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From the
happiness of virtue to the virtue of happiness: 400 b.c.–
a.d.1780
Darrin M.
McMahon
It is only right that
Dædalus should devote an issue to happiness, seeing that
its publisher was chartered with the “end and design” of
cultivating “every art and science which may tend to advance
the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free,
independent, and virtuous people.”
Its publisher, of course, is the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, founded in 1780 at a time when Americans–newly
independent and free–were demanding that their institutions,
like their government, serve a purpose, that they be useful.
And to many eighteenth-century minds, there was simply no
better test of usefulness than ‘utility’–the property of
promoting happiness. The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham is
often credited with first articulating the creed. But when he
observed in 1776 in his lawyerly prose that “By the principle
of utility is meant that principle which approves or
disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the
tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the
happiness of the party whose interest is in question,” he was
merely giving voice to what was already an eighteenth-century
commonplace. To many enlightened souls on both sides of the
Atlantic, the need to promote happiness had assumed the status
of a self-evident truth.
That this truth, for all its self-evidence, was a relatively
recent discovery–the product, give or take a decade, of the
preceding one hundred years–is important. For though happiness
itself already possessed a long history by the eighteenth
century, the idea that institutions should be expected to
promote it–and that people should expect to receive it, in
this life–was a tremendous novelty.
It involved nothing less than a revolution in human
expectations, while raising, in turn, a delicate question.
Just who, precisely, was worthy of happiness? Was it fit for
all? Was happiness a right or a reward? And what, for that
matter, did the curious word really mean?
The answers to such questions take us to the heart of an
eighteenth-century contradiction that remains with us to the
present day.
It may already have been noted that implicit in the few lines
from the Academy’s charter is another central assumption
regarding happiness, though in this case the assumption is far
older than the eighteenth century. If we leave aside for now
the meaning of “interest, honor, and dignity,” we can see most
clearly that the Academy is asked not simply to cultivate
every art and science that advances happiness, but every art
and science that advances the happiness of a “free,
independent, and virtuous people.” The people in question are
the citizens of the United States. And the implicit assumption
is that those living in bondage or sin are not worthy of
happiness. In light of the fact that slavery was long
considered but a species of sin, and freedom but a product of
living well, I want to focus solely on the remaining
term–virtue–sketching in what follows a genealogy of its close
links to happiness.
The belief in the intimate association of happiness and virtue
was widely shared in the eighteenth century. The same man who
coupled liberty and the pursuit of happiness so closely in the
Declaration of Independence could later state without
equivocation that “Happiness is the aim of life, but virtue is
the foundation of happiness.” Jefferson’s collaborator on the
draft of the Declaration and an early member of the American
Academy, Benjamin Franklin, similarly observed in 1776 that
“virtue and happiness are mother and daughter.” This
assumption had for many the status of a received truth. But
the evidence for it was not at all recent.
On the contrary, it had accumulated so steadily, so
imperceptibly over the course of centuries as to become less a
self-evident truth than a truth unexamined, one that seemingly
required no evidence at all.
It was Aristotle, in the fourth century B.C.E., who first put
the matter most forcefully. Happiness, he expounded at length
in the Nichomachean Ethics, is an “activity of the soul
that expresses virtue.” For Aristotle, all things in the
universe have a purpose, a function, an end (telos).
And that end, he says, is what gives expression to the highest
nature and calling of the thing. In the famous example, the
noble end of the acorn is to become a thriving oak, and in the
same way the function of the harpist is to play the harp (and
of the excellent harpist to play it well).
But can we say that there is a function specific to human
beings in general? Aristotle believes that we can, and he
identifies it as reason. Reason is what distinguishes us from
plants, nonhuman animals, and nonliving things, and so our
purpose must involve its fruitful cultivation. Living a life
according to reason is for Aristotle the human function, and
living an excellent life–reasoning well throughout its course
and acting accordingly–is for him a virtuous life. Achieving
such a life will bring us happiness, which thus represents our
highest calling, our ultimate purpose, the final end to which
all others are necessarily subordinate.
Happiness for Aristotle is not a fleeting feeling or an
ephemeral passion. It is, rather, the product of a life well
lived, the summation of a full, flourishing existence,
sustained to the end of one’s days, “a complete life.”
It follows naturally enough that Aristotle affords at least
some place to the role of fortune–chance–in influencing our
happiness. For no one would count a man happy, he
acknowledges, “who suffered the worst evils and misfortunes.”
To do so would be to defend a “philosopher’s paradox.”
In conceding this role to chance as a determinant of
happiness, Aristotle, on the one hand, is simply admitting
with his characteristic level-headedness the limits on our
ability to determine our fate. In a world of uncertainty,
anything might happen before the end–a truth, Aristotle
affirms, that is well captured in the celebrated phrase of the
legislator Solon, “Call no man happy until he is dead.” Yet on
the other hand, by seeking to circumscribe the role of chance
in the first place–to cow it into submission by virtue’s
superior force–Aristotle was also participating in a much
broader philosophical shift, one that directly challenged
Solon’s ancient wisdom.
In order to fully appreciate this challenge, it is helpful to
look for a moment at the principal word in ancient Greek for
happiness, eudaimonia, one of a constellation of
closely related terms that includes eutychia (lucky),
olbios (blessed; favored), and makarios
(blessed; happy; blissful).
1 In
some ways encompassing the meaning of all of these terms,
eudaimon (happy) literally signifies ‘good spirit’ or
‘good god,’ from eu=good and daimon=demon/spirit.
In colloquial terms, to be eudaimon was to be lucky,
for in a world fraught with constant upheaval, uncertainty,
and privation, to have a good spirit working on one’s behalf
was the ultimate mark of good fortune. Even more it was a mark
of divine favor, for the gods, it was believed, worked through
the daimones, emissaries and conductors of their will.
And this, in the pre-Socratic world, was the key to happiness.
To fall from divine favor–or to fall under the influence of an
evil spirit–was to be dysdaimon or kakodaimon–‘unhappy’
(dys/kako=bad), or more colorfully, ‘in the shit,’ a
not altogether inappropriate play on the Greek kakka
(shit/ turds).
2
In a world governed by
supernatural forces, human happiness was a plaything of the
gods, a spiritual force beyond our control. When viewed
through mortal eyes, the world’s happenings–and so our
happiness–could only appear random, a function of chance.
Central to the outlook of Hesiod and Homer, with strong echoes
in many of the lamentations of Greek tragedy, this conception
of happiness would prove remarkably stubborn. We need only
think of the word itself: in every Indo-European language, the
modern words for happiness, as they took shape in the late
Middle Ages and early Renaissance, are all cognate with luck.
And so we get ‘happiness’ from the early Middle English (and
Old Norse) happ–chance, fortune, what happens in
the world–and the Mittelhochdeutsch Glück, still the
modern German word for happiness and luck. There is the Old
French heur (luck; chance), root of bonheur
(happiness), and heureux (happy); and the Portuguese
felicidade, the Spanish felicidad, and the Italian
felicità–all derived ultimately from the Latin felix
for luck (sometimes fate). Happiness, in a word, is what
happens to us. If we no longer say that we are
kakodaimon when things don’t go our way, we still
sometimes acknowledge, rather more prosaically, that “shit
happens.”
Despite this linguistic tenacity, most people today are
probably uncomfortable with the idea that happiness might lie
in the roll of the dice. And at least part of the reason for
that uneasiness can be traced to Aristotle and his central
contention that our behavior is the largest single factor in
determining our happiness. Taking his cue from both Socrates
and Plato before him, Aristotle avowed faith in human agency,
in our ability to control our fortune by controlling our
actions and responses to the happenings of the world.
Aristotle’s efforts, in this regard, were part of a much
broader movement to ensure the inviolability of a flourishing
life in the face of external contingency and chance. As Martha
Nussbaum has shown, Greek culture of the fourth and fifth
centuries B.C.E., in fact, was obsessed with precisely this
dilemma: how to ensure happiness despite what may happen
to us, despite the unpredictability of luck.
3
The same question continued to preoccupy the Romans, and
indeed it is the response of the Stoic philosophers Cicero and
Epictetus that best illustrates the extent of that new faith
in human agency. Whereas Aristotle and others had left at
least some room for the play of chance in determining
happiness, Cicero and Epictetus attempted to rule out its
influence altogether. If the man of virtue is the happy man,
they argued, then the man of perfect virtue should be happy
come what may. Happiness is a function of the will, not
of external forces. And so, extending this logic to its end
point, Cicero is able to conclude that even the most extreme
physical suffering should not thwart the happiness of the true
Stoic sage. “Happiness . . . will not tremble, however much it
is tortured.” The good man can be happy even on the rack.
Like Aristotle, the great majority of the founding fathers of
both the American Republic and the American Academy would
likely have dismissed such talk as the defense of a
philosopher’s paradox. Yet in its very exaggeration the
example illustrates perfectly the wider– and widely
shared–classical view that happiness and pain were by no means
mutually exclusive.
4
Happiness
itself was not a function of feeling, but a function of
virtue. And as such it frequently required denial, sacrifice,
even suffering. To anyone in the eighteenth century who had
received a classical education–which is to say, the vast
majority of educated men and women–this was a powerful set of
received assumptions.
And of course Cicero and Epictetus were not the only sources
of the assumption that happiness sometimes required suffering,
since a very different sort of man had also equated happiness
with pain. That man was Jesus Christ, and his instrument of
torture, his rack, was the cross.
Admittedly, the image of a mutilated corpse, suspended by
nails from planks of wood, and surrounded by weeping women,
does not call happiness immediately to mind. One will
certainly be forgiven for harboring similar reservations about
the religious tradition that grew up around this lugubrious
symbol. With reason, it might seem, has Christianity been
called the worship of sorrow.
And yet, we need only recall Christ’s frequent injunction to
“rejoice and be glad” to appreciate that the appeal of this
new faith lay in more than simply its invitation to take part
in the suffering and sacrifice of its central founder. The
promise of redemption through suffering–and the promise
of a happiness greater than could ever be imagined on
Earth–animated the tradition from the outset.
Consider, for example, the nature of Christ’s promise in the
Gospels, and particularly the ringing good news of the Sermon
on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain as recorded,
respectively, by Matthew and Luke in the second half of the
first century A.D.
Each begins with a series of ‘beatitudes,’ so named because of
the Vulgate translation of the Greek term with which they
open. Beati in Latin, makarios in Greek–the
terms are often rendered in English as ‘blessed,’ although
‘happy’ would serve equally well, as indeed it does in some
English and various other translations, such as in French,
where heureux from the Old French heur is used
in the cannon. What is critical, though, is the original Greek
term itself–critical, on the one hand, in that the term is not
eudaimon, a word that any educated speaker of Greek in
the first century would have immediately associated with the
tradition of classical philosophy; but critical, on the other,
in that makarios was itself a term employed frequently
by classical authors, including Aristotle and Plato, to
signify ‘happy’ or ‘blessed.’ More exalted than eudaimon,
without the same emphasis on chance, makarios signified
an even loftier state, implying a direct connection to the
gods. More importantly, it was the word that had already been
chosen by the authors of the Septuagint, the Greek translation
of the Jewish Bible (the Christian Old Testament), in their
rendering of the classical Hebrew beatitudes, the so-called
Ashrel. As Thomas Carlyle was later moved to observe, “There
is something higher than happiness, and that is blessedness.”
The authors of the New Testament beatitudes would certainly
have agreed. Here is Matthew:
Blessed [beati/makarios] are the poor in spirit, for
theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.. . .
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called
children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’s
sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
(Matthew 5:3–11)
And here is Luke:
Blessed [beati/makarios] are you who are poor, for
yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled.
Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.
Blessed are you when people hate you and when they exclude
you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of
Man.
Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward
is great in heaven.
(Luke 6:20–22)
Much, of course, could be said about these curious passages,
now nearly two thousand years old. But let it suffice here to
emphasize the promise of imminent reward for those living
virtuously in the here and now. The merciful, the pure in
heart, the meek–all who pursue justice and the way of the
Lord–will be given their due, granted mercy, a direct audience
with God, intimacy in his family, and the rich legacy of his
kingdom. The hungry shall be filled, the mournful shall laugh,
their gifts will be great in heaven. And though all are
enjoined to rejoice now in this expectation–to “leap
for joy”–this is essentially a proleptic happiness, a
happiness of the future, what Augustine would later call the
“happiness of hope.”
This Christian conception was tremendously powerful. For the
happiness promised in the beatitudes, and subsequently
elaborated in Christian tradition, was at once specific in its
suggestions of rich reward and extremely, luxuriantly vague.
Here the imagination could be set free to revel in the
delights of the kingdom of God, to fantasize the total
fulfillment that would justify one’s earthly pains. All the
milk and honey of Jewish deliverance was joined to a new
prospect of ecstatic, erotic communion with God, of gazing
lovingly into his eyes, “face to face,” as the Apostle Paul
had promised. The words themselves– release, rapture, passion,
bliss–are revealing. Whether in heaven or the New Jerusalem,
the happiness of paradise would be entire and eternal, endless
and complete.
Even better, the beatific vision offered a seductive rejoinder
to Solon’s saying “Call no man happy until he is dead.” In the
Christian account, happiness was death–a proposition that
dealt a powerful blow to the vagaries of earthly fortune,
while at the same time transforming the end of human life from
a boundary into a gateway. Whereas in the classical account,
happiness encompassed the span of a lifetime, Christian
beatitude was infinite. And whereas classical happiness
remained a comparatively cerebral affair–cool, deliberative,
rational, balanced–Christian happiness was unabashedly sensual
in its imagined ecstasies. Feeling, intense feeling, was what
flowed forth with Christ’s blood, transformed in the miracle
of the Eucharist from the fruit of intense pain to the sweet
nectar of rapture.
And yet, for all their essential differences, there were
important similarities between the classical and Christian
conceptions. In each tradition, happiness remained an exalted
state, a precious reward for great sacrifice, commitment, and
pain. The consummation, the crowning glory of a well-lived
life, happiness would be granted only to the worthy, the
virtuous, the god-like happy few.
As Christianity was fused ever closer with the intellectual
inheritance of the classical pagan authors, these similarities
were only strengthened. It is no coincidence that when
Augustine put pen to paper shortly after his conversion to
Christianity in 386, he entitled his first work De Beata
Vita, The blessed or happy life. True, he treats there the
theme that he would develop with such eloquence in the
Confessions and The City of God– that perfect
happiness, in this life, is simply not possible, because of
original sin. Nonetheless, the work is a classical dialogue,
with a message bearing the deep imprint of Plato and Cicero:
that the “search for higher happiness, not merely its actual
attainment, is a prize beyond all human wealth or honor or
physical pleasure.”
5
Augustine’s continual assurance that although “we do not enjoy
a present happiness” we can “look forward to happiness in the
future with steadfast endurance,” kept this once classical,
now Christian, end directly in the sights of all who wandered
as pilgrims on the deserts of life.
One could make similar observations with respect to various
other pillars of church doctrine, citing Boethius, say, from
his influential sixth-century De Consolatione Philosophiae,
in which he repeatedly insists that the “entire thrust of the
human will as directed to various pursuits is to hasten
towards happiness.” And of course there is Aquinas, who in
stitching the rediscovered classics of Aristotle–and
particularly the Nichomachean Ethics–into the tapestry
of the medieval church ensured that Aristotle’s highest end
would endure, with only minor alterations, as the Christian
telos for centuries to come. By the end of the
Renaissance, in fact, Christianity and classicism had grown so
closely intertwined on the subject of happiness that works of
Christian Stoicism, Christian Platonism, Christian
Aristotelianism, and even Christian Epicureanism tackled the
subject in depth.
6
The existence particularly of Christian Epicurean tracts on
happiness may seem odd, even a contradiction in terms. Yet it
is too often forgotten that Epicurus himself was an
unimpeachable ascetic who taught that “genuine pleasure” was
not “the pleasure of profligates,” but rather the simple
satisfaction of a mind and body at peace. This was a message
that less severe Christians could find amenable. And with the
changing attitudes toward pleasure that bubbled up from the
twelfth-century ‘renaissance’ through the Rinascimento
itself, increasing numbers of them did.
The fact is important, for it highlights a tension that had
existed in the Christian conception of happiness from the
start. On the one hand an earthly existence that demanded
denial and renunciation, the embrace of suffering as
imitatio Christi and the just deserts for original sin.
And on the other, the promise of a reward that was often
pleasurable– sensual–in the extreme. Heaven may always have
seemed a paradise, but beginning in the thirteenth century,
its luxuries achieved new levels in the Christian imagination.
“In that final happiness every human desire will be
fulfilled,” Aquinas observes in the Summa against the
Gentiles, and men and women will know “perfect pleasure,”
the “perfect delight of the senses,” to say nothing of those
of the mind. No pleasure, no pleasure at all, would be
lacking–even, Aquinas specified (to the later delight of
Nietzsche) the pleasure of enjoying others’ pain. Beati in
regno coelesti videbunt poenas damnatorum, ut beatitude illis
magis compleaceat. The saved would feast on the sight of
the sufferings of the damned.
Creative speculation on the Christian meaning of happiness
multiplied during the High Renaissance. In works like Lorenzo
Valla’s On Pleasure (1431) and the monk Celso Maffei’s
Pleasing Explanation of the Sensuous Pleasures of Paradise
(1504), to name only two, little was left to the imagination,
with accounts brimming over with the delights that awaited the
faithful in the world to come.
7
Classical descriptions of Elysium, the Blessed Isles, and the
pagan Golden Age were freely adapted to give spice to the
afterlife, as were Christians’ own accounts of the Paradise
before the Fall, where, as Augustine had stressed, “true joy
[had] flowed perpetually from God.” The Renaissance
imagination thus ranged freely forward to the joys that would
come, and backward to those that had been. But the impulse to
do so in such graphic detail clearly came from the present.
The imagined pleasures beyond, that is, were a reflection of
the greater acceptance of pleasure in the here and now.
The reasons for such a broad shift are of course complex. But
in terms of ideas, an important place must be given to Aquinas
and his fellow Christian Aristotelians. For by de-emphasizing
the total, vitiating effects of original sin, and emphasizing
the place of virtue as man’s telos, they carved out a
space for cultivating and improving earthly life. To be sure,
perfect happiness (beatitudo perfecto) would still
come only with death by grace. But in the meantime, one could
prepare for it by cultivating imperfect happiness (felicitas
or beatitudo imperfecto) along the ladder that led to
human perfection. It was by climbing– pulling oneself
upward–on the heights of just such a liberal theology that
Christian humanists like Erasmus and Thomas More were able to
conceive of an earthly existence that was rather more than a
vale of tears.
In some respects, it is true, the Protestant Reformation–with
its recovery of a dour, Augustinian theology of sin–tended to
put a damper on this open indulgence of pleasure. And
certainly the terrible violence of the ensuing Religious Wars
did little to minimize pain. Yet it should also be stressed
that for all their emphasis on human depravity, Calvin and
Luther were by no means ill disposed to pleasure. The damned
might well be “vessels of wrath,” in Calvin’s words, but for
those in whom the workings of grace could be detected, the
joys of the new Adam were at hand. As Luther felt moved to
observe in his preface to St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans:
This kind of trust in and knowledge of God’s grace makes a
person joyful, confident, and happy with regard to God and
all creatures. This is what the Holy Spirit does by faith.
Calvin, for his part, observed in the Institutes of the
Christian Religion that God’s grace was the alchemy that
could transform human misery–including poverty, wretchedness,
exile, ignominy, imprisonment, and contempt–into gold. “When
the favor of God breathes upon us, there is none of these
things which may not turn out to our happiness.”
8 The
trick of course was to be certain of God’s grace and
forgiveness, a certainty that in theory at least could never
be had. But as Max Weber famously observed, one could always
be on the lookout for signs. Did it not make sense to see
earthly happiness as an indication that one might be headed in
the direction of everlasting content? Not only fortune was
evidence of good fortune. The ability to take pleasure in the
wonders of God’s creation was also an encouraging sign.
In this respect, it is fair to say that just as Epicurus was
hardly epicurean, Protestants and Puritans were much less
puritanical than is often supposed. The sanctioning of sexual
pleasure within marriage, the “affirmation of ordinary life”
entailed in the enjoinder to seek God in all things, and the
constant reminder that the Creator’s perfect creation appeared
ugly only to those who saw it through sinful eyes–all this
went some way toward establishing the proposition that
pleasure might be taken as a sign of grace, that happiness
might be a direct reflection of the virtuous Christian soul.
9
Thus, the Reverend Thomas Coleman, preaching before the
English Parliament on August 30, 1643, likened his
country-men’s struggle against Charles I to the ancient
Israelites’ “long pursuit of happinesse,” arguing that they
might be confident in attaining their end.
10 It was a felicitous
phrase, and in the coming years Englishmen of a variety of
persuasions employed it regularly, echoing the conviction of
the author of the 1641 tract The Way to Happiness on Earth
that this was where our journey began.
11
“The being in a state of Grace will yield . . . both a Heaven
here, and Heaven hereafter,” rendering “a man’s condition
happy, safe, and sure,” emphasized the Puritan millenarian
Thomas Brooks.
12 By
the time of the Restoration, even High Church authors were
penning popular tracts on the art of contentment, as if to
give credence to an earlier author’s claim that “happinesse is
the language of all.” “We must look through all things upon
happinesse,” this author observed, “and through happinesse
upon all things.”
13
The claims of these seventeenth-century British divines bring
us very close to the truly momentous proposition that pleasure
and happiness might be considered good in and of themselves.
And it should not surprise us that one of the first authors to
entertain this bold suggestion–John Locke–evolved directly out
of this same religious milieu.
The son of a Puritan who had fought for Cromwell in the
English Civil War, Locke himself, to be sure, was no orthodox
Calvinist. And whatever insight he may have gleaned from
Christian sources regarding happiness was no doubt amply
supplemented by his immersion in Newtonian science and his
understanding of Epicurus (as interpreted by the French priest
Pierre Gassendi, whose writings Locke studied on happiness
closely).
Quite rightly, as a consequence, historians have long
emphasized the latter influences in shaping Locke’s work,
particularly the Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1689), in which he presents his celebrated conception of the
mind as a tabula rasa, born without innate ideas or
the corruptions of original sin, animated by sensations of
pleasure and pain.
In the famous chapter “Power” in book 2 of that work, Locke
uses the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” no fewer than four
times. And he indeed employs a variety of Newtonian
metaphors–stones that fall, tennis balls hit by racquets, and
billiard balls struck by cues–to describe the ways in which
human beings are propelled, and propel themselves, through the
space of their lives. The force that moves them, we learn, the
power that draws them near, is the desire for happiness, which
acts through the gravitational push and pull of pleasure and
pain. We are drawn by the one and repulsed by the other, and
it is right that this is so. For in Locke’s divinely
orchestrated universe, pleasure is providential; it is a
foretaste of the goodness of a God who desires the happiness
of his creatures. “Pleasure in us,” it follows, “is that we
call good, and what is apt to produce pain in us, we call
evil.” And happiness in its full extent is simply “the utmost
pleasure we are capable of.”
Here, then, was the monumental formulation. Redeeming
pleasure, it unabashedly coupled good feeling with the good.
Its influence on the eighteenth century was profound. There
was virtue in pleasure, Locke’s readers came to believe, and
pleasure in virtue. Being good meant feeling good. Arguably,
there was no more widespread Enlightenment assumption. Moral
sense theorists like Frances Hutcheson and Jean-Jacques
Burlamaqui shared it, as did the Unitarian Joseph Priestly and
the psychologist David Hartley. David Hume maintained as much,
right alongside the French philosophers Helvétius and
Condillac and the Italian legal theorist Cesare Beccaria. And
of course there was Bentham with his felicific calculus of
pleasure and pain, to say nothing of Jefferson and Franklin.
All of these men, as it happens, were deeply indebted to
Locke’s Essay. But by the second half of the
eighteenth century, even many who were not tended to share its
key assumptions.
14
The anonymous author of True Pleasure, Chearfulness, and
Happiness, The Immediate Consequence of Religion,
published in Philadelphia in 1767, gave no evidence of having
read the wise Mr. Locke. But he undoubtedly believed with him
that God delighted to see his creatures happy, and that
pleasure itself was a very good thing. Christ, he argued, was
a ‘Happy Christ,’ who had revealingly performed his first
miracle at a wedding, where not coincidentally there was
feasting, dancing, and ample wine. The heavenly Father,
surely, did not frown on mirth; he smiled fondly upon it.
This author was probably more upbeat than most. But he was not
alone in proclaiming earthly happiness to be a direct
consequence of religion. By the latter part of the late
eighteenth century, in fact, Christian writers on both sides
of the Atlantic–Protestant and Catholic alike–were churning
out works that made precisely this claim, arguing that
Christianity was an excellent means to a much coveted earthly
end. In this way, religion itself took part in the great
Utilitarian current that swept the century, sweeping up all
things in its midst. And if happiness and pleasure–good
feeling and amusement–were now expected even of religion in
this life, they could be required of most anything.
Increasingly they were, making unprecedented demands on
places, professions, laws, relationships, governments,
scientific academies–even essays on happiness, of which there
were more written in the eighteenth century than in any
previous age.
It bears repeating how radical this transformation was. For
henceforth religion would be asked not only to serve
salvation, but to serve what in a secularizing culture was
treated ever more like an end in itself: earthly happiness.
Already in the early nineteenth century Tocqueville could
point out that when listening to American preachers it was
difficult to be sure “whether the main object of religion is
to procure eternal felicity in the next world or prosperity in
this.” He would have much more difficulty today.
It has long been a truism of modern historiography that this
shift from the happiness of heaven to the happiness of Earth
was a product of the Enlightenment, the consequence of its
assault on revealed religion and its own validation of secular
pleasure. I would not dispute the main lines of this
interpretation, but as I have tried to suggest here, it is
also the case that the shift toward happiness on Earth
occurred within the Christian tradition as well as
without.
And this fact is important, for it helps to account for the
ways in which eighteenth-century men and women were able to
shield themselves for so long from an uncomfortable truth.
Namely, as Immanuel Kant would point out with such force at
the end of the century, that “making a man happy [was] quite
different from making him good.” Kant, writing in the
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), used the
term ‘happy’ in its eighteenth-century sense, as pleasure or
good feeling–and clearly he was right. For if the proposition
that doing good (living virtuously) meant feeling good (being
happy) was always debatable, it was far more dubious still
that feeling good meant being good. Virtue, Kant reaffirmed,
with an air of common sense, was sometimes painful. And those
who were happy, who felt good, were sometimes bad.
He might easily have added that by the logic of the
pleasure/pain calculus, not only was it good to feel good, but
it was bad to feel bad. Sadness, by this measure, would be a
sin, and those who experienced it would justly feel guilty for
doing so. It may be that in our own day we are close to this
point. But in the eighteenth century, the proposition would
still have shocked. The question is why–why did not more
people think through the implications and the logic of one of
the century’s most dominant ethical impulses?
One answer is that they did not want to–all ages, after all,
have their willful blind spots, our own day no less than the
1760s–and certainly it was nice to believe that feeling good
and being good were mostly one and the same. But most men and
women in the eighteenth century were simply not able
to think through the implications of their increasingly
contradictory assumptions about happiness–not able, that is,
to see with the piercing vision of a Kant the contradictions
that lay at the heart of the century’s newly self-evident
truths.
Admittedly, there were radicals who pushed the logic of the
pleasure/pain calculus to its ultimate extreme. Julien Offray
de La Mettrie, for one, or the Marquis de Sade, for another,
argued that if pleasure was good, and pain was bad, then the
most intense forms of pleasure–sexual or even criminal– should
be embraced with virtuous gusto. “Renounce the idea of another
world; there is none,” Sade observes in his “Dialogue Between
a Priest and a Dying Man” (1782). “But do not renounce the
pleasure of being happy and of making for happiness in this.”
If the world, in short, could offer nothing better than
pleasure, then should not pleasure be pursued to the hilt? And
what was more pleasurable, Sade wanted to know, than a good
fuck?
Such exceptions, however, prove the rule. For Sade and La
Mettrie were written off as pariahs, decried as scandalous,
condemned as immoral, accused of lacking virtue. Their
pleasure was not happiness, contemporaries charged, but
egotism, immorality, indulgence, and vice. But the assumption
that many fell back on to level this charge was not the
century’s newly self-evident conception of happiness as
utilitarian pleasure. They fell back instead on the teachings
about happiness that had accumulated slowly over the
centuries, amassed by Hebrews and Hellenes, classicists and
Christians: that happiness and virtue, happiness and right
action, happiness and godliness did indeed walk in step, but
that the journey was often difficult, demanding sacrifice,
commitment, even pain. That happiness, if it came at all, was
not a right of being human, but a reward, the product of a
life well lived.
In the eighteenth century there were still enough Stoics and
close readers of the Bible–men and women steeped in classical
teachings on happiness and rich in the legacy of Christian
virtue–so as not to efface completely the line that separated
being good from feeling good. The eighteenth century still
lived on this inheritance–but we might say that it lived on
borrowed time.
To his immense credit, John Locke understood this dilemma, saw
with a perspicacity and foresight that rivaled Kant’s own the
problems raised by the novel pursuits he set in motion. In the
very chapter “Power” of the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, Locke acknowledged, with more than a nod
to his Calvinist past, that what prevented his system from
devolving into a simple relativism of feeling was the prospect
that one would judge the virtue of present pleasures and
present pains–abstaining and acting accordingly–on the basis
of future pleasures to come. This was “the reasonableness of
Christianity.” As he emphasized again, with reasonableness, in
a later work of that name:
Open [men’s] eyes upon the endless unspeakable joys of
another life and their hearts will find something solid and
powerful to move them. The view of heaven and hell will cast
a slight upon the short pleasures and pains of this present
state, and give attractions and encouragements to virtue,
which reason and interest, and the care of ourselves, cannot
but allow and prefer. Upon this foundation, and upon this
only, morality stands firm.
15
By contrast, Locke conceded in the chapter “Power” of the
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, “Were all the
Concerns of Man terminated in this Life, then why one followed
Study and Knowledge, and another Hawking and Hunting; why one
chose Luxury and Debauchery, and another Sobriety and Riches,”
would simply be “because their Happiness was placed
in different things.” “For if there be no Prospect beyond the
Grave, the inference is certainly right, Let us eat and
drink, let us enjoy what we delight in, for tomorrow
we shall die.”
In such a world, why men and women should read the
publications of the American Academy if it did not feel good
to do so–or perform any number of other virtuous tasks–was not
immediately apparent.
1. On this subject, see Cornelius de Heer,
Makar, Eudaimon, Olbios, Eutychia: A Study of the Semantic
Field Denoting Happiness in Ancient Greek to the End of the
Fifth Century B.C.(Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1969).
BACK
2. The kak- root (bad) in Greek bears
no direct linguistic relationship to the kakk- root (caca;
turds). Yet the classical Greeks used kak- words as
generic forms of cursing to signify ‘damn,’ or perhaps even
more strongly, ‘oh shit,’ thus rendering the pun plausible if
not immediately apparent in formal terms. I am grateful to
Jeffrey Henderson of Boston University for sharing his
expertise on this matter. On the Greek penchant for such
punning in general, see Henderson’s wonderful The Maculate
Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy, 2nd ed. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
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3. See Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility
of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
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4. This, I would argue, is true even of
Epicureanism, although the case is certainly complicated. For
more on Epicurus, see below.
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5. This is a phrase from Cicero’s lost
manuscript, Hortensius, which Augustine knew well.
See Henry Chadwick, Augustine, Past Masters series
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 24.
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6. See Charles Trinkhaus, Adversity’s
Noblemen: The Italian Humanists on Happiness (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1940).
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7. See the concise account in Colleen
McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), esp. chap. 5, “The
Pleasures of Renaissance Paradise.”
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8. On the subject of happiness in Calvin’s
thought, see Heiko A. Oberman, “The Pursuit of Happiness:
Calvin between Humanism and Reformation,” in Humanity and
Divinity in Renaissance and Reformation: Essays in Honor of
Charles Trinkaus, ed. John W. O’Malley, Thomas M. Izbicki,
and Gerald Christianson (Leiden, The Netherlands: E. J. Brill,
1993).
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9. The phrase “affirmation of ordinary life”
is that of Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self: The
Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1989).
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10. Thomas Coleman, The Christian’s
Course and Complaint, Both in the Pursuit of Happinesse
Desired, and for Advantages Slipped in that Pursuit: A Sermon
Preached to the Honorable House of Commons on the Monthly Fast
Day, August 30, 1643 (London: Christopher Meredith,
1643).
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11. Robert Crofts, The Way to Happinesse
on Earth Concerning Riches, Honour, Conjugall Love, Eating,
Drinking (London: Printed for G. H., 1641).
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12. Thomas Brooks, Heaven on Earth, or, A
Serious Discourse Touching a Well-Grounded Assurance of Men’s
Everlasting Happiness and Blessedness(London: Printed for
John Hancock, Senior and Junior, 1657), preface.
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13. Richard Holdsworth, The Peoples
Happinesse. A Sermon Preached in St. Maries in Cambridge, Upon
Sunday the 27 of March, Being the Day of His Majesties Happy
Inauguration (Cambridge: Roger Daniel, 1642), 2, 5–6.
Holdsworth was master of Emanuel College and vice chancellor
of the university. Richard Allestree’s The Art of
Contentment (Oxford: At the Theater, 1675) went through
over twenty editions and was still in print in the nineteenth
century. Allestree, a leading royalist divine, was the provost
of Eaton.
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14. On the importance of Locke and the
primacy of pleasure in the eighteenth century, see Roy Porter,
“Enlightenment Pleasure,” in Pleasure in the Eighteenth
Century, ed. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts (New
York: New York University Press, 1996).
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15. John Locke, The Reasonableness of
Christianity, as Delivered in the Scriptures, ed. I. T.
Ramsey (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1958),
70.
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