In Butcher’s Crossing, his novel of the American west, the masterful John Williams explores wildness, an atavistic return to “fields and woods” and the freedom and vigor they appear to promise. Fleeing the religion and education of his Boston youth, Will Andrews, the protagonist, turns to the wilderness of Butcher’s Crossing, Kansas, a buffalo-hunting town of the 1870s.

Finding the beasts diminished by over-hunting, Will risks his entire savings to employ Miller, an experienced hunter making big promises of an unspoiled herd tucked away in a Colorado valley. Finally arriving, they begin to decimate the bison, shooting until their rifles glow with heat and rotting corpses dot the land.

To his shock, Will does not find in this wildness the goodness and hope he anticipated, but instead a kind of madness, a murderous passion. Not the unspoiled dignity of Rousseau’s uncivilized man, not even mere lust for money, but a kind of hatred for the world, a contempt or repugnance at being, what the novel terms “a cold, mindless response to … life.”

The West’s Repugnance at Being

As I have argued elsewhere, this repugnance at being, including a loathing of our own existence and constraints, has saturated our culture—many in the modern West have a cold response to being, experiencing reality with a sad revulsion rather than delight or welcome. Pope Francis hopes to reverse this sad revulsion, although many have misunderstood his challenge to our disordered culture. Sadness is a major theme for Francis. He tells us in a morning meditation titled Ode to Joy that joy and hope define the Christian, and that we should not conflate sadness and holiness or to live as though it were “Lent without Easter.” A Christian who encounters Christ can “never be sad and it is a serious disease of the spirit to exhibit a melancholic and severe spirit—remember his “funeral face” reprimand to the Curia?

Those are just examples, certainly, but Francis provides a key to understanding the seriousness with which he takes sadness in the opening paragraphs of Evangelii gaudium in which he describes “desolation” and “anguish” as the threat to the “quiet joy” of God’s love. “The great danger in today’s world, pervaded as it is by consumerism, is the desolation and anguish born of a complacent yet covetous heart, the feverish pursuit of frivolous pleasures, and a blunted conscience,” he says.

Whenever our interior life becomes caught up in its own interests and concerns, it no longer has room for others, no place for the poor. God’s voice is no longer heard, the quiet joy of his love is no longer felt, and the desire to do good fades. This is a very real danger for believers too. Many fall prey to it, and end up resentful, angry, and listless. That is no way to live a dignified and fulfilled life; it is not God’s will for us, nor is it the life in the Spirit which has its source in the heart of the risen Christ.

It’s all too easy to misread the pontiff as providing glib advice on how to be happy, as if he’s suggesting a superficial and saccharine cheeriness in the face of evil. But in the above text he isn’t suggesting anything remotely like self-help or positive psychology. Instead, he proclaims that it is “thanks solely” to a “personal encounter” with Christ and “God’s love” revealed in Christ that we “let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being.” Recall, too, that Francis has some fondness for the dystopian fiction of Robert Hugh Benson, has drawn attention for his “obsession” with the devil, and consecrated the Vatican to St. Michael. This joy is not glibness but more like an ascetic struggle.

Nor is joy’s absence, the funeral face—faccia funerea—merely bad PR, as if a grumpy Christian made for bad promotional pictures on a parish website. For Francis, it’s more than this. In his challenge to the Curia, he says that spiritual disease, of which sadness is one, results in people who become like “a branch which withers, slowly dies and is then cast off.” Sadness is a form of spiritual death.

The World as Creation and Gift

Francis links sadness to a mindset of consumption and dominion, to a cold response to life. In Laudato si’ he rejects any sense that the world is mere resource for our “unbridled exploitation,” noting instead our obligation to “recognize that other living beings have a value of their own in God’s eyes.” Quoting the Catechism of the Catholic Church, he stresses that “Each creature possesses its own particular goodness and perfection. … Man must therefore respect the particular goodness of every creature,” a respect which does not diminish us in any way but rather places us into our own proper place and flourishing.

Recognizing the world as the creation of God, rather than merely nature, he points out that it “can only be understood as a gift from the outstretched hand of the Father of all,” the result of “a free choice” and thus existing because, and only because, God loves: “Even the fleeting life of the least of beings is the object of his love, and in its few seconds of existence, God enfolds it with his affection.” If God loves something, we oughtn’t despise or dominate it, even if we develop, alter, and use it.

Further, Francis rightly insists on the universal communion of creatures. Of course each thing seeks God in its own proper mode, and the pope avoids any equivalence between persons and non-persons, but still “all creatures are moving forward with us and through us toward a common point of arrival, which is God,” and as every creature sings “the hymn of its existence” we might hear within that song the silence of God who “is intimately present to each being.”

It is of no small matter, then, to follow Christian discipleship in a “contemplative lifestyle, one capable of deep enjoyment free of the obsession with consumption,” for it provides the discipline of desires so that we can be “serenely present to each reality, however small it may be” and avoid “the dynamic of dominion and the mere accumulation of pleasures.”

If all creation exists because God loves it, and if all creation is moving with us toward a universal communion with God (each thing in its own proper mode), then we need to learn to see and love things as they are, loving things for their goodness and value. Conversely, if the world is mere matter, it can be raw resource for our use and dominance.

As Francis argues, quoting the great Romano Guardini, our culture seeks to dominate, “power is its motive—a lordship over all,” in part because we view the world as static object rather than creation, “something formless, completely open to manipulation.” Lacking meaning or value other than usefulness, the world is passive and we attempt “to extract everything possible … while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us.” (These arguments are deeply concordant with those made by Ratzinger in ‘In the Beginning,’  and John Paul II in Evangelium vitae.)

The Collapse of Modernity’s Love Affair

In our own time, we value technical control as an instrumental force over and against reality because we see the world not as creation brought into being by a free and loving God but

as an insensate order, as a cold body of facts, as a mere ‘given’, as an object of utility, as raw material to be hammered into useful shape; it views the cosmos similarly as a mere ‘space’ into which objects can be thrown with complete indifference”. The intrinsic dignity of the world is thus compromised. When human beings fail to find their true place in this world, they misunderstand themselves and end up acting against themselves.

Forgetting God, we forget also the value of his creation, losing not only God and the world but also ourselves in the process, a lesson sketched with great care in Theology of the Body by John Paul II. In that analysis, when Adam is presented with Eve and responds with his delighted “At last!” Adam accepts not only Eve but also God. To refuse Eve is to refuse the work and gift provided by God, but to refuse this relation with God is also to deny what and who Adam is. In the same way, when we—in some pique of domination—refuse to live in accord with the integrity of creation, we are rejecting God, his relationship to us, and thus our own proper nature.

This explains, in some way, the odd collapse of modernity’s great love affair with Man. Promised liberation from the constraints and shackles of creation—Dewey somewhere talks about the indignity of our obeisance to the world, our bowing and scraping in the face of the real—we forget who we are, often leading to the anti-humanism of those who would do away with humans in order to save the Earth. Pope Francis notes the “constant schizophrenia, wherein a technocracy which sees no intrinsic value in lesser beings coexists with the other extreme, which sees no special value in human beings.”

We have a cold response to life—in all its forms—because we have decided that everything matters only in its use rather than its being. Including ourselves. We matter just as much as we produce (or consume), are useful (or use others), or perform (or make others do so)—we value doing and having over being. According to John Paul II in Evangelium vitae, man

no longer considers life as a splendid gift of God, something "sacred" entrusted to his responsibility and thus also to his loving care and "veneration". Life itself becomes a mere "thing", which man claims as his exclusive property, completely subject to his control and manipulation.

Ungoverned by the love of being, capable only of a freedom to possess or reject, the late pope notices that we have lost ourselves, leading “to a freedom without rules” and “man … in ‘fear’ of his freedom.” Indifferent to life, its demands and possibilities are wearisome; they sadden us. Because we have lost ourselves, our world, and our God, all that remains is power, use, consumption, and dominance.

The Meaning of Laudato Si’

In Laudato si’ Francis provides no mere environmental tract, whatever some might say, and however squishy the opening sections may be. At its core, he is delving into one of the predominant spiritual diseases of our time, our sadness about being, our hatred of the limits and structure and order of the real, our deep weariness in the face of the goodness of creation. We are out of tune, we are not moved by anything, or anyone, for we see nothing lovely or worthy of affection in the world, not even ourselves, viewing our own bodies, wills, and minds as mere instruments of pleasure, use, and power.

Francis is concerned with our sadness, our failure to love. In fact, though, this sadness is really a weary repugnance, even a hatred, for all that is. We do not like creation, for creation is not ours to do with as we wish; it makes demands on us, primarily a demand to love it as God does. Having subverted creation with nature, we’ve given free rein to our devilish facility and delight in destruction. In telling us to love creation, thus, Francis is telling us to recover our humanity, to be like Christ, the one who reveals both God and man to us. “We are speaking of an attitude of the heart … which approaches life with serene attentiveness, which is capable of being fully present to someone without thinking of what comes next, which accepts each moment as a gift from God to be lived to the full,” he explains in Laudato Si’.


Jesus taught us this attitude when he invited us to contemplate the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, or when seeing the rich young man and knowing his restlessness, “he looked at him with love” (Mk 10:21). He was completely present to everyone and to everything, and in this way he showed us the way to overcome that unhealthy anxiety which makes us superficial, aggressive and compulsive consumers.

This is not silly environmentalism. This is the Gospel and its freedom for joy.

R. J. Snell is William E. Simon Visiting Fellow of Religion and Public Life in the James Madison Program of Princeton University and professor of philosophy at Eastern University. His most recent book is Acedia and its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire.