We are constantly unable to do everything we want to. The weight of our own expectations for the future, let alone anyone else’s, are crushing. There isn’t time to do every good thing this week. This is not a call to lackadaisical apathy—the Christian life requires discipline, and we should do as many good things as the week has time for. But we won’t be able to do them all. We have to embrace the limits of our humanity.
There’s an old story that used to be often told as a literary cautionary tale, that you don’t hear so much of these days: Faust.
In the story Dr Faustus becomes impatient with his limitations and the limitations his various fields of study placed on him. He found no matter how much he learned he never became the master but was instead in the service of something else. In law, of justice; in medicine, of healing; and in theology, of God.
He chafed at his limits and so did what any self-respecting renaissance man would do: he made a pact with the devil which gave him essentially godlike power for twenty-four years. He preceded to enjoy life without limits, until his twenty-four years were up and he was damned to Hell for all eternity.
It’s been told and retold for generations. It’s meant to be a cautionary tale—attempting to be a god on your own is not worth the cost. There’s a reason though that we hear the story told less often these days, as Eugene Peterson points out: it no longer sounds cautionary, it sounds aspirational.
Peterson suggests that the assumptions of our society are Faustian. He highlights our educational models, our economic expectations, and our popular religion. In the decades since he wrote A Long Obedience in the Same Direction things have only continued to rattle down the same track.
We think pride is a virtue. Pride was thought in the middle ages to be the deadliest of the deadly sins, now we reward it: we all think it’s good to be proud of who we are.
The Bible describes basic sin as taking instead of receiving. We now think that’s wisdom—to improve ourselves by all means possible, to take care of ourselves first. It’s something of a sick demonic joke that the result of stealing from wisdom’s tree is that we begin to think that stealing is wisdom.
We live in an age that has taken the virtue of aspiration—and there is definitely such a thing as godly aspiration—and declared all pride to be that. As a result we, like Faust, cannot embrace limits.
I am a proud man. Mostly when people say that in popular media these days it’s seen as a good thing, even if it sometimes won’t let them perform other good actions.
For clarity, I tell you this not to laud myself but to repent. There is nothing to be proud of in pride.
