Happiness Page 19
Clearly, Judaism teaches that happiness requires us to run to meet life with arms open, fearing nothing, blessing all, and trusting always that God who put us on this path will, if we run it, law in hand, also be there at its end.
To the Jew, happiness lies in keeping the law of God. That, and that alone, is enough, the tradition teaches, to attain the fullness of life. Not power or fame, beauty or money, security or even “happiness” itself, as the world defines it — all passing things — can possibly substitute for it.
Undoubtedly, the Jewish tradition puts its happiness in “doing well and living well.”
chapter 41
Christianity:
The Happy Life Is Elsewhere
For almost a thousand years Christianity itself became the definition of happiness in the West. The concern of the Greek philosophers to define the nature of happiness receded in the face of the spread of Christianity across Europe. Christianity’s answer to the question, What is happiness? was not a philosophical one. It was a theological vision based on an understanding of the nature of life as defined by its theologians. Christians kept the rules here, bore the burdens of life here, avoided sin/evil here, in order to, in the end, transcend life here and live in the fullness of life elsewhere.
Nurtured first among slaves and lower-class Roman citizens whose lives were both oppressed and insecure, Christianity promised a welcome hope for a better world hereafter. No longer would the slave be enslaved forever. No longer would any particular parts of humanity be forever doomed to drudgery and denied the good things of life.
In the Christian promise of justice and mercy — hoped for here but assured hereafter — there was no need to parse the word “happiness” anymore. Its dimensions were already clear: this world was simply a test of a person’s worthiness to enter a kingdom that existed beyond the ruthlessness of the world’s kings and kingdoms of history. In the next world, Christianity promised, justice would finally reign and mercy would be its hallmark.
The notion of Jewish deliverance from bondage here became instead a promise of eternal life with God.
Christianity became the herald of a new paradise, a return to the Garden of Eden where life had begun in an idyllic state but been corrupted by human infidelities. The accent was not on the goodness of God; the accent was on surrendering the right to the eternal goodness of God through sin. As a result, Christian life was one long effort to return to Eden, this time forever, for all eternity, where the hope of endless happiness would be fulfilled.
In this vision, death was simply the gateway to life without end, to happiness without sorrow, to fulfillment without the pain and suffering that plagued the search for happiness here in this life on earth.
The Greek philosophers had concentrated on a happiness of the living. Those who developed the ultimate rational response to life became people who, as a result, the philosophers taught, finally came to “live well and fare well.” For the Greeks, this moral development in itself made the human being a good person, a moral person, and so a happy person. Goodness was its own reward.
Christianity, on the other hand, came preaching the happiness of both the living and the dead. Those who followed Jesus not only lived a “happy” life — meaning a life that was not destructive and immoral, self-centered and malevolent here — but were also promised a reward for that sinlessness after death.
This happiness, the endless bounty of which they could only begin to imagine here, did, however, provide insights into the eternal happiness for which they strove. Based on gratitude for God’s bounty on earth, it was a theology of moderation, not restriction. Nothing was unclean to the Christian; everything was to be used in measures proper to rational discernment, the practice of which promised eternal joy.
Like the Jewish community from which it had sprung, Christians celebrated great days and small ones, feast days as well as fast days, holy days and saints’ days. It was a religion that celebrated life here but concentrated even more on meriting the hereafter.
This was the reward of virtue. This was happiness beyond measure. This was infinite life and interminable delight. And, most of all, for the sake of intellectual continuity and development, this image of happiness was not unique to Christianity alone.
Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican theologian of the thirteenth century, made the link between Greek and Christian theology. He brought to Christian consciousness what Aristotle, too, had argued — that happiness was the result of virtue, not the pursuit of physical delights.
On that point Christianity and the classical Greek philosophers agreed: virtue was the key. And so, not all were worthy of such rewards. Only those whose virtue, whose godliness, could be measured by their adherence to the Ten Commandments and the laws and virtues of the church, the new Christian mitzvot, could aspire to the reward that came from fulfilling their purpose in this life.
However good the earthly might be, it was not earthiness that happiness was about. Not accumulation. Not control. Not physical delights. Not sensual pleasures. It was not pandering to the physical that brought us happiness. It was about becoming everything a human being could be in mind and soul as well as in body and sensations.
With the awareness that these two views of life — Greek and Christian — were based on a common awareness and commitment to rationality, the stage was set for the reopening of the floodgate of questions about life and virtue and happiness that emerged in the Enlightenment and exist to this day. The concerns about the nature of happiness that had emerged in Greece hundreds of years before Jesus and been submerged in Europe with the advent of Christianity as the state religion in the fourth century ce
were, Aquinas pointed out, not totally distinct from one another.
It was an important melding of the minds. It made Christianity a subject of rational importance. It distinguished Christian theology from a purely emotional or physical definition of what it meant to be happy. It raised the level of Christian thought to the heights of philosophical purity.
But there was one more thing that Christianity had to offer that gave flesh and blood as well as philosophical argument to the meaning of happiness. Christianity offered the model of what it meant to be a virtuous person. Christianity offered the model of Jesus, who was willing to die for doing good rather than simply discuss the philosophical overtones of the subject.
In Jesus was the living model of how to lead the good life, the highest level of humanity of which the human soul is capable. Jesus “went about doing good,” the scripture said. The model burned its way into the minds of people everywhere: happiness was not a discussion. It was a commitment to the greatest ideals life had to offer, and it did not come from pampering the self. It was the fullness of the self that comes from being everything the human can be.
chapter 42
Christianity:
Happy Are They Who . . .
The life of Jesus stands before us much the same as that of many another great figure of history or religion. This was a soul free from the common undercurrents of humanity. He strode through his world above and beyond its pettiness, its small ambitions, its puny desires. He roused people to new levels of thought. He healed them and befriended them. He refused to allow anyone or anything to ghettoize him or cut him off from those “who were not like us.”
In a Roman colony where resentment seethed toward the foreign oppressor, he cured the children of Roman soldiers.
In a colony still playing at internal jealousies and historical prejudices and present shunnings, he went to the forbidden land of Samaria and taught a woman there the fine points of his theology of life.
In a culture in which sickness was still seen as punishment for sin, he cured one after another after another of the people by saying, “Take up your mat and walk,” rather than simply “Your sins are forgiven you.”
In a culture in which religious figures themselves had become rigid or obstinate or legal
istic, he who was not a rabbi confronted scribes, Pharisees, and rabbis at every turn about their own sins against the people.
In a society where women were excluded from public thought and participation, women followed him in droves and he did not turn them away.
This commitment to unmask rejection, corruption, and prejudice was the hallmark of his public life until, eventually, both religious figures and officials of the state made him both enemy and outcast. Finally, in collusion with one another for the sake of their own ambitions or control, they managed to get him executed.
It is a story far too common in the life of many powerfully good, powerfully prophetic figures.
And yet Jesus’ teachings, in the midst of all the sorrow and pressure around him, were about happiness.
In what history has come to call his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus preached the key to living a happy life to people who, most would say, had little or no life at all. Even you, he said — as Christianity would say later to all the enslaved and oppressed of Europe and eventually the world — even you can be happy. The problem was that it turned the whole notion of success, power, and happiness upside down. The scripture reads:
Blessed (happy) are the poor in spirit: the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Happiness, Jesus says, does not lie in grasping for the goods of this world. Nothing satisfies anyone indefinitely, so to put our happiness in the accumulation of things only serves to set up the hedonic treadmill on which we run from one thing to another and doom ourselves to be forever disillusioned.
Blessed (happy) are the gentle: they shall have the earth as inheritance. Every attempt to wrench the world to our own taste and designs can only end in frustration and resistance. To live well on the earth we must live in harmony with everything else here.
Blessed (happy) are those who mourn: they shall be comforted. It is those who care for the suffering of the world, who take on themselves the grief of those who are deprived, whose meaning in life is outside themselves, who know what real happiness is all about.
Blessed (happy) are those who hunger and thirst for uprightness: they shall have their fill. Those who seek justice for others, who spend their lives building a just world, live a life full of meaning and purpose, the acme of real happiness.
Blessed (happy) are the merciful: they shall have mercy shown them. Those who understand what it is to be a human being, who value human growth more than the imposition of human laws on those most unable to keep them, will themselves live a life free of the pain of perfectionism.
Blessed (happy) are the pure in heart: they shall see God. Those who harbor no dishonesty, who seek no harm to others, who live without evil in their hearts make all the world safe and all people welcome in the human community.
Blessed (happy) are the peacemakers: they shall be recognized as children of God. It is those who refuse to stir up hatred between people or seek to operate by force rather than love who bring the spirit of the love of God into the world.
Blessed (happy) are those who are persecuted in the cause of uprightness: the kingdom of heaven is theirs. Happiness transcends feeling. If we live as we ought and do what we must to make the world a caring place for everyone, whatever the pain or price or social cost of doing it, the soul will be in peace.
Blessed (happy) are you when people abuse you and persecute you and speak all kinds of calumny against you falsely on my account. The things in life that make suffering worthwhile and pain bearable are whatever it takes to live like Jesus, even in the midst of rejection.
* * *
“Rejoice and be glad,” he says, “for your reward will be great in heaven.”
It is a simple formula for happiness. It requires us to live with open-handedness toward the rest of the world. To oppress no one. To harm no one. To care for those who suffer. To minister to those in need. To be gentle with the world. To make peace. To stand for justice and right. To bear persecution from those who reject these things in us without becoming what we ourselves abjure.
Most of all, it reminds us that the fullness of happiness can never be found in the things of this world. Happiness requires more than the senses, more than pleasure. It requires that, though loving these things, we transcend them to become bigger than ourselves for the sake of the rest of the world. It requires a life full of meaning, full of purpose, full of a reason to be alive that transcends life itself.
chapter 43
Islam: Submission
and Community
When the prophet Muhammad recited the verses of the Qur’an to the people of Medina, one thing became instantly plain: this new religion was not raised on the back of a complex and intricate institution. Nor was it meant to be the glorification of Muhammad himself. “I am not divine,” the prophet was clear to say. “I am only a messenger.”
Instead, Islam was meant to redirect the world to the God of Abraham and Isaac, the God of Moses and Aaron. This was not a new religion in the sense of being different or unique or a surprising new revelation. This religion meant simply to refocus the “people of the book” — of Judaism and Christianity, as well as the rest of the world — on the mind and meaning of the one God for the people God had created. This was a search for happiness back through time to the point at which the blueprint had been pristine but diluted by those whose practice of it had failed in its fidelity.
The Qur’an, in fact, rehearses the stories of creation in the Hebrew scriptures. It recalls the history of God with the Jewish people as well as the call of the prophets, up to and including Jesus, to Christianity. It is at once an old call and a new call to the people of the book — to all those for whom the Judeo-Christian scriptures are central. Its single purpose is to call the monotheistic religions of Abraham back to a more pristine acceptance of the scriptures.
To those to whom the revelation of monotheism had been given — but had been allowed to grow dry and dull over the centuries — Islam was a new call to Jews and Christians as well as Muslims themselves to repentance and renewal of spirit.
Islam, however, concentrates less on the organization of the synagogue or the church, as do Judaism and Christianity, and more on simple submission to the Word of God in life as now redefined in the Qur’an.
Submission to God’s will and adherence to the Muslim community as its premiere model and support become the major components of Islam, the foundation of happiness both here and hereafter. It is not liturgy, not theology, not diet or dress or custom or land on which Islam stakes its claim. Islam rallies around one concept alone: the acceptance of the Word of God in this world and the entrance into the happiness of Paradise in the next.
The Qur’an, the community, and the individual conscience bind Muslims to the faith and to the Sunnah, its living body, the Muslim community itself.
On the individual in Islam rests the entire burden of the faith. Theologians and religious leaders pronounce the interpretations of the faith, but it is the individual who, in the final analysis, is responsible for gathering this information and then making a personal decision about whether one interpretation of the law or another most binds them.
The basic concepts of the faith are clear:
Islam is an essentially optimistic faith. There is no sense of original sin or essential brokenness. Everyone, Islam teaches, is capable of living according to the will of God and is equally worthy in God’s eyes. Happiness is a universal option. There is no hierarchy of lifestyle or merit here. What is needed is the simple resolution to be a good Muslim. That, Islam teaches,
is the path to happiness, however much effort it takes to do that.
Islam understands human frailty. Humans are forgetful, the Qur’an states, and must constantly wage a jihad — a holy struggle — to maintain the faith. As human beings, fallible and in struggle with ourselves, we must be always on the alert to our own weakness and trust the faithfulness of God to support us in our search.
In Islam, faith
and politics, faith and public life, are one and the same thing. Sharia law, the application of theological principles to civil law — whether or not a woman may drive a car, for instance — is common in traditional Islamic states. Whether or not Sharia law is the law of the land — as it is not in most Islamic countries — religion holds a favored position in the community and is expected to influence public politics as well as personal virtue.
All Muslims must believe in God, the angels as his messengers, the day of judgment and predestination. On these beliefs and a life lived according to the law depend the Muslim’s final entrance into Paradise, where salvation and real happiness rest, to await the day of judgment and bodily resurrection.
Happiness is the final goal after a life of tests and trials and tribulations, all of which the Muslim submits to in supreme trust in the God who will soon gather up the world again to enjoy the rewards promised to those who believe.
Chapter 44
Islam: Living the Good Life
There is something disarmingly simple and, at the same time, unmistakably intense about being Muslim. Islam is not a doctrine; it is a way of life that touches every hour, every major action of a Muslim’s life. In Islam the community is every bit as important as the Qur’an. This Muslim book of scripture, Islam attests, was revealed to the prophet Muhammad in segments between 610 ce and 632 ce and has been recited by Muslims everywhere for all of the fifteen centuries since. The Islamic life is a life that assures to its followers the Paradise to come in the next world, provided the adherent is faithful to the prescriptions of the Qur’an in this one.