Gratitude and the Laughing Fire
I recently read Aristophanes’s comedy, The Clouds, with my students. Writing in the fifth century BC, Aristophanes was known to often parody the tragic work of his famed contemporary Euripides. Both men lamented the collapse of the Athens city-state which they saw taking place as a result of their losing the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC). In the artistic struggle to say something about decline in the face of its inevitability, Euripides wrestles through the relationship of law and freedom. He fails to arrive at an answer as to how to manage the hyper-extension that constantly takes place between law and natural desires. The orgy doesn’t look as appealing by the time the sun is rising. Denzel Washington famously said about P. Diddy’s parties, “You’ve got to leave the party before the devil shows up.” Aristophanes, on the other hand, sticks with humor and mockery. What becomes apparent, when reading The Clouds, is the universal truth that while laughter may be good medicine for the downcast soul (Proverbs 17:22), it is as powerless as authoritarianism in offering a long term solution for the the disappearance of beauty in a society. Both tragedy and humor lack proper orientation when they are not backed by Biblical gratitude. The Gospel not only teaches us when to cry and when to laugh, it also teaches us when to stop crying and laughing.
I’ve been wondering about this in my own life. The tragedian knows how to lament the loss of beauty. The comedian knows how to mock the fools who would desecrate beauty; but what would the work of recovery or preservation look like? Is it futile? A friend recently counseled me away from constantly confessing ingratitude. His comment was made in the context of a conversation about discouragement. “You mentioned confessing ingratitude, but this might be part of the great accusation you are under. ‘Also you are ungrateful.’ Instead, you might intentionally give thanks … As you know, I’m sure, the command is not to focus on the perfect things but to focus on any good in the imperfect things. Instead of feeling guilty, try to remember.”
One of the reasons we love memes is because laughter truly is medicine for the soul that is downcast. But my own cynicism often fuels the laughter in the direction of hyper-extension. I often get sufficiently drunk on mockery to the degree that I start acting like an accelerationist with a bulldozer, looking for any corner of the Parthenon still standing. Tragedy without any good news, without a plan forward, erupts in a futility that causes the resistance to simply join the invaders. Josephus says that when the Jews who were fighting in the resistance during the sack of Rome (70 AD) saw that the Romans could enter the holy of holies without consequence, they themselves set fire to the temple curtains. It’s why the only trick environmentalists seem to have in their bag these days is dumping orange paint on valuable stuff.
In the same manner, one of the reasons we love tragedies is because it is right to lament the loss of something good. But the danger here is, similarly, the absence of a proactive plan. The moviegoers file out of the theater, after a tragedy, in the same way mourners leave a wake. There has to be a proactive plan for building and preserving that reserves the right to use both laughter and crying. Wisdom understands context and can discern the times. Apart from the Gospel, the only option is for comedy and tragedy to enlist themselves in the work of collapsing society. Believers, we are told in Scripture, are not to mourn as ones who have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13) . Without Biblical discernment, we have no governors on mourning and laughter and they simply converge.
Kierkegaard has a famous parable in Either/Or about a clown that is dressed for the show but is sent on stage by the manager to warn the audience that the theater is on fire. Everyone laughs. The harder the clown cries . . . the more earnestly he begs to be believed, the greater the laughter. Inevitably, the fire claims not only the theater but the entire village.
Gratitude is a way forward. Gratefulness is a real plan. The man who is grateful for his family and home will not merely lament its loss, should that happen, but he will be motivated to protect them from attack. He will be driven to rebuild when necessary. A woman who is grateful for the order and thriving that comes with Biblical wisdom will teach her children to laugh at the threat of foolishness’s calamity (Proverbs 31:25). She will not merely train her children to appropriately mock the way of foolishness, but she will be motivated to discipline them when they stray. She’s too grateful for the right to not oppose the wrong. Being thankful is not a passive response; it is the initiation principle of thriving.
