The man sunk in ressentiment, unable to compete, must still relieve his tension

Know Your Enemy

by Anthony Esolen

A few weeks ago, as readers of Crisis are well aware, Cardinal Ludwig Mueller delivered to the American nuns who head the Leadership Conference of Women Religious the most glorious day they’ve enjoyed in twenty years. He noticed them. He called them out for heresy, for praising groups who had “moved beyond Jesus,” for honoring people who fight the Church in such matters as abortion, and for being in the Church institutionally but far outside of it in faith. He pleaded with them to return. They cried with outrage against the bully.

Also a few weeks ago, my daughter, my mother and I stopped to look at and take pictures of the largest glacial pothole in the world. It’s in a tiny state park in my hometown, secluded, accessible only by highway. Ordinary people used to go there, long ago, for picnics. When I was a small boy, the teenagers in charge of our playground took us on a three mile hike to the pothole, and back again. That was probably the last time anyone could have done so, because the place has since become a pickup place for strange flesh.

My daughter is interested in geology, so I said I’d drive her there, but I was hoping that the place would be empty. It wasn’t. There were two cars in the parking lot, each with a man at the wheel. When we got out and began taking pictures and talking and doing ordinary things, first one car and then the other tore out of there—obviously the drivers were angry and embarrassed. I hadn’t looked at them, hadn’t said anything. The mere presence of the ordinary was enough to gall. And there is nothing that anyone can really do about that. I can pretend all day long that the men were only ordinary men with one little sexual wrinkle. But pretending doesn’t make it so, as the men themselves can attest.

I bring these incidents up because they illustrate a moral syndrome which Christians ignore at their peril. Cardinal Mueller mistook his antagonists. Mueller is a normal human being. A normal human being, acknowledging the value of something noble, venerable, lovely, good, and holy, assumes that those who wish to ruin it are mistaken as to fact. Chesterton, that eminently normal man, said that many people hated what they thought was the Church, but very few hated the real thing. Or the normal man assumes that his enemies seek some genuine good, but fail to see that what they wish to destroy promotes that good, or does not obstruct it. Socrates was wholly normal when he said that human evil was a result of ignorance—of not knowing something true, or of not seeing something good and beautiful.

If human beings were utility machines, acting by a calculus of moral duty regardless of passion, memory, the body, and all that they see that cannot be reduced to a calculus, then debates might be simple affairs. But human beings are no such machines. They are made for self-donation, giving themselves completely to what transcends them: homo adorans. Now it’s one thing to adore a god that is insufficient, incomplete, even a distortion of the true. It’s another thing to adore the false god out of frustrated impotence, in enmity against the true. That is the dreadful self-absorption, a mockery of self-donation, that Max Scheler writes about inRessentiment.

Ressentiment, says Scheler, is not the same as revenge. When the boy next door pushed me around, my father calmly told me to punch him the next time he did it. I followed his advice, and the boy and I were friends after that. My father might have learned that easy lesson from boyhood, or from his time as a sergeant. If two soldiers got into a scrap, they’d be ordered to put on the boxing gloves and get in the ring. The leaders in the Army wanted more than abstract justice or acknowledgment of rights. They wanted order, camaraderie, friendship.

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