable and pious; they did believe, but with this spirit that has nothing to do with what you see around here.
For example, St. Louis the King, all decked in golden armor and taller than all other men in his army, jumped into the Mediterranean waters and went ashore full of enthusiasm for arriving at the battlefield.
A king who jumps out of his boat and is the first to engage in battle!
What about St. Thomas Aquinas? He believed in reasoning with all the freshness that an innocent soul believes in the truth.
He fully believed in logic and faith.
He achieved the perfect balance between logic and faith and soared on the horizons of rational thinking with the purity of a Seraphim.
His logic is as pure as the blue, red or gold of a cathedral’s stained-glass windows! In him, the concepts of purity, sublimity and radicality are united.[Feb. 2, 1972]
Adding Up One’s Ages
This does not mean that we should not mature but must add the perfections of each age and attain extremely old age with the idealism of childhood and all the characteristics of previous ages.
This is something that 19th-century man usually failed to do: he attained maturity without his childhood.
A contrary example is Monsieur Martin, St. Therese’s father, who had the splendor of maturity, but one could see childhood in his gaze.
An even greater splendor, in my view, is that of Blessed Charbel Macklouf, [today, a canonized saint] a virgin man, a real cathedral.