“Happiness” for many psychologists refers to “subjective well-being”, how a person feels his or her life is faring; how satisfying one’s life is. On this basis many people might be described as being relatively happy.
Greek philosophers are sometimes represented as also promoting the pursuit of happiness. However, the relevant word is eudaimonia, which is better translated “human flourishing.” Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus and Epictetus all insisted that to experience eudaimonia one must cultivate both moral and intellectual virtues.
Moral philosophers of the Enlightenment have moved from these moorings and have driven a wedge between morality and “happiness”. So Kant argued that happiness is not only insecure but also prone to lead us morally astray. To make themselves happy people can be unfaithful to their spouses, commit fraud, burn down schools and murder people. Consequently, Kant reasoned that duty and the moral law should be the goals people pursue, not happiness.
Both Kantians and utilitarians effectively divorce morality from happiness when they treat morality as a problem-solving enterprise which aims at developing principles that will solve moral dilemmas. This reason-focused approach to morality neglects the morality of virtue - the development of moral character in everyday living. Whereas Enlightenment philosophers ask, “What should I do?”, Socrates and his contemporaries asked, “How should I live?”
Psalm 1 presents humans who are in the ultimate state of prospering or flourishing. They are those who are “blessed” (verse 1). Such a person
is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season, and whose leaf does not wither. Whatever he does prospers (verse 3).
But to be “blessed” is to not to be one who has achieved this flourishing state through self-effort. Rather such a person is a beneficiary. The psalm ends in a way that corresponds to how it began:
For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish (verse 6).
To be blessed is to be one who enjoys the protection, favour and guidance of God. This makes this state of flourishing much more stable than “happiness” which, on most definitions, depends very much on happen-stance. This prosperous condition is secure and guaranteed.
Yet, significantly, the blessed person is not a passive recipient of God’s protection, favour and guidance. The life of such a person is characterised by profound virtue. Such a person
does not walk in the counsel of the wicked
or stand in the way of sinners
or sit in the seat of mockers (verse 1b).
Yet this virtue is not an expression of priggishness or snobbery or superciliousness. It is not rooted in relativistic ideas as to what distinguishes “the wicked”, “sinners” and “mockers” from “the righteous” (verse 5b). Rather it is an outworking of God-revealed guidance or instruction (Torah/”law”) which has been thoroughly digested and assimilated by the prospering person as he or she takes delight in learning and doing God’s will - meditating on Torah day and night (verse 2).
Psalm 1 serves as the introduction to the Psalter and in only six short verses provides a super-summary of the difference between those who flourish (the righteous) and those who perish (the wicked). As the Psalter progresses it becomes evident that in the real world things become more complex. Psalm 73 provides the apparent counter-example, a righteous man envying ”the arrogant when [he] saw the prosperity of the wicked” (verse 3). Yet after a meditation upon final destinies (verse 16-20), God’s protection, guidance and favour (verses 23-26), the psalmist ends off declaring,
But as for me, it is good to be near God. I have made the Sovereign LORD my refuge; I will tell of all your deeds (verse 28).
Here is the ultimate state of well-being to be found this side of heaven, the sense of fulfilment and satisfaction that comes from being right with God and from enjoying his presence with all that entails. This is joy, a far more profound state than what psychologists typically have in mind when they refer to a mental state of subjective well-being. So Jesus, even as he knows he will soon endure a humiliating, agonising, horrific death on a cross prays to his Father:
I am coming to you now, but I say these things while I am still in the world, so that they may have the full measure of my joy within them (John 17:13).
Just as the flourishing, blessed person of Psalm 1 is characterised by a virtuous delight in wanting to obey God and live out his revealed will, as disclosed in Torah, so Jesus urging an obedience that expresses love for him, states:
I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete (John 15:11).
The flourishing person is a virtuous person who delights in pleasing the Lord and loves him. Such a person has entered a state that is utterly secure because it is granted and guaranteed by the Lord himself. All other attempts to harmonise virtue with some conception of happiness or eudaimonia are necessarily humanistic and, therefore, must inevitably fall short.
[A catalyst for these reflections, though going down a different path, was Matthew Pianalto’s article Happiness, Virtue and Tyranny in Philosophy Now {July/August 2008} 6-9]
Posted August 21, 2008
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