Despair

“Disorder in the house / All bets are off /I’m sprawled across the davenport of despair”

—Warren Zevon, “Disorder in the House”

In the midst of his discussion of astrology in The Elizabethan World Picture, E.M.W. Tillyard comments in passing on the phenomenon of modern despair. He writes:

With the superstitious terrors [of astrology] I am not concerned: they have little specifically to do with the Elizabethan age. But it is worth reflecting (as is not always done) that even these were not all horror and loss. If mankind had to choose between a universe that ignored him and one that noticed him to do him harm, it might well choose the second. Our own age need not begin congratulating itself on its freedom from superstition till it defeats a more dangerous temptation to despair.¹

In this telling, the modern world has shaken off the shackles of irrationalism (one wonders if Tillyard would revise his judgment were he still with us), but in exchange it has reaped a harvest of hopelessness. Tillyard suggests that even a hostile universe might be more comforting than an apathetic one. He is probably right. For the opposite of love is not hatred but indifference, and so an indifferent universe gives rise to greater existential terror than any other kind. In Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus, for example, the hero maintains a sort of nobility, albeit a tragic one: head held high against the divine powers that torment him, he goes to his doom.

Contrast the world of the stories of H.P. Lovecraft as described by Donald R. Burleson:

The horror, ultimately, in a Lovecraft tale is not some gelatinous lurker in dark places, but rather the realization, by the characters involved, of their helplessness and their insignificance in the scheme of things—their terribly ironic predicament of being sufficiently well-developed organisms to perceive and feel the poignancy of their own motelike unimportance in a blind and chaotic universe which neither loves them nor even finds them worthy of notice, let alone hatred or hostility.²

Contrast, too, the world of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Unpeopled of divinities, it is a world in which Aaron says to Demetrius, “Pray to the devils; the gods have given us over.” It is a dark world, a prison of sorrow, in which even evil and vice lose their vibrancy because they lack contrast with anything better. It is a world of fog, in which one continually stumbles for lack of vision. It is hell.

But now we have a problem. For Shakespeare created the world conjured in Titus Andronicus in the sixteenth century, the precise period that Tillyard indicates was less given to despondency than his mid-twentieth century present. In fact, “despair” was a common topic of discussion in the sixteenth century. Around the time of Titus Andronicus, the Danish Lutheran theologian Niels Hemmingsen devoted an entire treatise to it called the Antidote against the Disease of Despair (1590). That is not all. Tillyard refers to the “temptation to despair”: intriguingly, Hemmingsen treats despair under the petition of the Lord’s Prayer that reads, “Lead us not into temptation.”

Yet one might be forgiven for nevertheless thinking that Tillyard was onto something when he wrote of this temptation as peculiarly contemporary three quarters of a century ago. I am certainly sympathetic to that claim, and to the suggestion that the crisis has only accelerated since. According to Carol Graham, 70,000 Americans on average died from deaths of despair every year from 2005 to 2019. The United States Congress Joint Economic Committee gathered data in 2019 showing such deaths to be occurring at the highest rate on record in the U.S. In 2021, STAT reported on the alarming rise in the rate of such deaths, an increase that ranges from 56% to 387%.³

To see whether the despair of the sixteenth century differs from today’s despair—and, if so, how—we need to look more closely. We need a thicker account of what it means to be without hope in the world.

***

Traditionally, despair was often discussed in relation to the theory of the four humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm), whose balance or imbalance was thought to illuminate, and even to account for, various personality-types. If one had an excess of black bile, he would be melancholic, and thus given to despair. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for example, was such a person, as is clear from the first appearance of the eponymous protagonist in Act 1, Scene 2 of the play; so, it would appear, was Ophelia. Her case was fatal.

But the best and most enduring accounts of despair from this period are theological, as I suspect Shakespeare, and the Wittenberg-educated Prince of Denmark, knew.

For the theological delineation of despair is a discovery and legacy of the Wittenberg Reformation. I have already referred to the account by Hemmingsen, who, not coincidentally, was himself, like Hamlet, educated at Wittenberg--“not coincidentally” because Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Copenhagen’s Hemmingsen had, I suggest, a shared intellectual forerunner, Martin Luther. One can do much worse than look to Martin Luther’s 1535 commentary on Galatians as one of the canonical texts of theological psychology.

In Luther’s commentary, the frequent mention of theologically-charged desperatio is integrally connected to the distinction between the law and the gospel. This is by design: despair does not, and must not, stand alone, either as a discursive topic or as a category of experience. If it does, the result is disorder—and, in the end, death. Instead, the law, when used appropriately, gives the knowledge of sin. This knowledge, in turn, makes a person despair of his own efforts to be righteous before God, so that he can receive forgiveness and Christ’s alien righteousness through the gospel.

That is the thumbnail sketch. But now we must paint the picture. How does a theological account of despair function in Luther’s dialectical account of law and gospel, and what does that have to do with Warren Zevon and America’s suicide rate?

For Luther, the dialectic between law and gospel is a classic instance of an experience everyone has had at some point. Someone says to you, “I have some good news and some bad news.” What do you say in response? “Give me the bad news first.” That is what the law does. And the news is very, very bad. In one passage, Luther puts it as follows:

[W]hen the law accuses and terrifies the conscience by saying, ‘You should have done this or that! You didn’t do it! You are therefore guilty of the wrath of God and of eternal death!’—then the law is fulfilling its proper use and end. There, the heart is ground down all the way to the point of despair. This use and office of the law is perceived by terrified and despairing consciences that seek death or desire to commit suicide on account of the trouble the conscience brings.⁴

The law, when it confronts our consciences with our guilt, our shame, our inadequacies and failures, kills. From this, Luther does not shy away. The conscience that is truly afflicted, Luther says, longs for death.

Luther’s theology would indeed be a counsel of despair if he said no more than this. But, though the law tells us that we are wicked, we recall that God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 33:11). God does not give us the law out of sadistic delight, so that he might entice us to self-slaughter.⁵ Even if “the office of the law is only to kill,” it is nevertheless to kill in such a way that God is able to make alive. Therefore, the law was not given for death simpliciter; but, because man is proud and dreams that he is wise, that he is just and holy, he needs to be humbled by the law, so that that beast, the self-satisfied opinion about one’s own righteousness, might be killed. Until it has been killed, man cannot live. Therefore, although the law kills, God nevertheless uses that effect of the law (that is, the death I have spoken of), for a good use, namely, for life.

Or, more succinctly:

[T]he proper office of the law is to make us guilty, to humble us, to kill us, to lead us to hell and take everything from us—but with the following purpose: so that we might be justified, lifted up, made alive, carried into heaven, and might obtain everything. Therefore, it does not kill us simpliciter, but it kills us unto life.

What an arresting phrase: “It kills us unto life.” This promise of life and peace, however, comes with a catch. We must first confess that we are worms and beggars, “arrant knaves all”;⁶ and that is a very unpleasant thing to do.

Isn’t there some other way to be happy—one that involves less discomfort? Perhaps we could get rid of the law altogether. If we were to do that, maybe we could cut to the chase and find happiness without the embarrassment of self-abasement.

It is attractive, this possibility of being glad without all that gloom and, by denying the Decalogue, doing an end-run around despair.

If one wanted to attempt this, it would make sense to start at the top. For to rid ourselves of the law, we must rid ourselves of the God who gave the law. Thus the first step must be, and has been, to hear the commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me”—and shrug.

***

We⁷ have tried this. The odd thing is not that we have done so; the odd thing is that it hasn’t worked. We have tried to expunge what we think of as the vengeful God of hard-edged revelation. Having done so, we are, as a people, more miserable than ever.

Many people have noticed this strange phenomenon. Years ago, for instance, the comedian Louis C.K. said on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, “Everything is amazing right now, and nobody’s happy.” And what, precisely, did he think was “amazing”? Cell phones, ATMs, credit cards, air travel, in-flight internet. All the items on this list have something in common. They are all technological, all the material application of technique for the alteration of material circumstances. But it is a matter of empirical observation that such things evidently do not bring happiness. At best, they are diversions from misery. At worst, they make it worse.

So the answer to why we are miserable must lie elsewhere. I suggest that it lies in our en masse rejection of the first commandment. And that rejection turns on a lie at its very heart, namely, that we can dispense with the injunction to have no other gods before the true God simply by having no gods at all. Thus we avoid violation of the commandment while also not needing to mess about with the capital-G God mentioned there. Checkmate, God—or so we think. But, as always, God is wiser than we. He must laugh when he sees what careless readers we are.

For God tells us in the first commandment that we must have a God, and that it must be he. With him, there is “no shuffling,” to quote Hamlet’s Uncle Claudius. We can sin against the first commandment, in other words, both in excess and in defect. Having too many gods goes against God’s law, to be sure—but so does having too few. Try as we might, we will never be happy so long as we refuse to admit that this is the case.

“Prove it,” someone might say. But what need is there for elaborate marshaling of evidence? Just look around. Franz Kafka’s narrator in The Castle remarks that K., the novel’s central character, has the following sensation upon being left outside alone in the snow: “‘Cause for a slight attack of despair,’ was the thought that came to him, ‘if I were only here by accident, not on purpose.’”⁸ But W.H. Auden realized that such a sentiment (that is, that it would be better to be products of random chance than of design) was no solution—was, in fact, exactly backwards—when, 80 years ago, he had his own Narrator, in his Christmas oratorio "For the Time Being," note near its inception that the perceived emptiness at the center of the cosmos—the uninterpretable accident of existence—the horrible silence that does not condescend to scold us—is the worst punishment of all:

That is why we despair; that is why we would welcome
The nursery bogey or the winecellar ghost,
why even The violent howling of winter and war has become
Like a juke-box tune that we dare not stop. We are afraid
Of pain but more afraid of silence; for no nightmare
Of hostile objects could be as terrible as this Void
This is the Abomination. This is the wrath of God.⁹

“[T]his Void”: it is this that causes existential despair, the hopelessness of being in a world with no intrinsic meaning or reference to anything outside itself.

***

“The hopelessness of being” is a phrase that accurately encapsulates the encounter many in the contemporary West have with the world, the encounter they have with themselves.¹⁰ Perhaps it is an encounter you have had with yourself. I now switch to the second person, and I do so with purpose. Lutherans are fond of saying that “the law always accuses.” In the current state of affairs, existence itself is often felt as an accusation,¹¹ the hammer blow of what can appear to be an iron law of inscrutable cosmic ambiguity. Thus the cosmos is now summoned on stage to shake its finger at you. Your universe is empty, and somehow you hear it speak. This is what it says: “Here you are, and now what?”

One widespread answer at the bottom of the statistics I mentioned earlier is found in the title of a 1995 song by The Smashing Pumpkins, “Here Is No Why.”¹² Its opening line sets the tone: “The useless drag of another day.” Billy Corgan goes on:

And in your sad machines
You’ll forever stay
Desperate and displeased with whoever you are

The world is a “machine,” not a creation. You are a “machine,” not a creature. And you feel trapped and imprisoned in your machine, “desperate and displeased” with yourself and others.¹³

What should you do? As one does with any machine whose performance disappoints us, you tinker with it—tune it, modify it, swap out some parts for others. There are all the old vices for this, of course—not just chemicals, but identities, for instance that ghastly modern invention, “race.” Perhaps you can lose yourself in assimilation to some group larger than yourself and find your happiness there; perhaps you can even cloak your vice under the virtuous-sounding name of “solidarity.”

But it is 2024, and you no longer need to limit yourself to the old vices. Medical technology has invented new ones, too. Now you can be whoever you feel you are supposed to be, you are told. The identity with which you entered the world was “assigned” to you: it was someone else’s doing, and you are that person’s passive victim. That is not right—it is part of the prison—and you must change it. Then you can be happy.

That is the sales pitch that our contemporary evangelists of earthly felicity make, the gospel that answers to the empty universe’s law.

But what if these ploys don’t work? What if you are just as miserable as you were before? What happens then? Every day, the news tells us what happens then, and the news is very grim news.

***

It is worth pondering why our fixes don’t help. If Christianity is true—if reality is given, not made—then the denial of creation will not evacuate creation of its existence and of its controlling and ordering force, however much one may wish to make it go away. There is, in other words, an echo here of what was said above about the existence of God and the despair induced by his law. Let us see why this is so.

Consider the Ten Commandments. They speak of relations: our relation to God and our relation to our neighbor. But the universality of their principles—what C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man calls the “Tao”—suggests that they are not arbitrary injunctions creating a new reality, but rather a reflection of the reality that already exists, one that in turn codifies the kind of human action that will lead to happiness within that order, that is, to what Aristotle identifies as “living well.” More briefly, divine law is an expression of created order. Thus the aforementioned Dane—Hemmingsen, not Hamlet— thought (correctly, in my view) that he could successfully prove the truth of the Decalogue by purely natural and rational means.¹⁴

But if the order of creation underwrites the order of law, then violating creation will bring one to misery just as surely as violating the law does--albeit, perhaps, a bit more slowly. My epigraph from Warren Zevon was not, therefore, superfluous: disorder and despair are intrinsically connected.

And if the transcendent dimension has disappeared, our despair occurs within a totally immanent frame, with no God to save us.

Thus it should come as no surprise that living against nature, as Westerners now try to do in so many ways, brings about a seemingly invincible unhappiness across society.

***

We should not miss the fact, then, that the existential despair driving so many deaths, so much violence and rage, such agonizing sadness in the United States and elsewhere is actually a type of theological despair. As Auden says, “This is the wrath of God.”

Curiously, though, this bad news brings good news with it. The false guilt and shame of contemporary identitarianism are signs: signs that man in his fallen state cannot do without guilt and shame. If we reject what God says about guilt and shame, we will simply make up something else. We have done so: when someone has sinned, we can expect to see him bow and scrape in contrition before the manufactured god of public opinion. It is a cruel god, one that does not bleed on our behalf or pardon when we pray.

If despair is the sickness unto death, the reorienting of the problem within a transcendent theological frame reminds us that death is not the end. We need guilt and shame, yes, but the real kind: the kind that can be confessed—and forgiven. Only the old God, the one we have killed, can do this; has done this. In sum, the cure for existential despair is the realization and confession that it is a form of theological despair, the same one that Luther acutely analyzed 500 years ago. The cure is the gospel.

This truth is beautifully stated in a poem that Philip Melanchthon wrote for Martin Luther’s son a few years after his father had died. It begins thus:

The church, despondent, choked on night’s dank fog,
And faith grew silent, buried by the law.
Yet, lest the human race die in despair,
The Lord God taught us by your father’s voice.¹⁵

What did he use that voice to teach? As Melanchthon puts it in another poem about Luther (though I have taken some liberty with the rendering), “pure Christ, one hundred proof.”¹⁶

It is stated again in a twentieth century hymn by another Martin, Martin H. Franzmann. He can have the last word.

Thou camest to our hall of death,
O Christ, to breathe our poisoned air,
To drink for us the dark despair
That strangled our reluctant breath.
How beautiful the feet that trod
The road that leads us back to God!
How beautiful the feet that ran
To bring the great good news to man!

Footnotes

1. E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto & Windus, 1943), 49.
2. Donald R. Burleson, H.P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 12.
3. See Carol Graham, “America’s crisis of despair: A federal task force for economic recovery and societal well-being” (February 10, 2021), accessed March 28, 2024, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/americas-crisis-of-despair-a-federal-task-force-for-economic-recovery-and-societal-well-being/; United States Joine Economic Committee, “Long-Term Trends in Deaths of Despair” (September 5, 2019), accessed March 28, 2024, https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2019/9/long-term-trends-in-deaths-of-despair; David Introcaso, “Deaths of despair: the unrecognized tragedy of working class immiseration” (December 29, 2021), accessed March 28, 2024, https://www.statnews.com/2021/12/29/deaths-of-despair-unrecognized-tragedy-working-class-immiseration/.
4. All translations from this work are my own.
5. Cf. Hamlet’s first soliloquy: O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, /  Or that the Everlasting had not fixed / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, (Hamlet 1.2.129-32)
6. Hamlet 3.1.129.
7. I continue saying “we,” though it is obvious that I frequently mean “other people.” Speaking of “other people,” I hate it when writers do this. What gives? Though “we” don’t all, as individuals, do what I am saying “we” do, I am convinced that what I am describing is, nevertheless, a temptation for all of us as individuals (and cf. the connection between temptation and despair noted earlier), as well as a fair characterization of our dominant cultural mode (i.e., our corporate identity) at present. I hope that that suffices to justify my manner of speaking—and if not, I beg your pardon.
8. Franz Kafka, The Castle, trans. Mark Harman (New York: Schocken Books, 1998), 14.
9. W.H. Auden, "For the Time Being," in Poems, Volume II: 1940-1973, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), 172.
10. One should not, however, overstate any purported uniqueness of the “contemporary West.” Existential despair has a long pedigree. Consider the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius: “In all this murk and dirt, in all this flux of being, time, movement, things moved, I cannot begin to see what on earth there is to value or even to aim for” (Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.10, trans. Martin Hammond [London: Penguin, 2006], 39).
11. This connection between the rebuke of the law and the rebuke of existence is not an accident: see below.
12. Even the posing of the question may indicate a disorder. Cf. a remark of E.R. Dodds in an essay on Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus: “‘What are we here for?’...is an old question….Plato in the Theaetetus affirmed that it was the proper subject of philosophical enquiry. But it is not in fact a question which happy men readily ask themselves” (“On Misunderstanding the Oedipus Rex,” Greece & Rome 13 [1966]: 21).
13. Again, it should be stressed that our predicament has antecedents, because it is in certain respects part and parcel of the human condition. Here is the first-century A.D. Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger: “The sickness [of mental unrest] has countless characteristics, but only one effect, dissatisfaction with oneself ” (Seneca, "On the Tranquillity of the Mind 2", in Dialogues and Essays, trans. John Davie [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 116).
14. Niels Hemmingsen, On the Law of Nature: A Demonstrative Method, trans. E.J. Hutchinson (Grand Rapids, MI: CLP Academic, 2018), 91-102.
15. The translation is my own. The “despair” in line 3 is my addition; a more literal version would read “Yet, lest the entire human race utterly perish.” But the gloss is, I trust, faithful to Luther’s outlook as described above, and an extension of the previous condition of the church in line 1, which Melanchthon says had been “despondent” (maesta) due to the law’s entombment of faith.
16. Melanchthon’s Latin refers to him as one “who taught Christ purely” (qui Christum docuit pure).