What If Sadness Just Is? What If The Way Out Isn't Within Us?

John Cassian on The Spirit of Dejection

Continuing on with John Cassian’s eight principal faults. A brief notice about the upcoming book club.

Upcoming Book Club!

Next month, for supporting subscribers, we’ll have our next book club on Benedict’s Rule, using this version. Dates and details soon.—MPMW

The Origins of Dejection: A Love Story

Unlike some of the vices—like fornication or gluttony—dejection doesn’t piggyback off a fundamentally good impulse within us. Dejection doesn’t orient us toward things we need, like love or material life. And unlike other of the vices—like covetousness—it doesn’t emerge because of something outside us.

Dejection is closest to anger in this way: it shows up from within us, but primarily as a destructive force. But if anger is oriented outward, attacking that which we perceive as a threat, dejection is oriented inward, attacking the self. Cassian’s description here is not quite the same thing as what we might call depression, but you can see some of the same marks:

In our fifth combat, we have to resist the pangs of gnawing dejection: for if this, through separate attacks made at random, and by haphazard changes, has secured an opportunity of gaining possession of our mind it keeps us back at all times from all insight in divine contemplation, and utterly ruins and depresses the mind that has fallen away from its complete state of purity.

It does not allow it to say its prayers with its usual gladness of heart, nor permit it to rely on the comfort of reading the sacred writings, nor suffer it to be quiet and gentle with the brethren; it makes it impatient and rough in all the duties of work and devotion: and as wholesome counsel is lost, and steadfastness of heart destroyed, it makes the feelings of almost mad and drunk, and crushes and overwhelms them with penal despair¹.

Dejection, like anger, destroys fellowship with God and others, but not through pushing away (as anger), but by collapsing inward, by withdrawing. For note that all of the things which dejection destroys here are external to the person: sacred writings, fellow travelers, wholesome counsel. Dejection causes us to pull away from these and collapse under the weight of “penal despair”: having cut ourselves off from any kind of external word that would buoy us, we are crushed by the weight of our own judgment.

From the last piece on Cassian, on anger, we saw that the judgment of God is primarily something that we feel, not because God is in fact turning toward us in anger, but because we recognize our sin as having created a rift. The same dynamic is present here: the crushing weight of guilt that Cassian identifies is not because God has placed it in the soul, but because we no longer trust in those things which would break into our souls and tell us a different story than our own self-judgment does.

Dejection, like anger, is a mystery in this way: it does not emerge from some external impulse like covetousness, nor does it emerge from some natural internal impulse like gluttony. Like anger, it just shows up, attaching itself to any number of internal thoughts or dispositions. It’s important to note that, while Cassian is not psychologist nor is he a clinician, his diagnosis of how dejection operates overlaps with many assessments of how depression works: one need not have to choose between viewing this dynamic of withdrawal as having roots in a spiritual temptation or a chemical imbalance². We also need not have some kind of theodicy in place to understand the origins of dejection: dejection shows up in response to events, but is not caused by any particular event³, and it’s not caused by God.

It’s just there.

The mistake with addressing dejection is, he says, thinking that it comes from some particular cause, and that by avoiding particular people or particular situations, I won’t be disappointed by them or I won’t fall into dejection. But this is, for Cassian, just a way of falling more quickly into dejection, as cutting ourselves off from that which rescues us from being alone with ourselves. Getting away from others, he writes, “only changes the cause of dejection”, but that only amplifies and accelerates the problem⁴. We can think of the source of dejection as a kind of ticking time bomb within the foundations of the self: the pier and beam underneath the house is cracked, and when we pull away from the comfort of that beyond ourselves, the weight cannot be borne.

The ticking time bomb is, it seems, just the condition of being human in a world in which sin operates. As we’ve seen already, creation offers struggle by design, that we might, through engaging that struggle, become by God’s grace that which we are meant to be. The vexations of loneliness and dejection are part of that—not a sign that you have brought it on yourself, but that you are a creature who lives in a world in which a lingering sadness is part of creation if you let yourself notice it. Some time back, I wrote on the dynamics of loneliness as an irreducible feature of the world, and it seems Cassian is echoing something like this here: to be human is to succeptible to the possibility of being overwhelmed by the ways in which the world is, in fact, God’s good creation gone awry.

But joining in that lament and being overcome by it are two different things.

Cassian, when he says that dejection belongs to the person who is dejected, isn’t victim-blaming, but acknowledging that dejection, like any of the vices he describes, is just there within the world, on offer to us. In the same way that some are more prone to covetousness, some are more prone to isolating in a crowd, sinking down into ourselves and into the seat of judgment of ourselves. The anthropology in play here is different than something like original sin: he certainly thinks we’re sinners, but for him, sin is more akin to refusing to be lifted by God’s grace. God’s grace is abundant and always, and as such, the gift to bear this particular temptation to isolation and dejection is always there. That we continue to be vexed by this is, he says, due to something which rests within us, but that is different than saying that it’s the fault of the dejected for being dejected. Rather, actively cutting ourselves off from the things which are everywhere and always available to us to rise up out of this state, and passively sinking back into ourselves, is what he wants us to see as most harmful.

That our culture identifies this particular area as one to be avoided at all costs, and not other vices, is worth sitting with, I think. It’s not as if, as we see here, that other generations weren’t attuned to what we call depression, and it wasn’t as if their response was always to “just get over it”. In some ways, our culture’s response to depression through identifying it as that which can be eliminated through eliminating toxic people or purely through medication, or through universal mental health protocols is to miss the force of Cassian’s point: it’s just there and can’t be remediated by the most stringent of structural protections.

It’s just there⁵.

Photo by Chetan Hireholi on Unsplash

The Odd Repair of Dejection: Patience

Dejection for Cassian isn’t a structural concern, nor is it something that can be remediated by altering brain chemistry. It’s what happens when the soul connected to an inordinate attention to oneself, assuming that all we need is what we already possess internally.

One possibility, of course, is that Cassian is just wrong, and that dejection simply is a reaction that we have to external events. Take care of the external events, or worse, take care of the bad brain, and problem solved. But Cassian seems to be correct, in that dejection attaches itself not just to one specific kind of situation or to one person, but that it is able to attach itself to manifold disappointments, losses, reversals, and even to successes: how many morning-after Olympians have told stories about being sad the day after they won gold?

But another possibility, of course, is that Cassian isn’t wrong. This approach, that the possibility of dejection just is, makes sense of why the very things which are meant to buoy us (large crowds of social media onlookers) crater us more quickly than if we criticized ourselves.

It makes sense of why excessive consumption of media is connected to general malaise and lack of healthy ambition, for if what we are connecting with external to us is passive, we becomes internally passive as well.

It makes sense of how some of the most truthful moments of a life are when someone breaks through in a moment of confession or in unexpected connection; in those times, it’s not just that we aren’t alone, but that we are being pulled out of ourselves, and that finding ourselves means finding ourselves as a connected being.

It makes sense of how, when we spend copious amounts of time diving inwards, we become not more inwardly well-rounded people, and also not necessarily self-absorbed people, but less satisfied people and more fragile emotionally⁶. For when we do that, we are developing resources which are only justifying sadness, building castles out of its malaise, and finally looking for someone to share in that sadness.

The solution does not lie in digging within, but in being willing to receive from the hands of others:

And so, God the creator of all things, having regard above everything to the amendment of His own work, and because the roots and causes of our falls are found not in others, but in ourselves, commands that we should not give up intercourse with our brethren, nor avoid those who we think have been hurt by us, or by whom we have been offended, but bids us pacify them, knowing that perfection of heart is not secured by separating from men so much as by the virtue of patience⁷.

Patience is that virtue which helps us to see that what we need always arrives from beyond ourselves. In the same way that creation is a gift of gratuity, and that the gift of the knowledge of God arrives from beyond our resources, so the the cultivation of a true self arrives not by digging it out buried gold in the soul, but by waiting for it from without. Digging deeper in to the soul first just means for Cassian digging a deeper hole.

1. Cassian, The Institutes, Book 9, ch. 1.

2. Why not both? It seems to make sense that people, knowing the invisible and immaterial God as those who are not invisible and immaterial, would be afflicted in similar kinds of ways.

3. Chapter 4-5: “Sometimes it is found to result from the fault of previous anger, or to spring from the desire of some gain which has not been realized, when a man has found that he has failed in his hope of securing those things which he had planned…it is clearly proved that the pains of disturbances are not always caused in us by other people’s faults, but rather by our own, as we have stored up in ourselves the causes of offence, and the seeds of faults, which as soon as a shower of temptation waters our soul, at once burst forth into shoots and fruits.”

4. Ibid., chapter 7.

5. I once wrote an article exploring this theme’s companion, that perhaps loneliness is just a feature of the world that we can’t get away from, and that it’s actually a friend to get comfortable with.

6. Contrary to Augustine, the main problem here is not that we create idols of our desires, but that we drown in them. As we’ve seen, the problem is not that the vices are bad at their root, but that in excess, good things overwhelm and distort us. Gluttony is the natural appetite of the senses gone amuck; fornication is the desire for another person swamping our reason and our commitments. Likewise here, digging deep into the interior life shortcuts how we cultivate rich interior lives, by excluding others from the process.

7. Ibid., chapter 7.