Post by Robert Olson

Another in a brilliant series by Regis Martin: “Fritz never forgot. Like his hero Chesterton, he simply knew, having early on experienced what Jacques Maritain called “the intuition of being,” that each of us is finally a word spoken by Another, the Eternal Word—who were He to cease speaking our name, we should straightaway fall into nothingness. In other words, there is no necessity for me to be, nor for anything else to be. Nevertheless, I am, I exist, and so do all things spoken into being by God. Thus, the temptation to give in to despair, to succumb to what Chesterton called “the blasphemy of pessimism,” must be at once and most fiercely resisted at every turn. As Fritz memorably put it in his The Metaphysics of Love, easily the best book he ever wrote: “The shock of non-being can stir within the mind a questioning as to why we are at all when every resource within our very nature cries out its own insufficiency and ontological poverty.” Shaken thus to the very core, right down to the bottom of contingent being, one instinctively feels “that shudder before non-being which is the heart of all anxiety.” And yet we must resist, we must not yield. Not one little bit. We are to choose the only possible alternative with which to banish the beast anxiety: namely, gratitude.”