In the opening lecture of our theology course one year, I told my class that theology is concerned with human happiness. Two students in the front row became uneasy at this statement and let me know indirectly that from that moment on, they discounted me. Here I seek to remind such students that to discount the importance of human happiness is to misunderstand theology and its purpose in two senses. First, if they think that theology is limited to believing propositions in order to get to heaven, they imply that theology is not about life in this world. Even a cursory glance at Christian thought disproves this contention. The second misunderstanding hits at the heart of this enterprise. Even if they think that theology is interested in this life, they are not persuaded that it is particularly interested in our enjoyment of it.
My purpose here is to dispel these common misperceptions. The task of theology is to help us know, love, and enjoy God better.1 The purpose for knowing God better is to love "him" and that loving we may enjoy him. Further, that enjoying him we may dwell in him and that in dwelling in him that we may glorify and be glorified in him and that in being glorified in him we may be happy, or, at least enjoy all the days of our life. To put the point sharply, a God-centered life is joyous and happily productive. It blesses not only individuals, but also society, and one s contribution to society by means of a God-centered liie enhances personal satisfaction.
Sadly, the misunderstanding of theology that I hope to dispel is widespread, even among Christians. Perhaps this is one reason why Christianity has such a dour reputation. Christians are perceived as anxious, moralistic, and judgmental. They have a reputation for being serious, and in our culture, being serious means not fun-loving. Another example of this assumption of the divide between piety and happiness pops up in an article critical of the contemporary moral philosopher Peter Singer of Princeton University:
We might well finally admit, however, that utilitarian values-utility, pleasure, preferences-seem particularly barren. Most of us, religious or otherwise, believe as [Shalom] Asch puts it, "there are things other than 'happiness' that matter: peace, justice, equality, wisdom." When the utilitarians want to say everything reduces to happiness, they're making a claim broader than happiness.2
We do not need to judge every aspect of life by whether or not it brings happiness. Sadness and despair also enrich life. Separating enjoyment, pleasure, and personal preference from peace, justice, equality, and wisdom, as Oppenheimer does, accepts the trivialization of happiness that dominates the culture. The trivial notion is that happiness is a state of mild euphoria.
This trivial view cannot work and it robs us of a salutary understanding of happiness. Ironically, Asch, cited to show the barrenness of the utilitarian view, reveals the barrenness of the trivial view resulting from the disjunction of happiness from beauty, wisdom, and goodness. I shall take up the ancient position that it is precisely living peacefully, justly, fairly, and wisely (to stay with Oppenheimer's terms) that make a person truly happy.
Living well is key to a happy life. Further, since peace, justice, fairness, and wisdom outlast our energy most of the time, we need a fixed point toward which to navigate to shape us into people who are capable of enjoying life in this richer way. My suggestion is that God is key to happiness in this life. In other words, we are shallow if we think of happiness as a state of mild emotional euphoria. A more substantial approach is to think of happiness as deep-seated satisfaction and enjoyment of life that is safe from its inevitable chances and changes: that is, it is far more rewarding to think of happiness in theological terms than in emotional terms.
Now, if we were to press Asch and his supporters for candor, perhaps they would say that the "things other than 'happiness' " are indeed more important. These may be summarized for now as goodness. Peace, justice, equality, and wisdom are forms of goodness that are more important than happiness, perhaps because they are social goods, while happiness, having been privatized, is thought to be selfserving.
This attitude is socially disastrous, because on its terms there is no reason ior people to want to contribute to the common good, since they assume that it will not make them happy (unless they become careerists). seeking happiness, which ancient philosophy recognized to be a universal and proper desire, now opposes being good. Concern for the loss of civility, the triumph of "autonomous individualism" so bemoaned in recent sociology-as in the writings of Robert Bellahis partly the result of an assumed enmity between goodness and happiness. The tacit assumption (or fear) here seems to be that being good will impede becoming happy. Acting peacefully and justly, treating people fairly, living wisely or prudently, are assumed not to be fulfilling but exhausting, draining, or depleting. Goodness, then, is assumed to burden us somehow, or perhaps empty us of something we need, or lead to a "boring" rather than an "exhilarating" life.
What lies behind the assumption that being good is unrewarding? Perhaps it is that being good requires restraint, having extended regard for others, sacrificing for their sake, and exerting self-mastery. Restraint is unpleasant, and lack of restraint, fun. It is an empty fun, however. The assumption apparently is that excellences are painful: they make us dissatisfied, or perhaps are simply tiresome. Perhaps another element in the disdain for careful self-use is that living carefully in this manner takes effort and a particular style of spiritual selftending. The reigning view of happiness is that it should not require spiritual effort, but be easy. Perhaps ease itself is thought to epitomize happiness: life should be constantly and effortlessly easy.
Here I argue that the popular understanding of happiness is based on a perverted psychology of happiness that is self-deluding and self-defeating. The popular notion of happiness is, of course, morally impoverished, but perhaps more compellingly, it is both psychologically impoverished and counterproductive. It does not satisfy. The task of rejoining happiness to goodness, wisdom and-noita bene-beauty is essential in our day, moreover, because the false and trivial understanding of happiness with which we currently live creates unhappy people. It is both psychologically and socially damaging.
The use of the word "rejoining" in the previous paragraph may deserve comment. Neither ancient philosophy, which identified various spiritual pathways to the good life, nor the Christian theology it inspired, ever separated enjoyment from goodness. Modem sensibility has simply failed to attend to this union, as the knowability of goodness, and eventually even the notion of goodness itself dissolved under criticism. The emotional allergy to transcendence and goodness must be broken through in order to alleviate our spiritual suffering under an emaciated vision of happiness. The questions now are: (1) Can we again come to know and yearn for beauty, wisdom, and goodness? and (2) Can these again become the comfort of our bodies and souls to the glorification of God and our neighbors?
The Challenge
The separation of happiness from goodness and the possibility of repairing the breach have at least two intersecting dimensions. One is philosophical, that is, both epistemological and ontological. Another dimension of the problem is spiritual-pride-and that is a problem no matter which side we advocate. Let us approach each in turn.
The high modern error
High modernity concluded that we could not know God, and moved from there to the (dreary) material view that reality is neither spiritual nor transcendent. We must content ourselves, therefore, with material goods and control over nature in this life. A consequence of this flat epistemology and ontology is psychological. Without transcendence, the soul became a self, increasingly interpreted in terms of personal biography rather than in terms ol its relation to God.
This reveals the basic spiritual problem of the secular conception. Without a transcendent perspective that locates enjoyment of life in a pattern of meaning more dignifying than self-gratification, enjoyment withers on the vine. For we need to share our joys and sorrows with others in ways that enhance their spiritual dignity. This suggests that the asocial ideal of the autonomous individual is limited in the enjoyment of life it can produce.
What we think will satisfy may only make us hungrier for more of what we think will satisfy. Envisioning "happiness" as essentially private gratification can become addicting, and it certainly is stultifying. In short, the privatization of happiness in modernity rendered the notion of happiness self-defeating. It cannot save because the terms on which it is set up are isolating, adversarial, self-absorbing, and ultimately demeaning. In short, modernity lost appreciation for the sociality of happiness.
Another error of the current view of happiness is that it means a constant state of mild euphoria. On these terms, no one can be happy for more than a few moments at a time. Additionally, while some aspects of ones life-like eating a great meal-will bring happiness, paying for it may not; happiness is always in danger of spoiling. Euphoric emotions come and go with circumstance. A more substantial view of happiness would suggest that it is a power of the soul, a virtue capable of encompassing life's vicissitudes. Being happy is, at least in part, a matter of character having to do with temperament and personality.
Finally, the asocial modem notion of happiness as self-gratification is smug-it assumes that we know what will make us happy and that we are able to get it. That we must oppose others in order to do so reveals a self-centeredness and adversarial approach to them that leads to loneliness.
The quest for self-gratification now substitutes for salvation. The disjunction of felicity from goodness is a modem mistake that has philosophical origins, psychological corollaries, and spiritual and social consequences. The task, then, is to articulate a spiritually rich vision of living wisely.3 To do this we will need to reclaim a transcendent perspective that includes knowledge of God toward which to steer and care for the soul that carries us beyond personal biography.
The christian error
While modem philosophy turned happiness into a private feeling, Christian theology also contributed to the trivialization of happiness by leaving the field. Some strands of Christian piety and theology suspect that enjoying life is somehow impious. This is due partly to the interpretation of humility that developed in medieval monasticism and partly because of poor theological education of monastics.4 A heavy emphasis on humility, introduced into the Western tradition through Benedicts rule, was interpreted as requiring self-denigration or self-abnegation.5 Monastic reform often discouraged intellectual curiosity, imagination, and laughter, and permitted severe restrictions on iood, sleep, sex, friendship, and property in an attempt to curtail natural desires.
While abbots and confessors often frowned upon ascetic excesses, popular piety exalted martyrs and figures like Simon Stylites (d. 459), who lived for thirty-seven years atop a pillar, and Catherine of Siena who, over the strong opposition of her confessor and her family, starved herself to death in an expression of eucharistic piety.
This suspicion of pleasure spilled over to the laity. In modernity, Pietism disapproved of alcohol, dancing, gambling, smoking, and entertainment in general, while judaism frowned on competitive and contact spoils. Some styles of piety in judaism, Christianity, and Islam frowned on art-at least representational art-and music other than the singing or chanting of prayer. Whether intentionally or not, these guards against untoward attitudes suggested that even modest pleasure could be spiritually harmful.
The modern sensibility reversed all this. Unfortunately, it overreacted and missed the spiritual reality that ascetical practices were seeking. It limited knowledge to empirical, demonstrable, or rationally deductible information. With acceptance of Feuerbachs insistence that "God" is no more than a projection of human values onto heaven, secularity triumphed and so happiness was trivialized into self-gratification, for spiritual or theological truth was no longer thought to meet us and shape us to itself.
To illustrate this, allow us to return to St. Catherine who ate only the host in order to fill herself with Christ. Enjoying normal food became impossible for Catherine because she tried to have God perfectly and wholly in this world, a goal that the tradition of Christian spirituality has usually held to be impossible. She viewed her body as lacking something that eating normal food could not repair. St. Catherine, great reformer of the church though she was, was unable to see the need for food as a gift from God, but saw it as an obstacle to having God. She desired to participate in Christ's suffering in order to get closer to him, but failed to see that God celebrates our bodies by giving Christ to become them.
Furthermore, most Christian theology teaches that life is a training ground for the vision of God that can only be enjoyed fully in eternity. That is, ior most Christian theology, the relationship between creation and redemption is continuous to some degree. That continuity between now and then is the basis of Christian hope, for without at least a hint of the beauty and goodness of God in daily life, we would not know what hope looks like. Like an aperitif or appetizer, a taste of God arouses the desire for more. St. Catherine may have understood this theologically, but she was unable to apply it to her own life. She starved herself to death at age thirty-three, the same age at which Jesus died, as a result of what looks to many of us like defiant pride rather than obedient humility.
Catherine lost sight of the fact that eating is an act of obedience to God who gave us bodies to care for. She did not see how she could enter into the beauty of God and enjoy the beauty of her bodily needs too. She sought to circumvent the normal pathway of life that accustoms our eyes to seeing and our mouths to tasting God. She wanted a shortcut. In her own way, she too had too narrow a view of enjoyment, only from the opposite direction. She lacked a vision of enjoyment of life's pleasures as obedience to the divine will. She suffered from a radical disjunction between earth and heaven, creation and redemption, her body and God, the knower and the known.
Humility, perhaps now the most despised of Christian virtues, is, nevertheless, essential to happiness. Here we see how easily it slips over into pride. The desire for ascetical perfection became harmful and led monks into depression and despair, a psychological condition called accidia, first recognized by Evagrius of Pontus (d. 399). In St. Catherine's case, pride defeated the search for humility when she disobeyed the law of the body.
In sum, in opposite ways both the modem and the Christian traditions have undermined a vibrant and salutary notion of happiness, each by going to its own extreme. Devoid of goodness, "happiness" is reduced to mere fun, and that can be socially and psychologically destructive. Devoid of material satisfaction, "happiness" in God can become physically and psychologically destructive. A robust theological teaching on happiness must avoid both extremes. To do that it must reclaim the connection between the spiritual and the material, as captured in the Christian teaching on the Incarnation and the classical teaching on the sacraments. Our attempt here will be to elucidate a vision of human happiness that is grounded in Christian theology, materially and spiritually nurturing to body and soul, and socially salutary.
Concerning knowing
Happiness, we argue, is a state of the soul that can be cultivated through a certain way of knowing. It depends upon knowing, because knowing shapes the soul. We will attend to two aspects of knowing: how we know-well or poorly-and what we know-a better or poorer object.
The knowledge we assimilate shapes us depending upon the effect what we come to understand deeply has on us. We become attached to what we know well. Intense emotional responses, be they positive or negative, stay with us. The more deeply things we desire or dislike stay with us the more deeply they take up residence in us, so that they become us. We can become both what we love and what we hate. The emotional power things have over us shapes our souls. Further, the formative influence of knowing may be either good or bad for us, depending on the quality of the knowledge and the object known. Much of this process may be pre-articulate. We may experience but be unable to name or grab hold of what is happening to us. That is one reason why it is difficult to know whether the way we are going will enable us to experience the enjoyment, gratification, and satisfaction we seek.
All this suggests that happiness requires discerning what is good to know well from what is bad to know well. Growing into a happy life requires prioritizing what is to get more, and what less, of our attention. The philosophical and spiritual traditions often suggest that we need a teacher to lead the way. Mentors from ancient philosophy and other spiritual traditions will lead us into the knowledge we seek. We cannot do this on our own. It may not be possible for everyone, and for many only in varying degrees. The ability to be spiritually nourished is itself a gift; one cannot impose it on oneself or on another. The argument here is that the beauty, wisdom, and goodness of God provide us with a pattern of meaning for our lives that bends the soul toward happiness by leading us in the care and nurture of human dignity.
Perhaps now we are ready for a theological notion of happiness or flourishing-enjoyment of and satisfaction with life through participation in the properties we understand to characterize God that become us.
The Evanescence of Happiness
The quest for happiness is perennial and evanescent. It drives philosophy, medicine, politics, and spirituality down the ages. Suggestions for achieving happiness are hard won, as the story of Siddartha Gautama, the Buddha, and the dialogues of Plato attest. Things that please have a way of getting lost, used up, worn out, being difficult to transfer from one life situation to another, or simply coming to an end. Relationships sour or fade. Wealth is subject to the vagaries of the market. Health fails. Accidents interrupt. Thinking realistically, one might settle for no more than medium-term or fragmentary happiness. Alternatively, one might be willing to trade in even medium-term happiness for fun, or even a few moments of excitement to spice up a banal life or provide respite from distress.
Yet titillation is not happiness. Even with modest expectations, anxiety has a way of spoiling the day. The bridal couple knows that death, if not something else, will eventually separate them. The mother nursing her baby knows that the time of weaning will come. The ride on the roller coaster will finish, leaving only a memory. Is that enough?
Perhaps more disappointingly, sometimes the things we think will make us happy fail to do so. Marriages are brittle these days. People move and change jobs often. Happiness spoils easily, robbing us even of pleasant memories.
Moved by the thought of lurching continuously among disappointments, ancient philosophers came to think of happiness in daily life as requiring a kind of knowledge that can direct expectations and control behavior in order to maximixe immediate enjoyment while minimizing disappointment and frustration. This changed the notion of happiness from something adventitious, over which the seeker has some limited control-wealth, beautiful children, a successful job or marriage-to something about the soul itself that gave the seeker greater control. This frees the soul from circumstance, giving it a power to minimize disappointment. To be more precise, happiness requires a quality of the soul to know well, an ability to see beyond the self, beyond immediate desire in a certain spiritual or philosophical way. It is a way of life that can be cultivated.
A personal anecdote may illustrate. I was once interviewed for a position at a theological seminary. The interviews took a full day. At the end of the day the dean offered to drive me to the train, since it wiis a very hot summer day. In the car he told me that the whole day had been a sham, since once they saw that I was white, it was clear that I would not be hired. I thanked him for his candor. Now I was not happy at the news that I would not be considered for the position because of my race, but the unhappiness was mitigated by the knowledge that my not being hired might serve a greater good. I was pleased to have been able to contribute to redressing racial grievances even if passively. The information provided soothed me. My belief in a greater good of which I was a part enabled me to interpret the events toward a happy outcome.
In short, being or becoming happy is a spiritual art. A question we will need to address is whether we can teach and learn these skills.
In the West, this way of knowing has to do with considering what we enjoy in the medium and short term in a long-term context that transcends each enjoyable instance. The gratification of being part of a larger reality that gives each experience a purpose beyond its momentary accomplishment buffers the soul against life's disappointments. Gratification comes from either the thing or event itself for its own sake, and from having a stake in and contributing to what is larger than its role in ones personal narrative. This knowledge endows one's personal biography with direction and gifts it with pleasure by expanding its range of concern beyond itself. Knowing that ones life and even one s suffering contributes to something beyond one's personal narrative connects happiness with dignity and nobility of purpose, for it is in being lifted up beyond self-interest that one s efforts reach their goal. It is a skill of the soul to be able to put experience into a larger non-self-reflexive pattern.
To summarize thus far, we can say that gratification that constitutes happiness requires seeing the transcendent good or value in immediate experiences and seasons of life so that momentary enjoyment gains a larger and more exalted meaning after the pleasurable event ends. This is a demanding undertaking that requires one to be both thoroughly engaged in the immediate experience and able to look at it from outside itself simultaneously. For only by enjoying the pleasure for itself while it is present and enjoying it on a more enduring level at the same time, will the anxiety at the thought of its loss be mitigated, and the happiness it brings be sustained. Achieving ones immediate goals requires knowledge, patience, and skill. Happiness proves to be no different. It requires largeness of soul.
That happiness comes from within went into hiding during modernity. The prospect of alleviating pain and suffering promised precisely what escaped philosophers who looked for spiritual remedies. Happiness from without, achieved by improving the length and quality of life, lay just around the corner. New political, economic, and social class arrangements promised happiness of a different sort. In this context, the modem self seemed to bring happiness closer because opportunity and activity could be tailored to one s own interests and needs in the immediacy of daily life.
In this atmosphere, reflection on happiness became utilitarian, partly because people were distracted by other things and partly because it seemed to be less needed as quality of life expanded. Better science meant fewer dips in life. Yet this view of happiness suggests that people who lived before modem medicine could not have been happy. Hmm. . . . More seriously, however, a radical shift in epistemology threatened happinesss own identity. The very notion of knowledge of reality beyond phenomenal experience, and more recently beyond personal biography seemed inaccessible if not implausible or impossible. "Happiness" became, in part, the ability to repair kinks in ones personal narrative.
Until modernity, Western civilization ordered happiness to knowing God who provided standards of truth, goodness, and therefore, happiness. Modem epistemology denied precisely this possibility because it separated fact from value, evidence from meaning. While some applauded this circumstance-not without reason-it became an epistemic necessity. Happiness in the philosophical or spiritual sense became impossible because it depended upon a vision of reality in which experience found larger than momentary meaning. Knowledge of God became impossible. Enjoyment and gratification had to be in immediate experience since there was no longer empirical evidence for anything else. This encouraged self-reference, rather than dignity from participating in transcendent goods as the locus of happiness.
Surprisingly, the story of science, economics, and technology has taken an unanticipated twist. We have discovered that improving length and quality of life does not necessarily make us happy. Ironically, the prospect of more improvement poisons what we already have. The ancient Jewish sage Rabbi ben Zoma opined: "Who is rich? The one who is content with what he hits" (Pirke Avot 4:1). The demand for ever better technology, now an economic necessity, feeds a desire for ubiquitous pleasantness and convenience. We want everlonger life under the best and most pleasant circumstances at all times. We desire more control over and more choice in more things. We crave what we imagine to be the perfect body, education, occupation, and children. For us, the tree of knowledge is the tree of technology. Wanting it is the kiss of death. It appeals to our vanity and soothes our insecurities, just as the serpent did in paradise.
We are more efficient at destroying as well as healing the body than over before. At the same time, we have expanded long-term feebleness and mandated the survival of deformed infants, creating and prolonging suffering and misery that death once mercifully ended. Modem medicine and technology (not to speak of advertising) cultivate discontent. They keep the economy growing. Ironically, they limit our choices by pressing technology on us.
Advertising exploits our weakness to the hilt. Like an addict, craving for the new, the better, the bigger, the faster, is necessary just to keep from falling behind. As a culture, we have lost the notion that bottomless craving is a problem. We do not see it as an obsession. The intentional enhancement of craving spells the end of satisfaction, the end of enjoyment. It robs us of happiness. Amazingly, we have created boredom out of constant change that we are scarcely able to absorb. We are scrambling to keep up and eager to discard simultaneously. Mounting their own protest of sorts, wealthy adolescent girls will insist on buying their clothes secondhand.
Enjoyment of material things requires being attached to them as they are so that one wants to protect and conserve them. The disposable society deprives us of enjoying material things, since goods have a short life and marketing urges us to discard easily. The search for the perfect lover is another example of the inability to be satisfied. It breeds chronic discontent, even petulance.
The end of satisfaction is a curse. It destroys enjoyment of things for their own sake. Focusing on how we will get what we want next undermines interest in what is at hand; the present is only an instrument for getting somewhere or something else. Without satisfaction, we are not motivated to attend to what is in front of us, for we know it will soon be gone, surpassed by another. New, easily gotten things are simply tomorrows trash. Again, our honor and dignity are weakened.
Even more ironically, this situation recapitulates a criticism of Christianity. With life being incorrigibly "nasty, brutish, and short," as Thomas Hobbes put it, life was expected to be a vale of tears on the way to eternal bliss. It was not valued for itself, but only as a gateway to heaven. Now we live with a secularized version of the same hope. We no longer enjoy material goods, for they are outmoded almost as soon as we Ieam how to use them. It is the future, not the present, that excites us. We are victims of our own trap. We are now left without enjoyment of either the spiritual life or material goods!
Here we reopen the conversation about happiness. Medieval monastics sought to abstain from enjoying daily life, lest they prefer it to God. Their assumption that in enjoying life we are not enjoying God is problematic and has contributed to our current problems. Nevertheless, our situation is quite different. When enjoying God seemed out of reach, we turned to enjoying life. Yet now the cultivation of craving robs us even of that. When faith in technology breeds chronic discontent, even low-grade greed and jealousy, seeking happiness in the here and now becomes burdensome. We need to rcleam to enjoy material as well as spiritual things.
Mutatis mutandis: there is great wisdom in the adage that the only constant is change. The collapse of one of the assumptions of modernity that contributed to the privatization of happiness offers those who seek happiness a great opportunity. Modernity defined knowledge as that which can be demonstrated objectively. The craving for objectivity, inherent in empirical science, comes from the desire to stamp out superstition, and establish uniform order and control over events. This led John Locke to identify faith taken on authority as private and to separate it from knowledge that was empirically verifiable and therefore public. Kantian rationality claimed that only universal and objective deductive reasoning yields knowledge. As a result, faith became opinion or personal preference.
Faith in God as opinion rather than knowledge eliminated theological knowledge as public or shareable. As each of the traditional rational proofs for the existence of God fell before the modern philosophical critique, knowledge of God softened. The most we could be sure of regarding God is what people believed they knew, but this is not theological knowledge but tradition. Further, empirical evidence was lacking to support the testimonies of Scripture and tradition. These continued to suffice for people who threw their lot in with hoary communities that offered wisdom, guidance, and comfort. More demanding minds preferred the security of reason to the comfort of forgiveness. For both empiricists and rationalists, although we cannot know God, we surely can know something about ourselves, and that must suffice. Without a transcendent dimension to identity, however, personal biography became the foundation of identity. The personal became the private, and happiness was enfolded into the private realm as a, if not the, goal of personal narrative.
In sum, the truncation of knowledge collapsed the soul that once connected earth to heaven into personal biography. Now in bloated distortion, the narrated self stands without obligation or responsibility except to its own happiness that eventually became reduced to fun.
A postcritical approach
In the second half of the twentieth century, the stirrings of postcritical philosophy began to counter modem critical philosophy. Michael Polanyi pointed out that in science, leaving the researcher's judgments out of the account of knowledge that s/he arrives at is not possible. Reasonable claims include intuition, judgment, and commitment on the part of the claimer. Gabriel Marcel argued for the importance of mystery over against empirical abstraction. The disjunction between knower and known became fuxzy. Hans Georg Gadamer argued that the prejudices of the claimer cannot be left out of the search for truth. Questioning the modern doctrine of impersonal universal reason this way expands the notion of what counts as public knowledge beyond the positivist position. Alasdair MacIntyre reclaimed the Aristotelian virtue tradition; Charles Taylor, the Platonic tradition of value, jerry Gill drew on Polanyi, the later Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty to offer a fresh vision of religious knowledge and experience, while Janet Soskice contributed to a renewed critical realism.
This postcritical movement provides an opportunity to reopen epistemological options that modernity closed, because it recognizes that the investigators interests and preferences are present in every realistic account of public knowledge. That is, to some extent, the knower shapes the known. Further, postcritical philosophy recognizes that the known also shapes the knower. For to the extent that we crave knowledge of whatever sort, we cannot be whole without it. Once we have it we cannot be unaffected or undirected by it, but are led by it into a larger self than we had before.
To suggest that knower and known mutually shape one another does not require that the process is idiosyncratic. It is probable that we only know in personalized ways and yet that this knowledge is public in the sense of being recognizable to others in ways that arouse interest and desire for it. If so, it is possible to invite others into knowledge of this sort, even if fingerprints are on the package and it is not sterile or pure. Poets, novelists, and dramatists do this all the time. One result of recognizing a broader range of what counts as knowledge is that it could again become possible to talk about knowing God in a public manner.
Part of the freedom of the current philosophical moment is that we are able to step back from objectivity and see that it is a limited, perhaps even a flawed, though powerful ideology. This critical distance enables us then to see that objectivity as the sole criterion for what counts as knowledge is too limiting to accommodate the human craving for happiness. For it rules out the role that values, desires, experience, and commitments inevitably play in the construction of knowledge.
For example, an instructor teaches his medical students that if they do not look for something in examining a patient, they will not find it. We inevitably see and hear selectively, depending on what we are expecting or hoping to find. Data alien to our mind-set often escapes our notice, only to be picked up by someone else. If we are fortunate enough to be around at that time, the second observer may point out to us what we passed over, enabling us to see more and better. So it is with theological and spiritual knowledge. On our own, we may not see or hear, but with the skills of knowing what to look for, the world becomes larger and spiritual truth can emerge.
The cult of objectivity cut us off from the possibility that knowledge involves us in itself and that it is not simply discovered by or given to us apart from who we are. This is to suggest that knowledge is irreducibly theological because it gives purpose to life. We are not indifferent to it and it is not passive toward us, but may grab us up into itself, reshaping us.
Postcritical epistemology now makes it possible to reopen the question of how and how well we can know God. If theological knowledge is again possible, we could have our souls back. This would revivify the possibility of speaking of human happiness in theological terms, that is, the possibility of recognizing the importance of knowing God for human happiness.
1 This definition appears to separate this endeavor from attempts to argue for or justify the epistemic conditions under which it would be reasonable to accept the reality of God that is the proper province of epistemology. That this is not the case will be seen in due course.
2 Mark Oppenheimer, "Who Lives? Who Dies?," The Christian Century, July 3-10, 2002: 29.
3 This vision will thus differ from other theological visions that accept the individualist thesis, and recognizing its limitations exhort love of neighbor as a religious or moral obligation.
4 Extreme ascetical discipline is not representative of medieval Christianity in general, as Eamon Duffy's work demonstrates. See The Stripping of the. Altars (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992).
5 This theme survived into Protestantism through Jean Calvin.
ELLEN T. CHARRY*
* Ellen T. Charry is the Margaret W. Harmon Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. In memory of Jim Griffiss she is honored to share here selections from her current book project. It picks up some themes from theological conversations they had. A few paragraphs appeared in an editorial for Theology Today (April 2002).
Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Winter 2004Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved
