Psalm 62:4

not everyone gets to be an astronaut

For thy mercy is better than lives: thee my lips shall praise. (Psalm 62:4 DR)

It is a particular conceit of the modern age that we think we are absolute masters over our lives. Many of the current societal pathologies are rooted in this desire to transcend nature, to mold and form ourselves into whatever we desire. It is the resurgence of the ancient gnostic heresy which so radically bifurcates body and soul so as to make the soul (which—ironically—most moderns deny exists) the sole component of human existence and the body something akin to silly putty upon which the soul impresses itself and which can be reformed at will.

This triumph of the will, however, carries with it an ironic twist. For since our wills are finite and we cannot in the end transcend the natural body-soul composite, instead of the elevation of the soul it turns into the elevation of the body and the eradication of the soul. We merge them into one so that that appetites of the lower nature wholly move the will so the the latter becomes indistinguishable from the former. In this manner we perfect our slavery, for like the brutes we only follow the leading of our appetites, but in our supposed sophistication imagine we are therefore free.

When I was a kid I remember being told that I could be whatever I wanted to be. We were encouraged to imagine great things and careers, and of course we all wanted something exciting like astronaut or firefighter or rock star. The only limitations placed on our desires was our imagination and strength of will, and everything in our culture pushed us towards fame and fortune. No one as a kid that I remember ever said he wanted to be a plumber and have a family, but the irony is that very few ever grow up to be astronauts.

The difficulty is that our society has largely replaced the virtue of magnanimity with the opposing vice of ambition. Magnanimity belongs to the irascible faculty of man which deals primarily with the intellect. the magnanimous mind stretches forth, as it were, towards great and difficult things for the sake of great honors. This may seem synonymous with ambition, but the distinction lies in the object and the use. St. Thomas notes that:

Virtue bears a relationship to two things, first to the matter about which is the field of its activity, secondly to its proper act, which consists in the right use of such matter. And since a virtuous habit is denominated chiefly from its act, a man is said to be magnanimous chiefly because he is minded to do some great act. Now an act may be called great in two ways: in one way proportionately, in another absolutely. An act may be called great proportionately, even if it consist in the use of some small or ordinary thing, if, for instance, one make a very good use of it: but an act is simply and absolutely great when it consists in the best use of the greatest thing. (ST, II.II., Q.129, A.1)

Thus a magnanimous act can be:

1. The great use of a small thing

2. The best use of the greatest thing

All the things that come into our use, St. Thomas goes on to say, are external things, and honor is in itself the greatest because it is closest to virtue for three reasons:

1. It attests to the virtue of the honorable man

2. It is offered to God and to the best

3. We forego other things for the sake of it

Ambition, on the other hand, is opposed to magnanimity in three ways:

1. Desiring more honor than one is due

2. Desiring honor in and of itself without reference to God as its source

3. Desiring honor for itself without desiring the profit of others

It is therefore easy to see how the virtue of magnanimity has largely been supplanted by the vice of of ambition in our society. Any great thing that we desire to do must be in accord with reason, which is how the mind stretches forth to magnanimous things in the first place. To desire a particular career is not wrong in and of itself, but that entire desire must fall within the virtue of magnanimity to avoid falling into the sin of ambition.

The difference thus comes from whether we are striving towards something because we have set our minds to it or because we desire base things determined by our lower appetites. To be a doctor is a noble and potentially magnanimous profession if offered up to God’s glory and for the well-being of one’s fellow man; entering the same profession just to acquire wealth can easily fall into base ambition. This is not to say that the magnanimous physician should not receive the wages he is due; rather, the motivation and use of those external things makes all the difference between magnanimity and ambition.

This digression leads us into this passage and the Psalmist’s recognition of his position before the Lord. In the desert he is in exile, yet in that barren land has found the sanctuary of God, as it were, for all the external trappings of power and security have been removed from him. He is naked, so to speak, before God and before man, and realizes that the entirety of his being is so fragile and dependent on the mercy of God.

This state is not something he has chosen for himself, but he has had an epiphany for God’s power and glory in this place. All things have been stripped away, and now nothing stands before him and his Lord. It is in this moment that he sees the truth, that all the thoughts and desires he had for his life are as nothing; that the mercy of the Lord far surpasses all those things. All the external honors of this world are out of reach, but now his mind can reach out to the greatest thing—God Himself.

Those “lives” are not merely a stacking up of lifetimes, but the lives he might have chosen for himself, the different ways in which he might have gone. All those ambitions and dreams are now seen as nothing compared to the sweetness of God’s mercy towards him, which he had to come into the desert to find.

In a culture that lies to us about our nature as human beings, we must rediscover magnanimity, choosing to stretch out our minds to great things that lead to virtue and ultimately to the greatest thing which is the Source of all virtue and life:

Therefore “His mercy is better than lives.” What lives? Those which for themselves men have chosen. One has chosen for himself a life of business, another a country life, another a life of usury, another a military life; one this, another that. Divers are the lives, but “better is Your” life than our “lives.” (St. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms, 62, 9.)

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For this animation I wanted to create a contrast of some kind but didn’t have a great direction in mind. I ended up playing around with some text and thought it’d be good to create the contrast with colors and motion.

I used the text “Better” as a matte for a precomp which contained an animated texture created using loopFlow. I then duplicated that precomp and modified the color and position of the texture so that it was complementary in color and flowed in the opposite direction. I then precomped the text and texture and added Shadow Studio, linking the Source Point to a Null and animating that to get the shadows to move.

Enjoy.

View a higher quality version of this gif here: