ramblin_rosie | In which this journal lives up to its name again...

... and I overthink SPN by way of G. K. Chesterton. Blame

dodger_winslow for this one; part of this ramble has been percolating for a bit, but she asked for it.

The story goes that a monk of Clairvaux once came to St. Bernard and confessed that he had no faith and wanted to leave. Bernard refused to let him go; instead, he urged the monk to have faith in his (Bernard’s) faith until his own was strong enough to stand alone, much as a child is supposed to learn from the faith of his godparents until he is old enough to confirm his own commitment to Christ.
The tactic worked. The monk slowly got over his crisis and never again felt compelled to return to the world.
Sounds a little like a certain pair of brothers in “Point of No Return,” doesn’t it? Dean’s fey; he’s lost faith in everything and is prepared to take what he thinks is the only way out; but Sam not only declares his faith in Dean but demonstrates it (hello, James 2:18) by taking Dean with him to the one place Dean logically should not go because he believes Dean will do the right thing. And Dean just can’t bring himself to let his brother down.
Why? Because he loves Sam that much.
I don’t know that either brother is wholly lacking in any of the seven virtues—faith, hope, love, justice, prudence, temperance, and fortitude. They have their vices, too, but without virtues they could not be heroes. Yet as Dodger pointed out in her comments on this post, each brother is stronger in certain areas where the other is weak; Sam’s mercy tempers and is tempered by Dean’s justice, for example. (Cf. “And Then There Were None”: “I’m not saying don’t. I’m saying not now.”) Only when they work together are they able to achieve the balance needed for the virtues to function as they should. When they don’t—well, here, have some Chesterton:

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful. (Orthodoxy, “The Suicide of Thought”)

Substitute “Dean” for “scientist” and “Sam” for “humanitarian” and you get episodes like “The Girl Next Door.” Take Sam’s pity for Dean to the extreme of excluding pity for anyone else, and you get Season 4. Virtues unchecked are like free radicals; each one needs to be bonded to the others so that they don’t cause deadly destruction.
But see if this doesn’t also describe both Sam and Dean:

The love of a hero is more terrible than the hatred of a tyrant. The hatred of a hero is more generous than the love of a philanthropist. There is a huge and heroic sanity of which moderns can only collect the fragments. There is a giant of whom we see only the lopped arms and legs walking about. (Orthodoxy, “The Suicide of Thought”)

I’ll grant that what Sam and Dean have and are isn’t necessarily healthy, even now (not that anyone could be completely healthy [from a Chestertonian perspective] in a universe where God has abdicated, but that's meta for another day). Sam’s hallucinating and Dean’s one straw shy of breaking completely; that’s about as unhealthy as you can get. But Sam’s lifeline to sanity is his willing to build on his assumption that he can know something about the objective reality of things outside his own mind; without that assumption, as Chesterton argues in St. Thomas Aquinas and (in a different way) in Orthodoxy, thought stops. The “suicide of thought” would lead inexorably to the suicide of Sam—indeed, Hallucifer was goading him to that very point in “Hello, Cruel World.” Yet he can make the assumption that reality, now represented by the scar on his palm, is different and is knowable because he has faith in Dean. And his faith in Dean is justified because, even when Dean has lost all faith and hope in anything else, he loves Sam with a deep, abiding agape love—the love that drove him to Stull as surely as it drove Jesus to the Cross and enabled Sam, like Christ’s enables us, to conquer the Devil. That love meeting that faith was in turn Dean’s lifeline in “Point of No Return,” keeping him from swerving from martyrdom to suicide; we have yet to see it become so again this season, but for Dean to be saved at this point, it will have to. The brothers pull against each other hardest when one is in danger of losing his balance; the trick for both of them is not allowing the tension to cause them to overbalance and fall or to separate and destroy.
Two more relevant passages about this balance and perhaps why it’s so riveting for us as viewers to watch the boys trying to keep it:

About the same time I read a solemn flippancy by some free thinker: he said that a suicide was only the same as a martyr. The open fallacy of this helped to clear the question. Obviously a suicide is the opposite of a martyr. A martyr is a man who cares so much for something outside him, that he forgets his own personal life. A suicide is a man who cares so little for anything outside him, that he wants to see the last of everything.... The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness. They blasphemed the beautiful duties of the body: they smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers. All this has seemed to many the very poetry of pessimism. Yet there is the stake at the crossroads to show what Christianity thought of the pessimist. (“The Flag of the World”)

All sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium; that one may be mad and eat too much, or mad and eat too little. Some moderns have indeed appeared with vague versions of progress and evolution which seeks to destroy the meson or balance of Aristotle. They seem to suggest that we are meant to starve progressively, or to go on eating larger and larger breakfasts every morning for ever. But the great truism of the meson remains for all thinking men, and these people have not upset any balance except their own. But granted that we have all to keep a balance, the real interest comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept. That was the problem which Paganism tried to solve: that was the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a very strange way.
Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide; and take the case of courage.... A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying....
This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery of the new balance. Paganism had been like a pillar of marble, upright because proportioned with symmetry. Christianity was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excrescences exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years. In a Gothic cathedral the columns were all different, but they were all necessary. Every support seemed an accidental and fantastic support; every buttress was a flying buttress. So in Christendom apparent accidents balanced. Becket wore a hair shirt under his gold and crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination; for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at least better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the black and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart. But the balance was not always in one man’s body as in Becket’s; the balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom. Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, flowers could be flung at his festival in the Southern cities; and because fanatics drank water on the sands of Syria, men could still drink cider in the orchards of England.... [I]t is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture or a word. It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing....
It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own.... It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect. (“The Paradoxes of Christianity”)

Here’s hoping the Winchesters can keep each other upright for at least the rest of the season.