A Descent

To the Underworld and Back Again

John Eldredge has often stated in his writings that every young boy asks the question, “Do I have what it takes?” This question drives boys and men to compete, explore, push, challenge, grind, climb, race, and generally seek the limits of their being. It’s all in order to answer the question.

“Do I have what it takes to hit a home run? To win a fistfight? To attract a woman? To make a fortune? To protect my loved ones? To tame a wild animal? To master a trade? To build a house? To survive the wilderness? To predict the future? To unravel mysteries? To weather storms? To cultivate food and livestock? To climb a mountain? To defeat evil?“

A man can spend his whole life answering this question one challenge at a time. But the reflective man might recognize that developing what it takes to meet any of these challenges is more or less a matter of time and persistence. One can conquer anything, if he’s willing to sacrifice everything. But what is actually worth such a sacrifice? Most people would agree that it’s not worth sacrificing relationships with good friends and loving family to achieve something like financial success. But many men do.

And so the reflective man may respond to the question “do I have what it takes” with the question “do I have what ‘what’ takes?” At a very basic level, let’s imagine “it” is life. This proves to be somewhat enigmatic. Anyone can live a life. So let’s specify—“do I have what it takes to live a meaningful life?” That seems to be man’s ultimate question.

Let’s imagine for a moment how a man might answer this question without any kind of guidance from a religious text or scriptural understanding of God. If man has been asking this question since the dawn of time, let’s imagine a South American man asking himself this question in the year 600 BC. He might personalize what is “meaningful” by asking, “Do I have what it takes to protect and provide for my family/tribe/town?” Furthermore, he might ask, “Can I even provide for myself? Can I protect myself? Which is more important?”

In this day and age, the popular thinking is that you can’t truly love anyone unless you first love yourself. But is that true? What if we learn to love ourselves by practicing love toward others? Or what if love comes only from God, and pours out of and into yourself and others in various ways and at various times?

We take this modern axiom for granted—that self-love is the bedrock of all love. But there have been countless ways of determining love of self and others through the centuries.

Emphasis on this modern idea of self-love awkwardly points out the obvious—Scripture is peculiarly silent about this topic. What’s more, both Old and New Testament consider it a given that people “love themselves,” and would therefore love others well, as they were commanded to do by both the Torah and Jesus Himself (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 22:39, Mark 12:31). The Apostle Paul also takes self-love as a given when he says “no one ever hates his own body” (Ephesians 5:29a) in order to make a parallel point on how essential it is for husbands to love their wives well. Why does Scripture assume that we don’t hate ourselves? Is it just because anyone who could hear or read the words must necessarily be alive, and so obviously doesn’t hate themselves to the point of suicide? And what does it actually mean to love oneself or hate oneself?

When people say that they hate themselves, do they really hate their being? Or do they just hate the life they’re currently living? Do they hate their being or their doing? Perhaps both? Same with self-love—does the person love their being or their doing or both? And which do they love/hate more if such a thing could be comparatively measured?

I would argue that these are two sides of the same coin. And since I would assume people are far less likely to kill themselves over loving their being/doing too much, I’ll start with exploring self-hate.

It may be easy to see how people could hate their life—what they are doing and/or what has been done to them. But to hate one’s being—what does that mean? And how would one express hatred of one’s being?

So as not to personalize this question, let’s imagine a person named 285. If you, an outside party, hated 285, what would you do? Well, if you hated their doing, you could eliminate their doing by eliminating their being—killing them. But you could also eliminate their doing by imprisonment—severely restricting their ability to have any effect on the world.

And here lies another issue—you would be hard-pressed to find someone who did not consider prison to be a form of suffering or punishment. So if someone truly hated themself, would they eliminate their being (kill themself), or make all their doing a kind of literal or metaphorical suffering and/or punishment (torture themself)?

I suspect neither. To do either of those things speaks to a desire. To eliminate one’s doing by suicide or self-imprisonment, speaks to a desire. It says, “my being is not meant to be tied to this doing.” One cannot escape valuing one’s being, even by eliminating their doing. Such action concludes that their being is worth more than to be connected to the doing they are experiencing.

Perhaps the real result of hatred of one’s being, is apathy. In this case, one would likely die from lack of desire and lack of care. The South American man might passively harm himself and his community by denouncing being itself. He would forfeit his contribution to his tribe and his want for anything better for himself, until death overtook him by some means.

Jordan B. Peterson often refers to the Columbine shooters as persons who had hated being itself. But even that hatred speaks to a desire. A desire to disconnect the perceived meaninglessness of life from the beings living it. In a warped way, the shooters express a kind of twisted liberation for their own being and the beings of others. It’s vile beyond description, but it’s not quite a complete denouncement of being.

I would say that denouncement is more summed up by apathy. Apathy is the statement, “I do not want. I do not wish. I do not hope. I do not desire anything better or worse for my own being. I feel nothing for my existence or the existence of others. I will not contribute. I will stop. Through no action of my own, I will allow my doing to cease, and my body to whither until I am no more. I need no reason to end, for there never was any reason to begin. Even of that I am not sure, but I do not care to be sure. I do not care to be.”

Enter the reflective man

“Your lack of doing will likely result in death.”

“Likely.”

“Do you then foresee yourself escaping your being?”

“I cannot be sure.”

“But you will escape your doing.”

“Yes.”

“So you might say you want to escape.”

After a long pause

“Damn it… I want. I desire. And I can’t be sure that I will escape my being, even in death.”

“It seems not.”

“Well I can’t be sure there’s a God either. I can’t even be sure I have being. Perhaps I don’t believe in God or being. Doing is all there is. I shall cease doing, and cease altogether.”

“So people who say they hate their being really just hate their doing?”

“Yes.”

“So it would seem, anyone could just change their doing, right?”

“Yes, they could be—wait, I don’t believe in being. Yes… it is possible for everyone to do something today that could potentially make their doing tomorrow better.”

“And since there’s no ‘being’ to worry about now, couldn’t you do the same?”

“I suppose.”

“What could you do today that might make your doing tomorrow better?”

After a reflectively longer pause

“…I think I would like some french fries… With ketchup.”

“I think that can be arranged. C’mon. Let’s go.”

God help the man that journeys this far into the  dark abyss of hopelessly rational thought. If that’s you, I hope some grace as common as french fries pulls you back up again.