Resolutions and Irresolutions

The faith of our students has a Spartan or Roman openness to it, something Magian, that deeply respects the full reality of things. They understand that our deepest analogy to God is submission to the truth, but they know from this education that seeing the truth of God’s will in crucial decisions might require patience like that of the Wise Men—and then, when the time comes, indomitable resolve.

You would have to be in a sorry state not to make a few New Year’s resolutions. Who has not felt that yeast of the will, that rising resolve, that this year, this time, we will do that difficult thing which has eluded us? Every time I think of resolution in this sense, I am reminded of the poem my stepfather used to recite, “Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley. Its last lines stuck with me: “I am the master of my fate,/I am the captain of my soul.”

Bracing words! But even at eight or nine years old, I never quite believed them. There were too many things that I was obviously not master of. For example, Lawton Davis could run a lot faster than I could, and my attempt to outstrip mere nature by lacing on a promising new pair of PF Flyers soured me on advertising. Being the master of my fate seemed a bit of a stretch, to say the least—though the phrase always, somehow, evoked the image of Teddy Roosevelt at San Juan Hill, not to mention, somewhat later, the mad faux Teddy charging up the stairs in Arsenic and Old Lace.

It’s both interesting and puzzling to reflect that the will per se—and willpower obviously underlies all New Year’s resolutions—did not have pride of place in Western thought until modernity. Some would argue that William of Ockham turned things in this direction in the 14th century when he insisted that reality is entirely a matter of God’s sovereign will; He can change everything in a moment, and we have no hold on God by reasoning about Him through an analogy of being—for example, saying that “truth” for us is analogous to “truth” for God. According to Ockham, God is completely unknowable to human reason outside what He has told us in Scripture itself, a position that Luther would later champion. The difficulty, of course, comes when we try to say what it means to be “in the image and likeness of God.”

Subtly, over the course of several hundred years, as Michael Gillespie has shown in The Theological Origins of Modernity, our understanding of the human similarity to God shifted from the reason to the will. Willing, not reasoning, felt most godlike. Witness Milton’s Satan after he is cast out of heaven and rouses Beelzebub with his rhetoric:

What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?

Reason might have to submit to logic, but not the will. Faced with difficulty, even impossibility, the heroic Will continues to assert itself. In different ways, good and bad, this emphasis on the Will underlies the ambitions of the modern scientific project, ideological totalitarianism in all its forms, the praise of the creative imagination in the Romantic poets, and the assertion of an immanent force that urges all things forward, as in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Leni Riefenstahl’s stunning propaganda film for Hitler was called Triumph of the Will.

So, am I the master of my fate and the captain of my soul? Our students at Wyoming Catholic College are so deeply imbued with a sense of God’s providence that the question itself seems offkey. To the extent that we strive to know God’s will and acknowledge Christ as the captain of our souls, then the Triumph of the Will becomes problematic. The advantage of being a great captain of one’s soul is that no one else need be consulted; those in our culture who are masters of their fates do not, in other words, do a great deal of “discerning”—a term that we hear quite often at Wyoming Catholic. If you understand the world and your place in it to be governed by God’s intention and design, then discernment is crucial.

This cautious but open bearing toward reality characterized the nobler ancient pagans as well as those in the biblical tradition. The Spartans refused to fight the Persians at Plataea until their leader Pausanius received encouraging omens from the goat sacrifices. By that time, Greeks were already falling under the Persian arrows, but having waited, the Spartans led the massive Greek rout of the Persians, and the threat begun a decade earlier under Xerxes came to a definitive end. Roman history consists of such stories—admittedly, not all of them so upbeat. My point is the humility implicit in submitting human will to divine direction.

Our Lady is the greatest example, but the Magi at Epiphany also give us a compelling instance, one that foreshadows the conversion of all the nations. Their patient watchfulness and expectation allowed them to see the great sign when it came. I often think about the difference between our graduates and their contemporaries, who are convinced by their educations that there is no God. We might get impatient if our students go on discerning for a little too long. Do something, make a choice, we want to say. But there is something clarifying about an honest resolve to be irresolute until the way is clear. The faith of our students has a Spartan or Roman openness to it, something Magian, that deeply respects the full reality of things. They understand that our deepest analogy to God is submission to the truth, but they know from this education that seeing the truth of God’s will in crucial decisions might require patience like that of the Wise Men—and then, when the time comes, indomitable resolve.

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College.

This essay was first published here in January 2022.

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The featured image is “Adoration of the Magi” (between 1568 and 1569) by El Greco and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.