“La Douceur de Vivre”, by Michael Pakaluk

There were a handful of jokes that Michael Novak told regularly.  One went:  “The pessimist says, ‘Things can’t get any worse.’  The optimist says, ‘Oh yes they can!’” Another was: “In a well-functioning marriage, the husband always has the last word.  And it’s ‘Yes, dear.’”  I learned from Novak, or at least I learned to admire, a certain equanimity and balance. Yes, which included a sense of humor, ready-to-hand, that would put even serious problems in perspective.

I have been thinking about him recently, while re-reading St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s Story of a Soul.  Novak was convinced that the astonishingly rapid spread of devotion to St. Thérèse throughout Europe prepared the way for the great “Catholic Renaissance” in thought and letters of the first part of the century.  (If you want to know more about this, your best guide will be Robert Royal’s A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.)  Novak saw the 20^thcentury with its crises as a bounded by an arc within the Church, between the teaching of the Little Flower at the start and that of Pope John Paul II at the end. …