VIRTUE, THE GREEKS, AND THE MEANING OF HAPPINESS
All that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.1
—C. S. LEWIS
We Americans identify happiness with feelings, the sort of emotion we find in a bag of popcorn and a DVD with a happy ending.
I can still remember the exact moment when I came to think that the things I most wanted in life were pleasure and happiness. It was early in high school, and I was watching the movie Dead Poets Society with some friends. The theme of the movie was contained in the phrase Carpe diem and in Henry David Thoreau’s explanation of why he went out to Walden Pond—to “suck out all the marrow of life.”2 The idea of seizing the day and getting the most out of life resonated deep within me and became my unofficial creed. Much of my generation likely shared this motivating belief.
What resulted from this approach, however, was not happiness. As a life strategy, the pursuit of pleasure (in Greek, hedone) has so regularly been tried and found to fail, that philosophers have a name for this phenomenon—the hedonistic paradox. The hedonistic paradox is that when you pursue pleasure for its own sake, you tend not to find it.
As a new believer, I sat down to write out the meaning of life. I only made it two pages. I realized that there was so little I understood on the subject, which gave me a hunger to go deeper on the big questions surrounding purpose, the meaning of life, and happiness. I began taking philosophy classes and set a course for graduate school.
In the spring before beginning graduate studies, while I was still trying to decide where to attend, I visited Biola University in Southern California. The admissions counselor set up a meeting for me with J. P. Moreland. I still remember that meeting as if it were yesterday. It was a thirty-minute slot over his lunch break, and we met in his small, windowless office. His desk was full of books and writing projects in process, and the shelves lining every wall were crowded with books two deep. Dr. Moreland was warm and friendly, and he seemed genuinely glad to meet me, but I could tell he was busy and thinking I was just one more student coming through the college. When I brought up the subject of happiness, however, his eyes lit up. He took his feet off his desk, leaned forward in his chair (yogurt in hand), and began to talk wildly about the true nature and meaning of happiness, its classical roots, and the tragedy of losing this understanding in modern Christian thought.
It was at that moment that I decided to attend Talbot School of Theology, a graduate school at Biola University, and to pursue a master’s degree in philosophy and Christian thought.
Eventually, I came to realize that the hedonistic myth involved a misaligned focus. It’s not that happiness per se is wrong, but that we tend to misunderstand the true source of happiness. God designed us in such a way that our happiness and fulfillment are to be identified with righteous movement. Our pursuit of God and our pursuit of true happiness, rightly understood, are one and the same.
RECLAIMING HAPPINESS
While at Talbot, I read Confessions by Augustine. I found his writing more relevant than anything I’d ever read, and one sentence in particular was a wake-up call: “For you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless till it finds its rest in you.”3 Instead of running from God to attain happiness, happiness is found in running toward God.
Happiness, instead of being a selfish pursuit, as many Christians unknowingly feel, is a godly pursuit.
But we have diluted the true meaning of happiness. These days, happiness often means a license to pursue self-gratification. It wasn’t always defined this way, however. Aristotle defined happiness as the chief end of humans and saw it extending throughout one’s life. As he wrote, “Moreover it must be in a complete life. For one swallow does not make a spring, nor does one day; nor, similarly, does one day or a short time make us blessed and happy.”4
His view of happiness included character development and the attainment of all other virtues. Achieving happiness meant fulfilling one’s potential in a holistic, ethical way.
For Aristotle and many of the ancients, happiness was a state of being; they used the word much as we use the word joy. Aristotle’s unabashed use of happiness as a driving force for doing good and being ethical was picked up by many Christian scholars at least through the Enlightenment. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and later Blaise Pascal all saw happiness, rightly defined, as one of the ends of human life; they saw no tension between happiness and living for God.
When Thomas Jefferson penned the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, he, too, had in mind the classical sense of the word happiness. Drawing from the traditions of ancient Greek philosophers (and modifying a statement by John Locke5), Jefferson saw true happiness—the full development of human potential—as a human right and goal alongside life and liberty.
It wasn’t until recently that the word happiness has been watered down to simply mean pleasure without regard to ethics or virtue. But this watering down explains why present-day Christians unknowingly have a hard time considering the word happiness in a positive light, and an even harder time thinking of it as something connected to faith, righteousness, justice, and obedience.
COMPLETE JOY
Why is it we often feel our selfish desires are in conflict with our holy desires? We see in Scripture that God’s design for the unity of our desires is found in pursuing right relationship with Him and others. Dissolving that unity, or separating our desires from our actions, results in an anemic faith and tempers the passion that is properly appointed for obedience.
There are two ways we can seek happiness. We can seek it for ourselves at the expense of others, or we can seek it on behalf of others. The second is the kingdom happiness Jesus calls “complete” joy that lacks nothing, the kind that produces right actions and genuine love.
Jesus said, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete” (John 15:9–11; emphasis added).
The reality is that our happiness, God’s glory, and loving our neighbors are all bound together. Understanding this, we can pursue an obedient faith in a holistic way, expecting to experience new heights in both our relationship with God and our own flourishing and satisfaction. Without this understanding, we’ve missed something important in our faith—in our pursuit of justice, godliness, and joy.
As the last chapter tried to show, living for God includes living for justice. Here, the argument is that living for God and for justice (our sacrifice for others) is somehow tied up with our own happiness. Or, as Jesus put the paradox, it truly is better to give than to receive.
As we give our lives away, we receive life back. Happiness is a reward for living justly.
Jesus gave us a further picture of godly happiness in His Sermon on the Mount in what we call the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1–12). The word Beatitudes is taken from the Latin word beati—meaning “power,” “blessed,” or “happy.” And beati is a translation of the Greek word makarios that was in the original version of Matthew, a word that also meant “happy,” “blessed,” or even “to be envied.” Jesus’ words indicate that while those who are meek, merciful, peacemakers, and persecuted may not have pleasure in the moment, they are the ones who will find true happiness and blessing from God the Father.
We need to recover the full, classical sense of the word happiness, because happiness is a vital part of the conversation about faith. Though there is a corrupted happiness that hampers active faith, there is also a happiness that spurs us onward, a happiness that brings community together and helps establish an intimate relationship with God. Happiness is the current that helps carry us along, and happiness, as strange as it may seem, provides a natural and godly motivation for doing good.
ENTITLEMENT
One thing that gets in the way of our pursuit of God and godly happiness is a feeling of entitlement, an idea that we have more rights than we actually do.
Every person has a variety of rights—rights endowed by God, rights conferred through citizenship, rights to be respected according to the status and place one has earned, rights within families, and so forth. The sum total of these rights constitutes a line to which we are entitled.
But we go beyond this line; we feel we have rights to a new car, more money, new clothes, getting our own way, a bigger house, have God appease our strongest felt needs, vent our frustrations without maturity, or act on our impulses childishly. These are not things to which we are actually entitled, but to which we often feel strongly entitled.
The inflation or gap between real and perceived entitlement can largely be attributed to lack of maturity or being “spoiled.” It may be the way we were raised or just the prevailing American consumer culture, but we tend to believe we deserve more than we actually do.
This gap, however it occurs in individual persons, tends to eat away at cheerfulness and gratitude, often while nurturing a victim complex or feelings that life is not fair in that it has not provided one with all he or she deserves.
THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY
One of the dominant illustrations of entitlement and contentment in my life occurred when I was walking around the Huntington Library in Pasadena, California. The Huntington Library is the estate of the late Henry E. Huntington, a railroad tycoon in early California history whose name is also given to Huntington Beach. His estate was turned into a collection of museums, libraries, and gardens. It’s one of my favorite places in Los Angeles—the botanical gardens create an oasis spanning 120 acres within the urban landscape of L.A.
The gardens reflect those of different places around the world: there are the Japanese Garden, the Palm Garden, and the Desert Garden, to name a few. By the teahouse and Rose Garden, where the rosebushes include every variety, there is a covered walkway with ivy running through the latticework. There’s something about light streaming through the covered walkway, the sense of age and peace that comes from the vines growing in and around the lattice, that speaks my language and is beautiful to me.
On a gorgeous day, one of my first times to the library, I remember walking through the archway and thinking, If only I could own this. If only this place could be mine. If only I could come stroll here in the evenings and be able to enjoy this all to myself. If only I wasn’t a visitor here, but could fold this into the things that belong to me. Then I could really enjoy this.
It was a bit of a scary thought to realize what was going on in my mind, to recognize that the need to possess was somehow standing in the way of my enjoyment.
THE SECRET OF CONTENTMENT
Feelings of entitlement can be overcome by pursuing godly contentment and living lives in submission to the One who created us. Contentment does not result from accumulating more and more stuff, or from reaching the upper line of a perceived entitlement. It also does not come from having the bare minimum of the lower line of actual entitlement. Rather, true joy and contentment come through spiritual strength and encouragement that transcend our lot in life, the sum total of our possessions, and whether or not we are receiving all we think we deserve.
Paul talked about learning the secret of being content whether he had plenty or nothing at all in the fourth chapter of the letter to the Philippians. He attributed the source of contentment to Christ by saying, “I can do all this through him who gives me strength” (v. 13).
It has been a consistent recognition by Christians throughout church history that we were created for relationship with God, and that only in that relationship do we find contentment. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “God alone constitutes [our] happiness.”6 C. S. Lewis has Aslan reassure Caspian, in his work Prince Caspian, with the words, “You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve. And that is both honor enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.”7
I think contemporary pastor and theologian John Piper summarized the idea of finding our happiness in God best: “God is most pleased with us when we are most satisfied in Him.”8
That is why when it comes to true happiness, prayer is more fruitful than striving, solitude more beneficial than competition, and trusting more reliable than claiming entitlements.
Where I worked at a manufacturing plant in South Carolina, there was a framed plaque on the wall with a quote from Pastor Chuck Swindoll. This short piece, entitled “Attitude,” sums up the idea of a contented spirit as well as anything I’ve ever seen. I have shared it multiple times with my church and have also begun teaching it to my daughters.
The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think, say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company . . . a church . . . a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we embrace for that day. We cannot change our past . . . we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play the one string we have, and that is our attitude . . . I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you . . . we are in charge of our attitudes.
Contentment does not depend on having; it depends on our heart’s wanting the right things. As C. S. Lewis put it, “our best havings are wantings.”9 I would rather be able to appreciate things I cannot have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.
Of course, one of the greatest enemies of contentment is envy. My best suggestion for combating envy is this: when tempted to compare yourself with those who have more, give yourself instead to those who have less.
LIVING IN THE TENSION
There is a tension to spiritual happiness. It is the paradox that while our felt needs and fears are closely tied to circumstances, happiness is somehow meant to transcend those needs, fears, and circumstances. But in the midst of bad circumstances, how do you consider your trials pure joy?
As with Peter walking on water, it’s really hard to keep our eyes on the source that sustains our faith, and it’s easy to focus instead on the many challenges or obstacles to walking in trust. Biblical happiness can ground itself in faith; it can exist alongside a bad day or a bad week, or even in the face of bad news. A basic difference between biblical happiness and pleasure is this: the existence of pleasure depends upon your immediate circumstances and emotional state, whereas biblical happiness and contentment can exist even when your present circumstances are difficult or challenging and your natural emotional state tenuous and volatile.
Life is messy. God is mysterious. And the successful quest for happiness will be a spiritual one. Happiness and the good life are for the Christian the same end as for the various schools of ancient philosophy. For the Christian, however, they are to be found in the virtues of a relationship with God.
Several hundred years ago, Pascal wrote of man’s inescapable need for God. Connecting our happiness with dependence upon God, he wrote,
There was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace. This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.10
This biblical understanding of happiness can seem like a mere platitude or abstract concept, but it ought to be the goal of every disciple of Christ to experience it as a fundamental reality of the walk of faith. What is more, when we learn to orient our desires away from circumstances and material things and toward relationship with God, we discover that true happiness far surpasses the sort of happiness for which we used to long. C. S. Lewis said:
If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desire not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, we are like ignorant children who want to continue making mud pies because we cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a vacation at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.11
“I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
—JOHN 10:10