Chris McCandless: A Disregard for Both Temporal and Eternal Goods
In his work On Free Choice of the Will, Augustine weighs the outcomes of valuing temporal over eternal goods, saying that he knows “no one who could be more truly said to have fortitude than the man who is perfectly resigned to the lack of those things of which it is not in our power to gain possession of.” According to Augustine, evildoing is a result of “the love of those things that one can lose against one’s will”, and is to be punished by just law. Therefore, fortitude towards temporal goods should, in theory, prevent an individual from punishment. However, Chris McCandless in Into the Wild does show fortitude towards temporal goods, and yet still gets punished with death. In the novel Into the Wild, Chris McCandless suffers punishment not as a result of an appreciation for the temporal goods in his life, but as a result of his mishandling of the eternal goods that remained when he showed fortitude towards temporal goods.
Throughout Chris’s young adulthood and especially on his journey to Alaska, one of his noteworthy characteristics was his utter lack or regard for material items and objects that others would deem “valuable”. When offered a brand new car after his college college graduation, Chris was offended at the thought that his parents would try to “buy his respect”, and vowed to never accept gifts from them again. Chris’s fear that his parents were trying to buy his respect illuminates a continuous theme in his life: the belief that temporal goods were roadblocks on the way to achieving a meaningful, authentic life. Chris continued to show fortitude towards temporal goods when he donated over 24,000 dollars to his college fund to a charity fighting hunger, OXFAM. In another instance, Chris, upon accidentally destroying his well-loved Datsun, “arranged all his paper currency in a pile on the sand…and put a match to it.” In fact, Chris hated temporal goods so much that he brought less than the bare minimum with him on his final journey into the Alaskan wilderness, presumably in the hopes that the less he carried with him, the more “raw” and “authentic” his experience would be. One would assume that, in all of Chris’s hatred for temporal goods, he would place a large emphasis on eternal goods such as family and friends. However, in becoming less interested in temporal goods, Chris also seemed to become less interested in eternal goods as well.
Chris Mccandless’s relationship with his family was rocky from the start, which may explain why he chose to shut them out entirely and pursue a life away from them. This, however, does not explain why Chris alienated himself from almost every person he came in contact with during his travels. You would think that if somebody gave up all of his earthly possessions save for a few essentials, that would make him value the people around him more, seeing as they would essentially be all he had. This, however, seemed to be the opposite for Chris McCandless. Chris made many friends along his journey, but he never kept them for long and always seemed to leave them behind a little too soon. Chris took jobs and food from others but never shared anything about his own past or current life. He isolated himself from almost everybody he met, yet still managed to have a profound effect on every one of them. Chris even made such an impact on Ronald Franz that he offered to adopt Chris, but Chris was “uncomfortable with the request”, and dodged the question. Chris, although he showed fortitude towards temporal goods, also seemed to show fortitude towards eternal goods at the same time. According to Augustine, true happiness and authenticity come as a result of valuing eternal over temporal goods, and while Chris certainly didn’t value temporal goods, he showed little to no appreciation for the eternal goods in his life either. His isolation from others both metaphorically and literally led to his punishment: his death.
Chris’s punishment, ultimately, was his life being cut short just as he had achieved what he had thought to be a meaningful existence. According to Augustine, possessing the virtues of prudence, fortitude, justice, and temperance makes our lives happy. Chris showed in his diary entries and through his actions that he had indeed achieved prudence, fortitude, justice, and temperance, and that he did wish to be happy. Prudence is defined as the quality of being cautious, and Chris certainly did prove that he was cautious when he spent hours examining berries and plants to make sure they were not toxic. Fortitude is the ability to display courage in the face of adversity, and Chris did just that. Even when he ran out of food and was extremely ill, he never gave up his fight for life, leaving a note in case anyone found him. Justice is showing just behavior or treatment to someone or something, and Chris’s justice was shown when he killed the moose and his actions haunted him for days. Finally, temperance is the ability to restrain oneself, and Chris also displayed that when he was able to subsist entirely off of meager portions of rice and small game for months. Even when Chris was starving, he never gave in and ate his entire bag of rice. He knew that he needed to portion it out, no matter how hungry he got. Chris had, according to Augustine, achieved true happiness in the woods, and his punishment was dying before he could live out the rest of his life with his newfound happiness. He suffered this punishment not because he valued temporal goods, but because he didn’t value eternal goods. He isolated himself from others and it led him to pay the ultimate price. On a literal note, he physically isolated himself from others and was unable to get help when he needed it most. Figuratively, though, Chris’s emotional isolation from others was what truly led to his downfall, according to Augustine. Through showing fortitude towards both temporal and eternal goods, Chris rendered himself unable to avoid punishment and achieve a life outside of the wild filled with true happiness. Had Chris truly valued those around them while at the same time showing fortitude towards temporal goods like cars and money, his journey could have been far more successful. He could have learned more wilderness survival tips from Alaskan natives, he could have had friends to check up on him, and, ultimately, he would have been a happier, more moral person for it.
In the grand scheme of things, although he committed “evildoing” in the eyes of Augustine, Christopher McCandless is not an “evil” person. However, when reading Augustine’s texts, it is easy to draw parallels to the “punishments” discussed by Augustine, and Chris’s eventual fate. Chris was able to abide by one half of Augustine’s teachings: he was able to avoid valuing temporal goods. However, it was his ignorance when it came to eternal goods that truly sentenced him to his punishment: death.