Fallenness and Flourishing (Oxford Studies in Analytic Theology) 9780198849094, 0198849095

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OXFORD STUDIES IN ANALYTIC THEOLOGY Series Editors Michael C. Rea

Oliver D. Crisp

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OXFORD STUDIES IN ANALYTIC THEOLOGY Analytic Theology utilizes the tools and methods of contemporary analytic philosophy for the purposes of constructive Christian theology, paying attention to the Christian tradition and development of doctrine. This innovative series of studies showcases high quality, cutting-edge research in this area, in monographs and symposia.   : Atonement Eleonore Stump Humility, Pride, and Christian Virtue Theory Kent Dunnington In Defense of Extended Conciliar Christology A Philosophical Essay Timothy Pawl Love Divine A Systematic Account of God’s Love for Humanity Jordan Wessling The Principles of Judaism Samuel Lebens Voices from the Edge Centring Marginalized Perspectives in Analytic Theology Edited by Michelle Panchuk and Michael C. Rea Essays in Analytic Theology Volume 1 & 2 Michael C. Rea The Contradictory Christ Jc Beall Analytic Theology and the Academic Study of Religion William Wood Divine Holiness and Divine Action Mark C. Murphy

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Fallenness and Flourishing HUD HUDSON

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Hud Hudson 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020952415 ISBN 978–0–19–884909–4 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849094.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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For Michael Bergmann, Jeffrey Brower, Oliver Crisp, and Michael Rea

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Preface: In Wandering Mazes Lost In Book II of John Milton’s incomparable epic poem Paradise Lost, Satan has departed Hell to fly through Chaos with the aims of invading the Garden of Eden and wreaking havoc on God’s recent creation in order to grieve Him. The host of rebel angels, through disobedience separated from God, must find a way to pass the hours as they await Satan’s triumphant return. By false, presumptuous hope, the ranged powers Disband, and wandering, each his several way Pursues, as inclination or sad choice Leads him perplexed, where he may likeliest find Truce to his restless thoughts, and entertain The irksome hours, till his great Chief return. John Milton, Paradise Lost (II.522–527)

Employing their full range of wondrous capacities, artistic gifts, and superb intellects, the rebels seek to produce their own happiness on their own power and to approximate the splendid mode of existence from which they have fallen—to make a Heaven of Hell. Some stride into the arena of athletic contests and glory in displays of physical prowess, others retire to silent places to compose poetry and song, a few devote themselves to adventure and brave exploration of the infernal rivers and burning lake which have become their new home, and still another group—those whose profile I resonate with and know best—receive this description: Others apart sat on a Hill retired, In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will and Fate, Fixed Fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost. Of good and evil much they argued then, Of happiness and final misery, Passion and Apathy, and glory and shame, Vain wisdom all, and false Philosophy:

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:     Yet with a pleasing sorcery could charm Pain for a while or anguish, and excite Fallacious hope, or arm the obdured breast With stubborn patience as with triple steel. John Milton, Paradise Lost (II.557–569)

The philosophically inclined rebels—willfully unreconciled to God—strive for a life of excellence which is rooted in the exercise of their own (fallen) intellects. Although they retain enough magnificence to appear to make progress in their inquiries into the mysteries of happiness and misery and to excite fallacious hope of success, in the end they manage only “with a pleasing sorcery, [to] charm pain for a while,” thus leaving the philosopherangels (who, like all of us, suffer from the noetic effects of their fallen condition) in wandering mazes lost. I believe that they—and those of us who, like the rebel angels, are willfully unreconciled to God—will remain in this condition even if the philosophers and theologians among us should manage to correctly analyze happiness and well-being and to identify the conditions under which we can rise to such a state of flourishing. The vanity of wisdom and the falseness of philosophy here decried may (but need not) be read as the inability to discern in what happiness or wellbeing ultimately consists. Rather the passage (as does the poem in its entirety) expresses the more austere thesis that this activity and the other pursuits just mentioned are powerless on their own to secure happiness and well-being, despite the fact that each involves genuine goods for embodied, intellectual creatures like ourselves. Genuine flourishing requires precisely that feature which the rebel angels of Milton’s poem—and those of us who are willfully unreconciled to God— painfully lack: the virtue of obedience. Or so it seems to me. This essay is an attempt to expand on this lesson which has been impressed upon me by studying Paradise Lost and to offer a defense of its truth. In the first chapter of this book, I will argue that the philosophy of pessimism is well grounded, quite independent of any particular religious orientation. The collective evidence for this view drawn from the plight of animals, the natural dispositions of human persons, our checkered history of social and political institutions, the world’s religions and wisdom traditions, and humanity’s achievements in art, literature, music, and philosophy is clear and compelling. Moreover, I will argue that this pessimism is overdetermined and even more austere for the Christian who takes the doctrines of

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:    

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the Fall and Original Sin seriously. Yet the good news for the Christian is that this philosophy of pessimism can be tempered by reasons for optimism—reasons which furnish a hope for salvation and also a hope that before every tear is wiped away, the groans of creation and the sufferings of its creatures will have properly inspired us to cooperate with God in the process of Atonement. Like the demons in Paradise Lost, however, even those who endorse the worldview underlying this optimism frequently willfully resist the efforts required to cooperate with God and to respond to the demands that love places upon us with respect to God and neighbor, and like those misguided and stubborn souls, many of us are beguiled by the prospect of pursuing our own happiness and well-being on our own power, of making a Heaven of the Hell that the philosophy of pessimism has taught us is our current abode. Thus many of us adopt the frame of mind in which we are willing to trust in our own powers, skill, artistry, intelligence, and all the magnificent resources of our own selves. No need of God. No loss in rebellion. And so in the second chapter, after defending certain aspects of the philosophical methodology in play, I will conduct a critical study of the current leading literature on well-being and happiness. Assuming that we can come to have knowledge of these matters, I will critically examine and argue against hedonistic, desire-fulfillment, and perfectionistic theories of well-being, advocating instead for an objective-list theory, and I will critically examine and argue against hedonistic and life-satisfaction theories of happiness, advocating instead for the Psychic Affirmation view. Thus, the main stage will be set: Christians and non-Christians alike can agree on the philosophy of pessimism—that (so to speak) we live in an exceedingly rough neighborhood and in very trying times. The Christian story furnishes particular reasons for optimism which involve cooperating with (perhaps initially simply by being nonresistant to) the work of God in the Atonement. Yet, many Christians and non-Christians alike nevertheless attempt to seek out happiness and well-being on their own power without the benefit of reconciliation with the divine. This second chapter suggests (charitably) that the attempt to do so need not be thwarted by skepticism about happiness and well-being. In the third chapter of this book, I will offer a report from the front lines where the battle for self-achieved happiness and well-being is decidedly not going well. After examining counter-reports of success from those in the field, I set forth the secular reasons for thinking that those reports were very likely to be unreliable and so lack the power to trump the mountain of

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:    

evidence for the view that there are precious few who flourish when drawing only on the resources of their own willpower, creativity, and ingenuity. But it’s not due to lack of trying; people want desperately to enjoy happiness and well-being. The real causes of failure, I will argue, are found in the noetic effects of sin—particularly in inordinate self-love and self-deception, but also (especially in those who have been further harmed and humiliated by relentless and systemic oppression) in insufficient self-love and the lack of safety, resources, and opportunities. The tale I will try to tell will be not merely a chronicle of failed bids at happiness and well-being ultimately grounded in our shared condition of sin; it will be also a tale of the unhappiness that visits so many of those who fall into this pattern of failure. This portion of the story will be informed and structured by the seven capital vices (also known as the seven deadly sins) the concepts of which were employed by Christians for self-examination, confession, preaching, and spiritual formation for centuries, and it will culminate in a sustained examination and exploration of the sin of sloth. The two main discussions—of the epidemic of unhappiness and the near universality of sloth—will be united by a surprising thesis: the theory of unhappiness (modeled on the theory of happiness endorsed in the second chapter) will turn out to be the twin of the analysis of sloth that emerges from careful attention to classical and modern scholarship on the vice. One peculiarity of the theses I will defend in the foregoing discussions is that they diagnose a condition which predicts that the diagnosis will be resisted by those it accurately describes. Literature can provide artistic illustrations as accompaniments to philosophical texts which can capture one’s attention in ways academic prose might not. In particular, fine literature can elicit many of the same emotional experiences that arise in everyday life and can mimic the chaotic and multi-dimensional reality of interpersonal interaction. Consequently, the reader can be deeply engaged by way of imaginative immersion into a richly nuanced narrative, subjective reactions to which provide brand new experiential data with which to theorize. A literary tour of the different masks of sloth will thus occupy Chapter 4 in the hopes of rendering the reader receptive to the diagnosis of the preceding three chapters which, thus illustrated, hopefully will seem less foreign than it might otherwise appear. As a result, sloth will be seen to be a misfortune with many faces. Under its onerous influence, one can race from boredom into mindless diversions, or convince oneself that the world is at bottom absurd, or anguish over whether life is worth living at all, or give oneself entirely over to evil, or abdicate one’s agency and be ruled by chance,

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:    

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or frantically pursue the diminishing pleasures of sensual novelty, or attempt to explain one’s misfortune by appeal to some invented offensive or indifferent feature of God’s, or despair over a perceived spiritual deformity in oneself rooted in guilt or shame. The predicament I try to depict in these four chapters and that I believe I see played out again and again in the world can be summarized (oversimply but succinctly) as follows: We separate ourselves from God through sin, and we and our world are the worse for it. Our pride leads us to attempt to make the best of our disastrous situation on our own terms. Predictably, we fail and fail miserably. We thereby forfeit well-being and happiness, and the new modes of suffering expressed in the deadly sin of sloth are our earned and unhappy wages.

In the fifth and final chapter, I will describe a response to this predicament that seems hopeful to me. I will began by articulating a particular conception of the virtue of obedience and detailing its four components—humility, restraint, response, and love—and by showing how they work together both to nurture an abiding and deeply seated pro-attitude towards uniting one’s will with God’s will and also to create and maintain a robust and stable set of dispositions aimed at succeeding in this aim. I will then illustrate that virtue in action and remark on the role of perseverance, the difficult mission of anyone who commits to acquiring and developing this virtue in life. Thus equipped, I will propose and argue on behalf of a refinement to the objective-list theories of well-being that emerged in the second chapter as the finest of the competitors. I will then give a formulation of and what support I can to my new theory that attempts to state the conditions of receptivity in a subject in addition to identifying the range of welfare goods in the world. The virtue of obedience, I will argue, is not only one among many welfare goods, but plays a unique role vis-à-vis the other goods on the list, insofar as it serves as the priming condition under which they can realize the full extent of their value in the subject in which they manifest. The virtue of obedience, on my view, thus plays a crucial role on the subjective side of the equation when the subjective conditions of readiness to flourish meet the objective ingredients for flourishing. Finally, I will call explicit attention to what I believe are the most worrisome aspects of the views defended in the book. One worry is that

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:    

the resulting accounts of happiness and well-being are too exclusive. Another worry is whether those very noetic effects of sin to which the argument of the book crucially appeals in establishing the predicament summarized above are themselves sufficient for derailing its primary strategy for combatting the evils of that predicament. A final worry is whether in pursuing the sort of project recommended in the book one runs a risk of generating harms to the most vulnerable among us. I will do my best to formulate those worries with fairness and force, and I will close by offering responses that seem promising to me with respect to each concern.

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Acknowledgments In writing this manuscript, I have become indebted to several persons and to some institutions. I extend my thanks to Western Washington University for professional leave (in the 2019–2020 academic year), to the philosophy departments at Baylor University, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Southern California, the University of St Andrews, and the University of Virginia, and to the School of Divinity at the University of St Andrews for financial support and for opportunities to give colloquium and conference presentations related to this project. I am also grateful to the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame, the Logos Institute at the University of St Andrews, the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at Western Washington University, and the Society of Christian Philosophers for financial support and for opportunities to give colloquium and conference presentations related to this project. Finally, my partnership with CLL/SLL diminished my teaching load in the spring and summer of 2019, and I deeply appreciate the substantial gift of time I thus received for reading, research, and early drafting of the book. I am happy to acknowledge Oxford University Press for permission to incorporate portions of my essay “Felix Culpa!” in Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments, Trent Dougherty and Jerry Walls, eds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 277–289, which now occupies much of section 9 of Chapter 1. I am also pleased to acknowledge Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing for permission to quote from my novel A Grotesque in the Garden, second edition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020). I am delighted to have the opportunity to thank colleagues, friends, and family who have offered comments, friendship, love, and encouragement: Elizabeth Barnes, Orion Bautista-Hepker, Matthew Benton, Mike Bergmann, Jeff Brower, Ross Cameron, Rebecca Chan, Nevin Climenhaga, Andrew Cortens, Jesse Couenhoven, Jan Cover, Oliver Crisp, Dustin Crummett, Paul Dunn, Robert Garcia, Tyron Goldschmidt, Cheri Hepker, Daniel Howard-Snyder, Frances Howard-Snyder, Aris Hudson, Jonathan Jacobs, Linda Jacobs, Shieva Kleinschmidt, Jonathan Kvanvig, Sam Lebens, Christian Lee, Brian Leftow, Kris McDaniel, Daniel McKaughan, Hans Madueme, Trenton Merricks, Sean Nalty, Sam Newlands, Faith Pawl,

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

Timothy Pawl, Dee Payton, Alvin Plantinga, Alexander Pruss, Theron Pummer, Mike Rea, Bradley Rettler, Eli Schille-Hudson, Amy Seymour, Bear the Shih Tzu, Jeff Snapper, Joshua Spencer, Eleonore Stump, Neal Tognazzini, Alan Torrance, Andrew Torrance, Christina van Dyke, Peter van Inwagen, Jerry Walls, Ryan Wasserman, Dennis Whitcomb, Bill Wood, Sameer Yadav, and especially Cathi Hepker. Finally, let me end on two further notes of gratitude: The first to Daniel Howard-Snyder—my friend and one of the best philosophical critics I’ve ever known—who for thirty years now has graciously provided me with tremendously valuable (and lengthy and harsh) critical evaluations of my work. The second to Michael Bergmann, Jeff Brower, Oliver Crisp, and Michael Rea for their fellowship, their wisdom, their affection, and our philosophical interaction over these many years.

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Contents 1. Some False Step 1. It Was the Best of Worlds, It Was the Worst of Times 2. The Kingdom of Animals 3. This Quintessence of Dust 4. Society and the Institutions of Cruelty 5. World Religions—Seven Stories for Everyone 6. Art, Literature, Music, Philosophy, and the Wisdom Traditions 7. The Fall and Original Sin 8. The Doctrine of (Optimistic) Pessimism 9. Felix Culpa

1 1 3 6 8 11 18 21 27 32

2. Thus Mammon Spake 1. Cannot We His Light Imitate When We Please? 2. Analytic Methodology 3. Happiness, Well-Being, and Interpreting Mammon’s Advice 4. The Question of Well-Being, Three Kinds of Skepticism, and Mammon’s Restriction 5. Hedonism and Desire-Fulfillment Theories 6. Perfectionism and Objective-List Theories 7. The Question of Happiness, Two Kinds of Skepticism, and Mammon’s Restriction 8. Hedonism, Life Satisfaction, and Psychic Affirmation 9. A Curiosity about Theories of Well-Being and Happiness

44 44 48 52

3. Libido Sentiendi, Libido Sciendi, Libido Dominandi 1. Secular Suspicions 2. Noetic Effects of Sin: Self-Love and Self-Deception 3. A Second Battle Lost 4. The Path from Happiness to Unhappiness 5. Steeped in Sin—Six Stories for Everyone 6. Sloth, the Sin of Sadness 7. Taking Stock

53 57 62 71 72 80

82 82 89 99 100 103 112 116

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

4. The Masks of Sloth 1. Cellar Dwellers 2. Boredom and Diversion 3. The Absurd—Tragedy, Meaning-Making, and Defiance 4. That Sleep of Death 5. Lawful Evil and the Demonic 6. The Lopsided Aesthete 7. Most Respectfully Return Him the Ticket 8. Guilt, Shame, Mediocrity

120 120 122 129 136 143 147 150 154

5. Ye Cannot Serve God and Mammon 1. Recovered Paradise 2. The Virtue of Obedience, Christ’s Temptations, and Perseverance 3. Obedience and Well-Being—A Story for Everyone 4. The Problem of Ignorance 5. The Problem of Exclusivity 6. The Obstacle of Sin and Caring for the Vulnerable 7. In Summary

158 158

Bibliography Index

199 209

160 169 177 180 184 193

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libido sentiendi, libido sciendi, libido dominandi Wretched is the cursed land which these three rivers of fire enflame rather than water! Blaise Pascal, Pensées

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1 Some False Step Accordingly, the sole thing that reconciles me to the Old Testament is the story of the Fall. In my eyes it is the only metaphysical truth in that book, even though it appears in the form of an allegory. There seems to me no better explanation of our existence than that it is the result of some false step, some sin of which we are paying the penalty. —Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Sufferings of the World

1. It Was the Best of Worlds, It Was the Worst of Times Panglossian defenses of ours being the best of all possible worlds, or (if not best) unsurpassable, or (if not unsurpassable) at least one of the finest within God’s power to create have fallen out of fashion, but they can still be found.¹ Yet if our world really does manifest one of these admirable features, one could be excused for not taking note of the fact. The history of sentience and the tragedy of the animal kingdom, the rise of rationality and those individual, social, and political cruelties which are its children, the world’s religions, its art, literature, and wisdom traditions, and the all-too-frequently unhappy lives of its inhabitants across the ages seem to point rather dramatically to a different thesis—a thesis of pessimism.² The philosophy of pessimism need not be construed as the claim that the world is unrelentingly awful and all of its creatures irredeemable miscreants, although some of history’s pessimists (e.g., that magnificent critic of humanity, Schopenhauer) can occasionally make a memorable case for such a view. Moreover, despite the well-entrenched stereotype, a ¹ See chapter 7 of Hudson 2006 for such an argument which appeals to the hypothesis of hyperspace and chapter 8 of Hudson 2014a for a defense which appeals to the hypothesis of hypertime. ² I shall return to the thought that this worst of times may well be embedded in this best of worlds in the final two sections of this opening chapter, and to three different senses in which the view to be developed below may yet earn the title “an optimistic pessimism.” Fallenness and Flourishing. Hud Hudson, Oxford University Press (2021). © Hud Hudson. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849094.003.0001

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  

philosopher of pessimism need not walk around in despair all the four seasons and need not be some curmudgeonly misanthrope dampening everyone’s day and chasing children off lawns. The pessimism hypothesis does not have to engender any particular psychological profile in its adherents. Rather, at its core, the philosophy of pessimism simply offers (on the whole) dismal predictions about what nearly all of us can expect to experience in our private lives and interpersonal relationships, about the welfare of our fellow creatures, about the character of our social institutions and global politics, and about our prospects for progress on these matters in the future. The philosopher of pessimism articulates and advances reasons in favor of or refutes reasons opposed to this general worldview. Occasionally, these reasons extend to providing a psychology of the self or a political theory of the state or a religious take on the purpose (or lack thereof) of our lives or a grand speculative metaphysics of the cosmos by way of providing support for the pessimistic predictions just noted. Other times the evidence is of the simple inductive, look-and-see variety. Both kinds can be compelling—surprisingly compelling, especially when one has not prejudged the issue from desperately wanting it not to be so and is not scrambling about for a way to oppose those predictions at all costs. The philosophy of pessimism is very old, indeed, and finds its champions in every age.³ And, although they are often among the most eloquent poets and philosophers, tragedians and theologians, aphorists and political theorists, they do not all speak with one voice. I do not intend to attempt an essay in the history of ideas, and neither do I wish to produce a haphazard catalog of famous pessimists and their differences. Rather, in the first several sections of the present chapter, I simply hope to instill a sympathetic feel in the reader for what I have called the core of the philosophy of pessimism and to identify and present what I take to be the central and persuasive lines of its defense. I endorse this pessimistic worldview, yet I take it to be seriously underrepresented and underappreciated. I have come to suspect that the reasons for its unpopularity involve unflattering claims about human nature, and in my experience these claims are nearly always successfully resisted when they appear at the beginning of a discussion. So, once again, I will be content if, with this opening chapter, I can merely instill a sympathetic feel in the

³ Let me recommend in particular a twenty-first-century addition to this list of champions, Joshua Foa Dienstag and his book-length treatment of our theme divided into its social, metaphysical, and existential forms (Dienstag 2006).

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  

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reader for the philosophy of pessimism that will form the backdrop to the argument of this book. As the line of reasoning develops, perhaps, a cumulative case for the backdrop thesis will emerge that has a better chance of competing with our natural tendencies and learned talents for keeping it at a distance.

2. The Kingdom of Animals The story of the non-person animals is a tragedy from start to finish. I begin with that modern horror known as the factory farming industry, which ranks among the greatest moral crimes of our age. The conditions of conception, birth, rearing, and slaughter of the 33 million cattle, 125 million pigs, and 9 billion chickens processed annually in the United States alone makes for unforgettable reading. Not only are many components of these incredibly high-volume industries morally grotesque and clearly impermissible, it is commonplace for people who simply listen to or watch recordings of their routine, day-in-and-day-out activities to be physically unable to continue as witnesses, despite being thus several steps removed from the action. The full and uncensored story is in fact so terrible, I predict that this is the aspect of our contemporary world most likely to be looked back upon by our descendants with nausea and incomprehension at how so many millions of otherwise moderately decent human beings turned a stone ear to the cries and sufferings of billions upon billions of sentient creatures with unspeakably miserable lives and deaths.⁴ Unfortunately, nature doesn’t need any lessons from us in how to be poor stewards. The biosphere is an aesthetic wonderland, to be sure, and the complexity of biological organisms, the interconnections (synchronic and diachronic) between the species, and the history and diversity of life are nothing short of awe-inspiring and sublime. Yet the animals who are the players in this tale are not automatons, and throughout their lives they are subjected to a variety of pains. Of course, there are pleasures to be had in the forest and the desert and the tundra and the bog, as well, but which mental ⁴ It is, in my opinion, unfortunate that so much of the philosophical attention to this industry serves primarily as an introduction to questions about moral restrictions on our food choices. There is, of course, a natural connection between the issues, and I don’t mean to impugn the significance of moral debates that focus on diet, but our attention should be riveted on what is happening to the legion of manufactured animals, whether or not consuming the products of those practices involves further moral wrongdoing.

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  

states predominate? Schopenhauer offered a sobering observation on the matter: The pleasure in the world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.⁵

For numbingly long stretches of time—in the hundreds of millions of years—generations and generations of confused and terrified and innocent creatures have torn one another limb from limb in a daily struggle to minimize, but only momentarily, the acute pain of hunger, earning nature her description of being red in tooth and claw. In addition to this cycle of carnivores and carnage—disease, malnutrition, and starvation decimate herds and packs. Infections that fester and broken bones that don’t mend await those who slide down ravines, stumble in a river crossing, or lose contests for mating opportunities. In the kingdom of animals, the coin of the realm is suffering. I hasten to note that I do not use the generic term “suffering” in a way that presupposes any sophisticated reflective capacities in the sufferer; the immediate sensations of having one’s jaw torn from one’s body or one’s leg snapped in half is suffering enough. (I will remark on distinctively cognitively enabled forms of suffering at some length in the following section.) And those who suspect that the pains in question cannot be of real significance, given that they are neither foreseen and dreaded in advance nor revived and relived in memory, need only accidentally burn themselves with a match to recall how unnecessary anticipation and reflection are to suffering that has significance. Moreover, since we are here dealing in geological timescales, it is only fair to acknowledge the incalculable number of panicked creatures whose deaths resulted from nature’s steady stream of avalanches, blizzards, droughts, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tsunamis, viruses, volcanoes, and wildfires—not to mention the worldwide devastation following an asteroid or comet strike.

⁵ Schopenhauer “On the Sufferings of the World” (2007, 5–18). This short piece and its companion, “On the Vanity of Existence” (19–23), are among the best mood-setters for the philosophy of pessimism you are likely to find. I extend my long overdue appreciation to Kelly Jolley for introducing me to these essays so very many years ago.

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Still, perhaps I will be accused of cherry-picking my considerations. After all, perhaps I am unfairly tugging at heart strings by invoking images of large mammals at their worst moments and masking all the pleasures with which nature might be teeming and which could offset these pains. Well, perhaps. It would be an interesting exercise, however, to see just how powerful the case for offsetting could really be. What would a cherry-picked case for the supremacy of animal pleasures that could legitimately rival the previous paragraphs even look like? Still, the point is well taken, and it is worth pausing briefly to reflect on those animals that rarely tend to come to mind in these contexts and whose suffering nearly always goes unremarked. The literature on the problem of evil often invokes so called natural evil and its specially positioned (because innocent of moral wrongdoing) victims, the non-person animals. This literature similarly seems to be preoccupied with large and familiar mammals (e.g., a fawn subjected to an agonizing death in a forest fire), but there are exceptions. Dustin Crummett’s study of the suffering of creeping things is a case in point. Crummett speaks for the arthropods—the insects, spiders, millipedes, mites, and crustaceans, among other animals—and reminds us that whereas there is some controversy concerning whether and how these less adorable creatures suffer, it cannot be taken as given that they do not suffer. And if they do, any critique of the discussion above that suggests the focus on the higher animals is too narrow will only result in recognizing an increase in animal suffering “by many, many orders of magnitude” on account of their vastly larger numbers and of their lives which are uniformly “nasty, brutish, and short.”⁶ Of course, even if the case for the disvalue of the mental lives of non-person animals vastly outweighs the case for any compensating pleasures, perhaps the aesthetic properties earlier identified—the sheer beauty of the biosphere and the sublimity of its complex and interconnected components—might be thought to shift the needle back in favor of overall value. Two responses to this line of thought: First, everyone should agree that some pain and suffering can be compensated for by aesthetic value and its appreciation; but before such an aesthetic defense strikes you as a comprehensive and adequate reply to the problem of animal suffering, soberly recall the timescale in play and the trillions upon trillions of lives that have come to a violent end in the jaws of natural disasters and predators. I suspect the

⁶ Crummett 2017.

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compensating beauty of it all will be a difficult sell. Second, even if the aesthetic defense or some other reply citing a thus far unidentified feature of the biosphere somehow makes the suffering of its animal component worth the trade, that doesn’t contest the thesis which opened this section, namely, that the story of the non-person animals is a tragedy from start to finish, regardless of whether or not it is embedded in a larger tale that is less troubling.

3. This Quintessence of Dust At some point in this tale—once upon a couple hundred thousand years ago—some animals crossed the rationality line and were the first of our parents to become persons. Whether this was an outcome of a process of natural evolution or a raising to rationality by special divine action in the world or something else, these beings became moral agents possessed of freedom, co-creators of their environment, and in a new and significant way responsible for themselves and one another. Yet the rise of primates to personhood, their achievement of moral freedom, and their newfound responsibilities in the world hardly manifested itself in a utopian community of moral self-improvement and love of neighbor. In many ways, of course, their lives became both easier and free of many of the dangers and pains that plagued their less intelligent cousins, and their productive curiosity and enhanced ability to communicate facilitated coordinated, cooperative activity that permitted new communities to form and social bonds to strengthen. Yet these were the animals whose instincts for power and control in their social groups and whose habits of self-preservation and acting in their own self-interest—instincts and habits cemented into their natures by millennia of genetic adaptations—were now coupled with the unmatched power and guidance of rationality. The pessimist views this condition as one in which the new person-animals are born into a state in which they naturally incline toward evil—by which I here mean natural inclinations towards selfish and self-absorbed actions and ends which (as the predominant modern theories would teach us) are often morally impermissible and shot through with disvalue, respectively. Consequently, rational animals, deluded by disordered desires, compounded the misfortunes limited to the pre-person era in profoundly significant ways by bringing a combination of intelligence and cruelty to the table, dominating one another, and inventing astonishing and revolting ways to reveal new depths of suffering.

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Moreover, the pessimist is likely to see the continual advance of material comforts, increased immunity from pain and disease, technological improvements, and opportunities for individual excellence and flourishing more than offset by other features of modernity—for example, by the steady increase of new and easily accessed material means for harming ourselves and others, by deeply entrenched social oppression and social injustice on a truly monumental scale, by political instability with the chilling capacity to place at risk the entire world, and by missed opportunities to live lives of excellence due to our penchant for perpetually distracting ourselves from activities that would foster flourishing in favor of tinkering with an endless stream of technological novelties and mood-altering substances that invite us to waste our leisure time and amuse ourselves to death. When persons joined the world’s population, advanced cognitive faculties of memory, anticipation, artificially enhanced sense perception, reflective introspection, imagination, common sense, understanding, rational intuition, inference drawing, systematizing . . . the lot, all came into play. And much of what is good in the world (again excepting the aesthetic goods to be found in nearly any direction and at any scale one looks) can be chalked up to the brilliant employment of these faculties and to certain desires for individual and collective goods that somehow rose to the surface in the sea of narrow and base self-interest in which their subjects were conceived. It is no part of the philosophy of pessimism to argue that there are not genuine goods or that we are helpless to produce them, dependent on the winds of chance to occasionally blow them in our direction. Rather, the philosopher of pessimism simply maintains that the quantity and quality of disvalue that comes into being regularly outpaces the production of goods (which we tend to exaggerate and magnify), that a significant share of this is our fault and the result of poor choices, and that there are scarce reasons to think our descendants will fare considerably better than our ancestors on this score, although the ways in which they will fall short will be mediated by a different assortment of glittering phenomena that personhood makes possible. Moreover, these same cognitive faculties by which animal persons are separated and elevated above the mere brutes also work in concert to provide a range of reflective pains from which the non-person animals are largely exempt. Lives riddled with feelings of guilt, regret, and shame, vainglorious mistakes stemming from unbridled ambition or from slaving after honor and prestige from others, an unshakeable melancholy that feeds on memories that sting and expectations of unmet needs, the angst that accompanies the recognition of agency, freedom, and capacity for

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responsibility—are one and all new sources of misery and anxiety for those with higher powers of mind. Unlike the non-person animals, there is no opportunity for restfulness in the present moment, for that sanctuary is forever being invaded by recollections or anticipations of goods and ills. Indeed, even the anticipation of future misfortune is itself a source of suffering for those mentally equipped to foresee it, and one such dreadful experience (reserved for persons alone) is the anticipation and consequent fear of aging and death, a ubiquitous phenomenon of such intense negativity it has fueled poem after novel after psychological theory after philosophical thesis after private and paralyzing night terror. Yes—but what of our reformed and enlightened social institutions, the deeply satisfying commitments and rewards of the spiritual life, the richness, profundity, and fulfillment afforded by art, literature, music, and philosophy? Well, they are all goods, without question. That’s not at issue. But allow me to offer some reflections on the apparent counter-pessimistic implications of this rhetorical question in the following sections.

4. Society and the Institutions of Cruelty How enlightened and progressive are our social institutions? One way to approach the philosophy of pessimism is to see it as a corrective to the optimism that characterized the Enlightenment: alternatively, as a corrective to the excesses of those over-enthusiastic cheerleaders and heralds of perpetual progress (often united by a commitment to a certain conception of the Enlightenment).⁷ To be sure, a number of significant changes marked the transition from late medieval to early modern philosophy in the West. Philosophy was increasingly written in English, French, German, and Italian instead of Latin, enabling a new audience with a common (rather than classical) education to participate in ongoing philosophical discussions. Mathematicians and scientists ventured into these debates considerably less burdened by the restrictions that had been imposed on theologians (who had predominated in earlier centuries) and less pressured to explore, articulate, and defend only those positions in step with the current interpretation of particular religious doctrines. ⁷ For example, Pinker 2018. For harsh and telling criticisms of Pinker’s scholarship and attempts to characterize and draw lessons from the Enlightenment, see Gray 2018 and Harrison 2018.

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Consequently, theology and theorizing about final causes relinquished ground and made room for empirical science and fruitful theorizing about efficient causes, natural laws, and the nature and workings of the human mind. The so called Enlightenment that swept England and France and (about a century later) Germany envisioned a new role for the faculty of reason, prized for its abilities to provide naturalistic explanations of phenomena, attacks on the Church, and strategies for reform in those societies who had (allegedly) misplaced their confidence in revelation. In so doing, it ushered in an era of optimism, promising an indefinite cycle of advance and improvement on the political, moral, intellectual, and personal happiness fronts. The prospect of self-made virtuous citizens in a fair and virtuous society replaced the hopeless and ineffectual longing for a return to Eden, and—so went the fashionable view of the day—was an imminently realizable reward of human insight and ingenuity.⁸ The pessimist, who certainly respects the achievements of Renaissance science and mathematics that ushered in the age of Enlightenment, is nevertheless inclined to dismiss this declaration of permanent advancement over past generations of stalled and stagnant predecessors, and perhaps even to regard as a genuinely dangerous social illusion the confidence expressed in the unlikelihood of backsliding and the inevitability of a perfected society. Mastering the mathematics that enables the study of natural law which, in turn, facilitates breakthroughs in transportation, medicine, communication, military power, and luxuries permanently changes the character and texture of individual lives, communities, and political entities. Still, that is a far cry from making human persons virtuous, or ensuring that the increasingly powerful social institutions are just, or promising that a perfected society is any more likely to be on the horizon than is the sanctioned and systematic oppression of various groups who lack the power to represent themselves or to remove the conditions of their oppression or even to quietly step out of harm’s way. It is worth pausing to think about the vastly increased scope and stability of institutionalized cruelty, which is a lesser recognized but very real child of

⁸ Notwithstanding this standard report of the prevailing optimism of the Enlightenment, the truth is closer to its mood being Janus-faced, for a deeply rooted pessimism was never (even temporarily) displaced, as has been painstakingly documented in Delumeau’s massive and erudite study of sin and fear in the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries (Delumeau 1995). I wish to note that some of the descriptive claims appearing in this paragraph on the Enlightenment (I believe) I first learned from Jonathan Bennett, but if so, I have not succeeded in locating the source.

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the Enlightenment. Cruelty’s trademark is the exploitation of a power difference, and at the individual level its effects can go far beyond the infliction of pain on a victim. Cruelty mars lives and can permanently change the orientation of the subjects of those lives even towards themselves, as unforgettably expressed in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a novel of the wretchedness of slavery and the dignity of the powerless souls whose lives it disfigured. Where anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up.⁹

As power structures become more entrenched, the systemic misuse of power enjoys increased immunity from correction, and the lives that can be wrecked and ruined by the well-oiled machinery of institutional cruelty multiply beyond measure. The tale can be told again and again, from the revolting history of the American slave trade to the depths of the Holocaust to the sex-trafficking of children which pollutes every corner of the globe to the ongoing systematic oppression of women to the savage inhumanity that some despot of the hour perpetrates upon his own people. Philip Hallie’s unnerving study Cruelty emphasizes one further point that is worth restating. Institutional cruelty effectively exploits two devices— secrecy and rigid abstraction—in order to conceal its destruction of lives from those who might be in a position to organize themselves and diminish those harms.¹⁰ For example, denying access (so to speak) to the room where it happens and employing carefully crafted, Orwellian language (such as the ludicrously deceptive phrase “humane treatment”) in order to make invisible the countless cruelties that terrorize the pens and cages and killing floors of the factory farming industry successfully prevents the disgust and outrage that would motivate opposition. And since institutional cruelties are often accompanied by unearned privileges for those who are best positioned to contest those cruelties, the thus benefitted are often all too willing to participate in this masking of the harms, voluntarily closing their eyes

⁹ Morrison 1987. Non-fictionalized and first-hand examples documenting such profound takings can be found in Douglass 2016. ¹⁰ Hallie 1982.

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when the inconstant cloak of invisibility might permit a glimpse of the actual events in a clear and harsh light. Discussion in this vein can go on and on (and does exactly that in the sprawling literature on the problem of evil, where there is no shortage of examples to provoke discussion). But precisely because the list is so inexhaustible, by counting off its entries and displaying their uglinesses one after another, one runs the risk of deadening an audience’s ability to appreciate just how atrocious they truly are. Let us, then, turn to a consideration at a higher level of abstraction.

5. World Religions—Seven Stories for Everyone What do the major world religions have to say about the philosophy of pessimism? In his popular book largely designed to combat the dangerous myth that at a fundamental level the world’s religions are one and unified, Stephen Prothero pauses to take note of at least one genuine point of commonality: What the world’s religions share is not so much a finish line as a starting point. And where they begin is with this simple observation: something is wrong with the world. In Hopi language, the word Koyaanisqatsi tells us life is out of balance. Shakespeare’s Hamlet tells us that there is something rotten not only in the state of Denmark but also in the state of human existence. Hindus say we are living in the kali yuga, the most degenerate age in cosmic history. Buddhists say that human existence is pockmarked by suffering. Jewish, Christian, and Islamic stories tell us that this life is not Eden; Zion, Heaven, and Paradise lie out ahead.¹¹

Just what qualifies an institution for being among the world’s major religions is a vexed question. Sheer numbers, of course, count for something, but so too does disproportionate impact on world history and influential role in the birth and development of other religious traditions. I will say a few words about six such entities, three originating in the West, three in the East, and I will alter my manner of presentation in this section in the hopes of avoiding the opposite of the risk identified at the end of the previous section;

¹¹ Prothero 2010, 11.

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that is, I do not wish the discussion to occur at such a level of generality that the salient upshot of the religious observations is lost in abstraction—a real temptation when attempting to characterize something as many-sided as a world religion in just a handful of lines.

Story One A child in the Han Dynasty wakes early and begins the work for which she has no passion but great aptitude. Today she will again be entrusted with weaving multicolored birds into high-quality silks. Mistakes are costly, but she is meticulous. Her combination of giftedness and diligence has been rewarded with the burden of extra work, and the long hours are punishing. She has no possessions, no independence, but her hands are beautiful. She once heard the adults saying so, and she believed them. A promise she made to herself as a result: “Although I have nothing else, I can protect one thing of worth. I will care for my hands. Preserving their beauty will be the sole thing I can offer back to the world in gratitude.” But the promise is broken within a year, for her father demands weaving at a rate inconsistent with caring for anything, much less her hands, which are roughed and scarred before her childhood is over. And not only her hands. She is also roughed and scarred before her life (which fails to extend much beyond her childhood) is over. She is a Confucian child, and she and the rest of the world are out of balance—in chaos, desperately in need of etiquette and ritual and propriety. She may not succeed in becoming a noble or exemplary person, but she believes she can struggle to perfect her character in part by walking in strict obedience to her father’s demands and in part by carving order out of unruliness and striving for moments of harmony in a discordant environment. But the work of her hands produces only cuts and bruises and bird-patterned silks, for disarray returns as soon as it is not monitored, and not even the artistically gifted can monitor beyond their means.

Story Two Displaced and half a world away from his native Bhutan, a middle-aged man, knee deep in water, pushes a rowboat onto a narrow beach in a Canadian fishing village. A series of accidents have brought him here, and for three years he has fished, learned new and complicated languages, politely endured

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suspicion, animosity, and maliciousness, and has shown himself to be reliable, kind, cheerful, and generous with his time. He has practiced, in particular, pronouncing the unfamiliar names of the children who always run to greet his return, and they laugh easily together. Passing out oddly shaped fragments of driftwood to his youthful companions, he is this afternoon preoccupied with a conversation that went badly the day before. Invited (or perhaps challenged) by the men from whom he buys his supplies to say something about his curious practice of meditation, he made the error of thinking they had some interest in the answer. In an overexcited cascade of English and French phrases whose nuances he couldn’t hear, he confessed his wish to be of assistance to others and rushed an explanation of how meditation prepared him to do so. He has privately nourished a desire to share thoughts that seem fine to him with these rough villagers he so wishes to befriend, and eagerly seizing on what seemed to be his first real chance, he had said both too much and too little too quickly. He is a failed Buddhist monk, and he and the rest of the world are out of balance—continually at the mercy of unsatisfied and unsatisfiable cravings that bring only discontent and sorrow. “Shown again,” he thinks “in my foolish thirst to teach even when I am unprepared to speak and others unprepared to hear.” He chastises himself, believing he should not have grasped at this invitation. He recalls how unchecked impatience and desire lost him a position in the monastery, how it led to unwisely leaving his homeland without the means to return, and how now it may have cost him his safety. The men of the village, he knows, are superstitious and easily frightened, and he is dimly aware that they managed to hear in his hurried and muddled descriptions of the impermanence of all they hold dear, the emptiness of self, the absence of soul, and the goal of achieving the non-existence of nirvana, something decidedly demonic.

Story Three The corpse is heavy and he struggles to properly position the body of his dead son, momentarily unsure which direction is south. The flesh has been washed, perfumed, shaved, and wrapped, and to be close in these final moments, he must almost perch on top of the body in the narrow entry to his home as he waits for assistance to carry the remains to the riverside pyre. On the verge of beginning the prayers to Yama, god of death, he hesitates and looks at the body with calm fascination and reserve. Death is not unfamiliar. He is quite old and has reversed nature three times, watching all of his children (themselves

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grandparents) vacate the bodies he helped fashion for them. His own death will be next, but he believes it will also occur again years from now, just as it has already occurred many, many times before the son stretched out in front of him was ever conceived. Outlining his son’s features with a permanently curved forefinger that does not touch the face, he reflects: “I have lived many lives and have played many parts, and I am tired. The cycle pauses thus only to be renewed in a fresh body which one day will also reach its age and find itself on the floor facing south. And between death and death there is some pleasure and pain, perhaps a taste of wealth or power, duty—if you take it, but how can one be released and exit the cycle? Kama-artha-dharma, kama-artha-dharma, kama-artha-dharma, but never moksha.” He is a Hindu father nearing the end of his days, and he and the rest of the world are out of balance—trapped in the unsatisfactory cycle of samsara. He silently reflects on the misfortune of further wandering through the ages, set back by karma here, advanced by karma there, living in ignorance then and in wisdom hence, but forever repositioned no matter what he seems to do with his lives. And then, out loud: “Perhaps my son will be among the fortunate who will not return?” But he knows such fortune is rare, and returning to silence he closes his eyes and waits.

Story Four They had begun to shave his head but were distracted and passed him over. Now clad in a rough and ill-fitting shirt painted with flames and devils and irritating both his skin and his dignity, he marches in silence while a circus of drums, trumpets, church bells, and jeers from the assembled crowd swirl around him at the auto-da-fé where he will lose his life. Over the last few days he has six times exchanged fleeting but uplifting gestures of fellowship with other Muslims who have also been imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition, but he has been separated from them and now stands with a company of Jews who steal frightened glances from under their mandatory dunce caps, unsure whether they will be flogged or executed today. He is a Muslim merchant, and he and the rest of the world are out of balance— everyone reeking of pride. He had the satisfaction of telling his captors as much when they invaded his cell during prayer, setting upon him while he was prostrate and in absolute submission to Allah. They no better understood his critique than he understood their offer to be mercifully strangled before burning at the stake; yet they did comprehend the looks and posture of

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contempt that accompanied his words: “And what do they expect? What else could I say to these arrogant creatures who do not properly recognize Allah and their own subordinate place? Their assumed self-sufficiency is appalling; they act as if they are masters of themselves and in control of the fire they will light around me, when all they should do is throw themselves on the ground in surrender.”

Story Five Barefoot and stepping carefully into the mud and away from the open sewage running through the streets, she makes her way to the marketplace from the small wooden house she shares with nine others in a shtetl bordering the Black Sea. In bone-crushing poverty, she walks today to exchange geese for beans and garlic, candles and a rake, and a chance to hear the news that sometimes travels from St. Petersburg along with the wagons of grains, fruits, and spices. She is facing a choice: First—she can marry and avoid the childlessness she was taught to abhor from the cradle. In fact, she is well aware the shadchan has been nosing around, gathering information, and considering potential matches. But she worries: “How could my father possibly pay a dowry without making my brothers’ and sisters’ lives even heavier than they are now? I can’t be responsible for that.” Second—she can pursue her heart’s desire. She can steal away to Moscow to acquire an education. Of course, she is under family expectations and legal restrictions that make it all but seem impossible, but the wagon drivers have explained to her a scheme: she can study in Moscow if she can obtain a resident permit, and she can obtain a resident permit by registering as a prostitute. The girl is a Jewish teenager, and she and her people are out of balance—suffering hunger and hardship, persecution and injustice, punishment and exile. Still, she assures herself: “Adonai is just. Adonai is merciful. Adonai will permit our return. But not yet; for that we must wait and pray. For now it is marriage or Moscow.”

Story Six Agnes covers her eyes and walks to the south end of the shed where the sand has blasted clean the frying pans. Oklahoma dust is everywhere; dust in the milk, dust in the clothes, dust in every crevice, dust in the throat, dust in the crib, dust in the coffin, dust and ashes. The Homestead Act of 1862 offered

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160 acres of free federal land, just for the claiming. How her grandparents had danced in the twilight of that first evening they stood barefoot on their own soil. But not a single note of music now lingers in the air of this wasteland, and she searches her husband: “Who ever knew it could be this hard? Who would have guessed that after we ploughed up the grass, half the wheat wouldn’t grow and the other half wouldn’t sell? Both boys have the dust in their lungs, and now Owen can’t work; he can hardly breathe. If we lose any more livestock, we’ll lose it all.” Agnes is a Christian homesteader, and she and the rest of the world are out of balance—and she can’t help but think she must be at fault, that she must make things right. While her family sleeps she whispers to the ceiling: “I know the good book says it ain’t free no more, and we’ll eat bread by the sweat of our brow—but Lord, all I see is plenty of sweat and no bread. I’ve envied and I’ve taken more than my share. I’m quick to anger and I’m too proud. I’m rusted with sin, but so are we all. Forgive us if you can, and push or pull us through the winter.”

Different voices, different traditions, but a common message. The time is out of joint. Wherever the problem of human existence is ultimately located— chaos or craving, rebirth or pride, exile or sin—the major world’s religions are in unusual concord respecting Koyaanisqatsi. Some significant variation on the philosophy of pessimism is a centerpiece in each.¹²

One More—Story Seven In the midst of a Starbucks overflowing with ear-budded solitaries enjoying private concerts emanating from cell phones, a college student confidently sinks into a leather chair to read and misunderstand his Kierkegaard: If there were no eternal consciousness in a human being, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting force writhing in dark passions that produced everything great and insignificant, if a bottomless, insatiable emptiness lurked beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? If such were the case, if there were no sacred bond that tied humankind together, if one generation after another rose like leaves in the forest, if one generation succeeded another like the singing of birds in ¹² In preparing these impressionistic sketches I benefitted from the scholarly work in comparative religion in Amore, Hussain, and Oxtoby 2018a and 2018b, and in attempting to touch on first-person perspectives I benefitted from Davison 1992.

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the forest, if the human race passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and futile activity, if an eternal oblivion always hungrily lay in wait for its prey and there were no power strong enough to snatch it away—then how empty and hopeless life would be!¹³ “Yes”—he says, under his breath, mouthing the phrases “writhing in dark passions” and “bottomless, insatiable emptiness,” rolling them about as if they were something to be savored. Uninterested in the depths of his theme, he decides he will read more tomorrow but for now he will nibble on his scone and think on how meaningless existence is until it’s time to meet his friends for pizza and beer. Our college student is a trifler with the (serious) philosophy of the absurd, and he and his kind—those who have the leisure but not the discipline to think about the questions that have plagued our predecessors for centuries—are out of balance. His text counsels despair, emptiness, and hopelessness for those who believe in the scenario it describes, and he has told himself he believes it. He’s wrong; having given it almost no thought at all he doesn’t understand it well enough to believe it, and having never wrestled with any real obstacles in life worthy of remark (although he has been confronted by a few), he is too light a vehicle for the despair he casually imagines he carries about. At best he has managed to experience what Machado de Assis has called the voluptuousness of misery.¹⁴

Of course, the costume of a college student can be exchanged for that of a politician or a professor or an entertainer or an accountant or a priest or a bartender or a police officer or a postal worker or a house husband or a tax collector or what have you. Every walk of life has its representatives among the ever-increasing plurality of people who do not seriously wrestle with questions concerning the value of the world or of the lives they lead, preferring instead to flirt with this or that half-digested theory and not to demand of one another anything more. This shallow and disinterested profile can be combined with superficial allegiance to any of the world religions above; it is certainly not a rival to them. Instead what is distinctive about this frame of mind is its lack of engagement, that hallmark characteristic of the deadly sin (or better, the capital vice) known as sloth. Sloth’s brief cameo here is intended as a

¹³ The opening of “A Tribute to Abraham,” in Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard 2006, 12). ¹⁴ In his novel Epitaph of a Small Winner (Assis 2008).

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preview to the upcoming discussion of this dangerous, elusive, and anesthetizing sin that will occupy our attention in Chapters 3 and 4, where I will argue that not only has it long been a most common reaction to what’s wrong with our world, it is itself a leading contributor to what’s wrong with our world.

6. Art, Literature, Music, Philosophy, and the Wisdom Traditions To return to an earlier thought: what of aesthetic appreciation and of the fulfillment afforded by art, literature, music, and philosophy? As conceded before—they are one and all goods. Pessimism would be an impossible philosophy to embrace if it insisted on denying value where it is so manifestly obvious that value can be found. It is exceedingly hard to see, however, how the collective value of the David, the Mona Lisa, the Iliad, Don Giovanni, the Republic, and all of their siblings—breathtaking as they are—could balance out the magnitude, duration, and distribution of evils surveyed above. Such artistic achievements and other worldly goods—like athletics, sport, dance, creativity, exploration, and discovery—are like so many stars in a moonless sky whose scattered and tiny flickers of light prevent pitch blackness. Illumined with all the beauty, delight, and comfort they provide—it’s still dreadfully dark outside. A further point calls out for recognition here. Let me make the case with literature (where it is undoubtedly easiest to illustrate, although I suspect similar arguments could be constructed with respect to art and music). Just glance at the phenomenon of our obsessive ranking of poetry, prose, and drama—ranging from the problematic construction of a Western canon to the internet’s never-ending readers’ or editors’ or authors’ top-100 lists (of British novels or post-war short stories or epic poems or neglected masterpieces) to syllabi featuring marginalized voices offering windows onto the human condition from perspectives that have been unwisely and unfairly silenced. What are the most common themes—the topics that we prize and return to again and again both as authors and as readers who engage with the writing of others? They are the very themes that speak to the veracity of the philosophy of pessimism. One can certainly take issue either in principle or, if sympathetic with the endeavor, with the particular judgments offered by the Yale literary critic Harold Bloom in his famous catalog of the greatest authors and greatest

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works of literature the world has ever known. This department-dividing volume, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, was a polemical project that became a fierce battleground in the culture wars of the 1990s.¹⁵ Whether one respects or reviles, though, it is a representative enough source from which to draw further evidence for the observation above. Consider two-dozen figures taken from Bloom’s collection—whether you think them among the best or no: Homer, Sophocles, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Augustine of Hippo, Dante Alighieri, Robert Burton, Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Michel de Montaigne, Blaise Pascal, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Honoré de Balzac, Henrik Ibsen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Jane Austen, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, Henry James, Mark Twain, Marcel Proust, James Joyce.

If one were looking for a common feature of these authors, one could do worse than note that they all—despite differences of time, place, and tongue—found a way to express the trials, tribulations, and vale of tears that characterize the human condition and found responses to that condition that resonated with their audiences. It may be Homer’s explorations of virtue and vice or Greek tragedy’s fate, hubris, and ruin or Augustine’s moral psychology or Burton’s anatomy of melancholy or Cervantes’s comic-tragicholy madness or Milton’s diagnosis of disobedience or Dostoyevsky’s testing the limits of freedom or Melville’s study of obsession or Proust’s probing of memory or Shakespeare’s Macbeth’s soliloquizing: Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.

¹⁵ Bloom 1994.

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Both here and elsewhere, the finest literature frequently echoes the philosophy of pessimism and is not so much the remedy or compensation for suffering as it is the chronicle. It is unsurprising that much of the art and literature of the last hundred years or so is a reflection of the peculiar species of suffering and the response to that suffering that will be the focus of the second half of this book— suffering born of the bare and bleak depression of disconnection, of the anxiety of being unmoored and adrift in a culture that is suspicious of objective value and objective truth. As William Barrett argues in his compact volume on existentialism, Irrational Man, “modern art thus begins, and sometimes ends, as a confession of spiritual poverty.”¹⁶ There’s ample support for that verdict: Consider the fragmentation and emptiness of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland or the tragedy (not of the grand hero, but) of everyman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman or the disorientation and vacuity of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot or the sordid underbelly of domesticity in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf or the moody preoccupation with death in Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life or the desolate post-apocalyptic vision of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road or even the string of howls in Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy against the Human Race. As with the pre-twentieth-century literature briefly alluded to above, much of the poetry, drama, prose, and essays of our modern world reflect a pessimistic outlook well suited to its times. One last word on literature and pessimism. In his novel You Can’t Go Home Again Thomas Wolfe has one of his characters write to another these lines: Of all that I have ever seen or learned, [Ecclesiastes] seems to me the noblest, the wisest, and the most powerful expression of man’s life upon this earth—and also earth’s highest flower of poetry, eloquence, and truth. I am not given to dogmatic judgments in the matter of literary creation, but if I had to make one I could only say that Ecclesiastes is the greatest single piece of writing I have ever known, and the wisdom expressed in it the most lasting and profound.¹⁷

¹⁶ In his chapter on the testimony of modern art (Barrett 1958, 42–65). ¹⁷ Wolfe 1968, 732–733. Although I can’t endorse all the superlatives, this passage touches a chord with me. In fact, it was my reaction to Ecclesiastes far more than my reaction to, say, the gospels of the New Testament that played a role in my own religious conversion some two decades ago.

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Ecclesiastes is, to be sure, one of the world’s great literary treasures, and its exploration of the philosophy of pessimism is profound and moving; it is no wonder that so much poetry and prose reads as a series of footnotes to this work of wisdom. It warns that the labor of this life earns no profit, that wisdom brings grief and knowledge sorrows, that death is no respecter of persons visiting both sage and fool, that there is nothing new under the sun, that all is vanity. And in the most haunting single passage in all of literature that I know, we are told I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill: but time and chance happeneth to them all.¹⁸

If there is a more poetic and powerful statement of pessimism and the human condition, I’ve never seen it.

7. The Fall and Original Sin Bleak AF. That’s the lesson that emerges from this abbreviated and somewhat selective portrait of ourselves and our world. Recall, though, that I did not set out to offer a comprehensive catalog of goods and evils nor did I promise an exhaustive inquiry into comparative judgments of overall value and disvalue. There are, of course, further considerations on each side of the question that don’t even fall within the wide-ranging umbrella categories canvassed above. What I did propose to do, however, was to provide the reader with a series of reflections designed to instill a sympathetic feel for the philosophy of pessimism and thereby forestall an over-hasty reflex denial to the coming chapters’ suggestion that nearly all of us are failing to flourish and to encourage an honest acknowledgement of the force of the observation that whatever the status of the world as a whole turns out to be, we live in an exceedingly rough neighborhood and in very trying times. In the epigraph from Schopenhauer that opened this chapter, the philosopher nods to the Christian doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin and writes “there seems to me no better explanation of our existence than that it

¹⁸ Ecclesiastes 9:11 (KJV).

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is the result of some false step, some sin of which we are paying the penalty.” He doesn’t mean it, but I do. Schopenhauer famously does not think that there is any point or purpose, intelligence or design behind all our suffering.¹⁹ Yet the doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin strike me as contributing essentially to the best comprehensive response to the problem of evil (with respect both to explaining its ubiquity and justifying its existence), a response that is incumbent on the Christian theist to take seriously. Despite his own lack of commitment to the sentiment, I believe Schopenhauer here stumbles upon something profound: the most persuasive account of those features of our world which have been exhibited above and which provide ample evidence for the philosophy of pessimism has its genesis in “some false step, some sin of which we are paying the penalty.” In appealing to the predictive and explanatory power of the doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin, I follow a rich Augustinian tradition which purports to shed some light on the universality of succumbing to sin (as confirmed in every chapter of anyone’s biography), by arguing that it is rooted in “a malignancy of our own sinfully diseased selves,” a tragic condition of bondage in which “we do not simply possess [sin], but [it] possesses us.”²⁰ Despite the (amusing if it weren’t so unfortunate) quip found in Chesterton’s Orthodoxy that Original Sin “is the only part of Christian theology that can really be proved” owing to the embarrassingly abundant empirical evidence each day brings forth, the doctrines have become unfashionable, even in straightforwardly religious contexts.²¹ Thus, Edward Oakes opens his excellent article on Original Sin with this sober reminder: No doctrine inside the precincts of the Christian Church is received with greater reserve and hesitation, even to the point of outright denial, than the doctrine of Original Sin. Of course in a secular culture like ours, any

¹⁹ As he vigorously argues at great length in his masterwork, The World as Will and Representation (Schopenhauer 1969). ²⁰ The quotations are from chapter 2 of Couenhoven 2013 which contains an informative discussion of Augustine’s views on the explanatory power of the doctrine of Original Sin, including how it illuminates the need for infant baptism (a practice of the Church endorsed by Augustine). Couenhoven also defends Augustine’s scriptural evidence for the doctrine of Original Sin, arguing that it draws upon more than Romans 5:12 and is less subject to the charge of fabrication than his detractors would sometimes suggest. ²¹ Chesterton 2006. This sentiment can, in fact, be found in several historical pieces and (understandably) is not always played for a laugh.

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number of Christian doctrines will be disputed by outsiders, from the existence of God to the resurrection of Jesus. But even in those denominations that pride themselves on their adherence to the orthodox dogmas of the once-universal Church, the doctrine of original sin is met with either embarrassed silence, outright denial, or at a minimum a kind of halfhearted lip service that does not exactly deny the doctrine but has no idea how to place it inside the devout life.²²

Given such disillusion (or at least diffidence), it is worth saying something more careful and precise about the doctrines and their history. There is no single, unequivocal, uncontroversial formulation or interpretation of the doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin. There is instead a tradition of piecing together dramatically different elements from a grab bag of scanty and problematic New Testament verses (minus the authority of Jesus), select Church Fathers’ tentative contributions, full-blown and unabashed Augustinianism, tempered Thomism, Reformation refinements, postmodern fixes, and the hopeless and pitiful state of total depravity depicted by Calvin. A tradition of this sort is, quite naturally, vulnerable and a target for caricature and ridicule. By carefully combining prominent (and incompatible) approaches to the Fall and Original Sin, opponents can ensure themselves of a quick victory and can often hide the fact that they have strawmanned their rivals, appearing instead to have exposed ludicrous and outmoded assertions about our origins and our shared nature. Such a quick dismissal is preventable but not easily so. Perhaps it is best to begin with a brief primer on the salient choice points for those inclined to be serious about the doctrines.²³ With respect to the Fall, there are open questions about whether it is to be construed as a genuinely historical event involving a first or primal sin or as a non-historical shared sense of separation; if historical—whether the sin was ²² Oakes 1998. Compare the opening of Jacobs 2008. Similar sentiments aimed more widely at the combined doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin can be found in Delumeau 1995, McFarland 2010, Peters 1994, Shuster 2004, and Swinburne 1989. ²³ The next two paragraphs (and the initial portion of this one) are borrowed from chapter 3 of Hudson 2014a. In addition to the literature already cited in the previous notes, I am significantly indebted in my thinking about these issues also to Berkouwer 1971, Blocher 1997, Couenhoven 2013, Crisp 2020, Harrison 2007, Kelly 1978, Madueme 2020, Murray 2011, Rea 2007, Tennant 1903, van Inwagen 2006, Wiley 2002, and Wood 2013, but especially to N. P. Williams’s stunning historical work of 1927 on the ideas of the Fall and Original Sin. Nearly a century after its publication, Williams 1927 still ranks as one of the best pieces ever written on its topic.

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committed by a single individual or a uniquely positioned pair or an entire community; if historical figures—whether those individuals were superhumans or brutes; if perfect specimens of humanity—whether they were the beneficiaries of preternatural gifts or simply functioning in their superb and original pristine state; if historical—whether the sin occurred a few thousand years ago or a few hundred thousand years ago; and finally, if historical— whether the environment in which they sinned should be painted in all the brilliant colors of the Genesaic Garden or rather in the earthy colors of the African savannah. With respect to Original Sin, there are open questions about whether its corruption is to be construed as affecting its original agent alone or was instead transmitted to that agent’s community or to that agent’s progeny or both; if transmitted—whether the transmission was immediate owing to some metaphysical solidarity between that agent and all other human beings or mediated genetically by passing from one generation to the next or mediated socially by frequent example of malicious and awful behavior; and finally, if transmitted—whether the consequence is best described as a mere privation (of the continued loss of a divine gift or preternatural power) or as an inescapable and crippling state of disordered desire tempting one to ever further sin or as a corruption of the original human character itself (a wounded nature rather than a gift rescinded).

The main obstacle to taking some set of positions on these choice points seriously seems to be the nearly universally shared view that contemporary science has taught us otherwise. That only the most incurable rubes can take the doctrines seriously in the face of our modern worldview which has pronounced decisively on their falsehood. As is frequently the case, however, alleged irreconcilable conflicts between science and religion are instead misdescribed battles concerning negotiable philosophical assumptions— conflicts between metaphysics and metaphysics.²⁴ In my book The Fall and Hypertime I provide an extended illustration and defense of this claim with respect to the putative inconsistency between the doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin and the deliverances of contemporary science. As just noted, the tension in question emerges easily enough through a study of the many forms the religious doctrines have assumed over the centuries and

²⁴ For more on such misdescribed battles and non-naturalistic metaphysics in general see Hudson 2016.

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through a review of some well-established scientific lessons on the origin and history of the universe and human persons. I refer the reader interested in the details of the strategies for reconciliation to that work for a comprehensive discussion.²⁵ The bolder of the two strategies there offered for reconciliation accommodates an unabashed extreme literalism concerning the Fall and Original Sin which nevertheless has the extraordinary and delightful feature of being thoroughly consistent with the reigning scientific orthodoxy, a resolution affected by way of exploiting a novel hypothesis in the philosophy of time. The more modest of the two strategies still countenances a historical Fall and a robust reading of Original Sin, and yet remains consistent with the genuine science that shapes our modern worldview (as opposed to a combination of genuine science and naïve metaphysics propounded by influential scientists and masquerading as science alone). This more modest reconciliation responds to the choice points just identified with the following general picture: The Adam and Eve story is (in almost all of its details) a myth, yet the construction and preservation of that myth was conducted under the influence of the Holy Spirit, and it has special significance, touching on topics of consequence to all human persons (near and far, past and future). The primary function of the myth is to document the occurrence of a historical event which occurred perhaps a few hundred thousands of years ago and which involved our first ancestors who were also persons. These individuals—whether one, two, or an entire community—in some manner freely rebelled or disobeyed or turned away from God and in so doing damaged both themselves and those who have come into the world afterwards in a way that none of us is able to repair. This rebellion had among its consequences a kind of ruin from which you and I also now suffer, primarily characterized by a loss of an innocence, immunity, safety, and grace. One crucial consequence of this ruin is our subsequent susceptibility to further sin and disobedience, a susceptibility which may not be irresistible but which no one has, in fact, resisted with the exception of Jesus (and possibly also of Mary), a susceptibility which

²⁵ Hudson 2014a. In addition to engaging debates in philosophical method, surveying the history of ideas with respect to the Fall and Original Sin, and critically evaluating the different interpretations of those doctrines (and their companion doctrine of Original Guilt), the book explores the metaphysics and epistemology of a hypertime hypothesis at considerable length, invokes that hypothesis to furnish the reconciliations just advertised, and shows the relevance of that hypothesis to further outstanding debates in the philosophy of religion—including how best to understand omnipresence and eternality and how one might effectively respond to the atheistic arguments known as the problem of evil and the problem of the best.

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indicates a corruption from which no cognitive faculty or natural impulse is immune, in short—a total depravity. And how can this story—which, if true, would seem only to further solidify the case for the philosophy of pessimism—play a role in the comprehensive response to the problem of evil? First, a quick aside: quite right— if true, these doctrines would sharply incline one to predict a world described by the philosophy of pessimism, and to the extent that one takes them to be essential components of Christianity, the Christian should be sympathetic with that philosophy on these grounds alone. Second—if true, the ruin revealed by these doctrines can serve as powerful motivation in our cooperating with God as He pursues His rescue mission known as the Atonement. For us to be rescued from our condition of disobedience and separation from God, we must redirect ourselves and employ our gift of free will in responding to the love of God. The surest route to this reunion begins with a clear and unmistakable understanding of exactly what is involved in our separation from God and in rebellion’s insistence on navigating the world on our own terms. Quite simply, a world of our own devising is a world of suffering and a world of horrors.²⁶ Before we turn to the final two sections of this chapter, which are designed to interject a sorely needed note of optimism into this grim narrative, entertain a summary statement of the philosophy of pessimism drawn from a speech by the character Naphil, a committed philosopher of pessimism from a recent novel: Creation groans with the consequences of disobedience. The family of man and the defiant angels have informed Him that they prefer a world of their own, a life unhindered and ungoverned and undisciplined to one of servitude and subjection. And He answers—“Your will be done”. And what have they made of themselves, these would-be sovereign and selfsufficient visionaries of independence? Let us be clear. They have not made their world or its laws. They live and move and have their being no longer in God but merely in the privacy of their borrowed and dingy corner of spacetime, a contingent receptacle upon which they are utterly dependent, unable to ensure it will continue to host themselves and what they imagine to be their treasures. And the laws of the realm are—as you would expect in

²⁶ This observation is vividly and memorably defended in a way that will appeal to those with a philosophical cast of mind in Peter van Inwagen’s essay on the problem of evil drawn from his Gifford Lectures (2006, 84–94).

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His absence—rules which provide for self-preservation only at the expense of the destruction of others. Beauty and sublimity are nevertheless still to be found in the structure of the world and its laws, but peer closely at just what inhabits that structure. Starlight, atmospheres, waters, soils, plants, and animals all form a chain of energy furnishing sustenance for the fallen lives, a chain whose links are violence, carnage, death, and decay. The unhappy path of energy emanating from the mindless explosions of the sun’s interior and eventuating in the conscious power to defy God in a free, embodied agent is a path along which higher life forms devour the lower, a path which couples sentience with pain as this assimilation takes the form of one creature tearing flesh from another to provide temporary nutrients for its own ever-aging and diseased body, a path in which consumption finally adopts the intellectual forms of oppression of peoples and domination of individuals . . . nor are these final stages of oppression and domination rare. Minor, ugly, pathetic, and ubiquitous sins born of grotesquely ordered desires, empty and shallow lives teeming with and tormented by unrelenting cravings perpetrating small and pointless cruelties upon one another, murderous shrieks of possessiveness over trifles because the fallen in their ravenous desire to fill themselves cannot find enough waste to eat. But neither is all domination petty and immature. Without a visible model of community in mutual harmony any longer available and with only darkened rationality and unyielding desire as guides, love of one’s neighbor degenerates into the premeditated denial, conquest, and absorption of another’s will into one’s own. In brief—ours is a fallen world in which selfless and mutual love has been replaced with the (apparent) increase of one’s own being at the (real) expense of another’s.²⁷

8. The Doctrine of (Optimistic) Pessimism So, in the face of that cry of despair, why would anyone be tempted to qualify this worldview with the apparently oxymoronic slogan “the doctrine of (optimistic) pessimism”? I will explore three reasons encouraging such a qualification, all explicitly drawn from a Christian perspective, each of which is deserving of some attention. The first and second reasons I will address in the present section and the third in the final section of this chapter.

²⁷ Hudson 2020.

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Reason One—Salvation from Bondage to Sin The first reason spans a broad Augustinian tradition. I don’t mean the milquetoast tradition—Christianish—in which after some minor earthly stumbling here and there (the causes of which are largely the external slings and arrows of outrageous fortune as opposed to an internal and deep-seated corruption of self) creatures that are on the whole, well, pretty good really (but not perfect) are forgiven their shortcomings and receive a reward that is on the whole unsurpassably superb. Here Original Sin has become so impoverished it appears as a toothless truism of the we-all-make-a-fewmistakes variety and ceases to be fit to serve the explanatory function with respect to human nature and our joint predicament that has proved to be so insightful and so central to the intelligibility of the Christian worldview. I mean, instead, to call upon that austere tradition according to which although we are abysmally steeped in sinfulness, in utter bondage to sin and suffering from concupiscence and grossly inordinate or insufficient self-love, we nevertheless—in spite of such wretchedness—may still be the recipients of loving forgiveness and salvific grace.²⁸ This harsh and unrelenting view of our corrupted nature has waxed and waned across the centuries that separate us from Augustine, but despite dips in popularity it was never completely abandoned. It was expressed in a scorn for the world and contempt for humanity by Christian ascetics, preached as a source of the devastating wars, pestilence, and famine that pockmarked life in the middle ages, reinforced by confessional practices and penitential regimes, and (as always) available as a leading explanation for the failures, large and small, in countless individual lives.²⁹ The role of the revival of attention to the doctrine of Original Sin in the Reformation is well documented, and following Calvin’s sixteenth-century example, writing and preaching on the absolute centrality of sin reinvigorated the theology of the seventeenth century in colonial New England with figures such as John Winthrop and Cotton Mather and of the eighteenth century’s First Great Awakening in the formidable figure of Jonathan Edwards. Fixation on sin fell into disfavor as the world marched forward into modernity, but twentieth-century theology received a forceful reminder of its pedigree

²⁸ For what it’s worth, hearing that sentence as overexcited hyperbole is one of the many experiences it and the paragraph that precedes it are meant to criticize. ²⁹ Once again, a fascinating history of many of these topics can be found in Delumeau 1995.

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and explanatory power in the compelling Gifford Lectures of Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man.³⁰ In pursuing so unrelentingly (relative to his contemporaries) the issue of the centrality of sin, Niebuhr put forth an extended and excellent defense of his conviction that “there are resources in the Christian faith for an understanding of human nature which have been lost in modern culture.” There is real danger, Niebuhr warns, in straying from this tradition and focusing too narrowly on just one part of the Christian conception of man: The high estimate of the human stature implied in the concept of “image of God” stands in paradoxical juxtaposition to the low estimate of human virtue in Christian thought. Man is a sinner. His sin is defined as rebellion against God. The Christian estimate of human evil is so serious precisely because it places evil at the very center of human personality: in the will.³¹

By endlessly searching for external causes of temptation and loci of sin, we increase the likelihood of shirking our own responsibility, of deceiving ourselves about the degree of our complicity in evil, and of placing misguided hope in the sufficiency of our own efforts to eradicate our vices. Recognizing that ours is a condition of internal and intimate allegiance to sin (as opposed to the external misfortune of being continually steered, unexpectedly and against our will, into temptation’s path) helps us to avoid these attitudes, and, Niebuhr would add, helps us “to find ourselves in terms of obedience to the divine will,” an obedience that “makes it possible for man to relate himself to God without pretending to be God.”³² Yet, to be fair, there is the danger of treating certain expressions of sin as far more universal than they are. Niebuhr, in particular, has been singled out for special attention in this regard in overemphasizing a distinctive experience of sin from a male perspective—say, sins born of pride and of grasping for power as opposed to sins unified by an “underdevelopment or negation of the self.”³³ As Judith Plaskow succinctly concludes in her critique of Niebuhr (following the ground-breaking lead of Valerie Saiving some twenty years earlier): “insofar as [Niebuhr’s] theology fails to speak to the

³⁰ Niebuhr 1941. Finstuen 2009 provides an instructive overview of renewed Protestant attention to Original Sin in the twentieth century read against the backdrop of “an age of anxiety” (especially as it appears in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich). ³¹ Niebuhr 1941, vii, 16. ³² Niebuhr 1941, 15. ³³ Saiving 1960, 109.

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situation of women, it fails to speak to the human situation.”³⁴ Moreover, an alleged remedy that focuses on obedience also comes wedded to a special class of problems, which, if allowed to remain unanticipated, unattended, and unopposed, can certainly erupt in ways that disproportionately damage the vulnerable and historically most mistreated members of the Christian community.³⁵ Whatever forms the expression of sin takes and however they are distributed by lines of gender or race or class or even time and chance, without persistent attention to the corruption of our nature quite over and above whatever defects might tarnish our environment (which is the proper price of taking seriously the doctrine of Original Sin), our portrait of ourselves is more flattering and self-congratulatory than it deserves to be; an honest look yields a deeper pessimism. With the promise of wholescale transformation through God’s grace and the work of the Atonement, our portrait of what we can become is finer and infinitely better than anything we can make of ourselves and our world; this Christian point of view yields a hopeful optimism. Together, they form a doctrine of (optimistic) pessimism worthy of the name.

Reason Two—Original Sin as Pedagogue The second of my three reasons for the “optimistic” qualification on the philosophy of pessimism joins in the spirit of the first, but ventures beyond the thesis that ours is a world with the promise of eventual salvation from our bondage to sin (rather than a godless cosmos that springs into life in a low state of entropy, bears witness to a few billion years of unredeemed suffering, and dissipates into a meaningless and eternal night of stillness and equilibrium). It does so by emphasizing a special function of the universal corruption of Original Sin. The thought is again Augustinian, simple, and straightforward: the stark confrontation with and recognition of our own depravity that this corruption makes possible can teach us exactly what awaits when we demand individual sovereignty and independence from God ³⁴ Plaskow 1980, 93. For a brief history of the development of this critique over the last halfcentury, see McDougall 2007. I will return to this important critique and to the challenging issues it raises in Chapter 3 and its much more detailed exploration of sin. ³⁵ I will return to the concern of the ways in which a focus on obedience may place the vulnerable at risk in Chapter 5 where the relation of obedience and its analysis will be center stage.

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and can thereby function as a goad which may motivate us to renew our relationship with God and to cooperate freely (to whatever extent we are permitted) in realizing the Atonement.³⁶ The Christian promise of a new life together with this additional thought that much of the evil that disfigures this life may yet be instrumental in affecting our return to obedience and our freely willed cooperation with God’s plan for rescuing us from our own sin is grounds for optimism, indeed. Moreover, the awful period between rebellion and reunion will be finite and will forever diminish in an eternity with no further suffering, for when paired with eternity, any finite interval is vanishingly small. A final thought to bring this section to a close. One can occasionally find in the literature on pessimism a “more pessimistic than thou” attitude which conveys the impression that the overarching layer of optimism urged here makes for an impure, less respectable, inferior brand of pessimism: Thus, Dienstag adds a flourish to the end of a paragraph on Augustine: “And still the pessimists say more honestly than the Christians, ‘All is vanity.’ ”³⁷ Christians, of course, should not permit a reading of that sentence that would interpret the words “more honestly” with the phrase “with more truthfulness,” since they rather obviously take the intended atheistic variant on the pessimistic view to be false. Nor should they accept the implication that their atheistic opponents are on the up and up while they are being less than forthright in the presentation of their own position. Whatever criticisms might be launched against the Augustinian tradition of (optimistic) pessimism, it could hardly be credited with trying to hide either the relevant optimism or the good news which is its source. That portion of reality (with particular emphasis on our condition from cradle to grave—on our mortal lives) whose existence is jointly acknowledged by Christian and atheist partners-in-pessimism is indeed shot through with all sorts of disvalue. Those pessimists who are inclined to think that this portion is exhaustive of actuality then resist the optimistic Christian addition—and this worst of times will be swallowed up in this best of worlds. There is no blue-ribbon-of-real-pessimism to be coveted or

³⁶ Twice in Ecclesiastes do we hear a variant on this theme: “this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith” (1:13) and “I have seen the travail, which God hath given to the sons of men to be exercised in it” (3:10). This second reason provides one of a number of plausible answers to the question “And what function, apart from punishment, might be served by God’s so exercising us?” The excellent phrase “sin as pedagogue” I borrow from Couenhoven 2013, 56. ³⁷ Dienstag 2006, 245.

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awarded here, but at least one of our theorists is significantly mistaken with respect to the second of these two judgments. As I intend to argue in the following chapters, the best strategy for human flourishing in this hard world of ours depends on which of them has made the mistake.³⁸

9. Felix Culpa Reason Three—O Fortunate Fall! My third and final reason for the “optimistic” qualification on the philosophy of pessimism (which like the second capitalizes on features of the doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin) is a source of even greater optimism but is also considerably more complicated. Its discussion and critical evaluation requires some preparatory, stage-setting remarks.³⁹ In his “Supralapsarianism, or ‘O Felix Culpa’,” Alvin Plantinga proposes to revive and to carefully consider a response to evil that “has been with us for a long time,” a response which can help us to achieve “an important goal for Christians”—namely, to understand “the evil our world displays from a Christian perspective.” Plantinga does not claim that adopting the proposal he here explores is required in order to respond adequately to those arguments grounded in evil which target theistic and Christian belief—other responses featuring soul-making, free will, multiverse scenarios, the price of regular worlds, and the feebleness of noseeum inferences apparently suffice for that. Rather, he proposes to make progress on a second issue, the question of how Christians in particular should think about “evil and its place in God’s world.”⁴⁰ Plantinga articulates and advocates for a number of theses concerning value that are at the heart of his proposal. Here are the opening moves:

³⁸ I should like to note in fairness that these two figures do not occupy all of the conceptual territory, for there are atheists (those who reject the existence of the God of Western theism) who nevertheless think there is something in addition to that portion of reality we have been discussing that could potentially justify an optimism of another sort. I encourage the reader to examine efforts in this vein in the fascinating work of John Schellenberg, especially his 2009. ³⁹ This final section is more demanding than the foregoing discussion. The reader feeling sufficiently optimistic about the demonstration of pessimism that occupied sections 1 through 8 is hereby invited to move directly to the next chapter. But to those readers eager to secure as much optimism as they can and who would enjoy a critical evaluation of an unjustly neglected proposal—read on. ⁴⁰ Plantinga 2004, 3–5.

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1) Among the good-making qualities of worlds we find creaturely happiness, beauty, justice, creaturely goodness, performance of duty, and creatures’ conformity to love God above all else and to love their neighbors as themselves. 2) Among the bad-making qualities of worlds we find suffering, pain, creaturely rejection of God, hatred, and sin. Sensible selections. Those are, indeed, good-making and bad-making features of worlds, respectively. But then we venture out into deeper waters—it turns out that on Plantinga’s view our first list of good-making features omitted the two most important goods: 3) God is good. Better—God is the greatest good. Better yet—God is infinitely good. Better still—God’s goodness is unlimited, where unlimited value advances beyond mere infinite value by crediting God with a goodness which is better than any quantity, quality, variety, or distribution of creaturely goods. The line is drawn there, however. Plantinga does not insist that God’s existence is maximally valuable; there are a few things to add here and there to a world containing God that can make it even better. (Significantly, it is worth noting that as a side-benefit, owing to God’s tremendous goodness and to God’s necessary existence and to the constraints on creation given God’s nature, every possible world is a very good world.) 4) The state of affairs consisting of Incarnation-and-Atonement is good and (unlike God’s existence) is a contingent good. Better—Incarnation-andAtonement is the second greatest good, an unthinkably magnificent good “that towers enormously above all the rest of the contingent states of affairs.” Better yet—Incarnation-and-Atonement is infinitely good. Better still—the value of Incarnation-and-Atonement (like the value of God) is better than any quantity, quality, variety, or distribution of creaturely goods—and it is also so splendid that when combined with any quantity, quality, variety, or distribution of creaturely evil, sin, and suffering, its presence will still tip the overall balance in favor of a very good world, indeed. As before, though, no need to go overboard and call it maximal.⁴¹

⁴¹ I will hyphenate the term “Incarnation-and-Atonement” throughout the discussion in order to follow Plantinga in treating the state of affairs which constitutes the Incarnation together with the state of affairs which constitutes the Atonement as a single, unified good. The separability of these states of affairs will be considered in a moment.

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Admittedly, the third and fourth sets of claims aren’t as transparently true as are the lists of good- and bad-making features of worlds, but keep them in mind, since they drive the proposed theodicy to come. Finally, Plantinga introduces a thesis of comparative value: The Strong Value Assumption: Each possible world that contains Incarnation-and-Atonement is better than every possible world that lacks Incarnation-and-Atonement.

The machinery is then in place to float the following hypothesis: God aims to create a world that rises to a certain magnificent level of value. Given the strong value assumption, that level of value is achieved only by Incarnation-and-Atonement worlds. But Incarnation-and-Atonement worlds are worlds that include the Fall, sin, and the consequences of sin— evil and suffering. Accordingly, Plantinga concludes: “If a theodicy is an attempt to explain why God permits evil, what we have here is a theodicy— and, if I’m right, a successful theodicy.”⁴² Before considering powerful critical rejoinders to this hypothesis, let me briefly note that Plantinga anticipates three pointed questions that are likely to occur to his audience and offers some intriguing reflections designed to blunt their force. The first question—Why does God permit suffering in addition to sin and evil? And the outlines of its answer—Because the permitted sin and evil perpetrated by significantly free creatures causes suffering and because suffering is an important instrumental good in several different respects. The second question—Why does God permit so much suffering and evil? And the outlines of its answer—Because again even this much may be instrumentally good in a compensating way, or because for all we know the relevant counterfactuals of freedom necessitate just this much and no less, or perhaps because suffering and evil have to reach a certain threshold before Incarnation-and-Atonement is a fitting reaction (rather than an unreasonably excessive response), or because this much suffering may be the price of a highly regular world. Moreover, some amount of unnecessary suffering may be unavoidable, if there is a lower bound on how much suffering is required but no precise amount of suffering such that slightly less would not have sufficed for God’s purposes.

⁴² Plantinga 2004, 12. See also Helm 2019 for another take on and defense of this theodicy.

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The third question—Why view this whole affair as a great and towering good rather than a demented, cosmic version of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome where God orchestrates the fall of His children and permits astonishing kinds of evil and suffering just so that He can leap bravely into view and heroically rescue us in the final reel? And the outlines of its answer—Because although this involves treating His creatures as means, unlike standard and genuine instances of the syndrome, it does not involve any unfair or impermissible treatment of or any instance of imperfect love for His creatures (despite the fact that God allows them to suffer for His own purposes rather than for their own good and despite the fact that God has not secured their permission for this sacrifice in advance). Why? Perhaps because God knows that His creatures would consent if they fully understood and their desires were properly ordered, or perhaps because those creatures are, in fact, compensated directly in some way or other that satisfies many of those plausible agent-centered restrictions which, as it turns out, only appear to be imperiled here. Again, whereas these are genuinely significant and serious opening challenges, Plantinga has provided genuinely significant and promising initial responses to them. We will return to the force of those responses later. However, even if these first three objections were thus decidedly put to rest, there are a few other theological and philosophical matters worth worrying over before we should be prepared to sign on to this theodicy. In particular, powerful worries targeting Plantinga’s strategy have emerged in recent literature from which I would like to highlight three objections advanced by Kevin Diller and Marilyn McCord Adams. Diller asks why Plantinga takes the value of the Incarnation-andAtonement to be so high, and finds in his theodicy this answer: Because Incarnation-and-Atonement yield both the stupendous good of significantly increased intimacy with God and also the exceedingly good display of God’s self-sacrificing love for those creatures who have rebelled against Him. To this answer Diller raises a philosophical objection (later echoed by Adams): The Incarnation and the Atonement are logically independent of one another; we could have Incarnation without Atonement (perhaps even absent suffering of any kind) and (although it is a considerably more controversial claim) we might even have Atonement without Incarnation. Yet it is the precondition of Atonement alone that supplies the present theodicy with its answer to the question—“Whence evil and

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suffering?”—whereas it is very probably the Incarnation that primarily generates the great good of increased intimacy.⁴³ Further, Diller raises a theological objection: The Felix Culpa approach misidentifies the relative value of a proper relationship with God in comparison with a demonstration of God’s love for us insofar as that theodicy maintains that sacrificing a proper relationship with God (for all for a while and for some forever) is an appropriate price to pay in order to be humbled and astonished and benefitted by a certain display of God’s love, which, for some peculiar reason, can only be communicated by way of Atonement.⁴⁴ Diller’s excellent objections force the proponent of the Felix Culpa theodicy to retreat into a somewhat more precarious position. One option in response to Diller’s first objection is to argue that every Atonement world is also an Incarnation world so that they cannot come apart after all (but this is a path fraught with philosophical and theological obstacles). Another option is to argue that the value of the towering and magnificent good of Atonement alone deserves all the accolades earlier bestowed on Incarnation-and-Atonement together. Accordingly, the revised strong value assumption will require revision so that it now reads—“each possible world that contains Atonement is better than every possible world that lacks Atonement”—but since some of those non-Atonement worlds will nevertheless contain the Incarnation and the increase in intimacy it brings to our relation with God, the plausibility of the value assumption now operative is seriously diminished. The options in response to Diller’s second objection are either to argue that the magnificent display of God’s love really is as good as advertised and that whereas a proper relationship with God may be the best good in our lives, its temporary interruption for the sake of securing the value of God’s great expression of love for His rebellious creatures is a worthwhile exchange, or else to argue that it is not just the display of such divine love that furnishes the Atonement with its supreme value but the presence of something else tucked in as well (e.g., perhaps the unique kind of intimacy which comes from cooperating with God in effecting our rescue from the consequences of sin) which, like the deep expression of love in question, is obtainable by way of Atonement alone. In her analysis and critique, Adams adds a third worry to these first two by focusing squarely on agent-centered restrictions. Adams agrees with

⁴³ Diller 2008, 90–91 and Adams 2008, 131–132.

⁴⁴ Diller 2008, 92–93.

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Plantinga that God would not violate any moral obligations in making use of His creatures to further His aim of increasing global value at the expense of extreme and uncompensated personal disvalue. Their parting of ways turns instead on whether in so doing God would be unloving, unmerciful, or less than perfectly good. And just to be clear—on the theodicy on offer—some of us are not merely being forced to suffer the headache for an hour or two for purposes that do not personally benefit us, but to suffer being wrecked and ruined, damnable and (barring Universalism) damned. In short, Adams charges Plantinga’s theodicy with having an “insufficient appreciation of the category of horrors”—evils so ruinous, so detrimental to a person, that any greater good thereby provided for would have to be personally compensating in a way that restores individual meaning and value to the life of the horror-participant in order to properly exonerate God from the accusation of being unloving or unmerciful.⁴⁵ As with Diller’s critique, Adams’s objection also forces the proponent of the Felix Culpa theodicy to take on explicit further philosophical and theological commitments. The options in response to Adams’s objection are either to answer the call at the end of her critique to show just how Atonement worlds nevertheless allow horror-participants to be personally compensated in a way befitting God’s perfect love and mercy (with the proviso that mere Universalism isn’t individually specific or personally restoring enough to achieve that end), or else to argue that not only are perfect love and mercy compatible with requiring the suffering of a person for ends that are unconnected to her own good but that these traits are also compatible with that suffering extending to being wrecked and ruined, damnable and (maybe in some cases) damned.⁴⁶ If we were to stop the discussion here and were asked to choose sides, I have to admit I could work up some real sympathy toward Plantinga’s end of this debate. I feel the force and deep attraction of the Felix Culpa theodicy and its strong value assumption. I am heartened by Plantinga’s promising answers to why it would require evil and suffering in addition to sin, and why it would require as much evil, suffering, and sin as we see in the actual world, and why it can escape the charge of being an objectionable instance of Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome on a cosmic scale. I acknowledge and ⁴⁵ Adams 2008, 128–138. ⁴⁶ This second strategy will face the formidable opposition developed in Stump 2010 and in Adams 1999.

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welcome the need to reformulate the theodicy by making its further commitments explicit in deference to Diller’s objections, first by maintaining that Atonement either requires Incarnation or (more plausibly) is equipped with sufficient goods on its own to earn the job and second by maintaining that the expression of God’s love embodied in the Atonement together with its other unique good-making properties really are as great as advertised. And I recognize and welcome Adams’s call to take a stand on the issue of horrors, either by revealing how Atonement furnishes the appropriate level of personal recompense for horror-participants or else (and I confess a preference for this option) by explaining why perfect love and mercy require no such thing, after all. Unfortunately, however, I think we can’t just leave the discussion here; it’s not yet time to take sides. There is yet a further problem for Plantinga’s Felix Culpa theodicy that (unlike the others) strikes me as decisive. The Felix Culpa theodicy depends on the revised strong value assumption which, in turn, depends on Plantinga’s claims about comparative value rehearsed in the opening remarks of this section. Since the worry I will investigate below does not turn on whether the Incarnation is separable from the Atonement, I will continue to treat them (in accordance with Plantinga’s own presentation) as a single, unified good. A reminder: Incarnation-and-Atonement is good, and (unlike God’s existence) is a contingent good. Better—Incarnation-and-Atonement is the second greatest good, an unthinkably magnificent good “that towers enormously above all the rest of the contingent states of affairs.” Better yet—Incarnation-andAtonement is infinitely good. Better still—the value of Incarnation-andAtonement (like the value of God) is better than any quantity, quality, variety, or distribution of creaturely goods—and it is also so splendid that when combined with any quantity, quality, variety, or distribution of creaturely evil, sin, and suffering, its presence will still tip the overall balance in favor of a very good world, indeed.

The assertions are clear, but the support is elusive, for in the few paragraphs devoted to establishing the absolutely essential value claims which fuel this theodicy, Plantinga writes: I believe that any world with Incarnation-and-Atonement is a better world than any without it—or at any rate better than any world in which God

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does nothing comparable to Incarnation-and-Atonement. It is hard to imagine what God could do that is in fact comparable to Incarnationand-Atonement; but perhaps this is just a limitation of our imagination. But since this is so hard to imagine, I propose that we ignore those possible worlds, if there are any, in which God does not arrange for Incarnationand-Atonement, but does something else of comparable excellence.⁴⁷

That’s problematic. Of course, any world with Incarnation-and-Atonement is better than any world in which God does nothing comparable in value . . . but rather than hearing a triviality, I detect a rhetorical assertion to the effect that there is in fact nothing comparable in value. But why, precisely, are we to accept this verdict? Because, we are told, it is hard to imagine what it could be. Clearly, it would be uncharitable to hear in this the verdict that we can eventually imagine it although doing so would be a difficult task for us, but exactly what is communicated, then? I suspect nothing more than the observation that we are not in fact aware of anything comparable in value to Incarnation-and-Atonement that we recognize to be comparable in value to Incarnation-and-Atonement. Perhaps that’s right—suppose we grant this point. What advice follows upon this observation about our inability? Well, that we ignore all those possible worlds in which such comparable (but unidentified) goods are substituted for Incarnation-and-Atonement. But, of course, without proper assurance that aren’t any, this advice can’t really be intended to be taken at face value in this context, for then the theodicy on offer would transparently fail in its goal of offering a genuine and satisfying explanation to Christians of the sin, evil, and suffering in our world, for it would simply propose to ignore those highly eligible worlds God could have created which are every bit as good as ours but which do not contain the sin, evil, or suffering required by the Atonement. Once again, the only plausible reading at hand is one that repeats the position that there is in fact nothing comparable in value. So, just what line of reasoning emerges from behind the rhetorical flourishes? The answer, I believe, is a simple and straightforward noseeum inference. Nothing stronger is justified, nothing weaker has any chance of supporting the weight placed on it, and (as far as I can see) nothing else can reasonably be extracted from the passage. The explicit premise—We are not in fact aware of anything comparable in value to Incarnation-and-

⁴⁷ Plantinga 2004, 10.

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Atonement that we recognize as such. The suppressed premise—But if there were any such thing, we would be aware of it and recognize it as such. The conclusion—Hence, there is nothing comparable in value to Incarnationand-Atonement. Thus, in the end, the core claim in the theodicy at issue is a thesis about the relative value of Incarnation-and-Atonement defended by appeal to a noseeum inference. Noseeum inferences of precisely this sort, however, are vulnerable to socalled skeptical theism considerations. Skeptical theism provides a satisfactory block to one of the most promising arguments for atheism, and this is responsible for much of its appeal, but it is also independently immensely plausible. Skeptical theism can be characterized in a number of ways, but I here will formulate it as a conjunction of three theses.⁴⁸ We are in the dark about whether the possible goods and possible evils we are aware of are representative of the possible goods and possible evils that there are, and We are in the dark about whether the necessary connections we know of between the obtaining of possible goods and the obtaining of possible evils are representative of the entailments of this type that there are, and We are in the dark about whether the amount of good or evil we recognize in a state of affairs is representative of the total amount of good or evil it actually manifests.

(Note that “representative” in the present context is elliptical for “representative with respect to the property—figuring in a potentially explanatory reason for God’s permitting the sin, evil, and suffering of our world”.) This seems to me a clear-headed, honest, and humble recognition of our epistemic state, and (more to the point) it seems to me to have a direct and lethal analogue when applied to Plantinga’s noseeum inference.

⁴⁸ Compare the formulations in Bergmann 2001 and 2009 and Howard-Snyder 2009 which contain excellent discussions and defenses of skeptical theism. In utilizing the phrasing “in the dark about whether,” I bracket theism in the interests of not making a dialectically inappropriate move: as Daniel Howard-Snyder has pointed out to me, whereas the theist may well take herself to have very good reasons to believe that the objects of our awareness are not representative (on the grounds that since God exists, compensating goods or morally justifying reasons also exist— notwithstanding our being unaware of them), the skeptical-theism theses are meant to express the state we are and should be in if we do not first presuppose God’s existence and then simply infer that some compensating good or morally justifying reason is thereby guaranteed, as well.

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Admittedly, we surely have a fair amount of knowledge about value. Certainly, for example, we know that Incarnation-and-Atonement is a towering and magnificent good. But given the intellectually modest concessions embodied in skeptical theism, we have no good reason to think that if there were a contingent state of affairs comparable in value to Incarnationand-Atonement that we would be aware of it, or—if it were somehow an object of mere awareness—that we would recognize its full range of infinite and unlimited value. That’s not to say that Plantinga’s strong value assumption is false—far from it; rather it is simply a reminder that if we do know that assumption, it is not by way of a noseeum inference grounded in what is hard to imagine. Unfortunately, other potential routes to demonstrating the supreme and unique value of Incarnation-and-Atonement do not seem to be very promising either. It is not especially plausible to maintain that this crucial thesis is available for confirmation through the exercise of our other natural capacities. It is not, for example, an infallible deliverance of some Cartesian faculty of intuition or illuminated by the natural light of reason. It is not a properly basic belief. It is not a product of memory, sense perception, or introspection. It is not yielded by an employment of Reidian commonsense. It is not a self-evident, transparent, or first truth. It is not a proper object of a priori intuition. It is not a celebrated discovery of contemporary axiology. Moreover, it is worth noting that this crucial thesis is similarly unlikely to be known by us by way of divine revelation. Of course, I fully recognize that my word that this thesis is not a proper subject of revelation may not be very authoritative (despite my having spent minutes and minutes poring over the salient texts and resources in the area), but my theological informants have assured me that it would be a decidedly controversial position to insist that we know by way of revelation that Incarnation-and-Atonement is (and is the only) infinite and unlimited contingent good. Moreover (although this is a minority view) the skeptical theism that spells trouble for the noseeum inference detailed above also poses a perplexing problem for any claim to knowledge by revelation alone so that even if there were no controversy to be had over the view that this crucial value thesis was backed by revelation, still—it is not clear that all would be transparently well.⁴⁹ Accordingly, I do not see any way to adequately support the central move in the theodicy. Without good reason to accept the thesis on the

⁴⁹ Hudson 2014b.

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overwhelming value that Incarnation-and-Atonement contributes to a world (everything considered) and about the uniqueness of this package in this respect among created goods, we would be irresponsible to take the strong value assumption to be true, and without the strong value assumption, the Felix Culpa theodicy is in trouble. Significantly, however, without good reason to reject that characterization of the value that Incarnation-and-Atonement contributes to a world (everything considered) or to reject the claim of uniqueness, we would be equally irresponsible to take the strong value assumption to be false. Moreover, since both parties to the debate seem to rely on all-in judgments about value, the considerations discussed above seem as well suited to contest taking the thesis to be false as they are to contest taking it to be true. So who gets it right—Plantinga in his endorsement of the Felix Culpa theodicy and its strong value assumption or Diller and Adams in their rejection? Full of doubt—it is Milton’s Adam who gets it right in the closing pages of Paradise Lost: O goodness infinite, goodness immense! That all this good of evil shall produce, And evil turn to good; more wonderful Than that which by creation first brought forth Light out of darkness! Full of doubt I stand, Whether I should repent me now of sin By me done and occasioned, or rejoice Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring. John Milton, Paradise Lost (XII.469–476)

Milton’s Adam has no idea whether or not his rebellion was, in the end, a fortunate fall—and neither do we. Note that with this verdict on the Felix Culpa theodicy, our third reason for optimism about our pessimistic worldview has been demoted to something in which even the committed, believing Christian might, at best, place her hope, not her confidence. Accordingly, there is a sense in which this is pessimism about optimism about pessimism. But given that we are in no position to refute the Felix Culpa theodicy either, I am feeling more or less optimistic about that result.

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In Summary The philosophy of pessimism is well grounded, quite independently of any particular religious orientation. The collective evidence drawn from the plight of animals, the natural dispositions of human persons, our checkered history of social and political institutions, the world’s religions and wisdom traditions, and humanity’s achievements in art, literature, music, and philosophy is clear and compelling. Moreover, this pessimism is overdetermined and even more austere for the Christian who takes the doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin seriously: a worldview according to which the local time and place (spanning the Fall to the General Resurrection) is a relentless tale of sin and corruption—for most a lamentable chronicle of withering lives, for some a living nightmare of inscrutable horrors. Yet the good news, again for the Christian, is that this philosophy of pessimism can be tempered by reasons for optimism—reasons which furnish a hope for salvation and also a hope that before every tear is wiped away, the groans of creation and the sufferings of its creatures will have properly inspired us to cooperate with God in the process of Atonement, a process that itself will have enhanced the magnificence of our world insofar as it thus embodies such a marvelous good. Such optimism can give one the courage to look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come even through the doubly darkened glass of sin and ignorance through which we now peer.

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2 Thus Mammon Spake Let us not then pursue . . . our state Of splendid vassalage, but rather seek Our own good from ourselves, and from our own Live to ourselves, though in this vast recess, Free, and to none accountable, preferring Hard liberty before the easy yoke Of servile Pomp . . . As he our darkness, cannot we his Light Imitate when we please? This Desert soil Wants not her hidden luster, Gems and Gold; Nor want we skill or Art, from whence to raise Magnificence; and what can Heaven show more? —John Milton, Paradise Lost (II.249–273)

1. Cannot We His Light Imitate When We Please? The impious War in Heaven has been lost, and Satan and his rebel angels have been cast into Hell there to dwell in penal fire, as the curtain rises on Milton’s brilliant epic, Paradise Lost. And what fault did Satan’s excessive pride engender that led to such ruin? He opposed the monarchy of God, attempting to set himself above his peers by usurping God’s place, but . . . how best to say it? . . . without the proper qualifications. And now, separated from God, happiness forfeited, in pain, he lies vanquished on a lake of fire with choices before him. He awakes from his fall in a prison of his own making, as Milton says “in darkness visible,” but rather than capitalizing on this moment to appreciate the immensity of his mistake, the tragedy of his loss, and the only remedy for his condition, he immediately falls into self-deception (which quickly transforms into the deceiving of anyone who will listen to him). He consoles himself with the absurd thought that he might have been victorious after all, and takes refuge in the fact that even if beaten on the field, not even the Fallenness and Flourishing. Hud Hudson, Oxford University Press (2021). © Hud Hudson. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849094.003.0002

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Omnipotent can wrest from him his worship or his love freely given, and he assures himself it will be an expression of great courage to forever maintain the one and only thing ultimately within his own power—to elect to remain in Hell, separated from God. A horrible tale and yet oddly familiar: So one of God’s creatures has rebelled, has rejected God’s sovereignty, has demanded that the world and his place in it be conducted in terms of his own choosing, and has ridiculed the prospect of reconciling himself to God which would apparently require the preposterous admission of his own subordinate place. Moreover, he has played the only card in his hand that has any value at all—the trump card of free will with which he can trade his happiness for the opportunity to grieve God by frustrating His desire for reunion. Satan knows he has made the wrong choice. As he surveys his new dungeon, the philosophy of pessimism has hardly ever been more appropriate: Farewell happy Fields Where Joy forever dwells: Hail horrors hail. Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings A mind not to be changed by Place or Time. The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than he Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: Here we may reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven. John Milton, Paradise Lost (I.249–263)

Beautifully rendered in poetry, yet again not really unfamiliar: One of God’s creatures fully realizes that he is miserable and why he is miserable, and yet voluntarily and perversely bids goodbye to the joy he could regain. Apparently proud of the prediction that he will not reverse course and exchange this disastrous decision for the only source of happiness possible for him, he accepts the self-lie that he has the power to make a Heaven of

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Hell as well as the self-lie that his freedom can be exercised only in rebellion. It is terribly important to recognize that the second claim is a lie. Satan does not forfeit his freedom in returning to God; he forfeits his pride, there’s a difference, and we should say so explicitly. The hopelessly confused final line rings hollow, yet how often is it continually reaffirmed, if not in words, in the daily choices and actions of so many of God’s other creatures who similarly take a proud stance of disobedience, cobble together a life that is anything but heavenly, and tell themselves how very good it is to be king? In no time at all the demons have set to work to build a great palace, Pandaemonium, where in council “the great Seraphic lords and Cherubim / in close recess and secret conclave sat” to weigh their collective options for action. The point of this quick detour through the early stages of Milton’s poem is to examine the advice offered by the third and most persuasive of the demons to speak at this gathering—one Mammon—a speech which only partly carries the debate in Pandaemonium. Although Mammon’s advice is more or less put into play immediately afterwards, it is temporarily postponed in celebration of Satan’s departure for Eden to pursue a complementary plan—by force or subtlety to waste or possess or seduce God’s new creation. What interests me here, however, is how Mammon’s advice seems also to be directed at the rest of us, Milton’s readers, and how many of us seem to believe that it is excellent advice, indeed. Mammon, afraid of another contest with the unfallen angels and unwilling to return to Heaven chastised and on condition of obedience, is nevertheless a rhetorical genius, and he begins his series of recommendations by considering the simple and best alternative only to make it appear abominable. Suppose He should relent And publish Grace to all, on promise made Of new Subjection; with what eyes could we Stand in his presence humble, and receive Strict Laws imposed, to celebrate his Throne With warbled Hymns, and to his Godhead sing Forced Halleluiahs; while he Lordly sits Our envied Sovereign, and his Altar breathes Ambrosial Odors and Ambrosial Flowers, Our servile offerings. This must be our task In Heaven, this our delight; how wearisome

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Eternity so spent in worship paid To whom we hate. John Milton, Paradise Lost (II.249–278)

Mammon’s preamble, in short, amounts to little more than these pairings: Their present misery—preferable to the beneficence of God’s grace; their torment and dissatisfaction—vastly superior to acknowledging and respecting where acknowledgement and respect are properly due; to occupy a subordinate position—wearisome and servile; the Creator of the world and the source of all goodness (and this is left wholly unchallenged by any in his audience)—an object of hate. But Mammon envisions a solution which does not require the dreaded reconciliation or the humiliation he imagines would inevitably attend it. And his scheme doubles as a recommendation for our own response to the philosophy of pessimism showcased in the previous chapter. Thus Mammon spake . . . Let us not then pursue . . . our state Of splendid vassalage, but rather seek Our own good from ourselves, and from our own Live to ourselves, though in this vast recess, Free, and to none accountable, preferring Hard liberty before the easy yoke Of servile Pomp . . . As he our darkness, cannot we his Light Imitate when we please? This Desert soil Wants not her hidden luster, Gems and Gold; Nor want we skill or Art, from whence to raise Magnificence; and what can Heaven show more? John Milton, Paradise Lost (II.249–273)

Issuing advice which echoes Satan’s own words upon electing to remain in Hell to make himself its possessor and brandishing a pride unwilling to be altered by the prospect of eternal separation from the only source of genuine happiness, Mammon instructs us all to trust in our own glorious powers, to imitate God’s light with our skill, artistry, intelligence, and all the magnificent resources of our own selves—to make a Heaven of Hell. And once we do, what have we really lost in rebellion? What can Heaven show more?

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In urging us to make lemonade of Hell’s lemons, Mammon shows himself to be the demon of Enlightenment optimism. But, of course, let us remember that our minds (as are the angels’) are merely unwilling (not unable) to choose reconciliation, our powers are feeble (hardly glorious), our resources paltry (especially when the bar for magnificence is divinity), and the directive to exploit these tools to make a Heaven of Hell, laughable.

2. Analytic Methodology Nevertheless, the demons applaud. Their confidence in their own strength and capacities is undiminished by their resounding defeat and painful relocation, and they are initially delighted with the proposal. Leaving the grandeur of Milton’s poetry now to one side, I think it is fair to say that throughout history humanity has taken Mammon’s advice to heart. Despite the foregoing mountain of evidence for pessimism, many of us find ourselves buoyed up by the casual assurance that we are surely equal to the task of creating a local oasis in the midst of this scorched and inhospitable world. Taken in and flattered by such thoughts (which we seem eager to recommend to ourselves and one another), we are easily persuaded to follow Mammon’s lead.¹ Of course, it is no surprise that those who do not share Mammon’s belief in God, or who do but do not share the Christian hope of salvation, might be eager to take up this challenge. After all, from their point of view they risk nothing worse, and there is no better alternative than applying their ingenuity in the hopes of improving their lot—not in Hell, to be sure, but in our hard world which can be hellish enough.² It is rather more surprising to find that those who do share that belief and who harbor that hope of salvation so often seriously entertain the advice, as well. I would like to offer three further comments to conclude this section and then, in the remainder of this second, stage-setting chapter, turn our attention to epistemic (as opposed to practical or weakness-of-will) obstacles to ¹ Why “flattered” and “taken in”? Is there some reason to think we are not, in fact, equal to this task? Isn’t it simply a matter of individual and collective willpower, creativity, and ingenuity? I acknowledge the force of that question here. I will defend my answer to it in Chapter 3. ² Of course, atheistic Buddhists and Ultimists, or polytheistic Hindus, or monotheistic Jews and Muslims may disagree about that claim of risk and cite their own reasons for shying away from Mammon’s advice. Fair enough, but I will not here attempt to speculate on those additional reasons, as well. For Ultimism, see Schellenberg 2009.

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implementing Mammon’s advice as well as to a survey of how those epistemic obstacles have been addressed and debated in contemporary philosophy. That is, I will critically examine the philosophical literature that addresses the initial questions we encounter on the path Mammon recommends—“Toward what end shall we aim?” and “In what, precisely, do our happiness and well-being consist?” First—a general comment about my target audience: If one denies the philosophy of pessimism, I can only recommend revisiting Chapter 1 and its sources. And if one denies the grounds for our earlier optimism with respect to that pessimism, either by way of atheism or by way of rejection of the Christian hope of salvation, I can still at least offer the following invitation: Just as the committed Platonist about abstract objects can learn a good deal of metaphysics by reading a monograph addressing some problem facing her nominalist opponent, and just as the ethical theorist who rejects a rightsbased theory of moral obligations and permissions can gather something worthwhile about adjudicating a conflict of moral claims by reading a treatise advocating for rights of bodily autonomy, and just as the logician devoted to classical logic can pick up something useful about the epistemology of inference forms by reading the work of a paraconsistent logician . . . so too, I hope that anyone interested in happiness, well-being, the good life, philosophical anthropology, and the ethics of character can benefit from the remainder of this work, whether in agreement with Mammon’s religious presuppositions or not. Second—a cautionary comment about the particular subfield of contemporary analytic philosophy (with which we will be occupied for the remainder of this chapter) in which theorists attempt to articulate and defend answers to those questions that must be wrestled with by anyone who takes up Mammon’s call: Analytic philosophy is notorious for employing a strict and meticulous method characterized by a striving for precision, clarity, and consistency and aiming at properly formulating and evaluating the truth value of claims about a variety of subject matters by way of careful and sustained argument. Analytic philosophers are often brilliant and quite talented at what they do, yet for all their gifts, they frequently seem oblivious to the fact that what they do is just a smallish slice of what there is to be done. As a result, they are susceptible to overrating the importance of their own achievements and to significantly failing to appreciate the value of alternative modes of inquiry. This tendency can be especially problematic when the lessons of unfettered analytic inquiries are exported into analytic theology, where additional restrictions are reasonably in force. Accordingly,

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philosophers who are interested in, say, Christian analytic theology have good reason to listen to theologians and biblical scholars when it comes to keeping their analytic metaphysical pyrotechnics in check on the perfectly reasonable grounds that not all creative metaphysical readings of particular religious doctrines are theologically or biblically acceptable. A promising philosophical move in an open debate can quickly become a non-candidate when the debate is conducted under certain authoritative restrictions imposed by scripture or tradition. Of course, theologians and biblical scholars can be mistaken in declaring that some proposition does, in fact, enjoy the authoritative weight of scripture or tradition, and they can also be mistaken with respect to the relative force of that weight. However, since by the end of this study I would like to be in a position to recommend its results to Christian analytic theologians (among others), I here flag these potential sources of criticism so that their practitioners can be set on their guard and keep me honest as I critically sift through the analytic literature on wellbeing and happiness over the next several sections and make recommendations to the reader. Third—a sympathetic comment in support of a methodological move extremely common in such analytic debates that frequently (and incorrectly) is accused of some kind of illegitimacy:³ The literature in question is full of what can appear to be cavalier appeals to intuitions and arguments to the best explanation (which themselves are often accused simply of being bare intuitive judgments masquerading as well-founded principles of theory selection). A dismissive attitude toward the literature can then quickly follow upon the judgments that such intuition-mongering and armchairphilosophizing is incapable of filling in the gaps in our theorizing in reliable ways and that analytic philosophy over-relies on this approach to its detriment. After all, intuitions, we are reminded, are non-uniform among philosophers, display wildly different success rates in different domains, and are overly sensitive to environmental and historical factors.⁴ Defenders of the intuition approach understandably attempt to counter these reasons. One strategy is to note the difficulty in making explicit and then really making stick the general charges of suspicion against the use of intuition. Such a task is non-trivial, to say the least; it would involve identifying a normative premise (a necessary condition on, say, justified belief), a non-normative premise (showing that appeal to intuition fails to ³ Here and in the next two paragraphs I borrow from Hudson 2016, 175. ⁴ Humphreys 2013.

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satisfy this condition), a local constraint (explaining why the skepticism attaches to intuition alone, rather than to cognitive faculties much more generally), and a non-self-undermining constraint (ensuring that the justification of the premises just noted is not rooted in intuitions of the very sort that the argument seeks to undermine). Once the standards for a successful skeptical argument are in place, the defender of intuition can attempt to show that arguments from, for example, a lack of independent calibration for intuition, from the non-uniform character of intuition, or from the unreliability of intuition fail to satisfy one or another of the relevant adequacy conditions on a successful skeptical argument.⁵ The defender of intuition can also go on the offensive, arguing first that it is not at all clear that we can have a decent epistemology of logic without intuition (e.g., in rulings on just which argument forms are valid), and second that not only is intuition (setting aside explicitly religious sources such as revelation) “the only source of justification for claims about justification, reason, evidence, and other epistemic concepts,”⁶ but it is, in particular, a self-supporting source of evidence.⁷ Further, one can point to the fact that seemings are a genus with both perceptual and intellectual species, and, to the extent that we recognize a significant connection between seemings (at a general level) and prima facie justification, we may infer that intuitions have justificatory power just as do their better-respected cousins, perceptual seemings.⁸ In short, it is difficult to specially favor perceptual seemings while dismissing intellectual seemings,⁹ and justifying claims about epistemic concepts of any kind without straightforward reliance on intuitions of the very sort so often impugned by those suspicious of intuitions is an untenable, self-defeating task.¹⁰ All that by way of preparing the reader for my not complaining against the competing theories to be examined in the remainder of this chapter

⁵ The four conditions and their application to a host of specific arguments for intuitionskepticism are taken from the excellent discussion in Pust 2012 of the nature of intuitions, of their epistemological role, and of arguments for and against their employment in different contexts of reasoning. I am also indebted to Pust for the brief overview of defenses of intuition that turn on considerations of epistemic circularity and similarities to perceptual justification given in the next paragraph. ⁶ Pust 2012; a sentiment also defended in a series of articles by Bealer, e.g., 1998. ⁷ Epistemic circularity threatens, but only in the guise that we have been taught to recognize and regard as innocuous by Alston 1993, inasmuch as it is the kind of epistemic circularity that attends any alleged foundational source of evidence. ⁸ Huemer 2014. ⁹ Chudnoff 2011. ¹⁰ Bealer 1992.

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either that there are no such things as intuitions, or that there are such things but we can’t reliably tell when we are in the presence of one, or that we can reliably tell but with no advantage for they lack epistemic force.

3. Happiness, Well-Being, and Interpreting Mammon’s Advice Unhappily, discussions about happiness are rife with equivocation. Fortunately, this equivocation is both predictable and easily remedied. The term “happiness” is frequently used to express a psychological state. Individuals enjoying this state (provided that they understand the claims in question) will tend to describe themselves as satisfied with their condition or, more broadly, with their lives. At ease. In good spirits. Emotionally well off. Intellectually fulfilled. Tranquil. Relaxed. Pleased. These judgments, however, are not the condition itself but merely helpful, first-person reports which indicate its presence (reports which are, not infrequently, mistaken). It is the condition allegedly being reported (rather than the reporting) that “happiness” in this psychological sense latches onto. The psychological states which are the objects of such judgments can be fleeting or might occupy the space of an afternoon or linger for a season or persist throughout a much larger period, say, one’s childhood. Although we do not hesitate to report ourselves as being happy during a weekend getaway or at last night’s concert, the psychological state that I will reserve the term to pick out tends to be less of a passing or intermittent mood and more of a settled, stable, long-lived condition. At first blush, the philosophical questions in the neighborhood are: “What state, precisely, is being gestured at in these proattitudes and judgments of lasting contentedness and satisfaction?” and “In virtue of what, precisely, does that state obtain?” More colloquially—what is happiness and where does it come from? The term “happiness” is also used to express a distinctive kind of value. Individuals properly characterized by this value (whether or not they would be inclined themselves to say so) can be described as enjoying a condition of well-being, or the state of flourishing, or that desirable feature Aristotle was theorizing about under the heading eudaimonia. Inquiries into happiness (on this reading) are inquiries not merely into what is good simpliciter, but rather into what is good for a given subject—what benefits or furthers the interests of that subject. On this second disambiguation, the philosophical questions in the neighborhood are: “What state, precisely, is well-being?” and

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“In virtue of what, precisely, does that state obtain?” More colloquially— what is flourishing and what makes a life go well for the subject of that life?¹¹ Henceforth, in this book, the term “happiness” will be reserved for the psychological state alone and the terms “well-being” and “flourishing” for the evaluative state alone (although “flourishing” might seem to suggest a particularly high end of the well-being scale). It is a conceptually open question whether and to what extent happiness is bound up with wellbeing. An interconnection, if there is one, will be revealed by investigation and argument, not by further reflection on the meanings of words. Other popular assumptions, reasonable though they may seem, should not be taken as conceded at the outset, for there are controversies worth engaging: in particular, it is also an open question whether and to what extent happiness or well-being is bound up with a theory of moral (or intellectual) virtues and vices or with a theory of moral permissions and obligations. Perhaps being virtuous, for example, is partly constitutive of flourishing or is among the causes of happiness. Perhaps we have moral prima facie obligations to secure our own well-being and to not interfere with others’ pursuit of happiness. Perhaps. Again, though, such interconnections, if they exist, will have to be established by investigation and substantive argument; they cannot be established simply by appealing to the meanings of terms. Mammon tells his fellow demons (and us) to apply ourselves and our own ingenuity to make a Heaven of our Hell, and in so doing he seems at once to recommend both the pursuit of happiness and the achievement of wellbeing—to seek both lasting feelings of contentment as well as our own good entirely from ourselves. In the remainder of this chapter, I will do my best sympathetically to set the stage for following each of these two elements of Mammon’s double-barreled advice.

4. The Question of Well-Being, Three Kinds of Skepticism, and Mammon’s Restriction In asking whether an individual enjoys well-being, we are not asking for a full-blown theory of value or for a theory of right action or for a theory of ¹¹ A minor complaint: As I have done here, theorists often phrase their inquiry into wellbeing by asking what makes one’s life go well for one. But a focus on lives can encourage us to overlook questions of well-being for individuals that are not organisms and that do not have biological lives but rather lifespans or careers or locations (e.g., angels, demons, artificial intelligence). That said, the practice is entrenched, and I will adhere to it.

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virtue.¹² Neither are we asking what makes a life good for the world or what makes a life meaningful or what makes a life good, full stop. What makes a life good for the world will, unsurprisingly, be determined in part by its consequences for the world, and it is an easy exercise to conceive of a life that makes an outstanding contribution to the world at the expense of the subject whose life it is. Moreover, there may well be features of lives that contribute to their meaningfulness and to their overall value and thus that are partly constitutive of what makes that life meaningful or good, which nevertheless do not have any bearing on how good the life is for the subject of that life. Such features could even be totally beyond our ken and unrecognizable by us; there is no reason to think that every good in a life is good for or in any way accessible to its subject. The question of well-being, then, is narrowly fixated on those things that are good for an individual subject of a life. Already some assumptions are on the table: to wit—there is such a thing as value, lives can manifest value and differ with respect to value, and some subset of this value is good for the subject of the life. Those starting points I am happy to pass over without any quarrel. The next two prospective assumptions, however, are rather more problematic: to wit—we are in a position to come to know the correct theory of well-being, and we can apply that theory in ways that generate knowledge of particular well-being ascriptions to particular individuals. Why agree with these additional hopeful claims? Two local skepticisms threaten our attempts to follow Mammon’s advice. Consider a pair of warm-up exercises: An ethical theorist may well believe that her intuitions about a wide range of particular cases have provided her with particular knowledge of this instance of morally permissible action or that instance of moral-obligation violation. Still, that same theorist may argue that we are not in a position to justifiably decide between a number of competing theories of moral permissibility, each of which is consistent with these particular moral verdicts. This is a skepticism about moral theory but not about moral judgments. Alternatively, a different ethical theorist may well believe that we are in a position to theorize successfully and definitively about what it is in virtue of which an action is morally permissible, settling on, say, a specific form of act-utilitarianism over other consequentialisms, deontological theories, virtue theories, rights-based theories and so on.

¹² This remains true even on an austere theory according to which well-being is achieved exclusively by being virtuous. One need not produce or even entertain competing theories of virtue in order to invoke the concept of virtue in an answer to the well-being question.

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Still, that same theorist may argue that the right-making features thus revealed are opaque to us in practical contexts, and conclude that we are never in a position to apply the theory with any confidence in particular situations. This, then, yields the reverse case—a skepticism about moral judgments but not about moral theory. Of course, one could be skeptical about both together. Why think that we are not in one of these predicaments when it comes to a theory of well-being? There is the question of analysis—In virtue of what does well-being obtain?—and the question of application—So, which of us enjoys well-being? And as we have just seen, there is no guarantee that knowing the answer to one will ensure that we can come to know the answer to the other. Even if we wholeheartedly wish to adopt and to follow Mammon’s advice, our willingness does not of itself do much to quell these epistemic obstacles in the way of doing so. Even more worrisome, I suspect there is one excellent and completely overlooked reason on the horizon for embracing skepticism with respect to theorizing about well-being. Recall the discussion of skeptical theism which played a crucial role in the exploration of the Felix Culpa theodicy in the final section of Chapter 1. Here is a close analogue of that position—well-being skepticism—similarly presented as a conjunction of three theses: We are in the dark about whether the possible goods for us and possible evils for us we are aware of are representative of the possible goods for us and possible evils for us that there are, and We are in the dark about whether the necessary connections we know of between the obtaining of possible goods for us and the obtaining of possible evils for us are representative of the entailments of this type that there are, and We are in the dark about whether the amount of good for us or evil for us we recognize in some state of affairs is representative of the total amount of good for us or evil for us it actually manifests.

(Note that “representative” in the present context is elliptical for “representative with respect to the properties—being a contributor to well-being [if a good for us] and being an impediment to well-being [if an evil for us].”) It is worth belaboring just what is and what is not being contested here. Let us openly concede we have a fair amount of knowledge about value in general, about the value of lives, and about which aspects of that value are

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good for the subjects of those lives. Certainly, for example, we know that pleasure and knowledge are wonderful goods that contribute to well-being. But given the intellectually modest concessions embodied in well-being skepticism, we have no good reason to think that if there were a flourishing-making feature of lives comparable in value to pleasure and knowledge that we would be aware of it, or—if it were somehow an object of mere awareness—that we would recognize its full range of value. Similarly, we know that certain kinds of pleasure interfere with certain kinds of contemplation, that (holding facts about our psychology fixed) the presence of the former pre-empts the presence of the latter, but we don’t know how representative is our knowledge of such interconnections between the items that make for well-being. We have no good reason to think that if there were other salient necessary connections between conditions enabling flourishing and conditions impeding flourishing, that we would be aware of them, or—if they were somehow an object of mere awareness—that we would recognize them as such. So what? Well, an admission of this sort should threaten our confidence in our overreaching verdicts about flourishing. Judgments about well-being are a species of all-in value judgments—“everything considered, a life goes well for its subject just in case and because such and such obtains.” There is a remarkable difference between that sort of all-in judgment and the more modest and accessible judgments—“here are goods I enjoy which directly contribute to my flourishing” or “here are evils I suffer which directly contribute to my withering.” Unless we have some other way of learning that the goods for us, evils for us, and necessary connections between them that we are aware of are representative of the goods for us, evils for us, and necessary connections between them that there are, we will have no business making grandiose allin judgments about well-being. To be clear, it’s not as if we have to verify independently that such other goods do not in fact exist, for mere knowledge of representativeness would permit an inductive inference on which we could rest the weight of an all-in judgment of well-being. Yet it is not especially plausible to maintain that even the weaker, mere representativeness claim is available for confirmation through the exercise of our other natural capacities. It is not a properly basic belief. It is not a product of memory, sense perception, or introspection. It is not yielded by an employment of Reidian commonsense. It is not a self-evident, transparent, or first truth. It is not a proper object of a priori intuition. And finally, it is not (or so I worry) the product of careful and compelling argument originating from

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credible sources of evidence. This problem, I believe, is seriously underestimated and underexplored in the well-being literature. A glance at the literature on these issues, however, suggests very little widespread concern of this skeptical variety. Neither of our general forms of skepticism (analysis or application) nor the particular worry I have here termed “well-being skepticism” exercises a very strong force in these debates at all. Instead a number of competing theories (whose desiderata are not taken to be insurmountably opaque) are vigorously debated and defended, and in the next two sections I will continue my project of sympathetically setting the stage for following Mammon’s advice by briefly introducing and offering a few critical remarks about four prominent families of these theories. After one last reminder: Mammon’s advice came wedded to a restriction—make a Heaven of Hell, pursue happiness and achieve wellbeing, but be sure to do so on your own terms, by way of your own resources, without capitulating to God.

5. Hedonism and Desire-Fulfillment Theories Let us begin by considering two leading theories of well-being that do not presuppose that objective values or standards are essential to well-being.¹³

Hedonism Is well-being ultimately a question of pleasure? Slogans informally expressing the hedonistic view tell us that well-being is a balance of pleasure over pain or that the flourishing life is the predominantly pleasant life. But as a statement of a theory such phrasing is too crude. First, why take balancing talk to pair pleasure with pain rather than pairing pleasure with nonpleasure? The second pairing, at least, has the advantage of being exhaustive. Second, why talk of balancing at all, which suggests (as does the phrase “the predominantly pleasant life”) that tipping just slightly to the pleasurable side ¹³ This is one of many ways to draw the so-called “subjective/objective” distinction between theories of well-being. See Badhwar 2016, 312 for reasons to think this approach is most desirable. Badhwar 2016 provides a remarkably compact introduction to theories of wellbeing and happiness with attention to their various advantages and is notable for remaining accessible without sacrificing precision.

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of the scale is where we’ll discover the threshold of flourishing? Flourishing is more of an excellence of being than a state which commences at themid-point-plus-a-smidge, so to speak. That is, even if well-being is gradable and can manifest in greater and lesser degrees and even if some determinate threshold on the pleasure continuum must be surpassed before any positive degree of well-being can be registered, there is no reason to invoke language that sets the bar obviously too low. Indeed, perhaps it is a mistake to characterize the view in terms of balance or thresholds in the first place. Natural objections to simple and implausible forms of hedonism historically have been dodged by clever appeals not only to the duration, stability, and intensity of pleasures, but to their quality, to the worthiness of their subjects, and to the fittingness of their objects. Countenancing qualitative and fittingness features of pleasures points in the direction of a more complicated assessment of the relation between pleasure and well-being than is suggested by the simple metaphor of weights in the pleasure pan of the scales of flourishing. Similarly, talking of well-being as a range on a continuum of pleasures (even pleasures adjusted for quality and fittingness) may be oversimplified. Perhaps some pleasures are flatly better than others and perhaps some pleasure-pain packages are simply superior to others, but it is not at all clear that just any old pairing yields such a determinate verdict, for different collections of pleasures and non-pleasures may be incommensurable. Thus, the hedonist may hold that two different subjects may each be flourishing owing to the pleasures and pains their lives contain, but that neither experiences more well-being than the other and nor are they equal with respect to well-being. Thus hedonism—a theory regarded by so many as a non-starter in these debates—can quickly become sophisticated in unexpected ways.¹⁴ To say that well-being is determined by pleasure alone need not be read as the overly simpleminded view that all pleasures (even the fleeting, mundane ones) contribute to flourishing, or that well-being is a quantitative matter of experiencing more pleasure than pain, or even that flourishing will be the inevitable outcome of worthy subjects enjoying frequent episodes of highquality pleasures which take fitting objects.

¹⁴ An overview of some of the less sophisticated formulations (fairly or unfairly) associated with figures such as Epicurus, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill as well as persuasive objections to those views can be found in Gregory 2016.

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Perhaps not even the achievement of maximizing pleasure of the highest quality is quite sufficient, for it leaves open questions about the shape or distribution of those pleasures across a life, the duration of that life, and about what non-pleasures or pains are to be found in that life as well.¹⁵ Note that two lives utterly alike in pleasure can differ such that one is also filled with intense and prolonged and undeserved pains and the other is utterly devoid of pain. The hedonist will surely think this a salient difference with respect to well-being. In fact, initial talk of the balance of pleasure over pain is really more about the relevance of pains and non-pleasures to well-being than it is about issues of commensurability. Moreover, lives which are predominantly or nearly entirely pleasurable can nevertheless contain disqualifying distributions of pains and non-pleasures that prevent their subjects from flourishing. The notion of a disqualifying pain is an analogue of the notion of a disqualifying horror—an event whose evil character disqualifies any world in which it appears from membership in the class of worlds worth actualizing for God, even if the world is nearly perfect in every other respect. A disqualifying pain, then, is an episode in a life that precludes well-being for its subject, even if well-being is hedonistic and even if the life in question is otherwise replete with pleasures.¹⁶ The hedonist about well-being, then, is a theorist who maintains that a flourishing life is brimming over with one of the (perhaps incommensurable) excellent packages of pleasures and pains which are spread out in one of the (perhaps incommensurable) excellent possible distributions. The primary problems for such a theorist come not in the worry that these features have been misclassified as contributing to well-being, but rather in the worry that many other features are misclassified as not contributing to well-being, as well. Overwhelmingly plausible candidates for this office can hardly be missed in the three different theories to be explored in succession below.¹⁷

¹⁵ Of course, one may complain that in appealing to considerations of worthiness and fittingness or of shape and distribution, one has departed from pure hedonistic principles and commitments. Fair enough. If so, then the best versions of hedonism will surely be found among its impure representatives, and I will press forward with those thus tainted but more plausible candidates. ¹⁶ Perhaps it is harder to imagine how any distribution of mere non-pleasure might be disqualifying. If so, consider a being that lives with no disqualifying pains and the highestquality pleasures for eighty years, followed by a bare existence in wholly inconsequential mental states with no pains and no pleasures for the next eighty trillion years. ¹⁷ Another route to this same critique of failing to recognize the full range of relevant goods moves through a discussion of Robert Nozick’s famous thought experiment of the experience

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Desire-Fulfillment Theories The most prominent of the subjectivist theories of well-being among philosophers, economists, and social scientists alike—the desire-fulfillment view— seems especially well-suited to satisfy one commonly held desideratum for a theory of what makes our lives go well for us: namely, that something can contribute to what is good for an individual only if that individual adopts a certain attitude toward it (e.g., finds it compelling or attractive, takes an interest in or prefers it to alternatives, or simply desires it).¹⁸ The basic idea, then, is simple and straightforward: Your life goes well for you when you get what you want. Establishing such an intimate link between well-being and subjective pro-attitudes is the chief selling point that keeps desire-fulfillment theories permanently on the list of best candidate answers to the well-being question. Predictably, a good number of the objections that initially spring to mind against this theory are navigable by fleshing out the options left open in this informal gloss on the basic idea that (unlike those objections) do not initially spring to mind. In particular, a quiver full of pointed questions about the relevance of the intrinsicality of a given desire, its intensity, its stability, its scope, the clarity of its object, the timing of its occurrence (relative to the state of affairs that would satisfy it), whether it is first- or second-order, and how central its location in one’s overall web of desires can all lead to negotiable refinements in the attempt to produce the best formulation of the view. But this is, perhaps, just to acknowledge that like any family of views with respect to well-being, desire-fulfillment theories also have their sophisticated and surprisingly defensible representatives. Before one embraces the admittedly popular desire-fulfillment view, however, it is worth thinking through a serious complaint that counts significantly against this manner of securing the alleged advantage of admitting goods only if their subject has a pro-attitude toward them. Appreciating what is implausible about the thought that one’s contingent and haphazard

machine (Nozick 1974). For an accessible discussion of this strategy and additional technical worries about hedonism see Gregory 2016. ¹⁸ Heathwood 2016 provides an excellent introduction to desire-fulfillment theories, reviews their impressive pedigree, and charitably and fairly represents the most serious objections to these views while still managing to demonstrate why they nevertheless continue to seem so compelling to so many.

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desires could ground well-being can be brought out by considering an objection which exploits a fact about the unrestrained scope of such desires. Either there are no restrictions on the desires one might form or there are. If there are not, then according to the present view, any possible object of desire (no matter how ugly, malicious, perverted, or cruel) could be such that having that desire satisfied is good for the individual who desires it. Conjure your own examples; don’t be shy. Wisely, Oxford University Press won’t even consider allowing me to print descriptions of the most compelling ones. Of course, there’s a bullet here to bite, and there is room to attempt to explain away our intuitive and exceedingly negative reactions to such cases by appealing to aesthetic and moral judgments. But, to be perfectly clear, the objection isn’t that there is no way to criticize the protagonists in such scenarios, it is rather that the view requires the outlandish judgment that having such desires satisfied is good for those subjects. In fact, I’d wager the there-are-other-adequate-ways-to-account-for-ournegative-assessments strategy has appeared to be far more plausible than it deserves precisely because it tends to be illustrated only against members of that class of activities whose descriptions can be printed in an academic text like this one. Nor will appealing to what the subject would desire if she were rational and knew all the relevant facts about the state of affairs that would satisfy the desire help in this regard. Moving to an idealized version of a desirefulfillment theory can counter objections that appeal, say, to a desire to drink a poisoned coffee when one is unaware of that particular danger. But idealized versions of the theory, which maintain that what is good for you is determined by what your idealized counterpart would desire in your situation, change both too much and (perhaps also) too little. They change too much, for the wants of your idealized counterpart may be utterly foreign to you now and the theory would thereby forfeit its main advantage (the necessity of the pro-attitude connection). And, although this is more controversial, they also perhaps change too little, for ugly, malicious, perverted, and cruel desires need not disappear in the presence of new knowledge and rationality, and (thus holding fixed reasonable aspects of one’s psychology) the idealized version of the theory encounters and stumbles against precisely the same difficulty as the original theory. So, suppose there are restrictions on the desires that one might form, after all. (For the record, this seems to me the only promising route to retaining this theory among the genuine competitors.) The worry now becomes that in order to sidestep the counterexamples hinted at in the previous

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paragraphs, the restrictions will need to introduce objective considerations that once again threaten to sever the connection between what can be good for one and one’s pro-attitudes, again relinquishing the primary advantage this theory holds over its objectivist rivals. That’s not to say that such an amendment cannot be successfully introduced and the theory rendered immune to objections that appeal to the implausibility of a subject’s flourishing as a result of the most vile and objectionable desires imaginable being satisfied, but whether or not its finest versions can be thus immunized is a genuine concern.¹⁹, ²⁰

6. Perfectionism and Objective-List Theories Let us continue this survey by considering two leading theories of well-being that are classified as objectivist. It won’t surprise the reader of Chapter 1 to be told that my sympathies are on this side of the subjective/objective line. In fact, I cannot work up much enthusiasm at all for the pro-attitude requirement on welfare goods that subjectivists defend at all costs. It strikes me as no more surprising that there might be events or states that contribute to my well-being in which I take no special interest than that there might be events or states that contribute to my bodily health in which I take no special interest. Accordingly, the associated complaint so frequently posed against the theories to be examined below—namely, that they introduce features allegedly relevant to well-being that are foreign or alienating to their subjects—leaves me unmoved. I will, however, assert now (and defend in Chapter 3) the thesis that reasons for thinking that (at least some of) these

¹⁹ There are, of course, further theories worth serious attention in the literature on wellbeing. These include Aristotelian-inspired eudaimonistic theories on which well-being boils down to living well (with a different variation for each position one might take on what living well entails)—see Besser-Jones 2016. Also, see Valerie Tiberius’s intriguing subjectivist approach which locates well-being not in desire fulfillment or in life satisfaction but rather in actively pursuing and realizing an appropriate pattern of one’s own distinctive (and quite possibly unique) set of values (Tiberius 2008). In nodding to these views only in a footnote, I do not mean to convey any negative evaluation of their content. On the contrary, I find Tiberius’s work in particular extremely instructive and illuminating, but I have to line-draw somewhere, and I have privileged views with a longer history in the ongoing debates. ²⁰ Finally, I cannot pass up the opportunity to flag one further and unforgettable contribution to the literature on well-being, Suits 1978. Philosophical brilliance, magnificence of style, and laugh-out-loud wit are all on display. Do yourself the favor of finding this very strange and very rewarding little book.

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goods are foreign or alienating may be less truth-tracking and more a product of self-deception than one might have guessed. If starting from scratch and asked to construct a list of items that seem to have a bearing on my well-being, I might hope to guide my efforts by appealing to fundamental facts about myself. I am, to begin with, an embodied being.²¹ Accordingly, some goods constitutive of my well-being may be grounded in my physicality, for example: Athleticism, Health, and Beauty

I am equally an emotional and intellectual being, one possessed of both personhood and agency. Accordingly, other goods constitutive of my wellbeing may be grounded in my emotional states, intellect, judgment, and will, for example: Achievement, Skill, Power, Autonomy, Creativity, Contemplation, Knowledge, Virtue, and Happiness

Some of the mental capacities I enjoy are more passive, but nonetheless may enable further goods constitutive of my well-being, for example: Joy, Pleasure, and Aesthetic Appreciation

Finally, I am unavoidably interconnected in a web of relations with other physical and mental beings who share my environment. Accordingly, some goods constitutive of my well-being may be irreducibly social, for example: Admiration, Respect, Friendship, Caregiving, and Mutual Love

Here, then, is a starter list of twenty goods that plausibly contribute to wellbeing for me. Let us initially remain neutral with respect to whether they are structured or prioritized in any way. If they do so contribute, irrespective of whether I take an interest in them, we could well ask why. Our first theory offers one intriguing reply. ²¹ I take this to mean that I am identical to a material object (although not to an animal or biological organism), but it will be true enough even if I am merely causally related to a human animal as the dualist would have it. My reasons for preferring the former alternative are set out at length in Hudson 2001. My reconciliation of this materialist thesis with my Christian commitments is discussed and defended in chapter 7 of that work.

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Perfectionism Perfectionism is a theory of well-being that maintains that what is good for an individual is determined by facts about that individual—but not merely attitudinal facts like what the individual desires, rather facts that are fixed by that individual’s nature. What unifies the items on the list above (or rather what unifies those items that are among the genuine goods for us) is that they are ways of developing and expressing the core capacities for things of our kind. That’s a bit too fast. Which kind is our kind? It’s not a trivial question.²² In one perfectly good sense I, for example, belong to as many kinds as there are truths about me, many of them insignificant and disjunctive, many of them very significant, indeed. Some of the kinds I belong to are gerrymandered: being a friend of Bear the Shih Tzu and an avid reader of fiction. That’s an extremely important kind to me, but hardly something rich enough in resources to determine my well-being. Some of the kinds I belong to are fundamental ontological kinds: being conscious and being an occupant of spacetime (alternatively, being both mental and physical) and some of my types concern philosophically significant categories of existence: being concrete (rather than abstract), being contingent (rather than necessary), being a creature (rather than God). Although each is a good candidate for a high degree of naturalness and fundamentality, these categories are all clearly too broad to be of much service. Some of the kinds I belong to are non-fundamental, but quite natural: being an organism, being a mammal, and being a human. But even if this line of typing is on the right track, which level of generality is the right one on which to focus and why? The standard answer in the literature is that being a human being is the relevant category, and then attention quickly shifts to questions about which capacities this answer renders salient and in what a life of developing and expressing them consists. The problem is that perfectly plausible answers to these latter questions yield problematic consequences for the theory. If the

²² I must confess some frustration about how quickly theorists arguing for and against perfectionism treat the question as if it were trivial, and assume the proper answer is “human being” without a careful consideration of alternatives. See Hurka 1993, Dorsey 2010, Bradford 2016, and Fletcher 2016b. This is particularly puzzling given that many of the objections raised against perfectionism can be sidestepped if this popular answer is replaced with the answer I will advocate for in the text, which also seems better to me on independent grounds.

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relevant capacities are those unique to human animals, the resulting list will be far too meager to serve as a foundation for a theory of flourishing. If they are those essential to being a human animal or essential to being a living human animal,²³ then the resulting list will lack (as do some unfortunate human organisms) the capacities for pleasure, pain, emotional response, and rationality, which arguably will leave the resulting theory with four counterexamples and nearly no resources at all. Rather than rehearsing these exchanges, I will instead recommend a different opening move. Suppose the perfectionist maintains that the property which determines my well-being is being a human person. This strategy has a number of desirable advantages. First, it is sensitive not only to my material, biological features but also to my psychological profile that makes for personhood (whereas the more restrictive answer “human being” entails nothing whatsoever about a conscious life, much less personhood).²⁴ Second, it permits non ad hoc responses to standard objections to perfectionism that exploit the fact that some human animals may have no mental life at all. Third, it is better than the more inclusive property being a person as well, for it is sensitive to goods that might be good for me but not for an angel, or for a dolphin, or for an extraterrestrial cognizer, or for the different members of the Trinity. Fourth, it has independent and compelling metaphysical arguments in its favor. According to the mind-body dualists, I have only a causal (rather than an identity or mereological) relation to an organism, and it is thus ill-suited to be my dominant kind. Similarly, for the hylomorphic theorists it is a philosophical error to type me by way of appeal to my material nature or species alone. And finally (perhaps surprisingly) even those who think I am identical to a material object have excellent reason to resist any identification with a human organism alone.²⁵ ²³ This is the proposal in Hurka 1993 which avoids some obvious counterexamples only to run headlong into others. ²⁴ To be fair, there exists a traditional reading of “human being” used to indicate those individuals with a human nature. When joined with the philosophical theses that a human nature is one type of rational nature and that a rational nature makes for personhood, this reading leads to the position that substituting “human person” for “human being” is unproblematic. However, I think that it has become increasingly common to hear “human being” as indicating nothing more than mere species membership, in which case a slide from “human being” to “human person” would depend either on a controversial metaphysics or a crass speciesism. Accordingly, I ask for the tolerance of those whose philosophical commitments do not incline them to hear a significant difference between the proposal I’ve criticized and its replacement, in the interests of being especially clear about just which reading I endorse for those who are so inclined. ²⁵ This final judgment is the thesis of a book-length argument in Hudson 2001. This position is contested (intelligently but, to my mind, not persuasively) in van Inwagen 1990, Olson 1997,

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This variant on the theory would then maintain the thesis that what is good for me, what contributes to my well-being, is determined by what counts as the expression and development of the core capacities associated with human personhood. At a glance, that is a promising unifying feature for many of the items that appeared on the starter list of twenty goods introduced above which plausibly contribute to my well-being. This is one nice feature of the view. Health, skill, autonomy, creativity, knowledge, and virtue are all plausibly and satisfyingly unified on this strategy. It is slightly more of a stretch, however, to insist that pleasure, aesthetic appreciation, admiration, respect, caregiving, and mutual love are equally well unified. Certainly, these features are connected to capacities possessed by human persons. But that’s not really what’s at issue. Are episodes of pleasure or admiring or caregiving somehow clearer developments or expressions of the core capacities of human persons than are episodes of pain or despising or dominating? To be sure, they are much better things to express, but on pain of circularity we must exercise caution not to select those items we think contribute to well-being as the better candidates for expressing the core capacities in question when the theory tells us that being so expressed is what makes them contributing factors to well-being in the first place. One resolution of this difficulty is to resist the traditional detour through unique or essential or distinctive capacities as the preferred manner of connecting one’s nature with the goods of well-being in favor of a different route that moves instead through our purpose to an identification of which things are good for us. Even the modern naturalist who tends to be suspicious of talk of final purposes for natural organisms can adopt this strategy by invoking naturalistic accounts of teleology. And I would think the strategy might have some real attraction for the theist, for example, one who says in accordance with the opening question of the Westminster Catechism “our chief and highest end is to glorify God and fully to enjoy him forever.” Moreover, anyone attracted to this approach would be able to revert (if desired) to the familiar and original emphasis on human nature (rather than human-person nature), for the non-universal distribution of core capacities among human beings would no longer be a source of the and Merricks 2001, but the philosophical costs of identifying yourself with a material animal turn out to be much higher than many are willing to pay. Far too many theorists steal the thesis without honestly following either van Inwagen, Olson, or Merricks in acknowledging what it requires of them. See Hudson 2007 for a breakdown of the different ways to pay this exorbitant bill.

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same purported counterexamples, given that original purpose can be present even where normal capacities have gone missing. Another way forward depends on an interesting choice point for theorists attracted to the items on our starter list: Either such items must be unified in some special manner that answers in a satisfying way the question—“Why does just this plurality of goods make for well-being rather than another?”— or not. If they must be, then an appeal to the core capacities of one’s dominant kind (whether being a human being or being a human person or yet some other property) is as promising a path to travel to this goal as there might be. The penalty is that items we intuitively judge to be relevant to our well-being won’t have equal credentials in the end, and adhering to the adequacy condition of having a properly unified list will come at the cost of excluding some intuitively relevant goods for us. Alternatively, embracing a brute-fact pluralism and giving up on the demand that the list be subject to such a monistic unification relieves the pressure to strike otherwise plausible candidates on the list of constituents of flourishing on the dubious grounds that they don’t have enough in common with other goods for us. This desirable flexibility will come at the cost of being unable to provide a derivation from a single unifying principle when pressed to explain why just each of these particular goods and no others qualify. Still, our next theory (and I) maintain that this second option is the better of the two, despite that cost. In parting, note one peculiar drawback of perfectionism, if it is tethered either to human animals or to human persons. A burgeoning literature has emerged in the transhumanism movement, and a great deal of it is fueled by intuitions and arguments about our individual and collective welfare. Proposals for technological improvements that read like pure science fiction have gained credibility, serious scientific attention, and funding. Moreover, these projects are increasingly supported on the grounds that they promise tremendous goods for us precisely because they venture beyond the development and expression of the core capacities currently available to humans. As standardly envisioned, perfectionism, but not the theory to be examined in the next section, would appear to be at unfortunate odds with the extraordinarily popular intuitions driving these hypotheses and research.²⁶

²⁶ See Bostrom and Savulescu 2009 for a fascinating introduction to this literature and its themes. Mammon’s whisperings about the glorious creatures we can hope to make of ourselves by way of our own ingenuity constantly echo throughout this literature in a disconcerting way.

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Objective-List Theories Sometimes simply called pluralism, objective-list theories opt for a piecemeal approach to what makes for flourishing. “Pluralism” is a badly chosen label, however. An objective list can contain a single entry. Also, the objective-list strategy is frequently described as a theory of human flourishing, but once again the immediate defaulting to the category “human” is gratuitous and unfortunate. In addition to what has been said on behalf of the category “human person” above, there are also haecceity categories worth considering, as well. That is, an objective-list theory could purport to specify goods for an individual in virtue of that individual’s own utterly unique collection of properties, unshared and unshareable with others.²⁷ The objective-list approach is free to incorporate much of what is attractive about other theories. Experiencing pleasure can definitely make the list. As can satisfying certain (restricted) desires. As can developing and expressing the core capacities attaching to one’s dominant kind. As can fulfilling one’s natural or supernatural purposes. As can positively judging and emotionally affirming the elements of one’s life. In fact, any and all states of affairs that initially seem to have some claim on contributing to flourishing can be examined and evaluated on their own merits. None needs fear disqualification on the grounds that it is not sufficiently similar to the others or not properly derived from a common, fundamental principle that governs all such goods. Similarly, no counterintuitive candidates can press to the front of the line demanding inclusion on pain of inconsistency given what else has shown up on the list. Such candidates cannot insist they bear the same credentials which earns them a spot on the roster, for there are no credentials to bear. Of course, this is precisely the feature that gives rise to the explanatory complaint that supposedly offers an edge to perfectionism over an objective list, which can seem by comparison a merely arbitrary and haphazard collection. I do not feel the force of this objection, and I suspect it rests on a double standard. Being charged to explain why there are exactly two or eight or twenty items on the list rather than one seems no better or worse a position than being charged to explain why there is exactly one item on the list rather than twenty or eight or two. It turns out the only-one-good-for-us hedonist

²⁷ For a development of this rather promising view, see Part III of Haybron 2008.

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and the only-one-flourishing-maker desire-fulfillment theorist have an explanation to give (or dodge or declare not that important to address), too. Yes, but it would seem a perfectionist can explain why, say, these ten items are good for us. How? For there are (let us imagine) exactly ten ways to develop and express the core capacities of humanity, and that’s what makes for flourishing. Moreover, the objective-list theorist can’t match this by explaining why the eight items that appear on her list should all be regarded as goods for us by deriving them from a single source. True, but that doesn’t really put her at an explanatory disadvantage. The perfectionist may show that the ten items on his list are derived from a single source (that’s what unifies them) but this is not an explanation of why that source is the goodmaking feature; that is, as of yet, unexplained. Moreover, whatever kind of general, theoretical method or reliance on intuition and rational insight leads the desire-fulfillment theorist to maintain that that very feature is what makes for flourishing can also be appealed to by the objective-list theorist for each item that appears on her list in turn. Interestingly, this sort of debate is carried out almost identically in the literature on moral permissibility, as well, with a Kantian (for example) offering a (monistic) single right-making feature for actions and with a Rossian (for example) offering a (pluralistic) range of prima facie duties or right-making features for actions. The Rossian may produce a list of seven prima facie duties only to be challenged to produce an explanation why those seven and no others are relevant to rightness. But so too, the Kantian, shall be challenged to produce an explanation why the single feature she favors and no others are relevant to rightness. The explanatory advantage of monistic over pluralistic deontology is illusory, and so is the explanatory advantage of perfectionism over objective-list theories. Of course, with a Rossian theory of moral permissibility and the inevitable conflicts of prima facie duties, one will either face genuine moral dilemmas (where each of one’s available actions are morally wrong) or else some prima facie duties will override or prove more stringent in a particular situation than others and yield an ultima facie moral duty or a moral obligation all things considered. Similarly, the objective-list theorist with goods that can clash or be distributed in different ways along life’s path will either face flourishing dilemmas (where each of one’s available careers leads to a failure of well-being) or else some combination of goods for us will prove preferable to others that they exclude and yet remain sufficient to constitute flourishing, all things considered. This is complicated by the fact that the goods for us may be so diverse that we end up weighing trade-offs between achievement

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and knowledge, or pleasure and friendship, or health and caregiving, or apples and oranges. But again, the sense of disadvantage here strikes me as illusory. As we noted earlier, even a theory as simple and bare as hedonism must face similar choices between alternative lifestyles that afford substantially different pleasure-and-pain packages, and the hedonistic theorist must similarly weigh quantities, qualities, fittingness properties, and patterns of distribution across a life that already threatened incommensurability. In short, the alleged explanatory shortcomings and evaluative complexities associated with objective-list theories are simply not puzzles unique to this approach to our theme, even if they are somewhat more likely to come to mind sooner rather than later when confronted with a list of goods that are not derived from a common source. It is alienation, in the end, which is (and continues to be) the much more serious worry to perfectionism and objective-list theories alike. As Peter Railton’s often quoted way of pressing this concern phrases it, It would be an intolerably alienated conception of someone’s good to imagine that it might fail in any way to engage him.²⁸

As I confessed above, I am less moved by this consideration (even in this unusually forceful form) than are others, but I recognize its wide appeal. Once again, though, I will provide reasons to be suspicious that this description really does apply to the individuals who might invoke it to reject the proposal, insisting that a particular good is not a good for them on the grounds that “it in no way engages them.” What observation teaches them this lesson? Neither untutored, pre-theoretical judgment nor reflective introspection is up to that task, I suspect. Worse yet, judgments concerning what does and does not engage us are susceptible to the unreliability that plagues those with great capacity for self-deception on exactly those issues—that condition in which (or so I will do my best to argue in Chapter 3) we are utterly mired. Moreover, even setting aside worries about unreliability stemming from self-deception, the timing of the allegedly disqualifying disinterestedness would seem to be highly relevant. Laurie Paul’s recent and excellent writings on transformative experience strongly suggest that it would not be at all surprising for us to be presently alienated from states of affairs that depend upon our undergoing certain kinds of transformative

²⁸ Railton 2003.

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experiences at a later time, and yet this very plausible hypothesis is perfectly in accord with the suggestion that some of those states of affairs may be great goods for us all the same.²⁹ Although they strike me as the best of the alternatives, a parting reminder that not all is well with objective-list theories is in order. The problem I introduced above and christened well-being skepticism is transparently a difficulty for objective-list theories of well-being. Not only does it open troubling questions about each purported good on such a list (which may be necessarily intertwined with something unseen and terribly bad for us), it also poses a significant problem for the suggestion that we have any good reason to believe that the list of goods we arrive at after careful reflection is complete. It may well be only the theorist who resorts to revelation as a knowledge source and believes that revealed truth extends to these topics who stands a chance of decisively answering well-being skepticism in the end.³⁰

7. The Question of Happiness, Two Kinds of Skepticism, and Mammon’s Restriction As we have just seen, even though the psychological state of happiness is not to be equated with the evaluative state of well-being, it would not be at all peculiar to find each of our various theorists arguing that happiness is quite likely to be bound up with well-being (and perhaps in the case of the objective theories, even among the necessary conditions for flourishing). Even if we can avoid the epistemic obstacles to a theory of well-being and come to learn both in what it consists and where it is to be found, why think that new local skepticisms will not resurface for a theory of happiness? There is a new question of analysis—In virtue of what does happiness obtain?— and a new question of application—So, which of us enjoys happiness? And

²⁹ Paul 2014. ³⁰ Again there are further theories worth serious attention in the literature on well-being. The most prominent family of views not yet represented here are the so called “hybrid theories” of well-being, theories that combine elements from existing views hoping (roughly) to pool their individual strengths and to avoid their respective weaknesses. Such theories are something of a disunified lot, however, since they need not share anything like a common core, and I will postpone my discussion of them until the final chapter where I will identify, articulate, and advance a new view in response to the terribly unhappy predicament that will emerge in Chapters 3 and 4.

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as before, there is no guarantee that knowing the answer to one will ensure that we can come to know the answer to the other. One might project confidence that we will defeat skeptical theses with respect to happiness on the grounds that, after all, happiness is a psychological state, and who is better positioned to be offering informed opinions about it than its very own subjects? I fear such confidence is misplaced and decidedly premature. It credits us with a degree of awareness and insight, consistency and judgment that we flatly do not possess, but I will postpone a critical discussion of that charge until the following chapter. Nevertheless, as before, skepticism has not really shown itself to be the dominant position on these matters. This issue has spawned a number of competing theories (whose desiderata are once again not taken to be insurmountably opaque) which are vigorously debated and defended, and in the next section I will continue my project of sympathetically setting the stage for following Mammon’s advice by briefly introducing and offering a few critical remarks about three prominent families of these theories.³¹ Again, after the reminder: Mammon’s advice came wedded to a restriction—make a Heaven of Hell, pursue happiness and achieve wellbeing, but be sure to do so on your own terms, by way of your own resources, without capitulating to God.

8. Hedonism, Life Satisfaction, and Psychic Affirmation Three types of theories will here occupy our attention: a sophisticated version of the thesis that happiness is to be found exclusively in pleasure, the widely popular view (perhaps even the dominant position in contemporary philosophy and psychology) that happiness is a kind of satisfaction with one’s life, and an impressively compelling member of the family of theories that take happiness to be a feature of one’s overall emotional state

³¹ It is worth noting that there is no additional problem with respect to happiness that functions as a counterpart to the skeptical worry I voiced with respect to well-being, for the simple reason that judgments of happiness are not a species of all-in value judgments as are judgments of well-being. Thus, they are not vulnerable to the same range of concerns about how representative we should believe our knowledge to be of goods for us and evils for us and of the necessary connections between them.

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with special emphasis on one’s moods, emotions, and dispositions with respect to mood and emotion.³²

Hedonism Hedonism as a theory of happiness is initially considerably more promising than hedonism with respect to well-being, for the simple reason that it is so very hard to ignore that range of goods that impact flourishing which have little, if any, bearing on one’s psychological states. What are the prospects, then, of equating happiness with some facts about pleasure? Well, which facts? As before, it won’t do to work with an informal slogan to the effect that happiness is a balance of pleasure over pain or that the happy life is the predominantly pleasant life. As with well-being, happiness is closer to an excellence than a mediocrity and ill-served by talk of balances or predominance. Similarly, our earlier observations on differences in the duration, stability, and intensity of pleasures, their potential incommensurability, the variation in their quality, the worthiness of their subjects, and the fittingness of their objects can once again position the hedonist to avoid a naïve or grossly oversimplified relation between pleasure and happiness. In particular, she need not hold the implausible views that all pleasures (even the fleeting, mundane ones) must contribute to happiness, or that happiness is a mere quantitative matter of experiencing more pleasure than pain, or even that happiness is guaranteed to worthy subjects who experience frequent episodes of high-quality pleasures which take fitting objects. Rather, the hedonist about happiness is a theorist who maintains that even if the category of well-being should prove to be a more expansive affair, at least its primary psychological component—the happy life—consists entirely in enjoying one of the (perhaps incommensurable) excellent packages of pleasures and pains which are spread out in one of the (perhaps incommensurable) excellent possible distributions.

³² As with the sketches of theories of well-being in sections 5 and 6, I am less interested in footnoting my way through the history of the literature on these various approaches to happiness and more concerned to articulate something about the pros and cons of the best representatives of these theories in the interests of intelligently pursuing Mammon’s advice. Full disclosure, however: I am myself deeply sympathetic to Psychic Affirmation as it is introduced, explained, and defended in Daniel Haybron’s excellent 2008 study of happiness and unhappiness.

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Accordingly, the hedonist can effectively sidestep popular objections that mistakenly insist she must treat all pleasures as relevant to happiness or that she makes happiness out to be far too easy to achieve. The genuine problems for the hedonist are not in what she thinks is a contributing factor to happiness but rather in what she excludes.³³ As with the corresponding “too narrow” critique of hedonistic theories of well-being, the best way to press this objection is to showcase the appeal of other relevant factors which are captured and expressed in non-hedonistic theories, two of which will be featured immediately below. As we begin to survey these considerations, however, it is important to keep in mind that even if one judges them to be pleasurable, that will not serve as a back-door defense of hedonism. It is, for example, the feelings of security and tranquility themselves that contribute to happiness, not merely the pleasure arising from the feelings of security and tranquility (even if pleasure is necessarily annexed to those feelings).

Life Satisfaction One defect of a hedonistic theory of happiness is that it focuses exclusively on a felt quality and in so doing seems to diminish the full scope of happiness, recognizing the relevance of the phenomenal experience but underappreciating the role of a subjective reaction to that experience.³⁴ A corresponding virtue of the life-satisfaction view is that it calls for a distinctive and essential contribution from the subject of the life. A respectable serving of life’s pleasures will almost certainly accompany happiness on the life-satisfaction view (for satisfaction of the right kind is rare where pleasures are too few and far between). Strictly speaking, though, the life-satisfaction view does not just layer an extra requirement on top of hedonism. For reasons that will emerge momentarily, it would be possible to

³³ Interestingly, the thought experiment of the experience-machine that adequately demonstrates this complaint in the case of hedonism about well-being is rather less effective when invoked against hedonism about happiness, since the target judgment is now restricted to a psychological state which may appear compatible with being hooked into the machine in a way overall flourishing is not. ³⁴ Putting the point that way is loaded. As was the case in my sketch of hedonism as a theory of well-being, I hereby assume a particular view of the nature of pleasure, favoring a sensory/ introspective view over an attitudinal view. Feldman 2004 and Heathwood 2007 offer tempting (but, to my mind, resistible) considerations in favor of different variations on the attitudinal view. For a sampling of critiques of the attitudinal view, see Badhwar 2016.

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satisfy the conditions of this theory with little to no pleasure in one’s life or even in the presence of a disqualifying pain that a proper hedonism would not accommodate. The distinctive contribution required of the subject need not assume the form of an occurrent belief such as “it’s a wonderful life, this life of mine,” or the more narrow “at least my life is going well for me,” or the more narrow yet “I’m mostly pleased with how I feel and what I’ve got,” or even the vague and indistinct “well, I reckon, on the whole, this (referring broadly to one’s life experiences over a substantial stretch of time) is enough.” Such judgments are commonplace, and the majority of us either have already tokened one or more of them or are disposed to believe something in the neighborhood when explicitly invited to reflect on the matter. But there is a crucial difference between judging your life to be satisfying and being satisfied with your life. The former is a fallible guide to the latter, but it is also a self-report on an intricate and complicated matter and like all self-reports of that kind is liable to significant error. Accordingly, the distinctive feature of happiness on this theory is neither some appropriate quantity and distribution of felt qualities, nor the actual possession of a genuinely satisfying life, nor the belief (true or false) that one possesses such a life, but rather the subjective response to one’s life of being satisfied with it, evinced not just in beliefs but also in affirmations, positive reactions, and pro-attitudes towards the events and experiences that collectively constitute that life.³⁵ Perhaps the terminological choices “satisfaction” and “being satisfied with” are unfortunate insofar as they can easily conjure up (in the thoughts of an outsider in these debates) scenarios in which their objects are just barely this side of minimally adequate. Something like—“Yes, I suppose I’ll be satisfied with an eighth-place finish, but I had really set my heart on winning this race.” The theorists in this camp presumably intend to convey a considerably stronger impression. Something closer to—“That meal was exquisite! Seven luscious courses and each one so satisfying!” It makes one wonder, though, why opt for something so easily confused with, say, a

³⁵ One widely admired and comprehensive defense of this view, a defense which embodies much more complexity and refinement than I can hint at in a thumbnail, opening sketch, can be found in Sumner 1996. Sumner argues for the significance of a satisfaction response that is authenticized by its subject’s being appropriately informed about and autonomously related to the conditions of the life she leads, thereby undermining counterexamples premised on experience-machine rides or nonculpable and insufficient appreciation of one’s place in society that could lead to deviant satisfaction responses.

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life-tolerance view, when labels unambiguously conveying a keen endorsement, approval, excitement, or even delight with one’s life sit unclaimed? The peculiar and potentially misleading name for this popular view, however, is among the least of its difficulties. In demanding a subjective contribution to lived experience as an element of happiness the theory advances beyond hedonism, but in identifying happiness with that subjective response, the theory is once again too narrow. One would think that high-quality pleasures taken in worthwhile activities unfettered by attending pains would certainly make some contribution to happiness, but on the present view that’s not quite right. Only when they partly occasion satisfaction with a life have they played a salient role, and then not as constituents of happiness but as partial causes of the central state in which happiness consists. It’s tempting to think they have thereby been assigned altogether the wrong status. More troublesome is a series of objections that exploit some alleged mismatch between happiness and the different kinds of life satisfaction (when kinds are individuated by the myriad reasons which can lead one to stand in the relation to one’s life of being satisfied with it).³⁶ As a warm up, let’s expose one popular critique that appears to have more force than it really does: to wit—the life-satisfaction theory is mistaken, for repeated surveys tell us that life satisfaction is remarkably high whereas true happiness is, frankly, just not that easy to come by. And who are we to second guess the survey responses furnished by exactly those who are best positioned to know, given that they are the subjects of those lives and enjoy introspective access to their own first-person reactions? Consider the following inconsistent quartet designed to cast doubt on the life-satisfaction view in the spirit of that complaint: 1) Judging that one is satisfied with one’s life is far more common than happiness. 2) Judging that one is satisfied with one’s life is sufficient for being satisfied with one’s life. 3) Being satisfied with one’s life is sufficient for happiness. 4) Judging that one is satisfied with one’s life is sufficient for happiness.

³⁶ I am indebted to Haybron’s illuminating discussion of objections in this general vein (2008, chapter 5).

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Obviously, not all four propositions can be true together. Yet (1) is admittedly true, and (4) validly follows from (2) and (3). So, if (2) is also true, then (3) (along with the life-satisfaction theory which entails it) is in serious trouble. Why, though, should the life-satisfaction theorist be at all inclined to grant (2)? Why accept infallibility or even a general reliability here? Being satisfied with a life is a complicated affair, and explicit judgments about the matter presumably involve detailed impressions of that life filtered through a variety of complex concepts, followed by the attempt to interpret one’s own pro-attitudes towards those events thus classified. Yet it is hardly news that such efforts are routinely impeded by bad prompts, availability heuristics, wishful thinking, overhasty generalizations, accidental and minor environmental factors, and self-deception. The life-satisfaction theory maintains only that happiness is as common as genuine life satisfaction, not as common as sincerely self-reported life satisfaction. The real threat to this view comes less from the purported infallibility of judgments of life satisfaction and more from the potential for mismatches unfavorable to the theory: Consider the misanthrope who dislikes you and me and himself, is unfailingly unhappy, knows it, and thinks he thoroughly deserves his misfortune. His one consolation is that the universe is just—he gets what he deserves. He is satisfied with his life—it seems profoundly fitting to him given what he takes to be his nasty character. He welcomes and embraces it. He hasn’t merely settled for what he can get; upon reflection, he wouldn’t have it any other way.³⁷ Alternatively, consider the grateful historian who reflects on the generations of his predecessors who didn’t have medicine or adequate nutrition, who couldn’t get warm, who died at forty having squandered their lives foraging, who knew great fear and few pleasures from cradle to grave. Unable to shift his attention from this reference class, he feels privileged and appreciative of his plentiful gruel and lukewarm baths and leisure time spent sitting alone in his kitchen, both satisfied with his life and unhappy. Alternatively, consider the phenomenally gifted and virtuous young musician. She is driven, driven, driven by a desire for excellence (which never turns into arrogance or pride) but which always leaves her believing (truly) she could have done a little something more. This prodigy brightens the world, flourishes, and is exceptionally happy, yet is

³⁷ Compare Haybron’s tortured artist—deeply satisfied with her life, yet unhappy, or his kvetching Manhattanite—perpetually unsatisfied with his life, yet happy.

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dissatisfied with her life on the grounds that some of her potential always remains untapped.³⁸ In each case, with just a few strokes of a story we can see how a genuine satisfaction or dissatisfaction with one’s life (in the very sense favored by the theory) can fail to track our intuitive judgments about happiness and unhappiness in the protagonists. The best reply for life-satisfaction theorists in response to these outstanding concerns will consist either in biting the bullet on a series of unintuitive consequences or in adding some restrictions on the grounds of the satisfaction response that effectively prevent the mismatches in each of the foregoing proposed counterexamples to the basic life-satisfaction view.³⁹

Psychic Affirmation On emotional-state theories, happiness consists in a person’s overall emotional condition which is a complex function of one’s moods, emotions, and dispositions with respect to mood and emotion. “Psychic Affirmation” is the name bestowed on one exceedingly promising version of this general approach by its primary champion, Daniel Haybron, and departing from my pattern of characterizing a basic version of a family of views and highlighting choice points for refinement, I will instead simply give my own (descriptively embellished) summary of Haybron’s specific version of an emotional-state theory.⁴⁰ Psychic Affirmation locates the core of the relevant subjective response to one’s life and its constituent elements in one’s central affective states—that

³⁸ These cases are my own variations in the spirit of two passing and suggestive hints in Haybron 2008, 93. All the cases exploit the insight that there can be plausible explanations of satisfaction (or its lack) that are quite independent of happiness. ³⁹ Nothing in this brief introduction approaches a decisive refutation—but it does provide a reason, if one still inclines this direction, to explore more developed and subtle versions of the life-satisfaction view (e.g., Sumner 1996) that seek out qualifications on the grounds of satisfaction that can render the application of the theory more palatable. ⁴⁰ As noted above, I find very congenial Haybron’s 2008 theory of happiness. I was delighted to become more versed in his theory while I was working on this book and to come to realize how thoroughly—given an extremely plausible bridge premise—a view I have been experimenting with in seminars on sin and vice for a dozen or so years (and which now drives the final sections of Chapter 3 of this study) both supports and is supported by Haybron’s views on happiness.

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is, primarily in one’s overall emotional condition as opposed to the popular emphasis on intellectual states that figure prominently in more cognitively oriented theories such as life satisfaction. One can readily acquire a precise sense of what’s at issue in this appeal to affective states and the psychic-stance approach to happiness they make possible by delineating three distinct dimensions of the emotional response to life. Insightfully, Haybron observes that whereas the following dimensions are objectively ranked in significance (from least to most following the order presented below), the prevailing judgment about their relative significance is badly mistaken, getting the order exactly backwards. (The dimension names are Haybron’s; the descriptive summaries are mine.) Endorsement The affects of endorsement are the most familiar and easily spotted trimmings of happiness: the spontaneous and radiant smile, a persistent and underlying cheerfulness, the easy and non-malicious witticism, a nonthreatening and open posture, the welcoming eyes, a quickness to laughter—happiness worn on the sleeve, as it were. These are the trappings of happiness instantly recognizable even to the toddler, those infectious and largely perceptible qualities that make the mirror neurons fire in the best of ways, manifestations of joy. Engagement The characteristics of engagement need not be expressed in smiles and winks, hugs and fist bumps. Often they run deeper and are more sustainable than the many and quick-lived exclamation points of endorsement. Here we find a subject enthusiastically entering into her life, accepting its contours—not merely tolerating or making peace with them but affirming them, committing to them. Engagement is a sort of emotional exuberance, a commitment to living passionately and grappling with life’s elements. It is an inoculation against ennui, an expansive yea-saying attitude to one’s experience and its goods and ills. Attunement The characteristics of attunement serve as a foundation upon which engagement is erected and endorsement displayed. Persistent feelings of security, of not needing to be on one’s guard against the world, give rise to a stable calmness and steadiness of mind, to a relaxed confidence. Nervous energy and attention are diverted from preparations for defensiveness and from preoccupation with troubles (large and small, real and imagined) and

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transformed into a peaceful contentedness in which creativity, curiosity, selfexpression, and receptivity can all be safely exercised. It is a state of antianxiety, a blossoming of the self and spirit.

In summary, then, the guiding insight of Psychic Affirmation takes happiness to consist in a particular overall emotional response to one’s life. This response is comprised of two primary elements: first—one’s central affective states (i.e., one’s productive, persistent, pervasive, and profound moods and emotions) and second—one’s mood propensities (i.e., one’s dispositions with respect to mood and emotion).⁴¹ The particular response of this kind identified with the condition known as happiness reveals itself in the three dimensions of endorsement, engagement, and attunement.

9. A Curiosity about Theories of Well-Being and Happiness Despite our periodic reminders, it turns out that we didn’t much need to attend to the restriction wedded to Mammon’s advice. To wit— Make a Heaven of Hell, pursue happiness and achieve well-being, but be sure to do so on your own terms, by way of your own resources, without capitulating to God.

In surprisingly many of the contemporary prominent discussions of wellbeing and happiness, religious topics in general (much less something as specific as one’s relation with God) tend to be rather thinly represented or to get a half-hearted nod by way of reference to broadly spiritual beliefs, attitudes, and practices. With respect to well-being—hedonism and desire-fulfillment theories have at best an accidental and tenuous connection to the issue of one’s relation with God which is wholly dependent upon its capacity to generate pleasure or to become the particular object of contingent desires. Perfectionism and objective-list theories on the other hand, stand a much stronger chance of incorporating such topics and of doing so in a way that affords them a direct and constitutive role in well-being—all conditional, of

⁴¹ Haybron 2008, 147.

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course, on whether, say, one’s relation with God is taken to be bound up with the realization of one’s proper nature or to be found nestled among that plurality of sui generis, fundamental goods that are also good for subjects of a life. Perhaps it’s no exaggeration to say that the increasingly popular view in this literature seems to be that traditional religiously oriented issues can safely continue to disappear from those proposed analyses of proper nature and those objective lists with fewer and fewer voices raised in opposition. With respect to happiness—hedonism and life satisfaction can be bothered with religious topics only to the extent that they are the source of the right kind of unencumbered pleasures or of aspects of life one responds to with satisfaction (and even this only wins them indirect acknowledgement). Psychic Affirmation, on the other hand, may or may not reserve an essential role for religious topics to play, depending on whether endorsement, engagement, and attunement can be secured without properly attending to them. A central thesis of the final chapter of this book is that certain religious goods must play exactly this essential role, but at this juncture it is yet too early to attempt to say why. On the way to that goal, let us next take up the questions of just how successful we have in fact been (and can reasonably hope in the future to be) in our attempts to follow Mammon’s advice on the generous assumption that the epistemic obstacles to so doing have been effectively removed by our understanding of what it would take to succeed according to our preferred theories selected from among the several we have canvassed above.⁴²

⁴² As has become clear, my own preference consists in the combination of some version of the objective-list theory with respect to well-being (subject to two explicit and crucial modifications to be introduced and defended in chapter 5) and Psychic Affirmation with respect to happiness.

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3 Libido Sentiendi, Libido Sciendi, Libido Dominandi For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. —1 John 2:16

1. Secular Suspicions So how do the scorecards look? How are people faring when it comes to an objective-list theory of well-being and the Psychic Affirmation theory of happiness?¹ Have attempts to follow Mammon’s advice proven to be successful? I will begin with some informal observations, not anything that should conclusively put the question to rest, but rather some considerations that should at least prime us for the more rigorous line of thought that follows. A rough and ready answer to our question can be gleaned from looking at one’s local, national, and international news. That process doesn’t take long to yield a verdict. With the exception of a three-minute, heartwarming story at the tail end of a nightly newscast, the voiceover for which weakly instructs you to renew your faith in humanity, the news is a twenty-four-hour stream of near-constant evidence that many, many people have lives that are not going well for them at all. But, then again, news sources select for such material and perhaps provide unrepresentative fare. Where else do we get general information on such matters about our fellow citizens? Personal experience with the educational system? The political system? The judicial system? The business world? The banking and lending industries? The health industry? Charity organizations? Churches

¹ I will not attempt to settle on the precise members of the objective list. The twenty goodsfor-us that appeared in Chapter 2 are reasonable candidates for inclusion, but let us for now be liberal and neutral about its final character. Fallenness and Flourishing. Hud Hudson, Oxford University Press (2021). © Hud Hudson. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849094.003.0003

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and religious groups? Neighborhood collectives? Family and friends? Co-workers and acquaintances? Community gatherings and nightlife? Parks and playgrounds? Social media? The technology industry? The motion picture and television industries? The sports industry? The music industry? The advertising industry? Each is an informal and instructive source of information about how folks seem to be getting along in the world, and my impression is that collectively (naturally with some exceptions) they point to remarkably similar conclusions. As I argued in Chapter 1, when we take such a wide-scale view of human beings across the spectrum, human beings in all stages and walks of life, what we find more often than not is Koyaanisqatsi—life out of balance—the very subject matter of the philosophy of pessimism. Apart from personal experience, anecdotes, and what we can fairly extrapolate from the discouraging founts of information on the common physical, mental, and social aspects of our lives (e.g., the healthcare industry, social media, and the advertising industry), we do have access to one further salient and specialized source of information that we might take to function as a trump card with the potential to overrule what can feel like a mountain of informal evidence for the thesis that very few of our fellows positively enjoy well-being and happiness. That potential source of powerful counterevidence consists in what the very people in question sincerely have to say about themselves. In astoundingly high numbers people claim to be happy. Sky-high numbers. Americans, to focus on one group in particular, have registered in the 84–94 percent range on a series of different studies conducted over the last few decades.² Self-reported unhappiness is equally astoundingly low (although this may have something to do with those measures with

² The study “Are We Happy Yet?”—discussed in Pew Social Trends 2006—reports American responses at 84 percent in the categories “very happy” and “pretty happy.” A Gallup Poll, “Most Americans ‘Very Satisfied’ with their Personal Lives”—discussed in Carroll 2007—reports American responses at 92 percent in the categories “very happy” and “fairly happy” (and provides more specialized results filtered by political party, household income, marital status, church affiliation, and race). Carroll further notes that (at that time) such figures had been fairly stable for a number of years. The numbers on related issues continue to soar, with the latest Gallup Poll at the time of this writing—discussed in McCarthy 2020—reporting a new record high of 90 percent in Gallup’s forty years of surveying Americans about their level of satisfaction with their personal lives. And the World Values Survey reported in 1995 American happiness responses at the 94th percentile. And it’s not just in America: the worldwide trends are strikingly higher than a philosopher of pessimism would be inclined to suppose, as revealed and analyzed in considerable detail in Ortiz-Ospina and Roser 2017. See also the World Happiness Report 2020.

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comparatively few pre-scripted options for replies in the unhappiness range). What should we make of this phenomenon? Some minor and obvious worries: As with any science whose data consists largely of self-reported states, there are questions about whether the participants are interpreting the terms with which the prompts are phrased in the same way as do the researchers or in the same way as one another. It is hardly condescending to suggest that many of the subjects may well not understand the question they are asked to answer when instructed to place themselves under one of three headings each of which contains an occurrence of the undefined term “happiness” or when asked which of seven faces (literally differing only in the arc of the smile or frown) best represents how they feel overall about their lives; it is rather a reflection of the fact that key terms and visual cues will often have nuances and connotations that will pull different people of intelligence and good will in different directions and will lead them to focus on rather different issues altogether. Or consider the “Cantril Ladder Question” utilized by the Gallup World Poll in producing the World Happiness Report: Please imagine a ladder, with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time?³

Moreover, even those who are interpreting the question in the same manner (no mean feat, given that the World Poll is conducted some 140 different languages) may be invoking very different measuring sticks in their assessments, a likelihood which poses tremendous problems for the reliability of comparative judgments of happiness across the participants. And, honestly, how could it be otherwise, given the basic and extreme economic, social, and cultural differences separating the 160 countries whose citizens take part in the surveys? Further complications can arise from pressures not to be truthful in answering. Untruthfulness need not be motivated just by a social desire to appear a certain way to those administering questionnaires (an

³ See Ortiz-Ospina and Roser 2017. Your best and worst possible lives! Eleven potential responses are now on offer as opposed to three, but at the price of a complication certain to skew results in an unhelpful way, if what we are interested in is how happy people take themselves to be.

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outcome which can be partially controlled for with various screens), but by a desire to appear a certain way to oneself. Temptations to self-report happiness can arise from the thought that one ought to be happy or as a way to avoid confronting the disconcerting thought that one may be unhappy. Still—suppose we assume that subjects properly interpret the questions they are asked with respect to happiness, that they consistently apply the same measuring stick, that they successfully resist any pressure to be deceitful to others or with themselves, and that they always answer to the very best of their ability.⁴ Even with such unrealistic and idealized presuppositions in place, a major worry remains: Why suppose human beings are wellpositioned to give truth-tracking answers on this topic? Why suppose human beings are reliable judges of their own happiness or well-being? Daniel Haybron opens his study The Pursuit of Unhappiness by announcing: The central thesis of this book is that people probably do not enjoy a high degree of authority or competence in matters of personal welfare. We should expect them systematically to make a host of serious mistakes regarding their own well-being.⁵

And again, upon completing the outline of his emotional state theory of happiness, he reaffirms this attitude even more forcefully: This view of happiness also gives the lie to any notion that happiness could be largely transparent to us. While it takes little discernment to figure it out when you feel happy, it takes a lot to figure out how you are doing across

⁴ Again, the first two of these four assumptions strike me as nearly impossible to satisfy, even with a series of assessments as celebrated as the twelve questions that form The Flourishing Measure at the heart of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. See VanderWeele 2017. In increasing the sophistication of their investigation into human flourishing by recognizing the relevance of health, meaning, purpose, character, virtue, social relationships, and stability (in addition to happy feelings and life satisfaction), the questions unavoidably introduce undefined terms that exacerbate the worries noted above about uniform interpretation among the participants and match of interpretation with researchers’ intent. Furthermore, what is gained in sophistication with respect to relevant categories is straightaway lost in the lack of sophistication with respect to the manner of their inclusion. That is, the questions targeting the new categories often presuppose seriously naïve and dubious characterizations of their subject matter. Consider, for example, the two measures meant to recognize the role of character and virtue in response to which subjects are to give a self-report from 0 = strongly disagree to 10 = strongly agree: “I always act to promote good in all circumstances, even in difficult and challenging situations” and “I am always able to give up some happiness now for greater happiness later.” ⁵ Haybron 2008, 13.

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   the several dimensions of your emotional condition, some aspects of which do not involve conscious or even occurrent states. Many of the relevant states, including numerous moods, are highly elusive and difficult to grasp or attend to . . . many of us may not have a clue how happy, or unhappy, we really are.⁶

Even if we conceded that undefeated self-reports of happiness had the power to override all of the extensive support for the thesis that people have been unsuccessful in following Mammon’s advice, support that can be extracted from those informal considerations drawing on personal experience and the general sources of information alluded to above, this new worry, I believe, is sufficient to undercut the force of self-reporting in favor of success. Of course, it doesn’t take much imagination to anticipate how people are likely to react to the suggestion that they aren’t authoritative or reliable when it comes to discerning their own happiness. Reactions run from incredulousness to outrage at being thus challenged on such a personal and delicate matter, a reaction which, frankly, is hard to square with the fact that in every country in the world people report that others are less happy than they themselves say.⁷ Hard to square, yes, but perhaps not that hard to predict. It is well documented that human beings overestimate their abilities and positive conditions and will confidently continue to do so even after this peculiar distorting bias is made salient and brought forcefully to their attention.⁸ Ours is a Lake Wobegon world in which far too many of us believe ourselves to be well above average in far too many areas, even when we know that our evidence should strongly lead us to revise those beliefs. Accordingly, the surfacing of such initial incredulousness and outrage does not do much to settle anything about the legitimacy of an inquiry into the reliability of such self-reports. In support of his charge of widespread incompetence, Haybron discusses a range of compelling evidence on the matter, including (i) our tendencies to adapt to and then to ignore persistent effects (even if they are unpleasant); (ii) our tendencies to focus more on temporary feelings of pleasure or pain, satisfaction or frustration than on anxiety or tranquility, even though the third pairing is more determinative of happiness than are the previous two; (iii) our selective (and fallible) memories which can suppress or reconfigure

⁶ Haybron 2008, 150. ⁷ Ortiz-Ospina and Roser 2017. ⁸ See Brown 1986, Taylor and Brown 1988, Taylor and Brown 1994, and Elga 2005.

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painful and embarrassing episodes, exaggerate and magnify our finer moments; (iv) our tendencies to recall the perceived value of peak moments and end-states of events, allowing those judgments to swamp other aspects of the experiences; (v) our cultural and social pressures to color certain experiences and lifestyle choices positively whether we are resonating with or finding any personal satisfaction in them or not; and especially (vi) our widely discussed susceptibility to adjust our assessments dramatically depending on temporary present moods and slight changes in environmental conditions (everything from a hint of the scent of chocolate in the air to finding a dollar on the pavement to a warm smile from a stranger). The most damning bit of evidence in favor of unreliability, however, comes from attending to the complexity of the three dimensions of happiness discussed in Chapter 2. It is fair to note that the first (and least significant) of the three dimensions, endorsement, is indeed more or less transparent to its subject and to everyone else, as well. Endorsement The affects of endorsement are the most familiar and easily spotted trimmings of happiness: the spontaneous and radiant smile, a persistent and underlying cheerfulness, the easy and non-malicious witticism, a nonthreatening and open posture, the welcoming eyes, a quickness to laughter—happiness worn on the sleeve, as it were. These are the trappings of happiness instantly recognizable even to the toddler, those infectious and largely perceptible qualities that make the mirror neurons fire in the best of ways, manifestations of joy.

Self-reports in the area of endorsement are not only more likely to be truthtracking, they are also more likely to be challenged successfully (when challenged at all), since they concern largely publicly accessible, perceptible features of the world. There is, so to speak, an external and available standard against which they can be checked. Reliability here is less a matter of incorrigible, introspective insight and more a matter of attentiveness (and honesty) with respect to outward manifestations. Of course, there can be a disconnect between a show of happiness and its underlying core. Things are not so obvious, however, when it comes to the second dimension of happiness, engagement, which involves an inner allegiance to a life that comprises bonds of commitment, the presence and persistence of elusive and hard-to-pin-down moods, and dispositions to respond to a

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wide range of phenomena that are nowhere as introspectable as whether one is experiencing pleasure from drinking coffee or feeling affection for a friend. Nor are these deeper psychological features even remotely suited to be distinguished from their opposing moods and dispositions by the arc of the smile line that marks the sole difference in a string of faces (each consisting of one circle, two dots, and one curve) offered as a mechanism for reporting life satisfaction. Once again: Engagement The characteristics of engagement need not be expressed in smiles and winks, hugs and fist bumps. Often they run deeper and are more sustainable than the many and quick-lived exclamation points of endorsement. Here we find a subject enthusiastically entering into her life, accepting its contours—not merely tolerating or making peace with them but affirming them, committing to them. Engagement is a sort of emotional exuberance, a commitment to living passionately and grappling with life’s elements. It is an inoculation against ennui, an expansive yea-saying attitude to one’s experience and its goods and ills.

And finally, with respect to forming judgments concerning the third (and most significant) dimension of happiness, attunement, we move beyond categorizing the actions and dispositions constituting fidelity and commitment to one’s life as it is being lived into the realm of understanding and correctly applying highly abstract concepts with respect to which even philosophers and social scientists who devote careers to the matter experience uncertainty. Attunement The characteristics of attunement serve as a foundation upon which engagement is erected and endorsement displayed. Persistent feelings of security, of not needing to be on one’s guard against the world, give rise to a stable calmness and steadiness of mind, to a relaxed confidence. Nervous energy and attention are diverted from preparations for defensiveness and from preoccupation with troubles (large and small, real and imagined) and transformed into a peaceful contentedness in which creativity, curiosity, selfexpression, and receptivity can all be safely exercised. It is a state of antianxiety, a blossoming of the self and spirit.

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Acquiring serviceable analyses of security, tranquility, creativity, curiosity, self-expression, and receptivity are hardly trivial tasks. Moreover, workable analyses in hand or not, reliably recognizing these features in oneself is a significant skill. Such a skill, with proper attention and effort, can be learned and honed over time, but there seems to be no good reason to think it is anything like a default state, that we come pre-equipped with the ability to determine the quality, character, persistence, and stability of emotional responses and underlying moods and dispositions like these. The sense that individuals are authoritative when it comes to determining whether they are happy, I strongly suspect, simply derives from recognizing the relevant transparency of the dimension of endorsement and then conflating the whole of happiness with its endorsement component, overlooking the introspective opacity of the dimensions of engagement and attunement. It is instructive to note that when being a close friend or confidant to those who venture self-reports on the categories relevant to attunement, we are quite likely to hear that people are overly busy, collapse by the end of the day, regret the shortage of time for family and friends, succumb to unhealthy choices in food and drink, skimp on hobbies and lifeenriching activities, worry about this, feel anxious about that, and are generally preoccupied with life’s troubles, little and large. If these are the same individuals who number among the 90 percent or so of people who report being quite happy, they would seem thereby to be giving self-reports in serious tension with one another or, more likely, they are reporting on something strictly weaker than happiness, on a superficial and external state that falls decidedly short of Mammon’s advice to make a Heaven of Hell. Thus robbed of the power to trump the other sources of evidence, despite the prevalence of self-reports of happiness, it would seem that the would-be followers of Mammon’s advice are stumbling and still at some real distance from achieving their goal.

2. Noetic Effects of Sin: Self-Love and Self-Deception In section 1, we were able to see how a secular perspective supports the position that first-person reports of happiness do not constitute very powerful counterevidence to the thesis of a widespread lack of happiness and wellbeing predicted and defended in the pessimistic portrait of the world from Chapter 1. In this section, we will see that the same verdict receives compelling and independent support from the Christian perspective, as well.

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“Why is it,” asks Schopenhauer, “that in spite of all the mirrors in the world, no one really knows what he looks like?”⁹ His answer suggests that once a reflection is recognized as one’s own, its caster no longer takes an objective view of its particular features, granting his reflection allowances and a privileged status that distort his real attributes and genuine position in the world. This is precisely the situation in which we find ourselves according to the doctrine of Original Sin. In The City of God, St. Augustine told us why: We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self. In fact, the earthly city glories in itself, the Heavenly City glories in the Lord. The former looks for glory from men, the latter finds its highest glory in God . . . In the former, the lust for domination lords it over its princes as over the nations it subjugates; in the other both those put in authority and those subject to them serve one another in love. Consequently in the earthly city its wise men who live by men’s standards have pursued the goods of the body or of their own mind, or of both. Or those of them who were able to know God did not honor him as God, nor did they give thanks to him, but they dwindled into futility in their thoughts, and their senseless heart was darkened in asserting their wisdom.¹⁰

A tremendous amount of insight is buried in that oft-quoted passage. Just as there are defects of the fallen body, so too, there are defects of the fallen mind. Here Augustine highlights the affective defect of the fallen mind—the fallen will, which has reversed the priority of the proper objects of love and which loves (or fails to love) all out of proportion to the proper object of love. The tragic upshot of this reversal is revealed in a scattering of billions of minor kingdoms, each poorly governed by a pretender to the throne. Where there should be fellowship among God’s creatures, united in their recognition of God as the supreme good, there is instead a babel of would-be sovereigns, each the center of the cosmos from his own first-person point

⁹ Schopenhauer 2007, 42.

¹⁰ Augustine 1972, xiv.28.

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of view, each a potential rival for the scarce and lesser goods that have been mistaken for the road to happiness and well-being. Our lives in this condition of Original Sin are lives of concupiscence and inordinate self-love, frequently manifested in the three lusts of the chapter title: libido sentiendi, libido sciendi, libido dominandi. The first is a lust of the flesh (in Augustine, primarily a disordered sexual desire, his own struggle, but the thought can be extended to disordered desires for other material pleasures as well, such as pleasures of the palate and of drink and of finery and of wealth). The second is a lust for knowledge often signaled by a lawless curiosity, by investigations unchecked by the sage counsel of Raphael to Adam in Book VIII of Paradise Lost—“be lowly wise” (a disordered desire for information and for the power afforded those who know, those who appear to know, and those who seem able to teach others).¹¹ The third is a lust for social status and power (a disordered desire not just to rise above one’s fellow creatures, but to dominate them, to wrest control from them, to subject their wills to one’s own). Augustine’s autobiographical Confessions masterfully exhibits his own personal struggle with this “Unholy Trinity.” As Thomas Williams explains in the introduction to his philosophically sensitive translation of the Confessions, Just as the Holy Trinity was thought of as Power (Father), Wisdom (Son), and Love (Holy Spirit), this Unholy Trinity involves Perverted Power (worldly ambition), Perverted Wisdom (lust of the eyes), and Perverted Love (lust of the flesh).¹²

¹¹ A brief comment here: A recurring theme in Paradise Lost is the value of a kind of censorship. On my first (and probably second and third) reading of the poem, I resisted this theme and what I took to be its bizarre unjustified paternalism at every turn. Then I encountered Roger Shattuck’s intriguing book Forbidden Knowledge, gave the subject some careful thought, and became convinced of several categories of inquiry in which self-censorship in particular is very wise counsel, indeed. Being especially susceptible to libido sciendi myself, it was a lesson I industriously worked hard not to learn. To the reader similarly inclined to an automatic and hostile reaction to all things censorship: begin with Shattuck 1996, and, thus primed, I predict you will discover a number of settings in which restraining one’s own curiosity is sage advice. ¹² Augustine 2019, xii. Williams also observes that the dramatic structure of the first several books of the Confessions is organized around these three forms of concupiscence, charting Augustine’s struggle with each (in the order presented here) in Books II, III, and IV, the beginnings of his turn from the world to God in Book V, and his overcoming the struggle with each (in the reverse order) in Books VI, VII, and VIII, followed by his deferred baptism in Book IX.

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Thus the emerging portrait of the sinful creature’s affective state who is a devoted inhabitant of the City of Man is something like prideful adherence to a perverted Kantian maxim: to wit— Where my will conflicts with God’s, I will nevertheless pursue my own desires and my own independence, even to the contempt of God and to the (earthly) ruin of my fellow creatures; thus, shall I seek my own good.

It is a demented and misguided subjective principle of volition in a creature that thinks the world of itself, a self-absorbed child raising what it mistakenly takes to be its own interests to exalted and unjustifiable heights and reacting with hatred and contempt to whatever it perceives as blocking its progress—be it creature or Creator. This incoherent strategy for achieving well-being is more or less that which is recommended by Mammon, but how it is possible to take this suggestion in all seriousness and to wholeheartedly pursue it (as so many of us clearly seem to do) is only partially explained by an epidemic of inordinate self-love. The rest of the explanation will be postponed for a few paragraphs until we reach a discussion of Pascal, who gives a compelling expression to what in addition to self-love makes this common mistake so nearly irresistible. First, though, a worry: Augustine privileges pride in his thinking about the sins, taking it to be the primary instigation of the Fall and the fountain of these disordered desires, thus described. As is a temptation for any of us, I believe Augustine magnifies the significance of the sin with which he is aware he fought most fiercely, but in so doing, he may have overlooked a second (albeit, less common) form of disordered love which deserves attention of its own. Much of human conduct can be chalked up to the forms of concupiscence just described and in the very terms that Augustine uses to examine them, but we have all known individuals who do not seem properly described by the psychological profile of excessive self-love. Their battles in the world are not centered around the pursuit of excessive pleasure, overreaching curiosity, or uninhibited grabs for social power; just the opposite. These are the individuals who have such little standing in their social worlds (or who have been made to believe that they do) that wide-flung plans of domination and subjection of others could barely enter their thoughts as such a reality is so remote from their lived experience. They lack the requisite temporal or material resources or else have been denied the minimal education and training that would open the door to curiosities that have the leisure to border on being unrestrained. And pursuit of excessive pleasure is both

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beyond their means and an indulgence for which they pay a much higher social price than those who enjoy privileges and entitlement and who are readily granted impunity by society while gluttony and lust carve a visible and damaging trail through their (and others’) lives. The Augustinian default condition of excessive self-love should be scaled back and combined with another form of disordered love which is found in the City of Man and which can erect its own formidable barriers to entering the City of God—insufficient self-love. In Chapter 1, I noted that a lessercelebrated child of the Enlightenment was the rise of stable forms of institutional cruelty that facilitate the sanctioned and systematic oppression of various groups who lack the power to represent themselves or to remove the conditions of their oppression or even to quietly step out of harm’s way. Here we will certainly find representatives of insufficient self-love. We are accustomed to treat gluttony, for example, almost exclusively as a disordered desire for overindulgence—picture the person who won’t or can’t stop rapidly shoveling in food and swilling down drink long enough to participate even minimally in the conversation at the dinner table. But the traditional sin of gluttony has at least five forms: too much, too frequently, too ravenously, too exotically, too daintily. The last two forms in particular need not be manifested in overconsumption at all, yet in refraining from consumption on the grounds that the presentation of a meal isn’t extravagant enough or the steak just a tad overdone or the wine too pedestrian, one can exhibit inadequate appreciation of perfectly good dining and gustatory experiences. Similarly, counterparts of the very same five forms can be distinguished in the case of lust and disordered desires for sexual goods. But just as it is possible to have excessive or insufficient appreciation of the genuine value of such material goods, so too, it is possible to have excessive or insufficient love with respect to oneself. Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that for each individual, it’s all one or the other, or to deny that forms of selfprivileging and self-absorption can occur in the ranks of the severely oppressed as well. But it seems imperative to acknowledge that some individuals have been so abused and deformed by their societies that their struggles center on finding enough to love in themselves in order to assist them in perfecting their love for God and for one another. In addition to the affective defects of the fallen mind, there are also cognitive defects. In one of the surprisingly few contemporary works devoted to an exploration of the noetic effects of sin, Stephen Moroney argues that these effects are at their most severe with respect to our knowledge of God, and then with respect to our knowledge of ourselves, and finally with respect

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to our knowledge of the non-person elements of creation.¹³ Not only is the epistemic state of knowledge in jeopardy, but all of the mind’s cognitive faculties are tainted and at risk—including perception, introspection, imagination, memory, anticipation, common sense, intuition, understanding, and especially reason. No aspect of consciousness is immune to the noetic effects of sin. Given my purposes in this book, I am here most interested in the middle category—our awareness and knowledge of ourselves—but first a brief word about the bookend categories concerning God and concerning the nonpersonal elements of nature. A popular caricature of the mathematicians and scientists of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries celebrates their bravely fighting tooth and nail to protect their inquiries from the hamstringing doctrines of the Church and heroically freeing themselves to be guided by the light of a proper and rigorous (and largely theology-free) method. The actual course of events was rather different, with the study of nature—both the nature of the human mind and the nature of the physical environment in which that mind makes cognitive judgments—being very much influenced and directed by a committed adherence to certain theological positions on the Fall, Original Sin, and the noetic effects of sin.¹⁴ Whereas the popular narrative is one of an irrepressible scientific community stepping out of the prescribed lanes into which religious authorities were misguidedly attempting to sequester them, the foundations of science acquired much of the character that we know them to have today precisely because the relevant religious doctrines were taken so seriously by their practitioners. But the knowledge of nature is not our present topic. Much of the recent emphasis of the noetic effects of sin has been centered on how Original Sin as well as our own host of individual sins affect our ability to come to know of God’s existence and nature. This emphasis can be traced in large part to the highly influential work of Alvin Plantinga and his philosophically sophisticated renewal and defense of John Calvin’s notion of the sensus divinitatis. Famously Calvin held that [t]here is within the human mind, and indeed by natural instinct, an awareness of divinity. This we take to be beyond controversy. To prevent

¹³ Moroney 2000, 36–37. Also see Hoitenga 2003 for an excellent and lengthy critical study of Moroney 2000, a review which is itself one of the better pieces devoted to the noetic effects of sin. ¹⁴ As compellingly and expertly demonstrated in Harrison 2007.

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anyone from taking refuge in the pretense of ignorance, God himself has implanted in all men a certain understanding of his divine majesty. Ever renewing its memory, he repeatedly sheds fresh drops.¹⁵

Plantinga argues that this special sense of divinity can be invoked to show how beliefs in the existence of God and God’s nature and activities can be justified.¹⁶ To sketch the view in very broad brush strokes—some beliefs we hold on the basis of other beliefs, and some we don’t. Among the latter, there are properly basic beliefs that are rational to maintain even in the absence of arguments. Moreover, some beliefs about the existence of God enjoy this feature. Grant the assumption that we are all equipped with Calvin’s inescapable sense of the divine, an innate capacity to recognize the presence of God—a sensus divinitatis. Once it is triggered by an environment, it functions much like the cognitive faculties of memory or sense perception insofar as it yields reasonable beliefs independently of argument, but whereas, say, vision takes shape and color as its proper objects, the sensus divinitatis registers divinity instead.¹⁷ Plantinga then observes that sin induces in us a resistance to the deliverances of the sensus divinitatis . . . [Sin] carries with it a sort of blindness, a sort of imperceptiveness, dullness, stupidity. This is a cognitive limitation that first of all prevents its victim from proper knowledge of God and his beauty, glory, and love; it also prevents him from seeing what is worth loving and what is worth hating, what should be sought and what eschewed. It therefore compromises both knowledge of fact and knowledge of value.¹⁸

Plantinga goes on to argue that the sensus divinitatis has been damaged and remains only partially functional, but this strikes me as neither the only nor the best way to account for its failure to generate the judgments for which it was allegedly designed. If the sensus divinitatis is taken to be a ground for a

¹⁵ John Calvin 2006, I.iii.1. ¹⁶ Plantinga 2000. Additionally, see Bergmann 2006 for a careful and thorough defense of the theory of epistemic justification which underlies the following claims in this paragraph. ¹⁷ For a related view found in Pascal, see Cuneo 1994. For a discussion of an alleged sistersense, a sensus daemoniaci, and on the question of whether non-person animals might have an undiluted access to both sorts of awareness, see Hudson 2021. ¹⁸ Plantinga 2000, 205–207. See also Helm 1998 for discussion of Calvin on the sensus divinitatis and of Calvin’s own take on the noetic effects of sin. It is, perhaps, worth remembering that not only sin but also depression, anxiety, and a variety of other mental states and disorders can induce such resistance, as well.

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disposition to form divinely oriented beliefs in certain contexts, then there is a number of ways in which its functions could be interrupted and its characteristic manifestations could fail to materialize. Hamid Vahid dips into the literature on dispositions with this issue in mind, separates the candidates for generating trouble into finks (which affect the intrinsic properties of a subject and the causal basis of a disposition), masks (which leave the subject alone but shield it from the triggering stimuli of its environment), and antidotes (which produce additional features in the subject once triggered that counteract the input from an external stimulus which would otherwise lead to the manifestation in question). He then argues for a masking mechanism on multiple grounds.¹⁹ I appreciate Vahid’s moving this discussion forward in his explicit search for a proper mechanism by which sin could yield its deleterious epistemic effects, but I would like to say something in favor of antidotes as opposed to his preferred explanation in terms of masks. Masks protect an object from receiving an external stimulus (as one might protect a fragile glass from breaking, when struck, by surrounding it in rolls of heavy fabric). A modern proponent of the sensus divinitatis, however, is free to maintain that the sense is not so masked and that it never fails to register divinity in the appropriate environmental circumstances, or even to hold that its workings unfailingly produce a characteristic phenomenal state which is always an object of conscious awareness—the literal feeling of being in God’s presence. Rather, it will be sufficient to explain the frequent failure of this awareness to give rise to a belief in God by showing why its subjects do not properly recognize those experiences for what they are. As we will see in the remainder of this section, fallen subjects are so busy deceiving and flattering themselves and so preoccupied with the swarm of additional noetic effects of sin, the complexity and chaos of their disordered intellects compete with the clarity of the experiences furnished by this finest of senses and successfully distract their subjects, thus counteracting its function. But the knowledge of God is not our present topic, either. So, that leaves us with the noetic effects of sin with respect to the awareness and knowledge of ourselves, and it presents me with the opportunity to cash in an earlier promissory note to complete the explanation (thus far founded on inordinate self-love) of how we could adopt such an incoherent plan as Mammon’s to seek our happiness and well-being by

¹⁹ Vahid 2019.

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steadfastly rejecting and running away from its source. In a brilliant contribution to the literature on the noetic effects of sin, William Wood explores the Augustinian-inspired writings of Pascal and discovers there a consistent and well-defended thesis: The Fall is a fall into duplicity, it is an aversion to both God and the truth, and it manifests in predictable ways in individual, social, and political arenas alike.²⁰ Rampant self-deception is partnered with inordinate self-love, and consequently, not only do we select some idol among God’s creations and bestow on it the love that is proper to the Creator alone—whether it be a material good or an epistemic good or some source of power and control in the world—we consistently and successfully deceive ourselves about that very activity in such a way that we continue to direct our attention away from God and thus persist in the refusal to cooperate in the only relation that could provide medicine for our diseased state. As Wood argues, we are, to our own detriment, highly skilled in the arts of deception: Because we are born into a duplicitous world that shapes us into duplicitous subjects, and because our loves are disordered, we find it easy to deceive ourselves. Any would-be self-deceiver will already have acquired the skills of self-deception because one must acquire exactly these skills in order to become a functioning member of society. Having been habituated into patterns of deception, he will persistently be able to refuse to attend to his own beliefs and intentions, and therefore he will be able to deceive himself. Moreover, insofar as he deceives himself, it is highly likely that he also deceives other people and contributes to their self-deception, thereby reproducing and reinforcing the reign of duplicity into which we are all born.²¹

Many a theorist has attempted to locate an irresolvable paradox in the notion of self-deception. For how could you fool yourself into believing a proposition is false when you simultaneously know it to be true? Still, the notion is not as fraught as it might appear to be. Culpably talking oneself into believing a falsehood on inadequate grounds (even if one did not rise so high as to know it to be a falsehood) is one perfectly serviceable sense of self-deception—a clear case of coming to get oneself to believe something

²⁰ This could serve as the one-sentence summary of Wood 2013 which Wood expands into a fascinating, book-length, persuasive, and credible defense of its thesis. ²¹ Wood 2013, 12.

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mistaken and also of being responsible for that unfortunate state of affairs. And Pascal insists that this is precisely what we are repeatedly guilty of to a truly astonishing degree.²² The centerpiece of the Pascalian argument for self-deception with respect to our desires involves our frantic search for and indulgence in constant diversion. When separated from God, we are faced with the woeful inadequacy of ourselves and our capacities for self-fulfillment and are threatened by a debilitating boredom. To escape this terrible spectacle of our grotesque unfittingness to play the sovereign role we have allocated to ourselves, we distract ourselves from our real predicament in nearly any way possible, seeking out amusements and pastimes that will fill the vacant hours that we have chosen to occupy in opposition to God. Pascal argues that we deceive ourselves into thinking that we are actually on a quest for rest, relaxation, and happiness in these pursuits, but our actual behavior and mental states belie this characterization; the frenetic pursuit of entertainment and diversion is anything but restful or a source of genuine satisfaction. But this deception does serve one ruinous end. We manage to talk ourselves and our friends and our acquaintances and even the research teams (discussed in section 1 above) into believing that we are, on the whole, mightily happy indeed—whether through our inflated holiday letters to friends and family, or in our social media posts so often designed to craft for others an image of success, contentment, and victory against life’s obstacles, or by way of research questionnaires that register ludicrous figures for deep levels of life satisfaction in this City of Man for which the philosophy of pessimism is transparently apposite. And in so doing, we sustain our collective masquerade while seeking the wrong loves and chasing after inferior goods under the description of pursuing and securing happiness and effectively stand in our own and each other’s way on the only path to correcting our error. Pascal renews the Augustinian subjugation-of-others theme, the libido dominandi. However, Pascal seems to be sensitive to a second and equally powerful source of sin that he pairs with pride and that Wood identifies with the classical deadly sin of sloth.²³ Here I find myself resisting Wood’s suggestion. I do not mean to challenge his Pascal scholarship; I suspect he is correctly explicating his historical figure. Furthermore (as argued above) ²² I will refer the reader to Wood 2013 for further discussion. The examination of the role of duplicity in the individual is treated primarily in the first fourth of the book, but its second half contains a sophisticated discussion of self-deception which effectively blunts the criticism that it is a concept too perplexing to put to good use. ²³ Wood 2013, 25–27.

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I am in agreement that it is important to distinguish between two related sources of sin—an excess of self-love and a deficiency of self-love—the first exemplified in overvaluing and the second in undervaluing oneself and one’s needs and projects. Each form of disordered love presents its own peculiar pitfalls and obstacles to entering the City of God.²⁴ My quarrel is only with the identification of this second source of sin with the deadly sin of sloth, which, as I will argue at length in section 6 of this chapter and all of the next, is better associated with particular set of consequences of both inordinate and inadequate love of self.

3. A Second Battle Lost Each of us loses our first battle upon succumbing to sin. The fight to resist temptation, to live a blameless and sin-free life is over almost as soon as it begins. The world is awash in sin, and (not to put too fine a point on it) each of us dives in headfirst at the earliest stirrings of morally significant free will. Which of us is free of bondage? Who cannot honestly join Paul in his confession (Romans 7:19)? For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

For those attracted to the doctrine of Original Sin, we might add that the battle is over even before it begins, since our ancestors lost their corresponding battle with the primal sin and the consequences of that loss reverberate throughout the centuries and express themselves in our condition of inevitable susceptibility. Either way, the penalty of the loss of this first battle is alienation and separation from God. Many of us continue to lose our second battle, as well. In struggling to follow Mammon’s advice and restriction to make a Heaven of Hell, to pursue happiness and achieve well-being, but to do so on our own terms, by way of our own resources, without capitulating to God ²⁴ Compare Saiving 1960 and recall Plaskow 1980’s critique of Reinhold Niebuhr (discussed in section 8 of Chapter 1) with respect to the limitations of overemphasizing a particular experience of sin and in regarding sin as arising (nearly) exclusively from an inordinate love of self as opposed to an inadequate love of self—love which can undershoot as well as overshoot its mark.

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we take on an assignment with respect to which we are especially illequipped to succeed. We can mouth half-hearted and inauthentic declarations of success to one another (and, in private moments that should command more truthfulness, also to ourselves), but half-hearted and inauthentic declarations of success aren’t success. For a staggeringly large number of people, good-willed and hard-working, the tide of the second battle is turning against them. The penalty of the loss of this second battle is a failure to flourish, a failure overdetermined by multiple factors the most transparent of which is a failure to achieve happiness.

4. The Path from Happiness to Unhappiness Being bereft of happiness is one thing. Striving to achieve happiness and well-being and failing miserably at both is yet another. Such failures beget more than a generalized sadness, a melancholy regret, a sense of lost opportunities which have passed one by, a disappointment. Failures to achieve goals of this magnitude in one’s life despite intentional and persistent effort result not merely in the lack of happiness or neutrality—they manifest instead in unhappiness. Our earlier survey of theories of well-being and happiness culminated in what I took to be the very best account of happiness—Psychic Affirmation— the leading representative from the family of emotional-state theories. An equally compelling theory of unhappiness can be constructed by way of paying careful attention to the elements of this happiness theory, and it will prove instructive to delineate this counterpart theory as a backdrop to the present chapter on the dire consequences of our failing to make a Heaven of Hell on our own power. As Satan pursues his plan of revenge against God and enters the Garden of Eden in Book IV of Paradise Lost, intent on spoiling God’s new creation, he suffers from a moment of self-recognition and honesty and chastises himself: Nay cursed be thou; since against his thy will Chose freely what it now so justly rues. Me Miserable! Which way shall I fly Infinite wrath and infinite despair? Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell . . . O then at last relent: is there no place Left for Repentance, none for Pardon left?

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None left but by submission; and that word Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame Among the Spirits beneath, whom I seduced With other promises and other vaunts Then to submit, boasting I could subdue The Omnipotent. Ay me, they little know How dearly I abide that boast so vain, Under what torments inwardly I groan: While they adore me on the Throne of Hell, With Diadem and Scepter high advanced The lower still I fall, only Supreme In misery; such joy Ambition finds. John Milton, Paradise Lost (IV.71–92)

Satan also is losing his second battle. Certainly, he flies wherever he chooses under his own (borrowed) power, but since he takes his unreconciled self along for the journey, “which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.” All the directions of the compass are open to him, but only the one marked “repentance” will take him through surrender and pardon back to happiness, and as the passage from the poem makes clear, Satan still prefers infinite despair to the shame of renouncing vaunts and boasts that he now rues and has come to acknowledge as grotesque and vain. This portrait of Satan’s unhappiness is grander and more tragic than ours, but in the end it is more a difference in degree than kind. Like happiness, unhappiness also consists in a person’s overall emotional condition, which is a complex function of one’s moods, emotions, and dispositions with respect to mood and emotion. Let us introduce the name “Psychic Renunciation” to christen our counterpart to the theory of happiness we encountered in Chapter 2 under the name “Psychic Affirmation.” Psychic Renunciation, then, also maintains that the core of the relevant subjective response to one’s life and its constituent elements is located in one’s central affective states—that is, primarily in one’s overall emotional condition. Unhappiness need not be viewed primarily as a cognitive affair (although it clearly will be intimately connected to any number of cognitive judgments that are presupposed by and that occasion the various emotional responses in which it consists). As before, we can delineate three distinct dimensions of the emotional response to life pertaining to unhappiness with increasing significance (as ordered in the presentation below).

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Dejection The affects of dejection are the most overt and tell-tale manifestations of unhappiness: the pinched lips and darkened scowl, a persistent irritability triggered by trifles, the unnecessary sarcastic or cutting remark, a protective posture and body language warning others to keep a distance, a restless fidgetiness, the narrowed eyes, a quickness to find fault—unhappiness made visible. These are the outward manifestations of unhappiness, effortlessly recognized in loved ones, co-workers, casual acquaintances, and even strangers, dissatisfaction that you can see and hear, the colors and sounds of sadness. Disengagement The characteristics of disengagement need not be expressed in grimaces and frowns, grumbles and chilly receptions. They run deeper and are more sustainable than the frequent and minor eruptions of dejection. Here we find a subject actively retreating from her life, rejecting its elements—not merely hobbling along or taking them in stride while hoping for something better tomorrow, but disowning and repudiating them. Disengagement is a sort of emotional lethargy, a dispirited walking-through-the-motions with no investment of self. It is a recipe for world-weariness, a nay-saying attitude to one’s experience and its goods and ills. Discordance The characteristics of discordance serve as the particular arena in which disengagement takes place and dejection is displayed. Persistent feelings of insecurity, of constantly needing to be wary and on watch against the barbs of the world, give rise to incessant agitation, cramping of emotion, and restlessness of thought—to a jittery and fragile frame of mind. A pervading sense of unease and general apprehensiveness creeps into, pinches, and distorts many of the everyday goods in life: second-guessing is exchanged for confidence in interpersonal relationships, self-doubt replaces creativity and self-expression, dissatisfaction supplants gratitude, fear curbs curiosity and receptivity. It is a state of stress and anxiety, a withering of the self and spirit.

Psychic Renunciation, then, takes unhappiness (just as Psychic Affirmation takes happiness) to consist in a particular overall emotional response to one’s life. This response is comprised of two primary elements: first—one’s central affective states (i.e., one’s productive, persistent, pervasive, and profound moods and emotions) and second—one’s mood propensities

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(i.e., one’s dispositions with respect to mood and emotion). The particular response of this kind identified with the condition known as unhappiness reveals itself in the three dimensions of dejection, disengagement, and discordance. It is this calamitous trio, then, and the unhappiness they comprise that await those who lose the second battle to make a Heaven of Hell after suffering the penalty of separation from God from losing the first battle against sin.²⁵

5. Steeped in Sin—Six Stories for Everyone The (optimistic) pessimist from Chapter 1 who has failed in an attempt to implement Mammon’s advice nevertheless continues to adhere to a theology in which she is not only unhappy but also remains steeped in sin. Moreover, she understands that unenviable predicament to be the condition of her fellows as well, whether or not they join her in any of the three religious reasons earlier supplied for such optimism. As noted in Chapter 1, talk of sin has fallen out of fashion. This is a significant and lamentable departure from a very long and distinguished tradition. One way of recapturing part of what was so valuable in that tradition comes through focusing on the seven capital vices, the concepts of which were employed by Christians for self-examination, confession, preaching, and spiritual formation for well over a thousand years.²⁶ Originating as a list of eight evil thoughts—gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, wrath, listlessness/sloth, vainglory, and pride—and externalized and personified as demons who could debate with one another and pay harmful visits to the monks of the Egyptian hermit communities, this conceptual framework for classifying, recognizing, and combatting sin was compiled by Evagrius Pontus in the fourth century. From Egypt the categories traveled to the West through the work of John Cassian in the fifth century, who adapted the list and imposed a structural hierarchy of mutual influence among the sins. In turn, Cassian’s work was later refined and restructured by Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century, who (in his devotion to lists of sevens) reduced the eight evil thoughts by assigning pride a special status as ²⁵ Keep this description of unhappiness in memory. We’ll encounter an intriguing reason to revisit it in section 6 below. ²⁶ A brief but satisfying history of the capital vices can be gleaned from the Introduction of Newhauser 2005. A fascinating scholarly and detailed treatment is available in Bloomfield 1952, especially 56–104.

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root of all of the sins (and thus dropping it from the official list of its offspring), introducing envy, and combining the originally distinct listlessness/sloth (conceived as spiritual lethargy) and sadness (conceived as dejection from being overwhelmed by evil) into the single vice of sadness: thus taking the list from eight to seven back to eight back to seven, where it could join the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, the seven principal virtues, and the seven beatitudes. This mode of presentation dominated until the twelfth century when Hugh of St. Victor succeeded in reversing Gregory’s subsumption of listlessness/sloth under sadness, by dropping sadness and restoring sloth (now conceived as a combination of listlessness and dejection, especially with respect to spiritual goods). Thus transformed the list came down to Aquinas. Post-Aquinas, pride eventually rejoined its companions (supplanting vainglory), and the grouping most likely to be familiar to the modern reader was solidified thereafter—pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, lust.²⁷ Whereas Evagrius used the appellation “evil thoughts,” Cassian and Gregory “principal vices,” and Hugh of St. Victor “capital sins,” it is presently more common to hear “seven deadly sins,” which is something of twofold misnomer. The seven are better qualified as capital than as deadly (thereby remaining neutral on the contested mortal/venial sin distinction which no longer has the popularity it enjoyed in the thirteenth century), and they are also better understood as vices or character traits than as sins (that is, than as individual actions that separate us from God associated with or thought to arise from those character traits).²⁸ That said, however, I will follow custom in casually moving back and forth between these standard referring expressions, treating them as stylistic variants on one another. This small but exceedingly versatile collection of vices has long been a primary vehicle for expressing Christian themes in the West. The sins were the subjects of countless sermons, figured prominently in confession manuals, were invoked as central categories of the examination of conscience, of

²⁷ I have reproduced some of the intriguing highlights of the conceptual history of sloth that appear in this paragraph from Nault 2013, 21–55. The ordering of the lists that appear at the beginning and ending of this paragraph is not accidental and reflects evolving views about the relations between the vices and the subjects whose lives they disrupt. It is unfortunate (especially in our age) that vainglory has been demoted, so to speak. It is significantly different from pride and a complex and fascinating sin in its own right. For a book-length discussion of vainglory, see DeYoung 2014b. ²⁸ Thus we may distinguish between, say, gluttonous desires, gluttonous actions, and gluttony or between wrathful feelings, wrathful behavior, and wrath—where the third member of each trio is the character trait and capital vice.

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self-critique, and of monitoring religious progress and spiritual standing. In stark contrast with what appears to be something of a widespread allergic reaction to any prolonged focus on the issue of sin in contemporary discourse, the capital vices could hardly have been taken more seriously by individuals, communities, and the Church for the majority of its history.²⁹ And this with very good reason. The seven deadly sins have a remarkable (even enchanting) power to capture and organize our thoughts about the evil we do, and they manage to be recognizable and to resonate with nearly everyone irrespective of age, sex, range of experience, language, culture, class, or status in the world.³⁰ There are not many finer-tipped brushes for painting a realistic and pessimistic picture of unhappy and non-flourishing humanity than you’ll find among the seven deadly sins. And the paintings need not be sprawling masterpieces depicting tragic heroes, larger-than-life villains, loathsome murderers, or battles against dark lords. Not every sinner is an Agamemnon, or an Alcibiades, or an Agrippina, or an Adolf. Most of us will never have access to the kind of power that ordinarily precedes an appearance on such a list. But there’s no great comfort in that. Epictetus the Stoic tells a story in his Discourses of a man who defends himself against criticism for misbehavior by noting that it was not as if he had killed his father. To which he receives the reply—“Yes, but your father wasn’t there to kill, whereas the only fault that you could have committed given your actual circumstances, you did in fact commit.” None of us is in a position to chase the White Whale, or to defend Isengard, or to fiddle while Rome burns, but each of us has access to all the resources we need to separate ourselves from God. The sins surface everywhere and they are masters of disguise. The epidemic of self-love and its partner in crime, self-deceit, work in concert to make the sins largely invisible to those afflicted by them, and when we do catch a glimpse of their handiwork in our own lives, we can, with a little effort, nearly ²⁹ For an overview see (especially Part II of) Delumeau 1995 and the assorted essays in Newhauser 2005. The capital vices were also prominently and richly explored in the literature of the same period. See Bloomfield 1952. ³⁰ I invite you to evaluate one piece of that claim clearly within your reach. Sit down with loved ones you trust and who know you well. Each of you construct a list where you rank the seven—pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, lust—from one to seven, where “one” is awarded to the sin with which you struggle the most and so on down the list. Before sharing your results, make your best guess about the lists being constructed by your partners in the exercise. If you choose to share your lists (and/or your guesses) and have a conversation about it, it won’t take long to see how quickly you get caught up in the action and to see how much you are invested in the outcome.

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always provide a rationalization for our behavior. In fact, this is one area in which nearly all human beings can claim significant accomplishment. But sometimes a sketch can engage the attention, imagination, and emotions in a way that flatly repeating a thesis cannot. Here is a brief exercise to put that thought to the test.³¹

Story One For leaving pottery out where it is in danger of being stepped upon and broken, a father from prehistory strikes his child—much harder than he intended. Her mother cries out against the act, and, embarrassed at his loss of control, he raises his hand menacingly at her in turn, but with no chance of carrying through as they both well know. His irritability has never been so high; anything triggers it. He cannot shake his experience with the other men. He glowers and to himself muses—“I was in the right, after all, and they wouldn’t admit it! I had persuasively argued that just as no one thinks this year’s snow is last year’s snow or this moon’s rain last moon’s rain or the grass of this spring the grass of seasons past, no one should think that the sun that rises tomorrow in the East is the sun that will set tonight in the West. Nature’s cycles prove it. There is, of course, a great succession of suns, one sparked anew each morning, blazing at the noon, dimming at the horizon, spent as it dips from sight, finally allowing night to reign until his brother is born and crosses the sky on the morrow. The fools who insist that there is but one sun madly racing under the ground to get back to its origin before the night is over, mysteriously replenishing its store of whatever oil it burns along the way . . . what are they thinking? They insult the God of the sun and diminish his creations, making him out to be some imbecilic child who uses the same cup every day. Why won’t they listen to reason?”

And so a disgruntled father lashes out in fevered wrath. But is he really so terribly in the wrong? His love is ultimately for justice and his desire for the proper acknowledgement and admiration of his reasoning (which, although mistaken in its conclusions, certainly did have something in its favor). The father may certainly say as much to himself.

³¹ Five of the six story-sketches that appear here are drawn from a chapter of my novel on sloth and the love commandments, Hudson 2020.

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Here’s another take: This prehistoric child abuser and would-be partner beater wants interpersonal power, not justice. Reasonable belief isn’t enough. His peers’ recognition of his intellectual skills, even their judgment that his skills exceed their own, wouldn’t be enough. He needs to extract a public declaration. They must acknowledge his intellectual superiority to him and to one another. Failing that—he would thrash them (or whoever is closest and indefensible enough to serve as a proxy) into submission.

Story Two The barn is cold. The yard is cold. The house is cold. Everything cold. “Why”—whispers the servant whose livelihood depends entirely on the whim of her employer—“Why do I have to rouse myself before dawn to burden and chore, while my mistress sleeps the sleep of the coddled? Yelling at me for not having the fire at full flame before six? Demanding this? Commanding that? She is no more deserving than I am. She was given her wealth, her position, her power. Such arrogance in one who has earned nothing! If anything, our places should be exchanged; my labor rewarded, her uselessness punished by slaving for and answering to me. Everyone should start the race at the same line. We all have seen the moon—no significant difference separates us. Only time and chance. I would rob her of it all, even if I could not take her place.”

Audible misery, but we try to render it more palatable by suggesting that this isn’t the petulant whining of one bested in a contest of merit, that all-toofamiliar mother of jealous speech and thought; perhaps it is rather the lament of one who loves fairness in distribution of goods and disdains lopsided privilege that bestows unearned benefits on one as it levels undeserved harms on another. The servant may certainly say as much to herself. Here’s another take: This disgruntled domestic wants social power, not fairness and equality. Grant her plea. Let her exchange places with her mistress. Will they then sit as equals at the table, share and share alike? Hardly. Unearned benefits and undeserved harms will remain the rule of the household. The only change worth noting will be in which of them bitterly complains.

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Story Three “The most generous woman they have ever known. She would give away her last dollar, share her meal with a stranger, offer her finest scarf to a shivering waif.” The professor has always delighted in such descriptions and has worked hard to make them true. She has made herself a woman who knows the worth of worldly possessions and that their value nearly always consists in their ability to be bestowed on others in need of them. She lives a Spartan life with iron willpower, free of the disease of acquisition, indifferent to the pressures of advertising, proud of and contented in her simplicity. Never shy or apologetic about taking a share large enough to satisfy her meagre and reasonable needs, she has enough . . . in all areas but one, for she is a knowledge miser. Head and shoulders above her peers in her astounding collection of facts, theories, interconnections, concrete know-how, and abstract speculation, she aches for more. More history, more philosophy, more literature, more religion, more physics, more mathematics, more . . . detail. She will select an article for which she has but a passing interest over a tea party with her child, an outdated documentary that promises a tidbit or two of trivia over intimacy with her husband, any opportunity to increase her stockpile of data at almost any expense. Fanatical pursuit of information drives her moral decisionmaking, often in the wrong direction. If there were only a way to make a gift of one’s knowledge at the expense of not retaining it oneself, she would see exactly how little claim she has to the title of generosity that so many of her family and friends bestow upon her. She does not care for dollars, meals, or scarves; parting from them is nothing to her. But ask her to relinquish some hard-won understanding in exchange for a substantial benefit distributed to those she most loves and watch the panic that ensues, behold the excuses that are devised, witness a selfishness that prefers to augment a good which is already plentifully enjoyed at the expense of real suffering to herself and others.

And so the self-deceived professor compliments herself on her capacity to withstand the multi-faceted temptation of avarice while being as tightly bound by that sin as anyone ever caught in its grip. But is it really worth her getting all worked up over the matter? Her aspirations to knowledge and to deep understanding of herself and her relation to the world are splendid facets of her character. The professor may certainly say as much to herself.

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Here’s another take: The knowledge miser wants the power of information, not simply a rich understanding of herself and her world. We all play to our strengths, often trading a well-rounded life for a grossly disproportionate share of one good whose overabundance becomes a cancerous growth, unbalances us, and forces us into niches from which we can neither extract ourselves nor interact with others without conflict.

Story Four A composer retreats from the music into the bottle. The audience applauds the superb performance of the first act of his opera, but absorbed in meticulously critiquing the sauces on the beef set before him, he slumps in the composer’s box, deaf to the appreciation of his artistry, and worries a fifth glass of wine. Obsessed with the presentation of the meal, he rejects it a third time, demanding that the chef meet his impossible expectations. In drink, he takes too much, too soon, too rapaciously, and spends excessively in pursuit of exotic tastes. In food, he barely manages to meet his basic nutritional needs, for no quantity, no quality, no arrangement, no temperature, no seasoning, no admixture is satisfactory. In both, unnatural and disproportionate concern with what he sees, smells, tastes, and ingests crowds out everything else worthy of attention, starves his relationships, and diminishes even the music with which he has been so richly gifted. Month after month, however, he recognizes and abhors his addiction and his pettiness. Vowing to reform once and for all, he is stone drunk within a fortnight, trading the integrity of his body and squandering his talent for pleasures of the palate that no longer ever materialize. Tomorrow he will look in the mirror and swear off his addiction again.

And so this shackled composer fusses over and spoils every meal and slakes his every thirst, but perhaps he can produce a justifying excuse, a compensating characteristic. He does, after all, possess a rare and formidable gift of aesthetic insight and genuine discernment. He simply aims at the aesthetic appreciation of the finest sights, sounds, odors, tastes, and textures his environment can afford, scarce and precious goods well worth nurturing and relishing. He is a custodian of the exquisite, and he must act for art and beauty’s sake. The composer may certainly say as much to himself. Here’s another take: This sloshed and finicky artist wants power over his environment, not aesthetic appreciation. Possessed of enough insight to

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recognize defects in himself, his work, and his surroundings, but without sufficient resolve and the ability to make the world conform to his will, he numbs himself with drink to ease the discomfort and applies himself to combinations of flavors and to the presentation of a plate in the sure-to-befrustrated desire of achieving perfection somewhere. He doesn’t hunger for aesthetic appreciation; he hungers for control.

Story Five Long past his prime, past even his predicted death, the second oldest man in the tribe arrives early to watch the girls dance. Fixated, the matrons watch the watching. “He should be ashamed,” they declare one to another. “Open mouthed and ogling. Wrinkled and staggering. It’s disgusting. What does he think he could possibly do with one of them? It’s appalling.” His body is failing, but his hearing is not. Cut by their remarks, he struggles to stand and departs. But there is an answer to their question. He could look at the girls for hours, fondly and sadly in turns, recalling his own youth, his virility, his physical power, his departed magnificence of body. Time is no one’s ally in old age, and decades have carved heavy ribbons into his flesh and brittled his bones, but his sexual cravings have lingered. No longer desirable, he desires all the more. He wishes to touch and to caress and to kiss and to please the dancing bodies. To experience once more the closeness with another that is celebrated in shared sexual intimacy. Somehow, however, these desires are not recognized for what they are, and an indiscriminate hunger for visual access to the youthful female form, to any youthful female form, to interchangeable parts on display, has taken their place. Humiliated, he is later discovered by the matrons stealing further glances from behind a tent.

And so the elder is caught out in a premeditated moment of self-emptying lasciviousness, but surely, his love is truly directed at strength, fitness, health, beauty, sexual goods, union and intimacy with another, and surely, these are the noble objects he has in view from behind his screen. The elder may certainly say as much to himself. Here’s another take: The lewd and tawdry senior wants sexual power, not (or not exclusively) deep union and intimacy with another. Suppose he gains access that is more than visual. Suppose he caresses and kisses the dancing bodies while maintaining his primary attitude of using them interchangeably as a device for wistfully calling to mind selective experiences of his

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youth that will not return. Those activities (driven by the state of mind in which bodies are fungible and are not represented as having persons attached to them) will soon fail to excite his desires and rekindle bittersweet memories of bygone days, but will yield to less compassionate touch and to the utter disregard for union and intimacy disclosed in force and submission, pain and sexual humiliation.

Story Six A well-armored reader peruses glancing and impressionistic descriptions of wrath, envy, avarice, gluttony, and lust as they appear in nondescript, mundane contexts. Not a single Achilles, Salieri, Scrooge, Cousin Pons, or Don Juan to be found in the bunch—just Everyman going about his business. Describing the stories later and over dinner with his spouse, the reader explains how they didn’t quite hit their mark. “Take that last one, for instance. I’ve seen some porn, but who hasn’t? It’s not my thing, really. Maybe I was a tad preoccupied with sex in my earlier years. But trust me; I’m long past the days when I’d cross the street to ogle anyone. A bit closer to home, I’ll be the first to admit I like a good meal and I suppose it shows a little, but it’s not as if I snack all day in the way Alice does. I mean, I swear she takes a bite-sized Snickers from the commons room every single time she walks by. (And she walks by a lot.) I’m getting a little worried about her, if truth be told. Besides I’ve cut way back on drinking since my college days. I doubt I’m anywhere near the weekly average you’d find if you surveyed the lushes that work in my office. I can’t say I’ve ever been much interested in hoarding anything, either. My aunt was a hoarder, and I saw exactly what it did to her. And I don’t just mean material things either. I’ve built up a pretty impressive track record of being generous and free with my time. I know, I know, you’re probably the exception, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve given more than I’ve received in every significant relationship I’ve been in since I became an adult. I don’t mind really. It feels good to always be caring for others. Also, I’ve learned a thing or two about the value of hard-earned money over the years, and I’ve never been one to be suckered by all the advertising that somehow lures my siblings into carrying balances in the thousands on their credit cards each month. In fact, Annie’s case is just embarrassing. What does she need all those clothes for?

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But maybe you have a better chance of relating to that one? Me, I can’t stand shopping. I feel bad for that servant girl, of course. It’s a damned shame that there’s such a discrepancy of wealth and position and class even in our day and age. But, you know, I look around and just can’t see much that others have that I might want—even if it were handed over for free. I’m good with the modest living we’ve cobbled together for ourselves right here in this house and in the condo we have in Sun Valley. Work is manageable. We travel enough. We can splurge on a bottle of wine and dinner out without consulting the checkbook like a couple of college kids. I mean, good God, how much does a person need? And finally that business about hitting a child and physically threatening your spouse. Man, I don’t care how mad you think you are. Nobody had better ever pull that sort of horseshit in front of me. Not even once. Not. Even. Once. I know people wrestle with their demons and all that, but to be honest, I’ve been lucky enough to dodge most of it.”

Could be. Good points. Hard to tell.

6. Sloth, the Sin of Sadness Worse than the diminishing of the centrality of sin in twentieth-century theology is the temptation in the broader culture to treat it as little more than a reservoir for humor or to adopt the position that the tradition has it backwards—“lust and pride are the virtues . . . don’t let the hopelessly prudish or those afflicted with smallness of soul dupe you into thinking otherwise; we’ve had much too much of that!”³² Unfortunately, this strategy is almost always conducted by misidentifying the vice in question. It’s an easy trick to perform. The modern reader, unfamiliar with the mountains of scholarship on the analysis and character of these vices, is in no position to spot a subtle switch of topics and is even more receptive to the experience insofar as it promises to flatter rather than criticize dispositions he fears himself to be burdened with. “Indeed,” writes Robert Hutchinson, “if society eradicates the vices, what will it use to overcome the virtues when, left unpruned in the garden of the soul, they grow out of control and begin to strangle the flowers of the human ³² For examples in this genre, see Blackburn 2004 and Solomon 2000.

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spirit?” The vices “are tonics for the soul.”³³ This sounds modern and liberating, but no one could talk this way that had properly identified the virtues which, as it turns out, pose little danger to the flowers of the human spirit (and certainly no credible threat of strangling).³⁴ To be clear, humor isn’t the problem. Laughing at especially insightful portrayals of the vices can be a very good experience in a number of ways, some of which involve letting down one’s guard long enough to see their hidden influence in one’s own life, to see clearly the damage they can do, and to put oneself in a position to do something about it. This is the perennial attraction of C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, a hilarious treasure trove of such head-clearing experiences. But pretending that the vices are really deeply desirable and that the only case to be made for the opposing point of view must stand on the unsteady ground of advocating for character traits and pro-attitudes that have been conjured up by priggish religious fanatics in moral philosophers’ clothing is just silly. No—not just silly. Pernicious. Eliciting this attitude soon turns what could be worthwhile laughter into schadenfreude and assists its audience in remaining largely ignorant of the profound and sophisticated work that has been done on the vices for centuries. The sin of sloth has recently been exploited and mined for humor in just such an unfortunate way by Wendy Wasserstein in a book commissioned for Oxford University Press’s series of single-authored monographs on the seven deadly sins.³⁵ As much as there is to admire in Wasserstein’s comedic talents, after putting all the yuk-yukking to one side, one walks away from her book-length parody of self-help manuals with no sense whatsoever of the tragic effects of this extremely widespread vice on the lives of so many of our fellow citizens of the world. One is, however, at some risk of forming a new appreciation for the (questionable) lessons that systematically cutting corners, routinely pampering oneself, and cultivating laziness really have quite a lot going for them. As one of the very few prominent venues in generations to have explored this most misunderstood of the capital vices, this was a missed opportunity.

³³ Hutchinson 1995, 3. ³⁴ To be fair, Hutchinson’s work is a send up of William J. Bennett’s The Book of Virtues and in its most egregious moments is tongue in cheek . . . but not entirely. The introduction and commentary seem to betray a genuine exasperated and modern impatience with serious attempts to understand and to be guided in practical judgment by reflections on the deadly sins. ³⁵ Wasserstein 2006.

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Here are three much more edifying first passes at characterizing this fascinating and debilitating sin. The sin of sloth has two components: acedia, which means a lack of caring, an aimless indifference to one’s responsibilities to God and man, and tristitia, meaning sadness and sorrow. In its final stages sloth becomes despair at the possibility of salvation . . . sloth is the loss of one’s spiritual moorings in life, and the ensuing spiritual vacuum manifests itself in despondency and flight from the worship of God and service to man.³⁶ The sin of sloth is a state of dejection that gives rise to torpor of mind and feeling and spirit; to a sluggishness, or, as it has been put, a poisoning of the will; to despair, faintheartedness, and even desirelessness, a lack of real desire for anything, even for what is good.³⁷ Sloth is a resistance to the demands of love . . . apathy . . . comfortable indifference to duty and the neglect of other human beings’ needs . . . sloth has more to do with being lazy about love than lazy about our work.³⁸

Miles and miles from the modern day connotations of mere laziness and indolence, sloth is a deadening and dangerous impoverishment of mind—a depression and a sadness which can overwhelm, compress, or even extinguish the normal range of one’s emotional responses to life. Sloth is the sin which carves out joy, leaving in its place a hollow and vacant indifference (even to items and activities one judges intellectually to be goods), and which gradually robs its victim of the capacity to fight her way back into happiness. In an excellent series of articles, Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung advocates for a Thomistic conception of sloth whose leading insight is that this sin breeds severe resistance to the demands of love.³⁹ One senses perhaps, at first pass, a tension between the characterizations of sloth both in terms of indifference and also of resistance—for how can I both not care about whether or not I have something (indifference) and also care that I lack it (resistance)? But this way of putting things involves a misconception which, once removed, relieves the apparent tension. The slothful do slide into the defective state of being indifferent to certain goods, and consequently become resistant to the demand that they undergo difficult change or commit to

³⁶ Schimmel 1997, 193. ³⁷ Fairlie 1979, 113. ³⁸ DeYoung 2009, 81–82. ³⁹ DeYoung 2014a is, in my estimation, the best of these.

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taxing effort to acquire and nurture those goods to which they no longer have an adequate affective response given that state of indifference. Laziness or excessive procrastination in refraining from engaging one’s duties is the defect of character which we have long been taught is the hallmark of sloth, and so familiar is the association that it has come to be confused with the entirety of the vice. It is not surprising, then, when a modern audience balks at learning that sloth (thus conceived) was for some bizarre reason classed alongside envy, wrath, and avarice—vices whose ills remain as transparent and genuinely threatening now as they have ever been. There is another sign of sloth, however, equally effective at ensuring that we do not respond appropriately to the demands of love and interpersonal relationships, and Pascal was dead right about our susceptibility to it. It’s not always idle hammocking in the sun all afternoon; indeed, we can often be spotted racing in the direction of the next available amusement or novel form of escapism to dodge the serious effort involved in responding well to our relationships. Consider the person whose life seems pledged to unremitting entertainment and distraction, from the five hours of television a day which is the national American average, to excessive gaming and social media consumption, to the ever-present earphones ensuring that music or podcast or political chatter or fashion news can all be summoned instantly with just a click or two while driving. Consider the busy bee—on the move from morning until night—completing utterly insignificant task after task, or else the workaholic—in the study from night until morning—fixated on a career and competing for all the trifling honors and ribbons in her field, while their respective children, spouses, friends, and spiritual lives are postponed, unattended, and starved. These are the better concealed but equally qualified candidates for sloth. Instructively, Aquinas opposes the vice of sloth to the greatest of the theological virtues, that of charity.⁴⁰ Sloth is a spiritual vice, and Aquinas (echoing Gregory) sees sloth as a kind of sadness with respect to the spiritual good of charity. Yet the sadness in question should not be confused with a mere feeling, for it has a volitional aspect. Just as charity or love requires an act of will, an endorsement on the part of the subject (as opposed to a bare feeling), so too, sloth is not solely a matter of one’s passive phenomenal states for it also involves the subject’s will in the act of resisting an offer of ⁴⁰ For an extended discussion of this opposition and its significance for understanding the sin of sloth, see DeYoung 2014a, 186–192. For Aquinas on sloth, see Summa Theologiae II-II.35, and De Malo XI (on spiritual apathy).

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love and its requirements. Sloth is thus a willfully indulged aversion to participating in and cultivating the goods of love. How such a thing is possible is a puzzle that exercises Aquinas, for in willfully resisting, say, God’s love we are, on the Thomistic account of flourishing (a version of perfectionism), thereby thwarting our well-being and happiness. But this is the same puzzle we have seen confronting Milton’s angels (and ourselves) in Chapter 2, and the explanation of its possibility plainly lies, I believe, in our universal condition of sinfulness exhibited in Chapter 1 and in our willingness to reverse the priority of value, relinquishing the supreme good of union with God to go traipsing after the lesser goods of the world. As earlier noted, however, we may hope that sin-as-pedagogue can ultimately teach us the importance of actively resisting this resistance and of not thwarting our own flourishing through a willfully indulged aversion to the transforming power of God’s love. One thesis which recommends itself at this stage of the discussion can hardly come as a surprise to the reader. The deadly sin we have now explored at some length (viewed in its historical context and painted in its many shades of gray) is so remarkably similar to dejection, disengagement, and discordance (the three dimensions of an emotional response to life that we termed Psychic Renunciation) as to positively invite an identification of the best understanding of sloth and the best theory of unhappiness. Or—if one maintains that these are not one and the same phenomenon, on the grounds that sloth is conceptually bound up with one’s relation to God in a way that unhappiness is not—they are nevertheless the closest of siblings. So close, in fact, as to be twins, for as I will argue in the final chapter, the remedy to unhappiness also depends to a great extent on this very feature that sloth wears so openly on its sleeve. Even though one’s separation from God and one’s resistance to God’s love isn’t printed right on the label of unhappiness (as it seems to be on sloth’s), it is the key to unlocking the secret of both conditions.

7. Taking Stock Each of us loses our first battle upon succumbing to sin and the penalty of this loss is alienation and separation from God. Pride is the sin most often associated with rebellion against God and with the myth of individual sufficiency and sovereignty. And in Chapter 1, I did my best to show what a world inhabited by billions of proud pretenders to the throne looks like in

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all of its pessimistic glory. In Chapter 2, I tried charitably to set the stage for those suffering from the consequences of pride who would follow Mammon’s advice to make a Heaven of Hell without reconciling with God and argued for the superiority of an objective-list approach to well-being and for the Psychic Affirmation theory of happiness. In the first half of this chapter, I reported old news, namely, that successful Mammonites are exceedingly rare, and I voiced and defended both religious and secular hypotheses designed to explain why this is so and why it is likely to continue. In its second half, I advanced the claim that in our feckless attempts to follow Mammon’s advice, we have lost a second battle for well-being, and this has not merely forfeited happiness but given rise to unhappiness. Accordingly, given the foregoing discussion of sin and in particular of the deadly sin of sloth, which reveals its affinity with the state of unhappiness, the following (over-simplified but succinct) summary can be stated: We separate ourselves from God through sin, and we and our world are the worse for it. Our pride leads us to attempt to make the best of our disastrous situation on our own terms. Predictably, we fail and fail miserably. We thereby forfeit well-being and happiness, and the new modes of suffering expressed in the deadly sin of sloth are our earned and unhappy wages.

In the final chapter of this book, I will recommend a partial strategy for confronting and combatting sloth in those whose unhappiness can be traced in accordance with the story presented above. At present, I will just remark that sloth is an especially difficult condition to eradicate, and for a peculiar reason that sets it apart from the other vices. One popular construal of the vices is to see them as settled dispositions to form disordered desires (e.g., regarding lust as the disposition to disordered desire with respect to sexual goods or gluttony as the disposition to disordered desire for the goods of the palate). The remedy? Provide the proper motivation and then the mechanics to successfully recalibrate the desires. But sloth does not fit nicely into this model, since it is less like a disordered desire and more like an extinguished desire. Rather than meeting the challenge to redirect or refocus an unruly desire that has wandered away from its proper object, the challenge here is to reignite a desire that has gone out. It is common to think of an agent as one who performs actions and to think of an action (as opposed to a mere bit of behavior) as an event which is the result of a belief/desire pair (in which the desire is for a particular outcome or end and the belief expresses a means to that end). Furthermore, it is common

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to think of an action as free when (among other things) the agent of the action has genuine alternatives and could have done otherwise. Sloth, with its characteristic apathy, complicates this picture: To the extent that a person really is indifferent to outcomes insofar as she is suffering from sloth, she lacks the variety of desires that can properly figure in belief/desire pairs to generate a significant range of actions at all. In the most extreme of cases—if sloth is comprehensive and all encompassing— she will simply be paralyzed and unable to act, much less act freely.⁴¹ Relatedly, to the extent that someone lacks the desire to respond to perceived goods in such a way as to pursue and nurture them, she may lack the freedom to pull herself out of her wretched condition without significant external assistance. In these ways, yet again, sloth proves to have much more in common with deep and pervasive depression than with self-indulgent laziness. In his elegant study of sloth, Jean-Charles Nault recounts five remedies for the condition that he finds described in Evagrius and the desert fathers, to wit: tears (which both soften resistance and also serve as a physical manifestation of the recognition that one needs to be saved), prayer and work (constant, regular, and familiar), immediate and direct confrontation of the evil thoughts with the words of scripture (thus imitating Christ in his own temptations in the desert), meditation on death (to combat the inordinate focus on self), and, perhaps most importantly, perseverance. This final piece of advice is a powerful balm for those struggling with indifference and a lack of positive response to the valuable elements of their lives: Stability of place!⁴² Don’t yield to bleak despair or abandon your duties for frivolous amusements which (as we have seen) are the seductive sirens of temporary escape when the noonday demon comes a calling. Diligence and industry, long-suffering patience, and discipline in everyday affairs are the proper road to renewed appreciation of goods whose value seems to have dimmed in the artificial darkness of psychic renunciation or unhappiness. Once again, in the final chapter I will attempt to combine this wise encouragement to stay the course with the lesson that so many of us find ourselves in the post-Mammon predicament of unhappiness and a failure to flourish precisely because we have successfully followed Mammon’s

⁴¹ In this connection, compare the discussion in chapter 7 of Frankfurt 1999. ⁴² Nault 2013, 37–49. Also see DeYoung 2009, 96–98. Schimmel 1997, 210–211, has additional observations to offer on the relation between this particular piece of advice and modern therapeutic practices in psychology.

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restriction without successfully following his advice. The remedy to sloth is found in cooperating with (or, even more minimally, in not actively resisting) God as one’s relationship with God is repaired. That task involves a good deal more than I can hope to comment on in this book (and, I fear, a good deal more than I confidently understand), but I do hope to be able to articulate one crucial component of repairing that relationship that will be founded on the philosophy of (optimistic) pessimism, a modified objectivelist theory of well-being, the Psychic Affirmation and Psychic Renunciation theories of happiness and unhappiness, and the traditional understanding of sloth as indifference to goods and resistance to the demands of love. The next chapter separates the preparatory work of these initial three chapters on the collection of themes just noted from the contribution to the battle against sloth promised in the fifth and will consist of an illustrated tour of a number of the distinctive and powerful masks (not disguises, but rather specific manifestations) in which sloth makes its unhappy appearance known in the world.

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4 The Masks of Sloth Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. O God, God, How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t, ah, fie. ’Tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. —William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act I, Scene ii)

1. Cellar Dwellers One peculiarity of the foregoing discussion is that it diagnoses a condition which predicts that the diagnosis will be resisted by those it accurately describes. We have already seen sufficient secular grounds for this same prediction, and we have reviewed Augustine’s and Pascal’s religiously based explanations for its truth. Kierkegaard concurs: [Human beings in general hardly] regard being under a delusion as the greatest misfortune; their sensuous nature is generally predominant over their intellectuality. So when a man is supposed to be happy, he imagines that he is happy (whereas viewed in the light of the truth he is unhappy), and in this case he is generally very far from wishing to be torn away from that delusion. On the contrary, he becomes furious, he regards the man who does this as his most spiteful enemy, he considers it an insult, something near to murder, in the sense that one speaks of killing joy. What is the reason of this? The reason is that the sensuous nature and the psycho-sensuous completely dominate him, the reason is that he lives in the sensuous categories agreeable/disagreeable, and says goodbye to truth; the reason is that he is too sensuous to have the courage to venture to be Fallenness and Flourishing. Hud Hudson, Oxford University Press (2021). © Hud Hudson. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849094.003.0004

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spirit or to endure it. However vain and conceited men may be, they have nevertheless for the most part a very lowly conception of themselves, that is to say, they have no conception of being spirit, the absolute of all that a man can be—but vain and conceited they are . . . by way of comparison. In case one were to think of a house, consisting of cellar, ground-floor and premier étage, so tenanted, or rather so arranged, that it was planned for a distinction of rank between the dwellers on the several floors; and in case one were to make a comparison between such a house and what it is to be a man—then unfortunately this is the sorry and ludicrous condition of the majority of men, that in their own house they prefer to live in the cellar.¹

Given our well-documented tendencies to resist the accusations of unhappiness and sloth and the general philosophy of pessimism, how can we tell when our resistance is based on veridical insight and secure foundations and when it is a manifestation of the underlying malady from which we allegedly suffer? There are, of course, several strategies for sincere efforts to sort it all out, many of which are intellectually centered, focusing on conceptual clarity, distinction drawing, counterexample devising, argument evaluation, and analytic inquiry in general. Another type of strategy, perhaps underutilized in academic monographs, looks instead to assistance from literature. Literature can provide artistic illustrations as accompaniments to philosophical texts which can capture one’s attention in ways academic prose might not. Yet it can also do much more. A skillfully authored, complexly layered novel can elicit many of the same emotional experiences that arise in everyday life and can mimic the chaotic and multi-dimensional reality of interpersonal interaction. Consequently, the reader can be deeply engaged by way of imaginative immersion into a richly nuanced narrative, subjective reactions to which provide brand new experiential data with which to theorize. Moreover, this new data does not simply amount to aesthetic window dressing to pretty up the chore of thinking through a theme in the analytic mode, but rather constitutes a unique source from which one may hope to acquire philosophical wisdom or knowledge. The libraries of the world contain resources for field study, as it were, that simply could not be duplicated by any other means—lacking, as we do, the capacity for time travel, body-morphing, world-building, the advantage of witnessing events

¹ Kierkegaard 1954, 175–176.

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without our presence disrupting their dynamics, and the capacity to hear the first-person thoughts of others. Significantly, insight thus earned can on occasion be even more compelling and even more stable than that acquired from a standard journal article chock full of reconstructed arguments and critical evaluations, insofar as one’s emotional reactions (and the intuitions to which such experiences give rise) have been adequately engaged alongside one’s abstract reasoning skills.² I suspect that engaging with literature can be an eye-opening experience and render one receptive to the diagnosis of the preceding three chapters. The deplorable condition of sloth or of unhappiness manifests in a great number of ways. Not every manifestation affects every sufferer, and not every manifestation need be as directly illustrative of the vice of sloth as, say, watching Rabelais’s Pantagruel slopping up his supper might be illustrative of the vice of gluttony. But I do hope here to capture some characteristic actions and patterns of action into which people fall once they are experiencing a deep sadness, a lethargy of spirit, and a non-responsiveness to the demands of love. In the sections of this chapter, some of the many masks of sloth will be presented for reflection by way of a combination of discussion and appeal to certain figures of fiction. Although this is not the place to offer a series of essays on works of fine literature, perhaps there will be enough motivation in the following observations and character sketches to spur the reader to visit or revisit the original works and perhaps catch a glimpse of him or herself in those narratives that renders the diagnosis about which I have been writing less foreign than it might otherwise seem.

2. Boredom and Diversion In his monograph on the philosophy of boredom, Lars Svendsen announces that [b]oredom has only been a central cultural phenomenon for a couple of centuries . . . it stands out as being a typical phenomenon of modernity. On the whole, the precursors were restricted to small groups, such as the

² For excellent discussions of the capacity of literature and narratives to furnish a nonredundant source of philosophical wisdom and knowledge see Nussbaum 1990 and Stump 2010. For a critique of the scope of these “compensatory epistemologies,” as he calls them, see the challenging criticisms in Zamir 2017.

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nobility and the clergy, whereas the boredom of modernity is wide-ranging in its effect and can be said to be a relevant phenomenon today for practically everyone in the Western world . . . boredom afflicts the masses.³

Yet, the emphasis must here be placed on the notion of a “central cultural phenomenon” and the significant measure of self-reflection and extent of public discourse such a phrase suggests, for it is hardly credible that the state of boredom has not periodically dulled the life experience of nearly all our predecessors at frequent intervals from cradle to grave. One need not be among the nobility, sunk in a velvet armchair with nothing to do but eat grapes, or be a cell-confined, fourth-century monk counting out the slowmoving minutes in the long silence and sweltering heat of an Egyptian afternoon in order to be thoroughly familiar with its phenomenology. In the same vein as Svendsen, Patricia Spacks makes a point about the relative newness of the concept of boredom in her literary history of that phenomenon, but then again, it would be a mistake to make too much of that observation; the newness of a concept is not in general a reliable guide to the age of the entities that are subsumed under it.⁴ Boredom is everywhen and everywhere in fashion; it was undoubtedly present on the African savannah and will surely be responsible for its fair share of restlessness and discomfort in the Martian colonies of the future. Boredom walks hand in hand with the danse macabre—no matter what one’s position in life, it unites us all. Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf opens with a portrayal of modern boredom in recounting a day in the life of Harry Haller, a day which may be uncomfortably recognizable: The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance with my primitive and retiring way of life. I had worked for an hour or two and perused the pages of old books. I had had pains for two hours, as elderly people do. I had taken a powder and been very glad when the pains consented to disappear. I had lain in a hot bath and absorbed its kindly warmth. Three times the mail had come with undesired letters and

³ Svendsen 2005, 11. ⁴ Spacks 1995. The issue is further complicated by the practice of gathering evidence for the history of a concept from linguistic facts (e.g., the English noun “boredom” appears for the first time only in the nineteenth century). But linguistic items and concepts can stand in a many-one relation, and a concept can, of course, long predate the appearance of a particular linguistic item to which it is related.

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circulars to look through. I had done my breathing exercises, but found it convenient today to omit the thought exercises. I had been for an hour’s walk and seen the loveliest feathery cloud patterns penciled against the sky. That was very delightful. So was the reading of the old books. So was the lying in the warm bath. But, taken all in all, it had not been exactly a day of rapture. No, it had not even been a day brightened with happiness and joy. Rather, it had been just one of those days which for a long while now had fallen to my lot; the moderately pleasant, the wholly bearable and tolerable, lukewarm days of a discontented middle-aged man . . . But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than the warmth of a wellheated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages . . . It was in such a mood then that I finished this not intolerable and very ordinary day as dusk set in. I did not end it in a manner becoming a rather ailing man and go to bed tempted by a hot water bottle. Instead I put on my shoes, ill-humoredly, discontented and disgusted with the little work I had done, and went out into the dark and foggy streets to drink what men according to an old convention call ‘a glass of wine’, at the sign of the Steel Helmet.⁵

An entire day spent in killing time, ingesting medicine, lying in tepid bathwater, fumbling through mail and advertisements, skipping exercise. Not “exactly a day of rapture.” Just a day of mediocrity for a “discontented middle-aged man.” In itself, the experience is (with minor exceptions) not painful, but despite reports of the shallow delights of kindly warmth and the half-hearted skimming of old books, it becomes clear that pleasure isn’t the dominant mode either.

⁵ Hesse 1963, 25–27.

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The first of the two ellipses in the above quotation is occupied in the novel by a contrast between days that bring genuine pain and suffering into the world and this ordinary and uneventful day of nothings. Haller notes that such a contrast could lead one (momentarily) to feel thankful that the day is not a day of unrelenting evil, and to nod in “the thick warm air of a contented boredom.” But then, with more honesty, Haller confesses that his day, “[not] brightened with happiness and joy,” was hardly much of an occasion for thanksgiving, after all, and that its “flabby and slightly stupefied” version of contentment filled him with “irrepressible hatred and nausea.” To be sure, some element of self-deception is surely operative in someone who reports both that the day was “moderately pleasant” and “wholly bearable and tolerable” and in the next breath admits that the insipid experience left him with a desire to smash something, “perhaps a cathedral,” to rage, to pervert, to wrong someone, to injure himself, to hate, to sooner invite in the devil than to endure more of the kindly warmth that was earlier singled out as one of the highlights of the afternoon. Finally, “discontented and disgusted” with himself and after clearly managing to express exactly why, he does not make a concentrated effort to correct what he has identified as the source of his dissatisfaction, but instead reverts to that characteristic sin of middle age—assuaging his disappointment in himself with creaturely comforts, in this case, a drink at the sign of the Steel Helmet. Hesse brilliantly exhibits the symptoms that Schopenhauer exposes in his remarks on boredom and its consequences. On Schopenhauer’s view we bounce back and forth between two states: “of a truth, need and boredom are the two poles of human life.”⁶ Striving to acquire some perceived good or to remove some cause of significant pain we are constantly in motion, working towards a state of satisfaction and contentment. And once the supposed good is finally secured or the cause of the pain is at last annihilated, do we then relax into a state of contentment and rest until confronted with our next worldly trial? On the contrary, argues Schopenhauer, “if at any moment Time stays his hand, it is only when we are delivered over to the misery of boredom.”⁷ In fact, he goes a step further, arguing that sheer existence is of no intrinsic value whatsoever, for once we achieve a brief cessation from craving and a state of relative painlessness—Haller’s ordinary and

⁶ Schopenhauer, 2007, 10.

⁷ Schopenhauer, 2007, 6.

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uneventful day of nothings—we are left not with the satisfaction and hardearned appreciation of life’s value untroubled by physical discomfort or unsatisfied desire, but with an agonizing boredom, “the mere feeling of the emptiness of life.”⁸ Perhaps all this seems overwrought, and perhaps it is. The present point is not that boredom must be the only upshot of temporarily succeeding in one’s aims, or that Schopenhauer is right that boredom proves that life has no intrinsic value, or that Haller’s descent into a demonic desire for any kind of mischief or misfortune to remove the hatred and nausea to which boredom drives him eventually awaits all those who fall into the middleage doldrums. The present point, instead, is that there are people enough who do wear this mask of sloth and who are accurately described by the Schopenhauerian pendulum swinging between striving and boredom, and also plenty of people who share Haller’s mindset, but who may be inclined to pass on the self-medicating drink at the sign of the Steel Helmet in order to follow the other path of response to boredom, the path of destruction of self and others. Pascal provides a somewhat less extravagant account of boredom, but he emphasizes one common consequence of that state that unveils a second and exceedingly popular mask of sloth. As we saw in the previous chapter, for Pascal boredom is not (as it is for Schopenhauer) merely a recoiling at the stark recognition of the absence of life’s value, but is instead that state where we most run the risk of being forcefully confronted with the terrifying fact of our separation from God and our own subsequent powerlessness. And we jet away from that prospect in pursuit of activities that can successfully divert our thoughts and our attention from such a catastrophe. Thus Pascal on our common state of mind in the condition of separation and sin: Being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.⁹

And again: But after closer thought, looking for the particular reasons for all our unhappiness now that I knew its general cause, I found one very cogent

⁸ Schopenhauer, 2007, 22–23.

⁹ Pascal 1966, 66, no. 133.

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reason in the natural unhappiness of our feeble mortal condition, so wretched that nothing can console us when we really think about it.¹⁰

And despite the fact we mislabel our efforts to avoid facing our actual predicament as indulging in harmless entertainments, enjoying a little rest and relaxation, and pursuing our chosen diversions for their respective objects, as Wood forcefully reminds us in his study of Pascal, we actually desire the diversion itself and not its characteristic end state.¹¹ Moreover, nearly any base and mindless diversion will do, as anyone can attest who has spent an uneasy afternoon procrastinating in the face of some serious task whose non-completion would be a disaster. Again, Pascal: Man is so unhappy that he would be bored even if he had no cause for boredom, by the very nature of his temperament, and he is so vain that though he has a thousand and one basic reasons for being bored, the slightest thing, like pushing a ball with a billiard cue, will be enough to divert him.¹²

As will a search bar on YouTube. As will a cable news program rehashing the same information he’s heard half a dozen times in the last twenty-four hours. As will an online magazine that promises side-by-side pictures of what those beautiful stars of the seventies look like now that they are in their seventies. As will checking an email account that was last checked twelve minutes ago. As will binge watching season four of a comedy, whose third season didn’t really please him and is already unavailable in memory. As will sending snapchats of his food, his drinks, his clothes, the cat, the clouds, the traffic, or unsuspecting fellow patrons at the bar or ball game. Of course, there is no end of other types of amusements (Pascal’s hunting and gambling, for example) that don’t involve a computer or a television or a smart phone or a streaming service or social media, but I’ve focused in on these items in order to make a final observation. With the explosion of technology, our age stands apart from its predecessors in one very significant respect, the consequences of which I suspect have yet to fully emerge. Every generation has its diversions, and (to be honest) great-great-grandad’s metal hoop and wooden stick can provide just as much distraction from what really matters as can junior’s virtual reality

¹⁰ Pascal 1966, 67, no. 136.

¹¹ Wood 2013, 3.

¹² Pascal 1966, 70, no. 136.

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gaming platform. The difference, however, is that for the first time, nearly every sort of diversion can now be pursued in privacy and isolation. Information and entertainment and experiences, astonishing in their quantity, quality, and variety, can be delivered wirelessly to be consumed without any trace of the effort or attention to interpersonal interaction that is required when one is in society with others. To be sure, interaction isn’t automatically impaired simply because it is electronic and conducted at a distance, but as we have seen, sloth is a resistance to the demands of love, and as this procedure of interacting with the world and one’s friends and acquaintances becomes more and more standard, the penalties of such resistance are naturally diminished. I am reminded of Neil Postman’s captivating work, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he contrasts the dystopian predictions of George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Whereas Orwell depicted a future of external domination and the crushing power and machinery of a Big Brother to execute the laws of an oppressive regime, Huxley envisioned a society that eagerly participated in creating the mechanisms of its own oppression, lovingly embracing the conditions of its own bondage: What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.¹³

¹³ Postman 1986, xix–xx.

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Postman’s book was predicated on the thought that Huxley, not Orwell, may have been right. The prevalence of boredom described by Schopenhauer and vividly illustrated by Hesse, the predictable mad rush away from its discomforts documented by Pascal, and the inexhaustible bread and circuses of the technological age that promise to temporarily quench the daily thirst for diversion without the need to leave one’s closet make a sobering case for Postman’s thesis about Huxley’s prescience that should deeply concern us all.

3. The Absurd—Tragedy, Meaning-Making, and Defiance Suppose, however, that one does occasionally slow down long enough to gaze directly at what Pascal says we feel an overwhelming compulsion to rush away from. What is the upshot of this prolonged and unmediated confrontation with the human condition? One answer, which has sparked a truly impressive body of philosophy, art, and literature, is a sense of a terrible misalliance, a failure of fit between the deepest needs of human beings and the world in which they reside—an Absurdity. First, there is a perceived mismatch between the expectations of the animal who reasons and a world that won’t fully succumb to rational description or complete intelligibility. This is not the complaint that there is no end to the series of why-questions which might provide an acceptable foundation for a systematic explanation of reality, for any chain of explanations ends somewhere (on pain of infinite regress or circularity). It is rather the jarringness of the arbitrariness of the location of the world’s brute facts— of the particular range of contingencies that have no further explanation or sufficient reason—that does violence to the expectations of human reason. Second, there is a perceived mismatch between what is earned or deserved and what is paid or provided. The obstinately wicked escape punishment. Virtue goes unrewarded. The beautiful is vandalized. Love is exploited and the noble debased. A lifetime of blood, sweat, and tears devoted to the most honorable pursuits and the finest values ends in the unremarkable death of their agent and the passing of her achievement into the hands of someone on whose neglectful watch it deteriorates into worthlessness. In short—things are not as they should be, there is no satisfactory explanation of the ways things in fact are, and (when it’s all said and done) our lives and our efforts amount to nothing. Moreover, the cosmos

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doesn’t care a fig; the universe is utterly indifferent to our wants and needs for explanation, justification, purpose, and meaning. The notion of the Absurd, roughly characterized by the previous few paragraphs, is often associated with the work of Albert Camus (during the period of the Second World War and its aftermath) where it received arresting and sophisticated expression (in relation both to the individual and to society) in the form of philosophical essays and works of literature.¹⁴ The feelings and judgments here depicted, however, are quite ancient, and returning to that manifesto of pessimism, Ecclesiastes, we can recall the famous lament of the mismatch of desert and reward: I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill: but time and chance happeneth to them all.¹⁵

Moreover, in Ecclesiastes we also (repeatedly) hear of the brevity and pointlessness of our lives and our efforts: death comes to all, there is no profit in labor, there is nothing new under the sun, one’s achievements are temporary and wind up in the hands of fools, life is hateful, days are sorrow, travails grief—all is vanity. In his retelling of the myth of Sisyphus, Camus presents a vivid and memorable illustration of the Absurd: The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.¹⁶

It is an oddity (but a happy coincidence, given the topic of this book) that the atheist Camus chose to illustrate his theme with a character who is punished for disobedience to the gods and whose crime consisted in attempting to make himself happy while ignoring their commands. Camus says of him:

¹⁴ Camus develops the notion of the Absurd along different dimensions in The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel, The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall. ¹⁵ Ecclesiastes 9:11 (KJV). ¹⁶ Camus 1983, 119.

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You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth.¹⁷

Let us suppose, then, that Sisyphus (like many others who are caught in the grips of the doctrine of the Absurd) was unable to secure happiness and well-being on his own power and now endlessly spends himself to no purpose, laboring without meaning in an apparently indifferent world. Coming to regard one’s own situation as broadly Sisyphean—a pointless life of worthless toil with no significant meaning—can also be a mask of sloth, a mask which may be further configured with one of three significant expressions.

The Absurd and the Tragic Sense of Life The first countenance one might find on a mask of sloth inspired by the Absurd is that of the contemplative melancholic, powerless over the fate that condemns him to loneliness, anguish, the ever-present fear of death, and eventual annihilation. Advantaged and disadvantaged by the gift of selfreflective thought, he can ponder and ponderously dwell on his misfortunes. Equipped (as he so often is) with the gift of writing, he can express with great poetry the tragic sense of life. For melancholy reflection on the shortness of life and oblivion, the great Spanish author Miguel de Unamuno is hard to equal. Preoccupied to the point of obsession with the inescapable reality of death and an unwavering desire for immortality that colors much of his life’s work, he writes, The visible universe, the universe that is created by the instinct of selfpreservation, becomes all too narrow for me. It is like a cramped cell, against the bars of which my soul beats its wings in vain. Its lack of air stifles me. More, more, and always more! I want to be myself, and yet without ceasing to be myself and to be others as well, to merge myself into the totality of things visible and invisible, to extend myself into the infinite

¹⁷ Camus 1983, 120.

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of time. Not to be all and forever is as if not to be—at least, let me be my whole self, and be so for ever and ever. And to be the whole of myself is to be everybody else. Either all or nothing!¹⁸

Yet he knows that his fate is sealed and that his days are numbered. When I contemplate the green serenity of the fields or look into the depths of clear eyes through which shines a fellow-soul, my consciousness dilates, I feel the diastole of the soul and am bathed in the flood of the life that flows about me, and I believe in my future; but instantly the voice of mystery whispers to me, “Thou shalt cease to be!” the angel of Death touches me with his wing, and the systole of the soul floods the depths of my spirit with the blood of divinity.¹⁹

For heartbreaking commentary on nearly every wretched aspect of humanity, each of which can seem permanent and unalterable against the backdrop of an absurd world, one can turn to the great Italian poet of the nineteenth century, Giacomo Leopardi. His masterful and unrelenting critique of our shared predicament borders on nihilism and comprises an alarmingly persuasive case for this summing up of the human condition: Alas, black care Sits on the lofty prow; in every land Beneath all skies, is Happiness invoked Vainly, for Sorrow rules us everywhere.²⁰

Unamuno is consumed with his tragic cast of mind and describes his experience of committing it to paper as delicious torture. The outcome is delicious reading that frightens and seduces simultaneously. Leopardi’s exposure and ridicule of human foibles, his chronicle of the unrelenting hardships encountered in an absurd world, and his misanthropy all side by side with his transparent longing for autonomy, for affection from others, and for meaning in his stilted life can inspire shame, anger, sadness, hopelessness, derision, empathy, pity, and emptiness, all in turn. ¹⁸ Unamuno 1954, 38–39. ¹⁹ Unamuno 1954, 40. ²⁰ Leopardi 1923, 241–243. And please do turn to Leopardi when you can. Origo 2000 provides a moving biography of this sad little figure, with a foreword by George Santayana on Leopardi’s art that astonishes the reader with its impossible promise of quality and then (after one engages the poetry) astonishes again with its accuracy.

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Together their poetic genius can make an indelible impression on even the most confident opponent, one wholly convinced they have built their worldview on all the wrong axioms. In the church of the Absurd, Unamuno and Leopardi are among the high priests.

The Absurd and Making One’s Own Meaning There is a special moment, full of promise, in each cycle of Sisyphus’s repetitive task when the massive stone has finally been wrestled to the very top of the summit and then, tipping over the edge, it careens back down the hill, finally coming to rest in the valley where Sisyphus will shortly join it and begin muscling it up the path once again. Camus imagines Sisyphus occupying this interval of time, as he walks back down the slope, in thought, and what he thinks and how he thinks it, suggests Camus, can make the difference between whether he has been ruined by the gods and their punishment or whether he can emerge victorious despite the futility of his labor. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy.²¹ Camus suggests that what is tragic in the myth is that Sisyphus is fully conscious that he cannot succeed in extricating himself from the situation into which he has been thrown; he cannot bring an end to the cycle of striving in vain. However, argues Camus, openly acknowledging a horrible truth can diminish its power to confine one in “boundless grief” with no relief from endless “nights of Gethsemane.” Sisyphus, the absurd hero, can choose to embrace his fate, own it, and enter wholeheartedly into his labor. The manner of carrying out his task is his to decide, and working within the confines of this otherwise uncooperative world, he can nevertheless find joy in the meanings he can make for himself in even this bleakest of circumstances. Ending on this hopeful note, Camus writes: I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that

²¹ Camus 1983, 121.

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stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.²²

And thus, the soothing tones of Mammon fill the air in a twentieth-century, French-Algerian accent. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy,” and you too, dear reader, can be happy, as well. Here’s the recipe: Attain an adequate understanding and appreciation of the doctrine of the Absurd as described above. True—this full consciousness of your position will ensure that you are the protagonist of a tragedy, like Sisyphus, but you need not be defeated. Resign yourself to your fate, but embrace it. Make it your own. Find your burden, take it up, and perform the pointless tasks forced upon you in joy. Negate the gods and raise rocks. Conclude that all is well. Imagine yourself happy. Dangerous advice—and no more likely to lead to happiness than it was when dispensed in Pandaemonium at the council of infernal peers in Paradise Lost. Whether the totality of reality is, in fact, indifferent to one’s life is in dispute between the atheistic Camus and the Christian philosopher of pessimism portrayed in Chapter 1. Similarly in dispute is whether Sisyphus or (more to the point) whether you have options which go beyond either embracing your fate or non-voluntarily acting out your fate. Whereas the rock mindlessly rolls down the hill in accordance with the law of gravity, Sisyphus freely walks down the hill in accordance with having resigned himself to the thought that he cannot do otherwise, given that there is no way to reconcile himself to the gods. Those who think there is no one with whom to be reconciled, or who think reconciliation is impossible, or who do think it possible but are unwilling to venture down that path are a prime audience for Camus’s recipe. Perhaps they will thereby find some measure of life satisfaction. Perhaps they will conclude that all is well and say so to one another. Perhaps they will imagine themselves happy. But on the strength of the discussion in Chapter 2 of what it takes to actually achieve that elusive state, none of this is very likely to amount to genuine happiness, much less to well-being.

²² Camus 1983, 123.

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The Absurd and Defiance A mask of sloth inspired by the Absurd can also sport a third distinctive sort of expression. Suppose Sisyphus endures his task day in and day out yet never quite finds a way to identify with and celebrate his futile labor. Suppose he is fully cognizant of the absence of meaning in his life and that he feels the heavy weight of both the injustice that afflicts him and the utter indifference of the world to his misfortunes. What could be left to do but suffer and stumble along while resigning himself to the melancholy and tragic sense of life? Yet there is another route to travel. He could foster an attitude that can seem a passable substitute for purpose and meaning in life—he could refuse to acquiesce in what the world foists upon him. He could repudiate his circumstances with every fiber of his being, even while marionetting through the inevitable motions. Overflowing with scorn, he could shake his fist at mindless chance and curse the hand he has been impartially dealt by fate in contempt and defiance. And upon reaching his death and earning a reward of nothing for a life spent in futility, he could be buoyed up in his final moments on the reservoir of resentment he harbors towards everything. Attempting to invest one’s life with meaning grounded in resentment, bitterness, scorn, and indignant defiance can spark great explosions of passion, even in the full recognition that such displays are powerless to alter the circumstances that occasion them. Some episodes of rage against the conditions one is forced to endure in an absurd world can be public, dramatic, and indiscriminately damaging: It is the vow we hear from the frenzied Satan of Paradise Lost who, feeling trapped by circumstances he has convinced himself he cannot escape, proclaims Evil, be thou my good!²³

It is the unhinged outburst of an Ahab who will be destroyed but not conquered, and who screams: Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last, I grapple with thee; from Hell’s heart, I stab at thee; for hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee! Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common

²³ Paradise Lost IV.110.

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pool! And since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale!²⁴

It is a beleaguered Job who, battered beyond his breaking point and ultimately rejecting what he takes to be an inadequate answer from an abusive whirlwind in response to his cries for explanation, openly defies even God.²⁵ Yet episodes of such rage can take a quieter, more subtle, but no less powerful form, as well. You can hear it in the misanthropic mumblings of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens as he seethes in his cave. It reverberates throughout the hilarious-while-vicious novels and poetry and essays of Alexander Theroux, whose verbal athleticism has no modern peer.²⁶ And finally, stylish literary scorn and condemnation is found on nearly every page in the sprawling, sixty-year oeuvre of the Romanian writer Emil Cioran, as his savage snarls and the razor swipes of his pen fill book after book of invective aimed at the absurd human condition.²⁷ Indeed, part of the reason the variations on the masks of sloth here described are so easy to slip into is that the literature to which they have given life is so seductive and remarkably well written.

4. That Sleep of Death Camus famously begins The Myth of Sisyphus with a startling pronouncement—an obvious falsehood, but rhetorically effective all the same:

²⁴ Melville 1951, 492. ²⁵ At least on one interpretation—tantalizingly explored in his commentary on Job by Balentine 2006, 694–695. ²⁶ If I were to take part in one of those most-underappreciated-modern-author polls that invariably convince me to add some half-dozen books to my must-read pile, Theroux would have my vote in a heartbeat. His Darconville’s Cat (just to take one example) is an experience like no other—a masterclass in writing. ²⁷ Pick up any of the following books by Cioran, and in just a few paragraphs from wherever you start reading you’ll see why there are no quotations from him on this page. There are simply too many excellent examples to choose from: On the Heights of Despair, The Book of Delusions, Tears and Saints, A Short History of Decay, The Temptation to Exist, The Fall into Time, The Trouble with Being Born, Drawn and Quartered. Seriously—try it. It’s astounding.

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There is but one truly philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.²⁸

Camus raises the topic of suicide explicitly against the backdrop of the Absurd, but having completed our discussion in the previous section, let us now depart from that particular worldview, which is, after all, only one of many ways of responding to the features of the world that make the philosophy of pessimism so compelling. Even in the absence of the doctrine of the Absurd, suicide remains a problem. And whether it is ultimately motivated by distinctively philosophical reflection or not, it continues to be a solution selected by far too many individuals in answer to the question of whether life is worth living. My focus is not currently on the applied ethics of suicide or euthanasia, and I do not intend to examine questions about whether it is ever the case that the quality of a life is so low that death is not a harm to its subject or whether the ending of one’s life either by one’s own hand or with another’s assistance is ever morally permissible. Nor do I have in mind this season’s crop of young Werthers, momentarily infatuated with the mere idea of suicide as a dramatic response to the emotional highs and lows of youthful love.²⁹ Rather I have in mind that individual who experiences severe sadness, hopelessness, and depression, who lives in a state of perpetual stress and anxiety, who is, in a word, unhappy, and whose condition drives him to thoughts of self-inflicted death. Listen to the testimony of literature’s most famous example of this unfortunate condition—the melancholy Dane: Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. O God, God, How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t, ah, fie. ’Tis an unweeded garden

²⁸ Camus 1983, 3. ²⁹ I certainly don’t deny that genuine despair arising from unrequited love can provoke the sort of sincere temptation to suicide that I do wish to address, but neither do I want to confuse it with fleeting melodrama.

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   That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act I, Scene ii)

This speech comes shortly after Hamlet is accused by Claudius of acting stubbornly, impiously, stupidly, peevishly, and absurdly for his reaction to the death of his father. Name calling apart—is Claudius wrong that Hamlet is overdoing it? Surely some expressions of grief are inappropriate. Has Hamlet crossed that line? We certainly can ask the questions invited by Claudius’s criticism: Is Hamlet’s grief genuine? Is it appropriate? Is it rational? Is it excessive? Is it childish? Just what, after all, has happened to him that makes him want to die? That makes him wish God hadn’t forbidden suicide? And we can answer such questions: His father has died (in old age). His mother has remarried (quickly) someone who doesn’t measure up in his estimation to his father. That’s it. Significantly, at this early stage in the play, he hasn’t yet any cause to suspect a murder in addition to these events. Ah, yes, we might think, but such adult matters are hard on any tender youth (even one blessed with all the privileges accorded to a prince), no wonder everything seems so bleak. That is, until we remember (as we learn in Act V) that Hamlet is hardly the naïve adolescent, abandoned by his mother and trying to piece together the perplexities of the adult world; he’s thirty. I realize it’s an unpopular take, but I find few reasons to be on board with the poor-Hamlet sentiment at this early stage of the play. However, I am intrigued by a kind of default allegiance to Hamlet that seems presupposed (even obligatory) in nearly every performance and commentary I’ve encountered. Indulge a quick rant: it will reconnect with our main themes in a significant way in just a few paragraphs. Hamlet is often taken to be a heroic figure. Bravely fighting the good fight. A person to respect and admire. But why? He issues a credible threat to kill his good friend, Horatio, for encouraging him to show caution when following what may well be a demon instead of the ghost of his father. He bizarrely vows to set aside every value and to make his primary aim in life the pursuit of a path of murderous revenge on (shall we say) less than certain evidence. He postpones his killing of Claudius, as the king prays, only because he wishes to be the instrument not just of Claudius’s death but of his eternal damnation. He pushes his lover, Ophelia, to suicide by the murder of her father and the breaking off of whatever relations (and promises) he has with her. He gratuitously orchestrates the deaths of his

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schoolmates Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are certainly guilty of stupidity but not of any capital offense. He abuses and emotionally wounds his mother, Gertrude, in a premeditated plan of cruelty that leads her to fear he intends to take her life. He knowingly commits a grotesque murder in utter ignorance of the victim’s identity (wildly hoping, perhaps, it was Claudius, discovering Polonius instead) and expresses contempt instead of remorse, puns instead of penance. The list goes on and on. Now look (in vain) for anything that justifies this string of abominable behavior. Consult your own views on morally evaluating character and action. How can Hamlet appear such a heroic figure to generation after generation? So what? In one respect it doesn’t matter at all whether Hamlet’s initial pouting in Elsinore is genuine, appropriate, rational, excessive, or childish. Overdone or not, it is nevertheless an expression of despair and deep unhappiness with his situation, and such suffering can be quite real regardless of its status as reasonable or unreasonable. Moreover, the calamity that his suffering creates—the ruin of his own character and the devastation of all who come into contact with him—is an awful and senseless undoing of a collection of lives which can and should be lamented even if Hamlet is culpable for the wrongs he commits and criticizable in his beliefs and emotional responses. The tragedy of broken lives isn’t much diminished by discovering who’s to blame for it. It very much does matter, however, that the cause of a catastrophe of this magnitude is a reaction to nothing less than the vice of sloth, especially given how widespread that vice is. The initial hallmark of sloth, an encroaching indifference to genuine goods, accurately captures Hamlet’s frame of mind, as is revealed in his words “how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.” It is unmistakable when it appears again in his confession to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern some short time afterwards: I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the

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paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act II, Scene ii)

Here we have the intellectual affirmation of the supreme value of all creation and worth of the human person—What a piece of work is man! / Noble, infinite, admirable, beautiful, a paragon, like an angel, like a god!—followed by an admission of not being able to generate pro-attitudes toward any of these splendid goods. Recall from our earlier discussion that traditionally the sin of sloth is a state of dejection, a torpor of mind, an indifference to spiritual goods—a desirelessness, even for what is excellent. Hamlet’s is a textbook case of sloth, and he wears one of its most familiar masks. The point of the brief detour through the evidence for Hamlet’s viciousness above is to float a hypothesis about ourselves. We may be susceptible to viewing Hamlet as noble and admirable and heroic (despite what appears to be a mountain of considerations for drawing quite the opposite conclusion) precisely because our own mask of sloth has many of the same characteristics as his, and we confuse a kind of similarity with grounds for approval. I obviously don’t mean that many of us are grieving the death of a father and the o’er hasty marriage of a mother, or that we are struggling with uncertainty about whether blood revenge is required by duty and if we will find the courage and discipline to act according to our best judgment. I do mean, however, that many of us are grieving some unwelcome twist in the narratives of our lives, some broken and incomplete relationships we cannot recover or repair, and that we are facing uncertainty about what response to our circumstances will best help us to reorient ourselves when we have lost our way and whether we will rise to the occasion should we discover the answer. In one predictable sense, it is not at all surprising we identify so quickly with Hamlet and find excuses to justify his behavior and admire his struggle. Hamlet is a mirror in which a great many of us see ourselves, and that’s exactly how Augustine has taught us we are inclined to respond whenever our own interests seem to appear before us. Hamlet’s melancholy mask of sloth tempts him to suicide. Or, much more powerfully—in the famous “to be or not to be” speech—leads him to proclaim that absolute annihilation is preferable to the life he has and that suicide is “a consummation devoutly to be wished,” if only that were the plain choice before him. He even goes so far as to impute that preference to everyone:

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For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? William Shakespeare, Hamlet (Act III, Scene i)

The one thing, he suggests, that stays his hand and prevents him from acting the Roman stoic’s part, seems to be that he cannot rule out the option that after “shuffling off this mortal coil” he will awake to a much worse situation in the afterlife; for who knows “in that sleep of death what dreams may come?” This is a good question. How should one make rational decisions in the face of two choices, in which one knows the disvalue of one option, but one does not know (or perhaps is simply completely in the dark about) the value or disvalue of the other option (which may well be infinite in either direction)? Harshly, he paints his own hesitation as a kind of cowardice, and continues to trudge through the life he has just claimed is a burden to him. Interestingly, other theorists who have shared Hamlet’s pessimistic view of human lives in general, even to a degree that out-lows his own, have similarly often taken a stand against suicide. Schopenhauer opposes suicide for reasons quite different from Hamlet’s, for his metaphysics wouldn’t permit him to flirt with anything like worries about the state of one’s individual being in an afterlife. Instead, Schopenhauer argues that there is a pragmatic contradiction in the act of suicide. Whereas one allegedly wants to bring an end to a certain kind of suffering arising from unsatisfied cravings, Schopenhauer holds (again on the strength of his metaphysics of the noumenal will) that such an action simply relocates exactly that sort of suffering.³⁰ Alternatively, Camus, sees the act of physical suicide as one (among many) illegitimate ways of attempting to evade the task of confronting the problem of life, whereas he advocates for facing the absurdity of the human condition in full consciousness so that one may revolt against it. Only a select few, of course, have the privilege or the leisure of reflecting on these sorts of esoteric shields against taking their own lives. It is far more likely that those who wear a mask of sloth much like Hamlet’s do not share

³⁰ For the details hinted at in this sentence’s parenthetical remark, see Jacquette 1999.

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Hamlet’s fear of the mysteries of the afterlife and his risk-aversion strategy, and do not hold with Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the noumenal will and his distaste for pragmatic contradiction, and do not concede to Camus’s insistence on embracing rather than escaping from the Absurd, and are not bowled over by any other abstract reasons designed to expose suicide as not in their best interests. Consequently, they remain in real danger of causing their own deaths in order to put an end to the unhappiness they have found in this life. A brief aside to close this section: I have said that Hamlet’s particular mask displays one very familiar way that sloth can manifest in the world. Given the prominence of Hamlet’s melancholy, this can call to mind the close connection we have already seen at the end of Chapter 3 not just between unhappiness and sloth, but also between depression and sloth. Thus, a worry: If depression is remarkably similar to sloth and sloth is a capital sin, it might seem an easy inference to the troubling conclusion that suffering from a mental illness is likewise a sin. In fact, the worry generalizes in the study of the seven capital vices, for sloth’s close proximity to mental illness is certainly not unique (e.g., wrath and intermittent explosive disorder form another pair). Whereas it is clearly true both that depression and sloth alike can be debilitating for their subjects and that there are close parallels between the special kinds of awfulness to be found in each, the inference seems no less troubling for that. The simplest refutation (decisive all on its own) is that the inference is invalid. Similarity binds some properties and not others; both premises might be true and the conclusion false. But there are deeper and entangled issues worth further comment here. One reason why the inference strikes us as troubling is that we tend (correctly) to think of suffering from mental illness as something for which one is quite often not in any way responsible, as something with respect to which feelings of shame or guilt are misplaced, and as something that one is not simply free to eradicate on one’s own power. Talk of sin, on the other hand, tends to conjure up thoughts of knowingly misbehaving and of being responsible (perhaps also blameworthy) for thus misusing our free will. The suggestion that a mental illness is a sin, then, smacks of victim blaming and attempts to pin responsibility where it doesn’t belong. Obviously there are situations in which one contributes to and is partially responsible for harms to one’s own bodily and mental well-being, but in the case of serious mental illness we often lack so much of the backstory about the causes and about the pre-existing conditions of susceptibility that it is

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wise to err on the side of a presumption of non-culpability. Indeed, even if there are reasons to suspect some degree of partial responsibility, the gravity of the situation and a desire to care for the individual who suffers certainly don’t encourage harping on the matter. Furthermore, perhaps it is worth observing that the thesis that depression is a sin suffers from an ambiguity and is guaranteed to perplex a modern audience, since the reading of “sin” as an individual action of moral wrongdoing or of separation from God is so much more familiar to a twenty-firstcentury reader than is the sense of “sin” at issue with sloth and the seven deadlies—namely, a particular kind of disposition, character trait, or vice. That reading of the thesis, then, involves a category mistake, and fails to be philosophically interesting. But once we disambiguate with the more appropriate, historical sense of the term “sin,” there is still no need to classify depression as a vice or to regard it as having any particular moral valence—whether or not one has had a hand in bringing it about, whether or not its continued presence is under one’s control, and even after discovering that it displays consequences whose disvalue mimics the disvalue associated with the illustrations of the manifestations of sloth occupying this chapter.³¹

5. Lawful Evil and the Demonic Sloth need not express itself in Hesse’s depiction of middle-age boredom, or in Huxley’s carnival of diversions, or in Unamuno’s melancholy obsession with annihilation, or in the faux-joy of Camus’s imagined Sisyphus, or in Cioran’s unrelenting scorn, or in Hamlet’s tributes to and flirtation with suicide. Sloth is also present in masks much more sinister than these. R. J. Snell begins his recent book on sloth with a chilling observation: I recall no depictions of violence in literature more horrifying than those given by the novelist Cormac McCarthy, now most famous for No Country for Old Men and The Road. And of all his terrors, I know of none more

³¹ Just how much more is at issue in classifying something as a vice will become apparent when I return to the topic of theorizing about the nature of virtues and vices in section 2 of Chapter 5.

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awful than the depravity unveiled in Blood Meridian through the character of Judge Holden, one of the most satanic figures ever concocted.³²

Snell then defends a thesis that strikes me as dead right. Holden is guilty of the “vice the Christian tradition labels acedia, or sloth.” Holden has gone far beyond mere resistance to the demands of love to fully giving himself over to and even seeking out a culture of violence and death. Holden is a figure who will perform the most horrific acts, wreck and ruin lives, with no more apparent reason than that it is an expression of his freedom and power in a world in which creatures like him are permitted to wield what power they have in the ugliest and nastiest ways they can. What’s more is that his choice to celebrate the place of cruelty in the world invests him with a kind of magnetic persona to which others are drawn and to which they subject themselves, mimicking his cruelty as if under some supernatural spell. Holden occupies one end of a spectrum which runs from self-sacrificial love of neighbor to the subjection and degradation of others. He would consume the entire world, but not in order to be in fellowship with or nourished by it—only to exercise dominion over it, and then to spit it out and grind its remains into the dust. Again, Snell: The judge of fiction serves as a diabolical revelation of our actual malaise, one held captive to the madness of sloth. Having rejected any norms given in creation, freedom is under no authority other than the awful lightness of the will; we are free to do as we wish, including violence against all being.³³

I am persuaded by Snell’s case and offer it here with the invitation to the reader to reflect on its merits. I would also like to pair it with a related theme that I have detected in one of McCarthy’s later novels. In No Country for Old Men, McCarthy invents for us another chilling figure in Anton Chigurh. This character also strikes me as an embodiment of one response to sloth, but even though he resembles Judge Holden in his apparent willingness to maim and kill with almost no affect, his reasons are subtly different and deserve separate examination. Holden presents as something of a minor demon. He craves nothing less than the power of God and covets the ability to exercise control over anything and everything. Here he is revealing himself:

³² Snell 2000, 5.

³³ Snell 2000, 9.

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Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent . . . Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.³⁴

Chigurh, on the other hand, views himself and his own personal swath of destruction through very different eyes. We see the man he is early in the novel when he commits a terrifying and utterly senseless murder. Then, on the verge of repeating the atrocity upon a simple and innocent man who has no idea of the danger he is in, he pauses and flips a coin: Call it, he said. Call it? Yes. For what? Just call it. Well I need to know what it is we’re calling here. How would that change anything? . . . You need to call it, Chigurh said. I can’t call it for you. It wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t even be right. Just call it. I didn’t put nothin up. Yes you did. You’ve been putting it up your whole life you just didn’t know it. You know what the date is on this coin? No. It’s nineteen fifty-eight. It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it’s here. And I’m here. And I’ve got my hand over it. And it’s either heads or tails and you have to say. Call it. I don’t know what it is I stand to win.³⁵

The man stands to win the rest of his life, which Chigurh is calmly prepared to take if he calls the wrong side of the coin. Giving in without understanding, he calls “heads” and is right. Chigurh is impassive. He is not interested in degrading or dominating this man for the sole purpose of exercising

³⁴ McCarthy 1992, 198. This passage is quoted and discussed in Snell 2000, 8–9, as well. ³⁵ McCarthy 2005, 55–57.

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control over him. He is, in fact, utterly indifferent to his affairs or how they might be related to his own position or sense of power. What is important to Chigurh is a certain kind of lawfulness. He (Chigurh) isn’t the one to make this decision. “It wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t be right.” The coin has been traveling twenty-two years to get here, and now it’s time. Anything can be an instrument, Chigurh said. Small things. Things you wouldn’t even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People don’t pay attention. And then one day there’s an accounting. And after that nothing is the same . . . You see the problem. To separate the act from the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment.³⁶

Chigurh sees himself as an instrument of fate and chance. There is an order and a lawfulness in the world which must not be violated, and one plays one’s part without remorse. This is not the demonic attempt to impose one’s will upon all creation in an absurd world. It is the abdication of one’s freedom and responsibility and a willingness to numbly perpetrate evil as dictated by the flip of a coin in the name of forces which allegedly cannot be resisted. Chigurh is called out on exactly this point late in the novel, when the decision whether or not to take a life rests on a coin flip for the last time. He has given his word (to a man now dead) to commit a murder which no longer can function as a deterrent, its original purpose. Chigurh, nevertheless prepared to be lawfully obedient to his word, consults chance: All right, he said. This is the best I can do. He straightened out his leg and reached into his pocket and drew out a few coins and took one and held it up. He turned it. For her to see the justice of it . . . Call it, he said . . . You make it like it was the coin. But you’re the one. It could have gone either way. The coin didn’t have no say. It was just you. Perhaps. But look at it my way. I got here the same way the coin did.³⁷

Look at it Chigurh’s way. Anything can be an instrument. Small things. He, too, is a coin, tossing and turning. The only value Chigurh believes he has left to acknowledge is the justice of chance. But when the coin lands “tails,” ³⁶ McCarthy 2005, 57.

³⁷ McCarthy 2005, 258.

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the evil he performs is every bit as real and devastating as it is when Holden decrees the outcome without bothering to flip at all. McCarthy provides two portraits of acquiescence to evil in a fallen world, each a mask of unhappiness and sloth: one in a man who realizes his freedom will not be curtailed and who exploits that fact to the fullest, the other in a man who is convinced he is unfree and who bides his time waiting to learn what behavior, good or evil, the next roll of the dice will require of him. Neither flourishes.³⁸

6. The Lopsided Aesthete Let us continue with our catalog. How else might one respond to the unhappiness (predicted at the end of Chapter 3) which arises from failing to secure well-being in a fallen world while remaining separated from God? Rather than cultivating the domination mindset of Holden, the minor demon, or the malevolent passivity of Chigurh, the coin in the machine, one can instead single-mindedly pursue a small and restricted range of goods, perhaps a solitary good, to which one still has considerable access. Undeceived, and in full knowledge that the good in question is insufficient to give rise to happiness and well-being on its own, it is nevertheless (or so say those who incline this direction) at least a balm, a partial compensation for the wretchedness of the world. And a comprehensive commitment to the lifestyle in which this type of good can be maximized might appear preferable to all that impotent hand-wringing over the tragic sense of life or inconsequential fist-shaking at a universe that doesn’t notice and wouldn’t care if it did. In Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel of aestheticism, Against Nature, the protagonist secretly retreats from the horde of fools and scoundrels with which he has always been intertwined to a remote and small house where he plans to spend his fortune keeping the rest of the world at bay while he lives, moves, and has his being in art and art alone. Thus, des Esseintes devotes himself to the uninterrupted search for the most exquisite, refined, and unique sensations he can discover, utterly enthralled to the speech Gustave

³⁸ Those whose experience with McCarthy has been limited to The Road, No Country for Old Men, and Blood Meridian may be surprised upon reading his novel/play The Sunset Limited. The latter is as beautiful in its expression of neighbor love as the former selections are appalling in their expressions of the fallenness of the world.

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Flaubert places in the mouth of the Chimera in The Temptation of St Anthony—“I seek fresh perfumes, larger blossoms, pleasures as yet untried.”³⁹ Beware—any serious pursuit in this vein is not for the faint-hearted, nor for the poorly equipped in imagination, nor for those with compunctions about the moral law. Unbridled, it can quickly run from drinking in the splendor of the finest poetry, prose, paintings, and perfumes to delving into the allurements of idle seduction and sadism to exploring the aesthetics of maiming and murder, with an openness to anything in between (without much regard to its social, legal, or moral status). In the end, the only thing that much matters is that it satisfies one non-negotiable prerequisite— furnishing an original experience. In fact, the newness of the encounter eventually takes priority over the quality of the aesthetic experience it affords, until the grand-sounding motto of the aesthetic movement—art for art’s sake—has deformed into that dubious guideline for sorting one’s preferences—“anything for novelty.” The slogan “art for art’s sake” originated with Théophile Gautier in France and was popularized and became influential through the work of Walter Pater in England, two figures who shaped the aestheticism movement that blossomed during the end of the nineteenth century. A sense of what was at stake (with emphasis on Gautier’s view that aesthetics must not be wedded to morality or to virtuous edification) is conveyed by Oscar Wilde in this excerpt from his Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, a novel which is itself a stunning exposé (intentional or otherwise) on the pitfalls of a life so lived: Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all . . . No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can

³⁹ Husymans 1998, 88. The tantalizing speech that so captivates des Esseintes occurs between the Chimera and the Sphinx in chapter 7 of Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of St Anthony.

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express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.⁴⁰

Yet the problem with an endless search for novelty (unencumbered by “any ethical sympathies”) and for constantly new and arousing aesthetic experiences is that it inevitably leads to the dreadful state given pride of place by that scandalous hero of the aestheticism movement, Charles Baudelaire. Opening his collection of poems The Flowers of Evil, he writes: But here among the scorpions and the hounds, the jackals, apes and vultures, snakes and wolves, monsters that howl and growl and squeal and crawl, in all the squalid zoo of vices, one is even uglier and fouler than the rest, although the least flamboyant of the lot; this beast would gladly undermine the earth and swallow all creation in a yawn; I speak of Boredom which with ready tears dreams of hangings as it puffs its pipe.⁴¹

It is the fate that eventually befalls Huysmans’s monomaniacal des Esseintes in his attempt to wring some kind of satisfaction out of life by chasing after the one kind of good he believes he can stockpile to the exclusion of all else: ‘Ah!’ he said; ‘to think that all this is not a dream! To think that I shall be rejoining the depraved and servile rabble of this age!’ He turned for help and comfort to Schopenhauer’s consoling precepts; he repeated to himself the painful axiom of Pascal’s: ‘The soul sees nothing that, upon reflection, it does not find distressing’, but these words echoed in his mind like meaningless noise; his ennui broke them up, stripping them of all significance, all consolatory power, all gentle, effective potency.⁴²

A poignant (and real-world) illustration of such a lifestyle is recounted in Oscar Wilde’s last prose work, De Profundis, a letter completed while in prison. Half the length of a novel, this letter is addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas, the young man Wilde had become entangled with and who had been largely responsible ⁴⁰ Wilde 1966, 17.

⁴¹ Baudelaire 1983, 6.

⁴² Huysmans 1998, 180.

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for his very public downfall and eventual imprisonment for “committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons.” The letter is scathing and sorrowful, a confessional work of art, and impossible to put down. Wilde, who once acknowledged that he would like to have been his character Dorian (the young man who follows the amoral path of sensual exploration after coming under the influence of Huysmans’s Against Nature), now writes: I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a flaneur, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetops. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the Captain of my Soul, and did not know it . . . I ended in horrible disgrace.⁴³

In pursuing art for art’s sake and seeking eternal novelty in sensual experiences to the exclusion of all other values, one risks joining Wilde in “malady or madness” and one arrives yet again in Baudelaire’s desert of boredom. Thus we complete the circle and find ourselves once more at the beginning of section 2 of the present chapter, no better off in the end for having aimed at the partial compensation of the life of the aesthete.

7. Most Respectfully Return Him the Ticket Huysmans’s Against Nature ends quite improbably with the wretched and misanthropic figure of des Esseintes turning to ask help of God. With no foreshadowing of his eventual choice between suicide and religion, the reader is somewhat unprepared for such a denouement. More surprisingly,

⁴³ Wilde 1966, 913.

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Huysmans himself (rumored to have resembled his des Esseintes in a number of ways) quite improbably turned to ask help of God as well, and converted to Catholicism some ten years after completing the novel. Such turns, unexpected or not, are possible in art and in life. The masks of sloth we have examined in this chapter thus far can be worn by the atheist, the agnostic, and the theist alike, two of whom are rather less likely to entertain the prospect of turning to God as a response to their various manifestations of unhappiness.⁴⁴ The final masks of sloth to which I would like to draw attention (in this section and the next) are worn instead primarily or exclusively by the theist. Recall for a moment the Christian who has been seduced by a combination of Mammon’s advice and her own sinfulness to attempt to make a Heaven of Hell, but without capitulating to God, and who, predictably, has failed and is now deeply sunk in sloth. Although neither disbelief nor suspension of judgment impede turning to God as a way of reigniting her desire for the good and of easing her resistance to the demands of love, other serious impediments can be manufactured in the throes of unhappiness that don’t require forfeiting her theism. Ivan of The Brothers Karamazov, speaking to his brother Alyosha, furnishes a memorable example: And so, I accept God, not only willingly, but moreover I also accept his wisdom and his purpose, which are completely unknown to us; I believe in his order, in the meaning of life, I believe in eternal harmony, in which we are all supposed to merge, I believe in the Word for whom the universe is yearning, and who himself was ‘with God’, who himself is God, and so on, and so on, and so forth, to infinity . . . and now imagine that in the final outcome I do not accept this world of God’s, I do not admit it at all, though I know it exists. It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept.⁴⁵

“But why?” inquires Alyosha. In a chapter of his masterpiece that Dostoevsky suggestively names “Rebellion,” Ivan answers that the tears

⁴⁴ Not necessarily less likely, however. True, the agnostic, for example, lacks belief in the existence of God, but other attitudinal stances (e.g., hope and faith) are not precluded by lack of belief. See Howard-Snyder and McKaughan, forthcoming. ⁴⁵ Dostoevsky 1990, 235.

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and suffering of innocents seem to remain unredeemed, and that such a trade for the alleged harmony of the cosmos at the day of judgment is unacceptable. I don’t want harmony, for love of mankind I don’t want it. I want to remain with unrequited suffering. I’d rather remain with my unrequited suffering and my unquenched indignation, even if I am wrong. Besides, they have put too high a price on harmony; we can’t afford to pay so much for admission. And therefore I hasten to return my ticket. And it is my duty, if only as an honest man, to return it as far ahead of time as possible. Which is what I am doing. It’s not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket. Imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears— would you agree to be the architect on such conditions?⁴⁶

Ivan is prepared to maintain his distance from God on what he initially hints are grounds of injustice or of God’s failing properly to care for all of His creatures in the interests of creating the greatest harmony at the expense of some of them. Without challenging God’s existence or wisdom or even the value of such cosmic harmony, Ivan tells himself a story on which God, in aiming at some higher good, permits harms to innocent individuals that do not ultimately result in benefits or compensation for those very individuals. To be sure, sophisticated disputes have centered on precisely this issue, and it is a fiercely debated question whether it would be morally impermissible or inconsistent with God’s perfect goodness or perfect love to occasionally make use of us as instruments in order to accomplish divine goals that involve injuries or suffering for which we receive no individual recompense.⁴⁷ Yet Ivan, who earlier acknowledges that the range of God’s purposes are beyond his ken, does not seem interested in entering into further serious philosophical reflection on these issues and does not really continue to press his charge of injustice or insufficient love and care. Instead, he ultimately phrases his rebellion in terms of personal preferences: “I don’t ⁴⁶ Dostoevsky 1990, 245. ⁴⁷ See Adams 1999 and Stump 2010 for sensitive and insightful discussions of this theme.

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accept . . . I can’t agree to accept . . . I don’t want . . . I’d rather remain . . . even if I am wrong . . . I just most respectfully return him the ticket.” One could, of course, go beyond Ivan’s speech and attempt to expose what one takes to be an unresolvable tension between unredeemed suffering and perfect goodness, arguing for atheism as a result. Alternatively, one could acknowledge that same tension, but render it consistent with theism either by defending the moral permissibility of God’s permitting an individual’s suffering for the sake of a higher good that does not benefit that individual or by insisting that there will be sufficient recompense to the individual after all, whether or not we are in an epistemic position to come to learn the details of its deliverance. Ivan’s particular oddity, however, is to begin to construct such an argument for atheism only to forestall it by apparently conceding the strategy for reply just noted, but nevertheless still hastening “to return his ticket.” In so doing, Ivan professes the desire not to live in a world like that (despite its being created by a being whom he recognizes as supremely wise and as aiming at the highest harmony) on the strength of his own idiosyncratic preferences, as he says—whether or not he is wrong. At least this is how I envision him, but perhaps I have offered a misreading of Ivan. Perhaps he is less confident in God’s existence and here pretends otherwise only for Alyosha’s benefit, in which case it is a misdescribed Ivan that will have to suit my purposes in exhibiting a particular and familiar mask of sloth. This is the mask of, say, a Christian who simply does not care for the terms on which the world is offered to her, even though, strictly speaking, the deal-breaking preference is not an expression of any considered moral judgment or deep reservations about the adequacy of the grounds for her religious beliefs and attitudes. It is perhaps more common that one does not care for the terms on which the world is offered on the grounds that one’s own place in it is not exalted enough (e.g., Milton’s Satan); Ivan’s preference is grounded on his displeasure with places he imagines are occupied by others. Alternatively, perhaps Ivan truly is convinced of a genuine injustice at the core of God’s plan, and although he does not see sufficient reason to deny God’s existence or wisdom or status as creator, he does revise his judgment either with respect to God’s goodness or with respect to God’s purported relationship with human beings (and, to that extent, also puts into question his status as a theist, at least as conceived traditionally). If so, Ivan could be painted as the philosopher of ananthropocentrism.

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In his Purpose in the Universe: The Moral and Metaphysical Case for Ananthropocentric Purposivism, Tim Mulgan argues for a view that many would see as a kind of hybrid of standard theistic and atheistic commitments. Through championing arguments for objective values and examining classic arguments for theism, Mulgan concludes that there is indeed cosmic purpose in the universe (although, on his view, it need not be embodied in a personal being), yet while rehearsing arguments rooted in evil and the depths of human perversity, Mulgan further concludes that this cosmic purpose doesn’t have much to do with us. One way of crystallizing this general worldview, then, is with the thesis that God is omnipotent, omniscient, creator of the world, and invested in an array of divine purposes, but we won’t find ourselves among them; God does not really care for us individually or collectively.⁴⁸ To be clear, I am not presently interested in critically evaluating whether Ivan’s suspicion that an innocent child’s tears might be permanently unrequited could be realized. Nor—if so—in whether this would be consistent with how God may permissibly interact with His creatures or whether it would suffice to forfeit God’s perfect goodness. Nor in whether there are good reasons to be sympathetic with Mulgan’s suggestion that the welfare of Ivan’s innocent doesn’t register on the divine radar in anyway whatsoever. Instead, the purpose of the brief survey of this section, like each of its predecessors in this chapter, is to serve as a reminder that those who are failing to flourish, those who are mired in sloth, those who are suffering from the condition of unhappiness we identified as Psychic Renunciation, will be inclined to respond to their condition in any number of distinctive ways that can imperil their chances of altering that condition.

8. Guilt, Shame, Mediocrity On the other hand, if the theist is not especially inclined to ascribe to God a defect which absolves the theist of his responsibility to respond to the demands of love, perhaps he can persist in sloth’s rejection of those demands by locating the defect in himself.

⁴⁸ Mulgan 2015. This work is an impressive reminder of what intriguing new ground can be broken by combining aspects of long-standing views that are ordinarily regarded as simple adversaries.

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Eleonore Stump draws attention to two distinct types of this phenomenon, one in which guilt predominates and one centered on shame.⁴⁹ In the case of guilt, focus is so unwaveringly fixed on one’s own grievous sins that one loses sight of the possibility of God’s forgiveness, imagining that one’s condition is so far from the threshold for God’s mercy that all hope is lost. This sense of guilt can be painfully intensified by the thought that one has been greatly blessed with unusual gifts and talents which one has simply neglected, misapplied, or squandered. As John Bunyan says of his youthful self in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners: I had been a great and grievous sinner, and . . . it was now too late for me to look after heaven; for Christ would not forgive me, nor pardon my transgressions. Then I fell to musing on this also; and while I was thinking of it, and fearing lest it should be so; I felt my heart sink in despair, concluding it was too late; and therefore I resolved in my mind I would go on in sin: for, thought I, if the case be thus, my state is surely miserable; miserable if I leave my sins, and but miserable if I follow them; I can but be damned, and if I must be so, I had as good be damned for many sins, as be damned for few.⁵⁰

This is the mindset of one who thinks the door of Heaven has been locked and barred against him in punishment for misdeeds which cannot be rectified; there is no option, thinks such a sufferer, but to steal what pleasures he can this side of the door, until annihilation or punishment more severe follows upon his death. In the case of shame, it is not so much that the door has been locked and barred, but that passing through its frame demands a dignity and bearing that has somehow been lost or tarnished or taken by fraud or force. In The Great Divorce, C. S. Lewis pens a character who, even though now dead and no longer successfully able to conceal how she truly appears from those who might take notice of her, continues to resist God’s call to come forward and partake “in infinite happiness.” Invited to begin her journey to Heaven, she refuses to go forth, for to do so she will have to stand and expose herself before others.

⁴⁹ See Stump 2018, 293–295. I follow her lead in illustrating two of the three versions of this condition I wish to acknowledge with works by John Bunyan and C. S. Lewis. ⁵⁰ Bunyan 1905, no. 23.

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“I tell you, they’ll see me.” “An hour hence and you will not care. A day hence and you will laugh at it. Don’t you remember on earth—there were things too hot to touch with your finger but you could drink them all right? Shame is like that. If you will accept it—if you will drink the cup to the bottom—you will find it very nourishing: but try to do anything else with it and it scalds.”⁵¹

In the broader context of this short novel, Lewis’s suffering ghost seems to be afflicted by a shame rooted in a combination of vanity and envy, but there are other varieties of shame, whose subjects are even less likely to be coaxed forward by a metaphor of downing the nourishing draught of exposing one’s shame and its source to the world and then being carefree an hour hence. I am thinking here of shame not for what one has done or left undone, but for who one is, shame in one’s identity, shame for the conditions into which one is born or for features over which one does not have and has never had any degree of control whatsoever. Untold numbers of vulnerable individuals have been shamed for their race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, body type, physical or mental impairment, social or economic status, and have internalized that shame until it feels as natural and fitting and obvious as anything can be. Thousands of invisible little nails driven by the remarks of the privileged (both casual and crafted), the social conventions of systemic exploitation and oppression, and the institutions of cruelty on display in our earlier discussion of the philosophy of pessimism, pin these individuals to a conception of themselves as second-class, unpresentable, unworthy, and unloveable. They wouldn’t presume to darken the door of Heaven, for they have come to believe that although it is a passageway open to others, their kind is unwelcome. A final example will bring this section and this chapter to a close. In Peter Shaffer’s exquisite and heartbreaking portrait of envy, Amadeus, Antonio Salieri wrestles with the bitter realization that although his own musical gifts are considerable, he is no prodigy. And in passing him over, God has selected as his instrument on Earth a vile and revolting creature, that loathsome animal Mozart, whose one redeeming feature is his musical genius. Salieri, who begins and ends a theist, wants nothing more than to worship and honor God with beautiful and sublime compositions, yet he feels humiliated and broken by his mediocrity.

⁵¹ Lewis 1974, 61.

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I know my fate. Now for the first time I feel my emptiness as Adam felt his nakedness . . . Tonight at an inn somewhere in this city stands a giggling child who can put on paper, without actually setting down his billiard cue, casual notes which turn my most considered ones into lifeless scratches. Grazie, Signore! You gave me the desire to serve You—which most men do not have—then saw to it the service was shameful in the ears of the server. Grazie! You gave me the desire to praise You—which most men do not feel—then made me mute. Grazie tanti! You put into me perception of the Incomparable—which most men never know!—then ensured that I would know myself forever mediocre.⁵²

This is not guilt over a life misspent. And it not envy alone that cries out in misery in this passage. It is unsatisfiable longing in a man who comes to believe that musical excellence has been denied to him in a way that mocks his heart’s desire. His perceived inadequacy does not turn him from his theism, but it turns him from his God. “So be it! From this time we are enemies, You and I!”⁵³

Thus, sloth can manifest in the imagined personal defects of being too depraved to be redeemed, too repulsive to be loved, or not worthy enough to be permitted one’s heart’s desire. Each can erect a formidable barrier. As we have seen throughout this chapter, sloth is a misfortune with many faces. One can race from boredom into mindless diversions, or convince oneself that the world is at bottom absurd, or anguish over whether life is worth living at all, or give oneself entirely over to evil, or abdicate one’s agency and be ruled by chance, or frantically pursue the diminishing pleasures of sensual novelty, or attempt to explain one’s misfortune by appeal to some invented offensive or indifferent feature of God’s, or despair over a perceived spiritual deformity in oneself rooted in guilt or shame. Unfortunately, no matter which particular mask of sloth one has donned, they all seem to share the feature of entrenching one’s unhappiness rather than alleviating it.

⁵² Shaffer, 1980, 46.

⁵³ Shaffer, 1980, 47.

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5 Ye Cannot Serve God and Mammon This first book proposes . . . the whole subject—Man’s disobedience. —John Milton, Paradise Lost (I: The Argument)

1. Recovered Paradise In an echo of Romans 5:19, the opening lines of John Milton’s Paradise Regained announce its theme and touch on ours: I who erewhile the happy Garden sung, By one man’s disobedience lost, now sing Recovered Paradise to all mankind, By one man’s firm obedience fully tried Through all temptation, and the Tempter foiled In all his wiles, defeated and repulsed, And Eden raised in the waste Wilderness. John Milton, Paradise Regained (I.1–7)

Adam succumbs to temptation, rebels against God, and through disobedience both loses paradise and bequeaths to humankind the condition of Original Sin. Thus in bondage, each of us replicates the tragedy, succumbs to sin, and through disobedience turns to a life of unhappiness to wear and be worn by one of the various masks of sloth. Thus, our Chapters 1 through 4. Obedience is an explosive term. It means (and has meant) different things in different contexts, some of them magnificent and some of them deplorable. It can call to mind a special relation between creature and Creator which gives rise to a great good (the possibility of which is established by an injunction like that against eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge in the Eden myth), or it can serve as a terrifying symbol of the worst forms of oppression creatures have ever imposed upon one another. During Fallenness and Flourishing. Hud Hudson, Oxford University Press (2021). © Hud Hudson. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198849094.003.0005

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especially sinister moments of our history, it has accomplished the latter while posing as the former. My use of the term takes a sense inspired by the conversation Raphael shares with Adam in Book V of Paradise Lost, when the angel is sent by God “to admonish Adam of his obedience,” and to remind him of his freedom and condition: To whom the Angel. Son of Heaven and Earth, Attend: That thou art happy, owe to God; That thou continu’st such, owe to thyself, That is, to thy obedience; therein stand. This was that caution given thee; be advised. God made thee perfect, not immutable; And good he made thee, but to persevere He left it in thy power, ordained thy will By nature free, not overruled by Fate Inextricable, or strict necessity; Our voluntary service he requires, Not our necessitated, such with him Finds no acceptance, nor can find, for how Can hearts, not free, be tried whether they serve Willing or no, who will but what they must By Destiny, and can no other choose? Myself and all the Angelic Host that stand In sight of God enthroned our happy state Hold, as you yours, while our obedience holds; On other surety none; freely we serve Because we freely love, as in our will To love or not; in this we stand or fall. John Milton, Paradise Lost (V.519–540)

Raphael can pack a lot of theology into twenty lines! Here are half-a-dozen points we can extract from this passage: First, Adam’s pre-Fall condition of sinlessness, the initial condition of his creation, is described as both good and happy. Second, persisting in this condition is not externally determined, not a matter of fate or necessity, but instead a choice relinquished to Adam. Third, electing to remain in this state involves the exercise of Adam’s will and is a morally significant instance of freedom. Fourth, the reason for gifting Adam this awesome responsibility is that God desires Adam’s

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voluntary union; to fix Adam’s response to God’s invitation of love is to thwart God’s purposes. Fifth, obedience is singled out as the condition of persisting in happiness—“therein stand,” as opposed to disobedience by which one falls, and obedience is named a second time as the condition of persisting happiness for the angels, as well—“on other surety none.” Note, however, that by “happiness” Raphael here has in mind not merely the sense of “happiness” analyzed in the theory of Psychic Affirmation from Chapter 2, but also the broader state that I have been using the term “wellbeing” to designate throughout this book. Sixth, continuing in happiness is described as persevering, an active (rather than passive) manner of persisting which engages the will in a specific fashion and which, in the final lines, appears to involve a particular mixture of obedience and love. I am quite attracted to Raphael’s picture, and in this final chapter, I would like to explore these themes against the backdrop of our world and ourselves that emerged in Chapters 1 through 4. In section 2, I will begin by developing a conception of obedience as a virtue and illustrating this virtue with paradigm examples that speak directly to the great temptations to disobedience discussed earlier (libido sentiendi, libido sciendi, and libido dominandi). I will also revisit the classical advice about combatting sloth through perseverance and stability of place in the attempt to illuminate the mixture of obedience and love Raphael seems to have in mind as he describes the willful effort to persist in happiness. In section 3, I will impose a modification to that objective-list theory of well-being that outperformed its rivals in Chapter 2, yielding an improved theory that posits a special role for the virtue of obedience. And I will show how the resulting conception of wellbeing comports nicely with the role Raphael envisions for obedience. In sections 4, 5, and 6, I will raise a number of objections to the central ideas developed in this chapter that seem to me genuinely challenging, and I will offer the best thoughts I have about how those objections may be addressed. Finally, section 7 will contain concluding reflections on this study as a whole.

2. The Virtue of Obedience, Christ’s Temptations, and Perseverance It is commonplace to take virtues and vices to be robust and stable traits of character. Not universal, however, for some theorists have opted instead for a conception of virtues in terms of properly grounded persisting attitudes.

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With respect to the traits-of-character conception, one promising modern approach (which aims to correct the over-intellectualization of a theory of the virtues) is to count a character trait as a virtue if and only if and because it is a character trait which systematically produces more actual good than not.¹ Thus formulated, this consequentialist approach to virtue has the advantage of intuitively tying virtue to value in an appealing way, but suffers from the disadvantages of seemingly setting the virtue bar too low with mere-preponderance talk and of being subject to misidentifying clear instances of vice as virtue (and the reverse) owing to deviant causal chains that accidentally produce, say, tremendous actual value from avarice or wrath, or that accidentally produce, say, tremendous actual disvalue from temperance or justice. Another more popular route, rooted in the teachings of Aristotle and writings of the neo-Aristotelians, is to count a character trait as a virtue if and only if and because it is a character trait which directly promotes or sustains whatever constitutes flourishing for its subject.² Thus formulated, the approach is neutral on whether flourishing is determined at the level of the individual or by appeal to some dominant kind (e.g., “human being” or “human person”). This formulation has the advantage of being the intense focus of a very long and impressive tradition of refined philosophy and scholarship, brimming over with insight, precision, and formidable defenses of its central claims. Yet it has recently been the subject of a significant worry arising from research in social and cognitive psychology which suggests that those fragile and impoverished features of character that human beings actually exhibit may not be robust enough to qualify as the sort of settled and stable character traits with which virtues and vices have traditionally been identified. The worry, then, is that if virtues and vices really must display the requisite robustness, then the relevant empirical findings may be evidence that we don’t (and perhaps, psychologically can’t) have virtues and vices at all.³

¹ This way of putting things can be found in Driver 2001. For complaints about and improvement upon the locution “produces more actual good than not” see Bradley 2005. ² An approach defended, for example, in Taylor 2006. ³ See Doris 2002. For intriguing discussions of and responses to these worries, see Adams 2006 and Miller 2015 and 2016. I note (with the philosophy of pessimism firmly in mind) that a number of arguments, designed to prove that the character traits historically identified with virtues and vices are significantly less robust than we have taken them to be, very often have premises featuring only the alleged virtues. The conclusion may thus be over-strong, for the vices, I fear, tend to be far more robust than their cousins the virtues and far more resistant to the accidents of circumstance.

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A third conception partially sidesteps the worries about the robustness of actual human character traits and instead conceives of virtue as persisting excellence in being in favor of the good.⁴ A virtue is thus identified with an abiding pro-attitude, held for the right reasons, in favor of a particular good. Perhaps further refinements may be desired as well that speak to proportionality, matching the degree of pro-attitude to the degree of the goodness of its object or to the extent and source of the stability of the persisting excellence. Advantages involve, among other things, much less of a threat from social and cognitive psychology to the existence of the subject matter of the theory and an emphasis on the intrinsic value of the virtues as opposed to their instrumental value as stepping stones on the path to flourishing. But it secures such advantages at the expense of a disconnect with the longstanding tradition of focusing on traits of character. Such a disconnect requires revisioning old relations with new relata and revisiting classical questions about virtue and vice. How, for example, should we think about whether and in what way the virtues are unified, or in what manner they can conflict, or if they can be taught, or the extent to which we have control over their presence, or how best to conceive of the relation between virtue and virtuous action?⁵ Although I will use the phrase “the virtue of obedience,” I am not especially inclined to participate in disputes of the kind just exhibited about the nature of virtue in general. It is interesting, however, that obedience appears to be a promising candidate for a virtue on each of the approaches just sketched. On the assumption that the claims to be made on behalf of obedience below are accurate, the robust and stable dispositions it presupposes certainly promote far more good than ill and also sustain well-being in their subjects, and to the extent that obedience involves pro-attitudes that are excellent and abiding towards certain relational goods between creature and Creator, it would seem to qualify as a virtue on all three accounts. Furthermore, it could be classed as a theological virtue, insofar as it is directly concerned with God and engages the will in a distinctive manner. Obedience, as I am envisioning it here, is a combination of an abiding and deeply seated pro-attitude towards uniting one’s will with God’s will and a robust and stable set of dispositions aimed at combatting the features that

⁴ This is a slight variation on the formulation in Adams 2006. A closely related approach is defended in Hurka 2000. ⁵ Just to be clear, these questions are not rhetorical objections, just observations about this approach to virtue.

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sparked the following unappealing characterization of our collective condition in Chapter 3: Thus the emerging portrait of the sinful creature’s affective state who is a devoted inhabitant of the City of Man is something like prideful adherence to a perverted Kantian maxim: to wit—Where my will conflicts with God’s, I will nevertheless pursue my own desires and my own independence, even to the contempt of God and to the (earthly) ruin of my fellow creatures; thus, shall I seek my own good.

In contrast, obedience involves the disposition to be alert to and on guard against our perpetual state of concupiscence which is daily fueled by excessive self-love and disguised by our prodigious talent for self-deceit. It involves the disposition to resist inflating and idolizing the lesser goods of pleasure, knowledge, and power in the world, especially when their pursuit conflicts with harmonizing our will with the divine will. It involves the disposition to commit oneself to God’s revealed word by faith, to persevere in the hope for the realization of the promises of that word, and to promote that realization in the exercise of charity through properly grounded love of God and neighbor. But isn’t this at once too poor and too rich a conception? Too poor—the advice for becoming wealthy that consists in the phrase “choose the right lottery numbers” will certainly help you succeed when you manage to follow it but is not of much practical value to most of us. Doesn’t the advice that consists in phrases such as “conform your will to God’s will” more or less suffer from the same practical defect? Perhaps, but permit me to defer my considered response to this worry until section 4 below, where I will engage it as one of four distinctive problems for the line of argument developed in this chapter. Too rich—there’s an awful lot of complicated content embedded in that wide-ranging description of obedience. Well, fair enough; in fact, it’s even messier than it looks. There are at least four distinct components to that description, each of which admits of degree, each of which is beset by problems of vagueness and borderline cases, and the totality of which can be co-present in an individual in different proportions. There is a humility component—being disposed to recognize and to own our affective and cognitive limitations imposed by the condition of Original Sin and to be vigilant about the ways in which they can lead us into difficulty and error.⁶ ⁶ For an illuminating discussion and analysis of intellectual humility see Whitcomb, Battaly, Baehr, and Howard-Snyder 2017.

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There is a restraint component—being disposed to moderate our powerful inclinations to pursue inferior goods, to privilege our own interests, and to adopt double standards in the evaluation of our thoughts, actions, and characters in comparison with those of others. There is a response component—being disposed to respond properly to the demands of love issued in the two great love commandments and thus to exercise the will in a direct confrontation with sloth which (as we saw in Chapters 3 and 4) is the very condition of willed resistance to the demands of love. And finally, there is a component specifying a pro-attitude—ideally love—which is capable of being nurtured and strengthened, which itself involves an exercise of the will, and which is directed at the good of being united with God.⁷ Messy or not, this package of dispositions and attitudes is precisely what the second reason for optimism about pessimism from Chapter 1—namely, the role of sin as pedagogue—was concerned with. The wretchedness of our condition and of a world damaged by sin can motivate obedience thus conceived which, when achieved, constitutes that kind of cooperation with God of which we are capable in bringing about the reconciliation promised in the Atonement. Moreover, I will argue, it is this wide-ranging (but clear enough) fourfold conception of obedience that has a unique role to play in reconfiguring the best theory of well-being that emerged from our earlier discussion and that promises the best defense against the unhappiness and sloth in which so many of us have lost our way. Of course it is possible to debate further about the best analysis of “obedience” that emerges from data points drawn from, say, scripture and tradition and supplemented by a priori insight. But I am less interested in backing one horse in that analysis race, and more interested in the work to be done by the combination of features I have just described. Let us, then, avoid that quarrel by way of stipulation: in the sequel, by “obedience” I shall have in mind that complex set of dispositions and attitudes whose four components and primary contours I have just articulated. One could look for the fruits of obedience in celebrated cases of its presence and of its proper influence upon action in the face of temptations to disobedience. A natural candidate for such an illustration, then, is Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, as recounted in Matthew 4 and Luke 4.

⁷ Even further complications will emerge momentarily when we consider how this virtue (or something very much like it) might appear in a being who does not suffer from sloth, sin, or even the condition of original sin—e.g., in Christ.

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The gospels tell the story that, upon being baptized by John the Baptist and revealed as the Son of God, Christ is led into the wilderness to fast and pray. At the end of this forty-day ordeal, presumably exhausted, dirty, hungry, thirsty, sore, perhaps also sad, troubled, anxious, lonely, and surely at the limits of his human nature—at this very moment of extreme need and weakness—the devil visits and tempts.⁸ The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’ ” Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve only him.’ ” Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’ ” Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ” Luke 4:3–12

On the surface, the temptations simply consist in offering access to the type of worldly goods for which so many have exchanged their own happiness and well-being. And to Christ who could not sin but, in being possessed of a human nature, could suffer temptation, the libido sentiendi whispers, “you are hungry; create the bread”; the libido dominandi flatters, “you would wield authority with compassion; take the kingdoms on these terms”; the libido sciendi rouses, “accept the impudent dare; prove yourself so that you will be fully known.” The three together: “Eat a crust, for you are of no value to anyone if too famished to act; is not forty days a sufficient show of temperance? Assume the reins of power here and now, for if not you in ⁸ I have no illusions of comprehensiveness here. I simply want to sketch some examples of obedience at work in the person of Christ, not to pretend to offer a comprehensive account or evaluation of the wilderness temptations.

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your benevolence, to what tyrants and dangers will you expose the people? Reveal your position and unveil your glory, not for your own sake, but does not this demon deserve to be checked and humbled more so than any creature in existence?” I do not here presume to report on the inner thoughts of Jesus (to which, of course, I have no access) but only to represent the fawning voice of concupiscence as it might make a temptation to acquire the goods of sustenance, authority, and acknowledgement through such means as worshiping Satan appear reasonable and attractive. In addition to whatever other lessons are available in this gospel story, at the very least the reported temptations portray the classic examples of human want and ambition in a context in which inordinate self-love and self-deceit could easily work together to encourage their subject to err.⁹ Three quick observations: First, Christ’s response to the first temptation is a partial quotation from Deuteronomy 8:3, a context in which three points are clearly at issue: such hunger and other types of suffering (i) have the function of humbling the individual who experiences them and who cannot prevent or alleviate the suffering as a matter of her own will, (ii) serve as a trial to determine whether she will remain obedient to God’s commandments in the midst of suffering, and (iii) teach the lesson that life comes not from bread alone but from the word of God, the source of those commandments. Second, Christ’s response to the second temptation is a partial quotation drawn from Deuteronomy 6:13 or else Deuteronomy 10:20, contexts in which three points are clearly at issue: (i) we are the recipients of divine commandments—in particular, to love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might (explicitly cited in both chapters), (ii) we are to be diligently obedient to these commandments even when distracted by good fortune which we have not earned, and (iii) our loyalties are not to be divided but are to be devoted to the service of God alone.¹⁰ Together the first two responses showcase obedience as I have characterized it above—a condition that arises in humility, is guided by God’s word, is binding upon us (whether or not relief of suffering or access to power or glory are available in exchange for defiance), is grounded in the love of God

⁹ For one brilliant and penetrating example of just how much more can be gleaned from the narrative of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, see Stump 2018, chapter 8. ¹⁰ See Stump 2018, 237–238 for further remarks on the significance of these oblique references to Deuteronomy.

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via heart, soul, and might (i.e., in a love that makes demands on the will), and is always of the highest priority, trumping all other aims and ambitions. Third, Christ’s choices in the third temptation are easily misrepresented. Once precariously placed on the pinnacle of the temple, the tempted Christ cannot remain standing utilizing only his human abilities. Thus positioned, he is offered a bit of advice that it would seem he can’t refuse: [stand or throw yourself down, but you can’t stand, so] “throw yourself down from here.” Despite the reassurance that the angels will protect him from harm, Christ resists, but how? Satan’s relocating him from the desert floor to the pinnacle of the temple seemed to be a device for forcing his choice. Yet Christ resists by pursuing a third option. To throw himself down is to will the conditions of his fall, the characteristic feature of sin. To stand unsupported is not, as we have noted, within his human power in his present state. But insofar as he has remained obedient (as displayed in his response to the first two temptations), Christ has passed the trials imposed upon him by suffering and by those promises of pleasure and power designed to turn him from love of and fealty to God to inappropriate worship of an unworthy being. In consequence, he stands supported by a God prepared to respond with grace to Christ’s willingness to conform his own will in obedience to God’s. I say that Christ possessed the virtue of obedience, but as delineated above, that virtue involves a disposition to recognize and own one’s affective and cognitive limitations and a disposition to moderate powerful inclinations to pursue inferior goods, to privilege one’s own interests, and to adopt double standards in one’s evaluations of oneself and others. Again, on the traditional Christian story, Christ cannot sin—but Christ can be tempted to sin, and presumably, he sharply experienced these inclinations born of temptation while providing an illustration of how to recognize and moderate them, and while also remaining vigilant with respect to the affective and cognitive limitations manifested by way of his human nature.¹¹ Of course, none of us shares the immunity from sin possessed by Christ, and enjoying the virtue of obedience is not a magical shield against sin, but there is a connection here worth exploring. As I mentioned earlier, the four components at the heart of the virtue of obedience—humility, restraint, response, and love—admit of degree, can be co-present in different proportions, and are threatened by instability and impermanence. Obedience is decidedly not the same thing as forevermore refraining from rebellion ¹¹ For excellent philosophical discussions on what temptations are, on the debate concerning Christ’s impeccability, and on the compatibility of temptation and impeccability, see Pawl 2019.

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against God—that achievement may simply be beyond our power. But it does aim at something which is within our power, and (as Raphael explained to Adam) something which God cannot extract from us by force, namely, our freely responding to God’s invitation to reconciliation. As Eleonore Stump eloquently argues throughout her study of the Atonement, this occurs when one surrenders (rather than submits) to God’s love, forming the second-order desire to will what God wills (as just modeled in the narrative of Christ’s temptation), upon which act of surrender “she receives at once the infused virtues and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit together with all the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit.”¹² Thus, in a condition of grace, one enters into a process of sanctification in which one’s will continues to be further integrated around the good. This process proceeds under the guidance and assistance of the Holy Spirit but is fragile and can be terminated by the creature it is benefitting; moreover, such termination is a realistic hazard, for although God strengthens the will in one’s attempt to conform to a second-order desire to will to will the good, such assistance nevertheless competes with our own defects of character and lifelong patterns of succumbing to sin. As with the condition of grace, possession of the virtue of obedience is compatible with a conflicted and fragmented will, with backsliding into sin, and with waxing and waning in sanctification. The dispositions and attitudes embedded in the virtue of obedience, however, work to maintain an openness to this second-order desire to conform one’s will to God’s, and once again, it is this (grace-enabled) condition of perseverance that comprises much of the contribution one can make towards cooperating in reconciliation, a contribution which God cannot wrest from us by force and upon which Raphael declares our happiness depends.¹³ Thus the Prayer of Obedience— God, please help me to will to will the good and then to will what I will to will!¹⁴

—a request of God (offered in the humility of recognizing a need for assistance in the matter) to form the desires that engender appropriate

¹² Stump 2018, 290. ¹³ Stump 2018’s chapter 9, “Perseverance,” contains an excellent and sustained treatment of these themes from which I have learned a great deal. ¹⁴ Borrowed (with permission) from a friend, X.W.B.

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resistance to those inferior goods which, when sought after at the expense of superior goods, leave those who ill-advisedly choose them mired in sloth and its resistance to the demands of love. It is no accident that perseverance and stability of place were also the traditional prescribed remedies for the sin of sloth, as recounted earlier. Such an injunction to stability of place is hardly an invitation to indulge listlessness and do nothing in response to one’s condition save sitting still and wallowing in it. Staying the course takes genuine effort. Sloth is not just a passing irritation at or resentment toward the demands of love. It is a willful aversion to those demands, both assented to and endorsed by a subject who realizes with anxiety and trepidation how challenging and even painful a transformation in responding to a call for love will be.¹⁵ The source of the aversion is, of course, the correctly foreseen difficulties of relinquishing the misperceived goods and quasi-comforts of a lifetime addiction to sin. This battle can be enjoined, however, by sincere attempts to acquire and nurture the virtue of obedience, a task which involves exactly the sort of efforts that stand some chance of defeating the sin of sloth.

3. Obedience and Well-Being—A Story for Everyone A Story—The Melancholy Kingdom of Nodland In the fabled kingdom of Nodland, people of every shape and size, every color and class, every walk of life tended to share one peculiar value and personal goal. The citizens of Nodland had come to be great admirers of magnificent works of art. A reflective appreciation of and profound regard for aesthetic goods permeated their history and social institutions, shaped their individual lives, and bonded them with one another. It was commonly conceded that creating and sustaining aesthetic value were among the greatest of goods and the noblest of pursuits. In addition to contributing to all the murals and sculptures and public works that adorned their taverns and town halls and churches, each citizen was charged with the care of one special canvas over which that individual had nearly sole autonomy and upon which the individual had tremendous liberty to paint nearly anything.

¹⁵ Again on characterizing sloth as resistance to the demands of love, see the excellent discussions in DeYoung 2009 and 2014a, esp. 186–192.

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The human bodies of Nodland, of course, came in all shapes and sizes, their natural features falling within a surprisingly broad range prescribed by the nature of human beings. Most were superficially quite similar, with predictable contours and symmetries, while others presented less common shapes and unfamiliar stops and curves. Yet each one presented an irreplaceable and unique canvas to be worked by the brushes and permanent inks fashioned from Nodland reeds and Nodland berries, nuts, leaves, and flowers. Each was a proper receptacle for aesthetic excellence. How one might paint one’s body throughout the course of one’s life was a topic of spirited and open discussion. Opinions were exchanged with vigor and confidence and flair in the pig stalls at the village market, were whispered late into the night in the royal bed chamber by the young princes and their attendants, arose without fail on all four weekly fellowship meetings where clergy thoughtfully sipped their wine together, and even gave rise to squabbles in schoolyards amongst children who didn’t appreciate the details of the positions they parroted but did appreciate something of the gravity of their subject matter. Broadly speaking, these theories of self-portraits (as they were called) sometimes consisted of less or more sophisticated variants on the advice to paint upon one’s body in any manner that gave one the most pleasure. Others recommended painting whatever would most satisfy one’s individual desires. Others had views about the special nature and purpose of the human body and advocated for artistry that was fitting and perfecting for that particular nature. And still others proposed lists of colors and shapes and themes that were objectively aesthetically good when appearing on a human body, and invited people to select from some representative and well-balanced portion of the list, whether those colors, shapes, or themes had any personal appeal to them or no. Every theory had its fair share of followers, and the streets and shops of Nodland furnished an art gallery ever in motion. Success was so highly prized that the citizens over-reported their level of satisfaction with their selfportraits and out of some combination of respect and embarrassment largely left one another’s reports unchallenged. Often they came to believe their own public pronouncements. Truth be told, however, there was a good deal of socially supported self-deception in play, for most of them had not succeeded, and transparently so. Nodland was, beneath its kaleidoscope of colors, a melancholy kingdom.

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One of the many theories of self-portraits, however, had an interesting twist worthy of remark. It was among the objective-list theories (which routinely suffered from the criticism that many of those who had tried to follow the relevant prescription and who had appeared to achieve some representative and well-balanced approximation of the items on some proffered list of aesthetic goods for a human body canvas, nevertheless failed to produce a self-portrait of real aesthetic excellence). The twist in the theory was not to offer a refined list with new candidate aesthetic goods, but rather to emphasize that the candidates could not manifest their full range of aesthetic excellence without the proper preparation of the human canvas. It turned out that a special and readily available oil made from the leaves of lilies, when brushed on the body prior to painting, permitted the colors to retain their vibrancy and splendor once applied to the skin. The colors were just as beautiful as they had always been reported to be, but if applied to an unprimed human body lost their luster and became muted, dampened, darkened shadows of themselves. The proposal was quite simple in the end: A theory of self-portraits which pays attention exclusively to the quality of the aesthetic goods for a human body canvas and not at all to the state of readiness of that canvas for absorbing and reflecting those colors in the world will decorate the worthiest of surfaces by artfully applying the most exquisite palette of pigments and not rise above mediocrity in the resulting artwork. All for the lack of a proper priming.

I believe that with respect to well-being, ours is a Nodland world. Like the citizens of Nodland, no matter our rank or station in life, we tend to share one peculiar value and personal goal—well-being (albeit often focusing narrowly on its happiness component). And just as each inhabitant of that fabled kingdom presents an irreplaceable and unique canvas for aesthetic excellence (despite the differences in body types permitted by the boundaries of human nature), so too, each of us presents an irreplaceable and unique life to enrich with the type of value that makes that life good for its subject (despite the differences in body types and psychological profiles permitted by the boundaries of human personhood). As in Nodland, we too (often, but not always) enjoy great autonomy and liberty over how we attempt that end, and as we surveyed earlier in this study, there is no shortage of theories of well-being and champions of those theories to help direct us in our efforts. Our streets and shops provide their own unending parade in which bids for well-being and their outcomes are on public display. And finally, as I’ve

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argued now at some length, beneath all its self-soothing protestations to the contrary, our world is a melancholy realm as well. Earlier I advocated for objective-list theories of well-being (represented by a sample list of some twenty goods) and argued against their hedonist, desire-fulfillment, and perfectionist rivals. I now propose one substantive amendment to that approach inspired by the good aestheticians of Nodland and one necessary condition on the list of goods. An objective-list theory of well-being which pays attention exclusively to the quality of the goods for a human person and not at all to the state of readiness of that person for exemplifying those goods may dress a creature capable of genuine flourishing in a fine assortment of physical, intellectual, emotional, and social goods and never rise above mediocrity with respect to her well-being. All for the lack of a proper priming—a priming which, I submit, would consist in adopting and exercising the virtue of obedience as articulated above. Three clarificatory points: First, the amendment here on offer to objectivelist theories is not really a move in the direction of so-called “hybridtheories” of well-being.¹⁶ One may attempt to avoid particular critiques of, say, hedonism as a theory of well-being by combining it with elements of a desire-fulfillment view. Alternatively, one may attempt to respect the alienation critique of objectivist approaches to well-being by tempering an objective-list theory with a rider about one’s having a pro-attitude to an entry on the list’s being a necessary condition of its contributing welfare value to one’s life. The hybrid theories, in general, aim to combine the virtues of two or more theories while skirting the difficulties of the theories taken individually. But an obedience-primed, objective-list theory is not a melding of two approaches, each of which is a theory of well-being in its own right, but rather an attempt to state conditions of receptivity in the subject in addition to identifying the source of welfare goods in the world. Second, nor is the amendment best viewed as a minority objective-list theory in which distinctively religious goods play a prominent role. At the end of Chapter 2, I noted the paucity of such theories, reporting that in many of the contemporary prominent discussions of well-being and happiness, religious topics in general (much less something as specific as one’s relation with God) tend to be rather thinly represented or to get a halfhearted nod by way of reference to broadly spiritual beliefs, attitudes, and practices. Still, an exception to this rule can be found among some natural ¹⁶ See Fletcher 2016b, esp. chapter 6, for an overview and critique of this approach to wellbeing.

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law theorists where religion is placed on the list and put on a par with other values that are good for a subject of a life.¹⁷ Like such views, an obedienceprimed, objective-list theory recognizes the relevance of religion (here in the form of obedience) to well-being, but not merely in virtue of its being one among a handful of welfare goods. That’s not to deny it such a status. Perhaps manifesting the virtue of obedience in and of itself directly contributes to the value of a life for the subject of that life—indeed, I would suspect as much—and that would certainly earn it a position on the list. But the spotlight here is trained on the role that obedience plays vis-à-vis the other goods on the list, insofar as it serves as the priming condition under which they can realize the full extent of their value in the subject in which they manifest. Third, perhaps one hears in that last remark that obedience is not merely one good among equals, but rather a special or privileged or prioritized good. But neither is the amendment on the table best interpreted as a variant on objective-list theories in which religion not only appears but plays the dominating role of a superordinate good.¹⁸ For all I’ve said above, the goods on a given objective list may or may not themselves have a ranking or internal structure, and certain religious goods may or may not enjoy a special kind of priority over others. An objective-list theory can be neutral on those matters. Again, the sense in which obedience plays a unique role among the welfare goods is not in the overriding significance of its unique kind of value, but rather in the part it purports to play on the subjective side of the equation when the subjective conditions of readiness to flourish meet the objective ingredients for flourishing. Thus conceived, the obedience-primed, objective-list theory is the one theory of well-being that clearly cannot be pursued while following Mammon’s restriction from Chapter 2: Make a Heaven of Hell, pursue happiness and achieve well-being, but be sure to do so on your own terms, by way of your own resources, without capitulating to God.

¹⁷ John Finnis provides an example of a theorist who places religion among other welfare goods while insisting on their objective equality (Finnis 2011, 103–106). See also Murphy 2001 and Oderberg 2004 for related discussions that approach this issue with depth and care. ¹⁸ For an example in which religion is given pride of place and objective priority on a list of welfare goods, see McInerny 2006.

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The four components at the heart of the virtue of obedience articulated above—humility, restraint, response, and love—are utterly inconsistent with the counsel of Pandaemonium’s seductive but demonic statesman, for once again, to be primed by obedience is to nurture a combination of an abiding and deeply seated pro-attitude towards uniting one’s will with God’s will and a robust and stable set of dispositions aimed at succeeding in thus cooperating with God. The central hypothesis I am advancing, then, is that obedience-primed manifestation of those objective goods that contribute value to a life for the subject of that life is the proper recipe for well-being. Like the many rich and vibrant colors of Nodland, such goods are exactly as wonderful as they have always been thought to be, but when appearing in an unprimed human person lose their luster and become muted, dampened, darkened shadows of themselves. Of course, there is a question of mechanics. If one were to ask why a coating of lily oil enables Nodland hues to be brilliantly displayed on skin that would otherwise bleed and diminish them, one will learn it is a matter of the chemistry of ink and flesh. But why would cultivating the virtue of obedience enable welfare goods to express their full range of value in a subject who would otherwise benefit from their presence only in partial ways that fall below the threshold for flourishing? Of course, no one must be in possession of a comprehensive answer to the why-does-this-priming-havethe-enabling-effects-it-does question to mount a significant case for the verdict that such priming can, in fact, produce the very effects under consideration. Defending the amendment on objective-list theories of wellbeing proposed here requires success only in the latter task, and the significant case for that verdict has, I trust, been progressively building across Chapters 2 through 4 of this study. Still, although we do not require an answer to the mechanics question, I do have two related observations to offer on the subject that strike me as having some merit. Earlier I proposed not only to defend one substantive amendment to the objective-list theories—the priming thesis—but also to propose one necessary condition on the list of goods. When earlier introducing our distinction between happiness and well-being in Chapter 2, I acknowledged that it is a conceptually open question how they are related, but in my representative list of welfare goods which provided the backdrop to the discussions of perfectionism and objective-list theories, I abandoned neutrality and included happiness in the list of goods, even remarking that it may hold a special status of being among the necessary conditions for flourishing. That

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popular philosophical thesis is my proposed necessary condition: happiness (here explicated as in the Psychic Affirmation theory) is not just a contributing good to well-being; it is a requirement for well-being. It now bears repeating, as argued above in the discussion of the Prayer of Obedience, a certain kind of perseverance is at once both the preferred strategy for acquiring stability and progress with respect to the virtue of obedience as well as the favored tactic for combatting the many masks of sloth and their harmful consequences. Thus, given the remarkable similarity between the state of unhappiness and the condition of sloth that emerged at the end of Chapter 3, the priming of obedience which enables relevant goods to manifest their full range of value in a way that makes for genuine human flourishing is also the very method for converting dejection to endorsement, disengagement to engagement, and discordance to attunement—that is, for exchanging unhappiness for happiness.¹⁹ As I argued in Chapter 3 and illustrated by appeal to literature throughout Chapter 4, following Mammon’s advice (which simply amounts explicitly to forgoing the virtue of obedience) is the surest path to sloth and its many faces of unhappiness. Cultivating the virtue of obedience, by contrast, is the remedy to sloth, the method for combatting the three dimensions of Psychic Renunciation, and the road to happiness. To the extent that happiness is necessary for wellbeing, it is thereby also the path to genuine flourishing. The second and related observation on the mechanics question is that the value contributed by other welfare goods is plausibly stymied and dimmed, bled and diminished by these very same conditions of dejection, disengagement, and discordance. Recall for a final time the portrait of unhappiness I constructed in Chapter 3 and christened “Psychic Renunciation,” modeled on its counterpart and predecessor, the Psychic Affirmation theory of happiness: Unhappiness consists in a particular overall emotional response to one’s life. This response is comprised of two primary elements: first—one’s central affective states (i.e., one’s productive, persistent, pervasive, and profound moods and emotions) and second—one’s mood propensities (i.e., one’s dispositions with respect to mood and emotion). The particular response of this

¹⁹ For descriptions and discussion of these three dimensions of happiness and the corresponding three dimensions of unhappiness (according to the Psychic Affirmation and Psychic Renunciation theories) revisit sections 1 and 4 of Chapter 3, respectively.

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kind identified with the condition known as unhappiness reveals itself in the three dimensions of dejection, disengagement, and discordance. Dejection The affects of dejection are the most overt and tell-tale manifestations of unhappiness: the pinched lips and darkened scowl, a persistent irritability triggered by trifles, the unnecessary sarcastic or cutting remark, a protective posture and body language warning others to keep a distance, a restless fidgetiness, the narrowed eyes, a quickness to find fault—unhappiness made visible. These are the outward manifestations of unhappiness, effortlessly recognized in loved ones, co-workers, casual acquaintances, and even strangers, dissatisfaction that you can see and hear, the colors and sounds of sadness. Disengagement The characteristics of disengagement need not be expressed in grimaces and frowns, grumbles and chilly receptions. They run deeper and are more sustainable than the frequent and minor eruptions of dejection. Here we find a subject actively retreating from her life, rejecting its elements—not merely hobbling along or taking them in stride while hoping for something better tomorrow, but disowning and repudiating them. Disengagement is a sort of emotional lethargy, a dispirited walking-through-the-motions with no investment of self. It is a recipe for world-weariness, a nay-saying attitude to one’s experience and its goods and ills. Discordance The characteristics of discordance serve as the particular arena in which disengagement takes place and dejection is displayed. Persistent feelings of insecurity, of constantly needing to be wary and on watch against the ills of the world, give rise to incessant agitation, cramping of emotion, and restlessness of thought—to a jittery and fragile frame of mind. A pervading sense of unease and general apprehensiveness creeps into, pinches, and distorts many of the everyday goods in life: second-guessing is exchanged for confidence in interpersonal relationships, self-doubt replaces creativity and self-expression, dissatisfaction supplants gratitude, fear curbs curiosity and receptivity. It is a state of stress and anxiety, a withering of the self and spirit.

It takes little imagination to envision how a continual sense of insecurity and a compulsion to be ever vigilant against what one perceives as a menacing world can impede experiences of joy, pleasure, and aesthetic appreciation,

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draining them of their full value. Or how a nervous and splintered frame of mind can obstruct access to the goods that come from hard-won knowledge of oneself and one’s environment. Or how a diminished self-confidence and heavy doses of self-doubt can hamper skill, achievement, and exercises of autonomy. Or how persistent feelings of dissatisfaction, stress, and anxiety can impoverish episodes of creativity and contemplation. Or how retreating from, disowning, and repudiating the central elements of one’s life can hinder the goods of friendship, caregiving, and mutual love. Accordingly, that the full range of value contributed by other welfare goods can be substantially affected by whether the subject of those goods has been primed by the virtue of obedience and to that extent partially liberated from the value-devouring dimensions of unhappiness seems to me an eminently reasonable hypothesis. Just as you cannot make an excellent beef and vegetable stew without beef, so too, you cannot flourish without happiness. And just as you cannot make an excellent beef and vegetable stew (even with all the choicest ingredients properly seasoned in the pot) unless the pot is put to the fire, so too, the finest of welfare goods will not make for flourishing in an unprimed subject whose non-obedience (and its attendant states of unhappiness and sloth) have sapped and muted what value they might otherwise have contributed to that subject’s well-being. Mammon’s speech contains advice—make a Heaven of Hell, pursue happiness and achieve well-being—and a restriction—discard the virtue of obedience. Following the restriction guarantees failure in following the advice. One cannot serve God and Mammon, and if one chooses Mammon, the exorbitant price is one’s happiness and well-being.

4. The Problem of Ignorance I intend to discuss four problems. The first can be solved (or dodged) by clarification alone and will be the topic of the remainder of this section. The second levels a by now familiar criticism against philosophical proposals tied to particular religious traditions and will be partially addressed in section 5, its full treatment left to others. The third and fourth problems, however, strike me as more immediate and challenging, for these final two worries arise in response to features of the particular argument developed over the course of this book. Since I believe a certain strategy for response is salient to them both, they will be examined together in section 6.

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Recall our first-pass critique raised in response to the description of the virtue of obedience from section 1 above: The advice for becoming wealthy that consists in the phrase “choose the right lottery numbers” will certainly help you succeed when you manage to follow it but is not of much practical value to most of us. Doesn’t the advice that consists in phrases such as “conform your will to God’s will” more or less suffer from the same practical defect?

How on earth are we supposed to know which particular actions qualify as conforming our will to God’s will? Even if one is utterly committed to embracing the four components at the heart of the virtue of obedience— humility, restraint, response, and love—how can we work to dispose ourselves to respond properly to the demands of love (and thus to exercise the will in a direct confrontation with sloth) or to struggle mightily to resist our inclinations to pursue lesser goods and instead unify our will with God’s, if we cannot determine what specific behavior is required by those commandments and if we cannot discern the content of God’s will? Those are excellent questions. In response, let us return for a moment to the melancholy kingdom of Nodland. Upon learning that nearly all selfportraits were lacking in quality, the aestheticians of Nodland gradually expanded the level of detail in their theories about why. In response to the question “Why are the self-portraits so poor?” they eventually climbed the following ladder of explanation. The self-portraits tend to be so poor, not because the pigments available for painting are inadequate, but because so frequently the human body canvases have not been properly primed. (Yes—and what is the proper primer?) The proper primer, it turns out, consists of oils extracted from a certain flower. (Yes—and what is the proper flower?) The proper flower, it turns out, is the lily. (Yes—and which of these several items in the garden is the lily?) This is the lily.

Each step on that ladder marks a kind of progress in fully understanding the reasons for the inadequacy of the self-portraits of Nodland and the strategy for addressing the matter. I believe that the obedience-primed, objective list

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theory can claim at least the same kind of progress that an aesthetician of Nodland might claim who had reached the third but not yet the fourth of the stages above: Human persons tend to be so unhappy, not because the welfare goods within their reach are inadequate, but because so frequently the persons have not been properly primed. (Yes—and what is the proper primer?) The proper primer, it turns out, consists of an additional benefit extracted from one of those very goods, a religiously oriented good. (Yes—and what is the proper religiously oriented good?) The proper religiously oriented good, it turns out, is the virtue of obedience.

Just as an inability to reliably select a lily from a garden of candidate flowers would not undermine the progress reached in stage three of the Nodland ladder of explanation, so too, an inability to reliably determine which particular actions among the garden of one’s alternatives would work to help dispose one’s will to God’s or to follow the love commandments need not undermine the status of the obedience-primed, objective-list theory of well-being introduced and defended here. Let me come at that general point from one more direction, for criticisms of this kind are often muddled, and it is worth clarifying them. Consider an ethical theorist who arrives at the verdict that necessarily, an action is morally permissible if and only if and because the value of its consequences is at least as good as the value of the consequences of any alternative action available to its agent. Suppose someone now raises the criticism against this act utilitarian theory—“Well, but since those value packages are obviously opaque to us, we could never use your theory to determine what we should do; we should, therefore, reject that theory.” Our ethicist may very well reply that this critique implicitly presupposes that the correct theory of moral permissions must be action guiding in a certain way, whereas we have no good reason to take that requirement to be an adequacy condition on the truth of such theories. The correctness of the theory is not thereby in jeopardy, even if it should unfortunately lead to skepticism about moral judgments of permissibility. The obedience-primed, objective-list theorist of well-being may similarly declare, “I am attempting to provide a theory of well-being, and in doing so, I use a term whose analysans specifies conditions about which skepticism

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can arise. At best, though, this cautions against our confidence of reasonably applying the theory; it is not an observation which of itself puts the truth of the theory in question.” The point, then, is simple and straightforward: even if the how-on-earth-are-we-supposed-to-know-in-what-obedience-consists complaint turns out to have real force, its force need not be directed at the theses this study has been designed to articulate and promote. But that’s enough playing along with the conceit in order to make a point in the argument, for I don’t, in fact, think it’s as hopeless as all that. The questions of how, specifically, to attempt to conform one’s will to God’s will and how to act in love of God and neighbor are hardly new and are hardly neglected; they most certainly don’t arise as artifacts of the theory here developed. There are brilliant and beautiful and competing answers to those questions in a vast and sophisticated literature, and one approaches that body of work as one approaches any field of inquiry—with the intuitions one has, with the sources of evidence one recognizes, with the cognitive gifts one enjoys, with an intellectual humility to temper one’s inquiry, and with a hope of eventual understanding. Skepticism is, of course, always a potential outcome, but it is hardly the default position.

5. The Problem of Exclusivity Consider a variation (tailored to our present theme) of a familiar criticism leveled against philosophical proposals that are tied to particular religious traditions: “An apparent consequence of the role here envisioned for the virtue of obedience is that non-Christians do not enjoy happiness and wellbeing, but this is both highly dubious and unacceptably exclusivist.” First, some clarification: I have indeed recommended pursuing and nurturing the virtue of obedience as a strategy for combatting unhappiness and sloth, but I have not argued that happiness is strictly unattainable without it. Happiness, as I have been maintaining throughout, consists in a person’s overall emotional condition which is a complex function of one’s moods, emotions, and dispositions with respect to mood and emotion, and is wellcaptured in the three dimensions of endorsement, engagement, and attunement. For the record, I do think that this condition is far rarer than we ordinarily take it to be (for the reasons catalogued in Chapter 3), but I see no reason to insist that it is impossible or unattainable without obedience. One’s overall emotional condition can be influenced by a great number of accidents of temperament and environment and good fortune, even to an

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extent that somewhat curbs the psychological destructiveness of the sin ever present in our lives. A tyrant might come to enjoy the emotional state of happiness sans obedience, while a saint utterly devoted to obedience might nevertheless spend much of her life desiring without achieving happiness.²⁰ Given the priming role I have assigned to obedience, well-being or, at the very least, the ability of those goods (which contribute to well-being) to manifest their full range of value in a subject do seem rather more dependent upon that virtue than does happiness. Once again, I do not insist that wellbeing is impossible without obedience, but I suspect it is exceedingly rare. To the extent, then, that such obedience is bound up with the Christian conception of God, the charge of exclusivity with respect to this theory of well-being seems not entirely misplaced. Reflect, briefly, on a much bigger picture—not merely on questions of happiness and well-being in this mortal life (which has been largely the focus of the present study), but on one’s condition of well-being with respect to one’s total existence, including the afterlife (if there is such a thing). There has been considerable discussion of the charge of exclusivity in this larger arena, and reflecting on that debate can provide a model for responding to the narrower charge of exclusivity under consideration here. The Christian worldview, for example, has implications for these broader questions of eternal well-being that, unsurprisingly, turn on doctrines particular to that religious orientation. In the face of religious diversity in the world, however, adherents of Christianity face new pressure to adopt skepticism about those implications, or to endorse an everyone-has-only-a-part-of-the-story-right pluralism, or to embrace some version of non-Christians-aren’t-left-outafter-all inclusivism, or to stand firm and defend their allegedly unpalatable exclusivism. In this broader picture, I find a combination of doctrinal exclusivism and salvific inclusivism to be most compelling. By “doctrinal exclusivism” I simply mean a commitment to the truth of the doctrines of a particular religion and a commitment to the falsity of those doctrines and beliefs inconsistent with them. By “salvific inclusivism” I mean that one’s ultimate condition of well-being with respect to one’s total existence, including the afterlife, need not depend on having certain attitudes (such as belief or faith) in those doctrines, and whereas it does require a certain relation to the truthmakers for those doctrines, it may not require a particular manner of

²⁰ One among many lessons to be learned in Mother Teresa 2007.

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conceiving of those relations or of those truthmakers.²¹ Less academically— someone who does not identify as Christian at all, someone who could not begin to give even a thumbnail version of the Christian story, may nevertheless enter into a relation with God and come to enjoy salvation in accordance with Christian doctrine (even if innocent of the truth or details of that doctrine as ordinarily conceived and articulated). Even more simply, when the Gospel of John reports Jesus as saying I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me²²

the gospel thereby gives voice to a kind of exclusivism to be sure, but one that turns on one’s relation to an individual, not to some privileged conception, phrasing, belief, or doctrine. How, then, can these thoughts serve as a model for responding to the narrower charge of exclusivism directed at the theory of well-being currently under consideration? Well, one could continue to maintain the truth of the hypothesis in play about the role of the virtue of obedience in well-being (thus committing to the analogue of doctrinal exclusivism) while looking for ways in which a Jew or Muslim or Sikh or atheist might successfully acquire and nurture this very virtue without pursuing it under the sorts of descriptions that have been employed in this chapter thus far (thus embracing the analogue of salvific inclusivism). Wonderful. I am sympathetic to this project, but I will not further pursue its details here; instead I will simply recommend the project as one worthy of investigation. I would, however, like to distinguish that congenial project from one that can easily be confused with it but is, in fact, a significantly different undertaking. Rather than searching for ways in which an individual might acquire the virtue of obedience (which are not especially bound up in distinctively Christian patterns of thought or language), one could instead search for a close cousin of the virtue of obedience that does not presuppose any particular religious orientation. For example, suppose we focus on a set of dispositions and pro-attitudes patterned on the virtue of obedience with all the religious baggage stripped away: Thus, we will find a humility component—being disposed to recognize and to own our affective and

²¹ For a book-length treatment of these and adjacent issues see McKim 2012, especially the plurality of ways to construe such inclusivism in chapter 5, “Inclusivism about Salvation.” ²² John 14:6.

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cognitive limitations (without insisting they have been imposed by the condition of Original Sin) and to be vigilant about the ways in which they can lead us into difficulty and error; a restraint component—being disposed to moderate our powerful inclinations to pursue inferior goods, to privilege our own interests, and to adopt double standards in the evaluation of our thoughts, actions, and characters in comparison with those of others; a response component—being disposed to respond properly to the demands of love (if not with respect to God, at least) with respect to our fellow creatures and to exercise the will in a direct confrontation with sloth (purged of its theological overtones); and even a pro-attitude component—ideally love—capable of being nurtured and strengthened, which itself involves an exercise of the will, and which is directed at being united with the good (as opposed to being united with God). The result would be a secular counterpart (perhaps one among many) to the virtue of obedience as conceived and defended in this chapter. Moreover, it could be invoked in the attempt to deny the analogue of doctrinal exclusivism as characterized above, insofar as one might try to show that this new set of dispositions and attitudes (rather than the collection I have been championing) is better suited to play the role of a priming feature in the theory of well-being. To be fair, there is certainly conceptual room for such competitors, for as we have seen, recognizing that some welfare good may have the additional feature of properly priming a subject for well-being is a rather different insight than discovering which of these goods has the right credentials for the position. I admit I also find this project fascinating and would certainly recommend it as worthy of investigation, especially to non-Christians who cannot get behind the virtue of obedience as here delineated, even when softened with the sort of inclusivism conceded above. Still, I must confess that I am less optimistic about success with a secular variant on obedience, and for what are by now predictable reasons. The main obstacle, I believe, turns on a feature of the Christian story that would be lost with such a substitution. Grant the value of the secularized dispositions to humility, restraint, and response. Grant the value of the pro-attitude toward integrating one’s will around the good. These are noble qualities but, I fear, beyond the ability of human beings to effectively realize on their own power. The severity of the condition of sin (countenanced by the Christian story but absent in the secular substitute) is too great a hurdle. We have the freedom to not resist God’s help, and perhaps even to ask for and to cooperate with divine grace, but I do not believe that we possess the ability to reorient ourselves to the good on the strength of our own power alone. To

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the extent that the opposite opinion motivates the hope of discovering a serviceable secular cousin of the virtue of obedience, I predict it will prove an unsuccessful rival.²³ Accordingly, let me honestly acknowledge that there remains some degree of exclusivism in the background that hasn’t been eradicated. For even if the virtue of obedience can be pursued and nurtured by those who would not self-identify as Christians, their successfully so doing still presupposes a particular conception of God and still presupposes the truth of a particular religious take on God’s relation to humanity. The response I think most appropriate to that observation is—yes, it does, and moreover, it doesn’t make any attempt to conceal that fact. This is largely the point of the book, not something to apologize for or to regard as a bullet to bite.²⁴

6. The Obstacle of Sin and Caring for the Vulnerable I believe that section 4 above on the Problem of Ignorance contained a fair response to the concern it engaged, especially given the rather loose and informal statements with which I posed that problem at the outset of the discussion. But, then again, I think the following is a fair refinement of that problem that demands a much more developed and nuanced response from any would-be proponent of obedience-priming. True—sidestepping general questions that ask after the particulars of securing the virtue of obedience is an acceptable dialectical move, given that those questions are faced by all manner of theorists, whether or not they also happen to think that caring about the topics of happiness and wellbeing provides them with additional compelling reasons to be interested in their solutions. That the answers may shed unexpected light on the topic of human flourishing is a welcome result but not a source of extra responsibility for the well-being theorists to come up with answers to those questions. Maybe so. Yet there are two topics in particular which played an essential role in this study that led to advocating for obedience-priming that do forge special (if not unique) relations between this approach to well-being and its defense on the one hand and attempting to identify the particular actions and attitudes involved in securing the virtue of obedience on the

²³ Compare the remarks on Mencius and Aquinas on just this issue in Quinn 2005. ²⁴ I am reminded of an introduction by Kris Kristofferson to a famous performance of his Me and Bobby McGee: “If it sounds country, man, that’s what it is; it’s a country song.”

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other. And on the strength of those special relations, one can reasonably demand that the obedience-primed, objective-list theorist of well-being say something about two specific challenges that arise quite naturally and pointedly for proponents of that approach to flourishing. The first is the charge that the argument of this book should incline us to think that there are profound obstacles in our way to successfully identifying the particular actions and attitudes involved in securing the virtue of obedience. The second is the charge that the argument of this book should incline us to think that there are special risks we take involving significant harms in attempting to identify the particular actions and attitudes involved in securing the virtue of obedience and in conforming ourselves to them. I now turn to those two challenges.

The Obstacle of Sin Suppose I were to emerge from my study, where I have been working with some very sophisticated, finely tuned instruments, to announce a discovery. The news is that I have just learned my instruments have long been damaged and are defective in various ways. It’s not as if they are utterly worthless and cannot sometimes yield correct or nearly correct readings, but their ability to do so has been impaired across a wide variety of contexts, and their deliverances must be viewed with some real degree of suspicion. Moreover, I explain, I have come to this discovery partly through the careful employment of these very instruments. Having reported this misfortune, I would now like to minimize the mistakes I realize I am in increased danger of making. So I shall resume my research straightaway, where I intend to make a careful examination of these flawed instruments so as to determine the scope and nature of the errors to which they are prone in order to be properly on my guard against their future misfirings, a task which will require a return to my study where I keep my instruments for such examinations. It should be clear that there are some peculiar difficulties with my news and my strategy. Combining my conclusion about viewing with suspicion any conclusions drawn from certain sources of information together with the admission that those very sources are the source of that very conclusion seems to commit me to an unstable line of reasoning; in other words, the argument would seem to recommend against anyone’s being persuaded by it. Perhaps that can be finessed, though, for the defective instruments may have played only minor and trustworthy roles in helping me come to learn

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that they were in fact defective. The more pressing problem, it would seem, is my strategy of employing the impaired tools to discover the scope and nature of the impairment. Why think I have any hope of making progress? The explanation I defended in Chapter 3 of the widespread failure of so many to achieve happiness and well-being leaned very heavily on the noetic effects of sin, in particular on how sin has played a role in corrupting the affective and cognitive features of our lives, leaving us with some very sophisticated and finely tuned, yet damaged and defective, instruments with which we form our desires and manipulate our thoughts. Perhaps we learned this fact about ourselves by way of revelation, and our cognitive faculties played only minor and trustworthy roles in helping us come to learn that we suffer from a characteristic depravity, and thus we can finesse the charge of instability in that discovery. But what should we think of the strategy of employing our impaired faculties to discover the scope and nature of the impairment? Why think we have any hope of making progress? In particular, why think we can employ faculties deeply corrupted by sin and arrive at reliable verdicts on, say, what will help dispose one’s will to God’s will or how to follow the love commandments—two areas in which, one would think, sin-diseased faculties might be especially liable to miscalculation? Merold Westphal has wisely and powerfully urged the significance for Christian philosophers of taking sin to be an essential epistemological category and of thinking very carefully about the noetic effects of sin.²⁵ But given the remarks above, exactly how we are to achieve this goal both in general and in particular cases (e.g., when learning how to seek the virtue of obedience) seems a bit mysterious, and discussions of this problem in the literature strike me as too eager to announce the existence of a fully satisfactory solution and too sparing with respect to its reassuring details.²⁶ George Mavrodes responded to Westphal’s call for not ignoring the effects of sin on one’s intellectual life by somewhat overstating the problem sketched above and declaring he had no idea how even to get started in following Westphal’s recommendation:

²⁵ Westphal 1990 is an excellent article on this theme. ²⁶ I confess this is the reaction I have in reading, for example, Hoitenga 1993, Moroney 2000, and Hoitenga 2003. I don’t mean that I disagree with the broad brush strokes and outlines I see there concerning where a solution might lie, but just that the brush strokes are so very broad and the outlines leave a lot of detail for filling in to the reader.

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How can I tell which part of my own philosophy has been badly warped by sin? Am I supposed to have an undistorted method, a faculty that has itself escaped the ravages of sin, by which I can make this discrimination? Why should we suppose that there is any such undamaged faculty—and even if there is, how should we recognize it? But if every faculty is damaged or if I have no way of knowing which are not, then it would seem that my thinking about the noetic effects of sin is just as likely to be warped as my thinking about anything else. And in that case I can’t improve my intellectual life by thinking about the noetic effects of sin.²⁷

This version of the problem that pretends there is no point whatsoever to thinking through the noetic effects of sin strikes me as overkill. Certainly, even Calvin’s total-depravity description of our collective condition was only meant to convey that we are depraved in our totality (i.e., in every part), not that we are totally depraved in every part. That is, although nothing in us is wholly untouched by the consequences of sin, we are systematically more likely to go wrong in some ways rather than others. It’s not as if our corruption leaves us unable reliably to recognize valid forms of reasoning or to do simple arithmetical sums, but it does leave us especially susceptible to, say, the persistent and unreflective attitudes of self-love and actions of self-aggrandizement and instances of self-deceit which were the characteristic trappings of the concupiscence on display in our discussions in Chapter 3. A starting observation, then, is that knowing something about the particular character of the damage to our noetic structure can allow us carefully and selectively to employ those damaged structures in ways that minimize their failings while compensating for the manner in which we know they are likely to skew certain results, even when we turn to topics as delicate and ripe for confusion and error as pursuing the virtue of obedience. Four further observations encourage me in this optimism for work conducted with stressed and weakened (but not broken and worthless) tools, whose use is informed by a reflective awareness of the specific type of corruption from which we suffer. Three of the observations I will identify and briefly comment on, and the fourth I will identify and then expand on in more detail in the closing paragraphs of this section. First, just how badly off we are with respect to forming justified beliefs about the matters at hand will turn, at least in part, on which theory of ²⁷ Mavrodes 1993. This piece is a response to Westphal 1992, itself a lite version of the more scholarly Westphal 1990.

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epistemic justification is paired with the thesis about the debilitating noetic effects of sin. But then again, acquiring and nurturing the virtue of obedience is not all about justified belief. Second, just how badly off we are with respect to what it takes to have faith in our goals regarding the matters at hand and in our own and others’ efforts and progress toward those goals will turn, at least in part, on which theory of faith is paired with the thesis about the debilitating noetic effects of sin. But then again, acquiring and nurturing the virtue of obedience is not all about our efforts alone. Third, just how likely we are to overcome the profound obstacles of our own sinfulness will depend, at least in part, on whether those obstacles remain constant in their opposition throughout the process of attempting to overcome them. Fourth, just how likely we are to overcome the profound obstacles of our own sinfulness will depend, at least in part, on whether we are making those attempts alone or with the assistance of our fellow creatures. I find the work of Alvin Plantinga and Michael Bergmann on epistemic warrant and epistemic justification, the work of Daniel Howard-Snyder and Daniel McKaughan on the many forms and facets of faith, and the work of the Holy Spirit in a person who begins the process of honestly turning to God to ask for help in the hope of acquiring the virtue of obedience to be extremely encouraging when confronting obstacles to acquiring the virtue of obedience rooted in ignorance and sin.²⁸ After all, the Prayer of Obedience, with which one can certainly begin the process of developing the virtue of obedience, makes a simple request of God offered in the humility of recognizing a need for assistance in the matter. God, please help me to will to will the good and then to will what I will to will.

It certainly need not continue with the strutting forth of a rich philosophical account of the matter: Where this second-order will, as we both know, exhibits an eightfold structure which I specify as follows . . .

Instead, one may turn to God in faith—that is, may rely on God to come through for one, a relying marked by resilience in the face of a wide variety ²⁸ Plantinga 2000, Bergman 2006, Howard-Snyder and McKaughan (forthcoming), the Holy Spirit (here and there).

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of challenges.²⁹ And through such faith and perseverance, one may hope to receive a measure of grace and to enter into a process of sanctification in which one’s will continues to be further integrated around the good and in which one is assisted in the acquisition and nurture of the virtue of obedience quite independently of scoring abstract and intricate insights into its nature and self-consciously pursuing that virtue under much more esoteric descriptions. Be that as it may, there are still particular choices one will face about how to nurture the virtue of obedience and how to respond properly to the demands of love of God and neighbor with particular actions that will call for individual judgment and that will be imperiled (for all the reasons we have been noting) by the noetic effects of sin. Such remains, for better or worse, our shared human condition. I will return below to the fourth observation inspiring optimism that the obstacle of sin is not insurmountable with a discussion of how the assistance of other creatures may play a role in our level of success in these endeavors. Before doing so, however, allow me to introduce the second promised problem for the obediencepriming theorist, a problem that concerns the special risks we take involving significant harms in attempting to identify the particular actions and attitudes involved in securing the virtue of obedience and in conforming ourselves to them.

Caring for the Vulnerable As I noted at the outset of this chapter, a call to obedience has figured as a terrifying symbol of some of the worst forms of oppression the world has ever seen. Usually, this occurs when obedience is demanded of one creature or group of creatures (whether united by sex or race or class or nationality or even mere vulnerability) by another creature or group of creatures who wield life-altering, worldly power of some kind or other over those recipients of the demand. Yet even when one stresses (as I have above—by way of stipulative definition) that the relation one intends to invoke under that label can hold ultimately only between creature and God, nevertheless, those in power have a habit of sliding from talk of obedience to God to talk of obedience to those who claim to speak for God. I think the best defense ²⁹ For a compelling and book-length treatment of this conception of faith and related matters see Howard-Snyder and McKaughan (forthcoming).

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against this slide is to call it out, repeatedly and strenuously. The slide is too tempting for those who are all too ready to speak for God to disappear on its own and (as history will attest) the consequences of permitting such substitutions are likely to be found in the catalog of institutional cruelties with which our social institutions are shot through (discussed in Chapter 1’s philosophy of pessimism) and about as far from a proper priming for well-being as it is possible to be. Moreover, even if the conversation is successfully kept on track (and not derailed by secondary demands of obedience to some individual or institution of worldly authority), there is still the danger of sending the wrong message to those who have been the victims of systemic oppression. The virtue of obedience as it has been explicated here is an intensely intimate and personal relation between an individual and God leading to grace and sanctification and (if the foregoing is correct) to the possibility of happiness and well-being. It most certainly is not a litmus test of sufficient faith in God, the alleged failure of which can be used as a cudgel to beat the relentlessly oppressed and to blame them for the consequences of their own mistreatment at the hands of others. And what of harmful mistakes by the powerful and privileged when it comes to those particular choices we all face about how to nurture the virtue of obedience and how to respond properly to the demands of love of God and neighbor with particular actions that will call for individual judgment and that are imperiled by the noetic effects of sin? “I want to obey,” says one prominent individual: “Does that mean that I should go out of my way to welcome and treasure and stand with my neighbors who have appropriately embraced an LGBTQ identity or am I to chastise and oppose and call attention to the sinfulness of taking on an LGBTQ identity or am I to aim for something in between, say, the advocation of a celibate lifestyle?” “I want to obey,” says another: “Does that mean that I should support and celebrate my wife’s pastoral ministry or urge her to give up her position in favor of remaining at home caring for our children?” “I want to obey,” says a third: “Do I march for or against a woman’s right to choose? Do I donate to or stage protests of Planned Parenthood? Do I take any stand on late-term abortions?” No matter how obvious you take the correct responses to be, there are several people ready to stand behind the other answers who, if pressed, would sincerely fall back on something like obedience in defense of their selection. And whichever side you champion, you might worry—don’t we run a severe risk in encouraging individuals to prioritize obedience when the sources and rationalizations of the answers they will thereby give

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(especially when they fall on the side of the question you take to be the wrong one) are so clearly connected to their own brokenness and the noetic effects of sin they have not successfully guarded against? In short, trumpeting the virtue of obedience in the pursuit of happiness and well-being—that elusive pair of goods in which we all are inextricably invested—seems especially well-positioned to further solidify and bestow credibility on institutions of oppression already firmly in place, to equip the privileged with a time-honored tool for producing new patterns of oppression freshly sharpened with praise for its role in enabling human flourishing, to instill feelings of guilt and shame and responsibility in those who unjustly suffer at the hands of others on the grounds that their own commitment to obedience is thereby shown inadequate, and to license the harms of social injustice with the unassailable, buck-passing excuse that one is merely devoted to obedience and obedience makes its harsh demands.

A Proposal for Attending to the Obstacle of Sin and to Caring for the Vulnerable I openly concede the risks of harm. They are real. Let us remind ourselves, even more forcefully, that oftentimes it’s not just risks with which we threaten each other. We routinely do harm one another individually and perpetrate or are complacent in harms that are collective. In any endeavor— but especially when choosing something as wide-ranging as general maxims for our preferences and behavior of the sort at stake in acquiring the virtue of obedience—we should be watchful and cognizant of the power we wield over others and how we are prone to misuse that power unjustly and for selfserving ends. There is no question that the course I am recommending can be put to perverted purposes and can yield just that assortment of wrongs that dot the previous two paragraphs. And it seems quite reasonable that the chances of such abuse are higher when the stakes are higher, as they are here in a context in which religious ideals, happiness, and well-being hang in the balance. But then again, what is the alternative? The masks of sloth await those who with Sisyphus abandon the genuine search for well-being and imagine themselves happy, and the Christian optimism that makes bearable the philosophy of pessimism demonstrated at the outset of this book depends on what I have called cultivating the virtue of obedience, quite independently of whether I am right that this activity is also the proper priming for

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well-being. The solution to the concerns outlined here is not to turn from the task of responding to the demands of love and cultivating the virtue of obedience in fear of the risks one thereby runs in doing so, for any alternative pattern of actions and dispositions faces its own distinctive set of hazards and gambles, the unhappy results of which we can see all too clearly in the world as it now stands. Instead the proper response to the problem of the vulnerable is to care for the vulnerable by doing our very best to understand the genuine harms they suffer and the ways in which we contribute to those harms. And the most likely route to success on this matter, or so it seems to me, begins with listening as the vulnerable, in their own voices, articulate their own experiences and develop their own critiques of the ways in which we harm them in a setting in which it is safe and productive for them to do so. Advice of precisely this sort is simultaneously my recommendation for the most likely route to success with respect to the other concern that occupied this section. Although we unavoidably walk through life hobbled by the noetic effects of sin, as I noted earlier, just how likely we are to overcome the profound obstacles of our own sinfulness will depend, at least in part, on whether we are making those attempts alone or with the assistance of others. How shall we follow Westphal’s lead and take sin to be an important epistemological category? How shall we guard against our own inclinations to concupiscence when those very inclinations have infected all our capacities to locate and eradicate them? I hear a great deal of wisdom in Caroline Simon’s reply to these questions: Isn’t one of the ways that we Christian philosophers, theologians, scholars, and preachers at least should acknowledge the effects of sin on our theorizing by attending, seriously attending, when someone else attributes a part of our theorizing to self-serving distortion? . . . How do we get started on Westphal’s project of taking sin seriously? By not being practical solipsists. By not depending on our own devices. By being “always reforming.” By not looking inward for some infallible organ of knowledge but using our ears to consider carefully what we hear. By not viewing professional exchanges as contests of intellectual one-upmanship but as genuine opportunities for correction and improvement.³⁰

³⁰ Simon 1993.

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It is perhaps easy to imagine that this call to attend, seriously attend to the voices and the critiques of those one only half-heartedly harkens to currently extends only as far as one’s inner circle of intimates and those who share enough of one’s features to ordinarily command one’s attention to some extent already. Yet the curtain that drops between this familiar group and the less familiar others screens off many of the voices that it may be most beneficial to hear when combatting the noetic effects of sin and when attempting to care for the vulnerable. Simon’s reply does not just tell us to suspend our knowing-better long enough to give a second hearing to a colleague on the other side of an intellectual fence or to a co-worker backing a different political candidate or to a sibling with a different selective memory of a shared childhood. Instead I hear a recommendation of mindful listening even to voices radically different from one’s own, whose opinions are deeply foreign to one’s own, and whose criticisms of one’s behavior and motives may well be much more revealing than one’s own attempts at critical self-examination. We are all of us better with motes than beams, and mindful listening—attending, seriously attending—to others with radically different points of view can exploit that fact in the best of ways. It may be tempting for those with more traditional views to think this excellent advice for those whose views are more progressive. Likewise, it may be tempting for those with more progressive views to think this excellent advice for those whose views are more conservative. Quite likely both thoughts are true, but, I hope, not also so consuming that they lead to overlooking the suggestion that it may also prove excellent advice for oneself.

7. In Summary In the opening chapter of this book, I argued that the philosophy of pessimism is well grounded, quite independent of any particular religious orientation. The collective evidence for this view drawn from the plight of animals, the natural dispositions of human persons, our checkered history of social and political institutions, the world’s religions and wisdom traditions, and humanity’s achievements in art, literature, music, and philosophy is clear and compelling. Moreover, I argued that this pessimism is overdetermined and even more austere for the Christian who takes the doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin seriously. Yet the good news for the Christian is that this philosophy of pessimism can be tempered by reasons for

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optimism—reasons which furnish a hope for salvation and also a hope that before every tear is wiped away, the groans of creation and the sufferings of its creatures will have properly inspired us to cooperate with God in the process of Atonement. Like the demons in Paradise Lost, however, even those who endorse the worldview underlying this optimism frequently willfully resist the efforts required of us to cooperate with God and to respond to the demands that love places upon us with respect to God and neighbor, and like those misguided and stubborn souls, many of us are beguiled by the prospect of pursuing our own happiness and well-being on our own power, of making a Heaven of the Hell that the philosophy of pessimism has taught us is our current abode. And so we are seduced by the thoughts of Mammon and are flattered into the frame of mind in which we are willing to trust in our own glorious powers, to imitate God’s light with our skill, artistry, intelligence, and all the magnificent resources of our own selves. No need of God. No loss in rebellion. What can Heaven show more? And so in the second chapter, after defending certain aspects of the philosophical methodology in play, I conducted a critical study of the current leading literature on well-being and happiness. Assuming that we can come to have knowledge of these matters, I critically examined and argued against hedonistic, desirefulfillment, and perfectionistic theories of well-being, advocating instead for an objective-list theory, and I critically examined and argued against hedonistic and life-satisfaction theories of happiness, advocating instead for the Psychic Affirmation view. Thus, the targets were exposed at which those who wished to attempt to follow Mammon’s advice were aiming (and in accordance with Mammon’s restriction) without the benefit of reconciliation with the divine. The third chapter of this book offered a report from the front lines where the battle is decidedly not going well. After examining counter-reports of success from those in the field, I set forth the secular reasons for thinking that those reports were very likely to be unreliable and so lack the power to trump the mountain of evidence for the view that there are precious few flourishing Mammonites. But it’s not due to lack of trying; people want desperately to enjoy happiness and well-being. The real causes of failure, so I argued, are found in the noetic effects of sin—particularly in inordinate self-love and self-deception, but also (especially in those who have been further harmed and humiliated by relentless and systemic oppression) in insufficient self-love and the lack of safety, resources, and opportunities. The tale I tried to tell was not merely a chronicle of failed bids at happiness and

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well-being ultimately grounded in our shared condition of sin; it was also a tale of the unhappiness that visits so many of those who fall into this pattern of failure. This portion of the story was informed and structured by the seven capital vices (also known as the seven deadly sins) the concepts of which were employed by Christians for self-examination, confession, preaching, and spiritual formation for centuries, and it culminated in a sustained examination and exploration of the sin of sloth. The two main discussions—of the epidemic of unhappiness and the near universality of sloth—were united by a surprising thesis: the theory of unhappiness (modeled on the theory of happiness endorsed in the previous chapter and christened “Psychic Renunciation”) turned out to be the twin of the analysis of sloth that emerged from careful attention to classical and modern scholarship on the vice. One peculiarity of the theses championed in the foregoing discussions is that they diagnose a condition which predicts that the diagnosis will be resisted by those it accurately describes. Literature can provide artistic illustrations as accompaniments to philosophical texts which can capture one’s attention in ways academic prose might not. In particular, fine literature can elicit many of the same emotional experiences that arise in everyday life and can mimic the chaotic and multi-dimensional reality of interpersonal interaction. Consequently, the reader can be deeply engaged by way of imaginative immersion into a richly nuanced narrative, subjective reactions to which provide brand new experiential data with which to theorize. A literary tour of the different masks of sloth thus occupied Chapter 4 in the hopes of rendering the reader receptive to the diagnosis of the preceding three chapters which, thus illustrated, hopefully seemed less foreign than it might otherwise appear. As a result, sloth was seen to be a misfortune with many faces. Under its onerous influence, one can race from boredom into mindless diversions, or convince oneself that the world is at bottom absurd, or anguish over whether life is worth living at all, or give oneself entirely over to evil, or abdicate one’s agency and be ruled by chance, or frantically pursue the diminishing pleasures of sensual novelty, or attempt to explain one’s misfortune by appeal to some invented offensive or indifferent feature of God’s, or despair over a perceived spiritual deformity in oneself rooted in guilt or shame. Thus, the predicament I tried to depict in these four chapters was summarized (over-simply but succinctly) as follows: We separate ourselves from God through sin, and we and our world are the worse for it. Our pride leads us to attempt to make the best of our disastrous

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situation on our own terms. Predictably, we fail and fail miserably. We thereby forfeit well-being and happiness, and the new modes of suffering expressed in the deadly sin of sloth are our earned and unhappy wages.

In this final chapter, I have tried to describe a response to this predicament that seems promising to me. I began by articulating a particular conception of the virtue of obedience and detailing its four components—humility, restraint, response, and love—and by showing how they work together both to nurture a combination of an abiding and deeply seated pro-attitude towards uniting one’s will with God’s will and also to create and maintain a robust and stable set of dispositions aimed at succeeding in this aim. I then illustrated that virtue in action and remarked on the role of perseverance, the difficult mission of anyone who commits to acquiring and developing this virtue in life. Thus equipped, I proposed and argued on behalf of a refinement to the objective-list theories of well-being that had emerged in Chapter 2 as the finest of the competitors. I then gave a formulation of and what support I could to my new theory that attempts to state the conditions of receptivity in a subject in addition to identifying the range of welfare goods in the world. The virtue of obedience, I argued, is not only one among many welfare goods, but plays a unique role vis-à-vis the other goods on the list, insofar as it serves as the priming condition under which they can realize the full extent of their value in the subject in which they manifest. The virtue of obedience, on my view, thus plays a crucial role on the subjective side of the equation when the subjective conditions of readiness to flourish meet the objective ingredients for flourishing. The resulting obedienceprimed, objective-list theory of well-being is thus the one theory that obviously cannot be combined with Mammon’s restriction, for the obedience-priming just is the lifting of that restriction. Finally, I called attention to a series of problems with special emphasis on those challenges that arise in response to particular features of the argument developed over the course of this book. One such worry was whether those very noetic effects of sin to which the argument of the book crucially appeals in establishing the predicament summarized above are themselves sufficient for derailing its primary strategy for combatting the evils of that predicament. Another such worry was whether in pursuing the sort of project recommended in the book one runs a risk of generating harms to the most vulnerable among us. I attempted to formulate the responses that seemed best to me with respect to each problem, and I hope to have properly positioned and highlighted one thought that touched significantly on each of

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the final two concerns—namely, that one of the most important ways to safeguard yourself from serious and grievous mistakes that are the work of the noetic effects of sin in your own thoughts and desires is simultaneously one of the most important ways to protect those who are vulnerable to you and to the various factions to which you belong. This strategy was to cultivate the practice of mindfully listening when someone ascribes your desires, thoughts, attitudes, or actions to self-serving motives, to inordinate self-love, or to inadequate self-love and to considering carefully and with humility the merits for that case—even if the charge seems utterly foreign, even if the accusation seems initially wildly implausible, even if the suggestion makes you angry or sad or bewildered. For one final time, we are steeped in sin, and in the grips of that deplorable condition we can commit any number of blunders and cause all manner of harm to loved ones, friends, colleagues, strangers, and neighbors of every kind. And we often cannot perceive ourselves or our failings anywhere near as clearly as do those we harm. Attending, seriously attending, to the voices of others to guard against the harms we do and the noetic effects of sin in ourselves, while attempting to cultivate the virtue of obedience (as I have envisioned it here), seems to me both the proper response to the philosophy of pessimism recommended by Christian optimism and also the proper priming for a life of happiness and well-being.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Absurd, the 17, 130–1, 133–5, 137, 141–2; see also Albert Camus Adam 12–15, 91, 157–60, 167–8 and Eve Story 25–6 Adams, Marilyn McCord 35–8, 36n.43, 39n.47, 42 Adams, Robert Merrihew 37n.46, 161n.3, 162n.4 aestheticism 147–9 agency 7–8, 63, 157, 195; see also free will Alston, William 51n.7 Amore, Roy C. 16n.12 analytic philosophy 49–50 analytic theology 49–50 animals: suffering of 3–6, 26–7 ananthropocentrism 153–4 anthropology, philosophical 49 Aquinas, St. Thomas 103–4, 115–16, 184n.23 Assis, Machado de 17n.14 atheism 25n.25, 31–2, 40, 48n.2, 49, 151, 153, 182 Atonement 26, 30–1, 43, 164, 167–8, 193–4 Incarnation-and- 33–6, 38–42 value of 32–43 Augustine 19, 22n.20, 28–9, 31, 90–3, 91n.12, 120, 140 avarice 103–4, 108, 111, 115, 161 Badhwar, Neera K. 57n.13, 74n.34 Baehr, Jason 163n.6 Balentine, Samuel E. 136n.25 Barrett, William 20 Battaly, Heather 163n.6 Baudelaire, Charles 149–50 Bealer, George 51nn.6,10 beatitudes 103–4 Bergmann, Michael 40n.48, 95n.16, 188

Berkouwer, G. C. 23n.23 Besser-Jones, Lorraine 62n.19 best, problem of the 25n.25 Blackburn, Simon 112n.32 Blocher, Henri 23n.23 Bloom, Harold 18–19 Bloomfield, Morton W. 103n.26, 105n.29 boredom 98, 122–9, 143, 149–50, 157, 195 Bostrom, Nick 67n.26 Bradford, Gwen 64n.22 Bradley, Ben 161n.1 Brown, Jonathan D. 86n.8 Bunyan, John 155, 155n.50 Calvin, John 23, 28–9, 94–5, 95n.18, 187 Camus, Albert 129–37, 137n.28, 141–3 Cantril ladder question 84 capital vices 17–18, 103–5, 113, 142, 194–5; see also seven deadly sins Carroll, Joseph 83n.2 Cassian, John 103–7 charity, virtue of 115–16, 163 Chesterton, G. K. 22 Chigurh, Anton 144–7 Christ, Jesus 22–3, 25–6, 155, 164n.7, 181–2 temptation of 118, 164–8 Chudnoff, Elijah 51n.9 Cioran, Emil 136, 143 compensating goods 28n.28, 34, 36–7, aesthetic 5–6 pleasures as 5 concupiscence 28, 91–3, 91n.12, 163, 165–6, 187, 192 consequentialism 54–5, 161 Couenhoven, Jesse 22n.20, 23n.23, 31n.36 Crisp, Oliver 23n.23 Crummet, Dustin 5 Cuneo, Terrence 95n.17

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damnation 36–7, 138–9, 155 Davison, Michael Worth 16n.12 Delumeau, Jean 9n.8, 23n.22, 28n.29, 105n.29 deontology 54–5, 69 depression 20, 95n.18, 114, 118, 137, 142–3 desert fathers, the 118 deviant causal chains 161 DeYoung, Rebecca Konyndyk 104n.27, 114–15, 115n.40, 118n.42, 169n.15 Dienstag, Joshua Foa 2n.3, 31 Diller, Kevin 35–8, 42 doctrinal exclusivism 181–3 Doris, John 161n.3 Dorsey, Dale 64n.22 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 151–2 Douglass, Frederick 10n.9 Driver, Julia 161n.1 Ecclesiastes 20–1, 31n.36, 130 Eden 8–9, 11, 46, 100, 158–9 Elga, Adam 86n.8 Enlightenment, the 8–10, 48, 93 Envy 45, 103–4, 111, 115, 156–7 Evil, the problem of 5, 11, 22, 25n.25, 26 Fairlie, Henry 114 Fall, the 1, 92, 96–7 and original sin 21–5, 23n.22, 32, 34, 43, 94, 193–4 as an historical event 24–5, 43 Feldman, Fred 74n.34 Finnis, John 173n.17 Finstuen, Andrew S. 29n.30 Fletcher, Guy 64n.22, 172n.16 Frankfurt, Harry G. 118n.41 free will 26, 32, 45–6, 118 abdication of 146–7 misuse of 45, 99, 142, 144 and personhood 6–8 gluttony 92–3, 103–4, 117, 122 God: forgiveness 28, 155 goodness of 33, 47, 152–4 love 35–8, 95, 115–16, 152–3, 167–8 mercy 37–8, 155 separation from 26, 47, 99, 102–3, 116–17, 126, 143 grace, condition of 167–8

Gray, John 8n.7 greed, see avarice Gregory, Alex 58n.14, 59n.17 Gregory the Great, Pope 103–4 Hallie, Philip 10–11 Hamlet 11, 120, 138–43 happiness hedonistic theories of 73–6, 74n.33, 81, 194 life-satisfaction theories of 74–8, 194 psychic affirmation theories of 73n.32, 78–81, 100–3, 116–19, 159–60, 174–5, 194 Harrison, Peter 8n.7, 23n.23, 94n.14 Haybron, Daniel 68n.27, 73n.32, 76n.36, 77n.37, 78–80, 78n.38, 85–7 Heathwood, Chris 60n.18, 74n.34 hedonism, see happiness, hedonistic theories of; wellbeing, hedonistic theories of Helm, Paul 34n.42, 95n.18 Hesse, Hermann 123–6, 129 Hoitenga, Dewey J. 94n.13, 186n.26 Holden, Judge 143–4, 146–7 Holy Spirit, the 25–6, 91, 167–8, 188 gifts of 103–4 Howard-Snyder, Daniel 40n.48, 151n.44, 163n.6, 188, 189n.29 Huemer, Michael 51n.8 Hugh of St. Victor 103–4 humility component of obedience 163–4, 167–9, 174, 178, 182–4, 196 Humphreys, Paul 50n.4 Hurka, Thomas 64n.22, 65n.23, 162n.4 Hussain, Amir 16n.12 Hutchinson, Robert J. 112–13, 113n.34 Huxley, Aldous 128–9, 143 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 147–51 Jacobs, Alan 23n.22 Jacquette, Dale 141n.30 Kelly, J. N. D. 23n.23 Kierkegaard, Soren 16–17, 120–1 koyaanisqatsi 11, 16, 82–3 Leopardi, Giacomo 132–3 Lewis, C. S. 113, 155–6, 155n.49 love commandments 106n.31, 163–4, 179, 186

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 component of obedience 163–4, 167–8, 174, 178, 182–3, 196 demands of 114–15, 118–19, 122, 127–8, 144, 151, 154, 163–4, 168–9, 178, 182–3, 189–92 lust 82, 91–3, 103–4, 111–12, 117 Madueme, Hans 23n.23 Mavrodes, George 186–7 McCarthy, Cormac 20, 143–7 McCarthy, Justin 83n.2 McDougal, Joy Ann 30n.34 McFarland, Ian A. 23n.22 McInerny, Daniel 173n.18 McKaughan, Daniel J. 151n.44, 188, 189n.29 McKim, Robert 182n.21 Melville, Herman 19, 135–6 Merricks, Trenton 65n.25 Miller, Christian 161n.3 Milton, John 12–15, 19, 44–8, 101, 158 misanthropy 132 moral responsibility 7–8, 29, 146, see also agency; free will Moroney, Stephen K. 93–4, 186n.26 Morrison, Toni 9–10, 10n.9 Mulgan, Tim 154 Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome 35, 37–8 Murphy, Mark 173n.17 Murray, Michael 23n.23 Nault, Jean-Charles 104n.27, 118, 118n.42 Newhauser, Richard G. 103n.26, 105n.29 Niebuhr, Reinhold 28–30, 99n.24 noetic effects of sin 93–4, 95n.18, 96–7, 186–97 noseeum inference 32, 39–41 Nozick, Robert 59n.17 Nussbaum, Martha 122n.2 Oakes, Edward 22–8 Oderberg, David 173n.17 Olson, Eric 65n.25 original guilt 25n.25 original sin: condition of 23–4, 30–1, 91, 94, 158, 163–4, 182–3 doctrine of 21–5, 28–30, 32, 43, 90, 94, 99, 193–4 literalism about 24–5, 30

211

Origo, Iris 132n.20 Ortiz-Ospina, Esteban 83n.2, 84n.3, 86n.7 Oxtoby, Willard 16n.12 Pandaemonium 46, 134, 174 Pascal, Blaise 19, 92, 95n.17, 96–9, 115, 120, 126–9, 149 Paul, L. A. 71n.29 Pawl, Timothy 167n.11 perseverance 118, 168–9, 175, 188–9, 196 pessimism: and Christianity 26–7, 31–2, 191–2, 197 and Ecclesiastes 21, 130 and the Enlightenment 8–9, 9n.8 Optimistic 27, 30–2, 42, 118–19, 164, 191–2, 197 Peters, Ted 23n.22 Pinker, Steven 8n.7 Plantinga, Alvin 32–43, 94–6, 188 Plaskow, Judith 29–30, 99n.24 pleasure: of animals 5 capacity for 64–6 and happiness 72–6, 81 and pain 4, 13–14, 57–8, 64–5, 69–70, 73, 86–7 and wellbeing 57–9, 68–70 Pontus, Evagrius 103–4, 118 possible worlds 7, 39 best of all 1 Postman, Neil 128–9 prayer of obedience 168 pride Augustine on 92 privileged place of 92, 103–4 Satan’s 44–6 principal Virtues 103–4, see also theological virtues problem of evil, the 5, 11, 22, 25n.25, 26 Prothero, Stephen 11 psychic renunciation 101–3, 116, 118–19, 154, 175, 194–5 Pust, Joel 51nn.5,6 Quinn, Philip L. 184n.23 Railton, Peter 70 Raphael 91, 159–60, 167–8 rationality 1, 6, 26–7, 61, 64–5

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Rea, Michael 23n.23 response component of obedience 163–4, 167–8, 174, 178, 182–4, 196 resurrection of Christ 22–3 general 43 restraint component of obedience 163–4, 167–8, 174, 178, 182–4, 196 revelation 8–9, 41, 51, 71, 186 rights-based ethical theories 49, 54–5 Roser, Max 83n.2, 84n.3, 86n.7 Rossian Pluralism 69–70

Pascal on 98–9, 115, 120, 126–9 and suicide 140–3 Thomistic conception 114–16 Snell, R. J. 143–4, 145n.34 Solomon, Robert C. 112n.32 Spacks, Patricia 123 Stump, Eleonore 37n.46, 122n.2, 152n.47, 155, 166nn.9,10, 167–8 suicide 137–43, 150–1 Suits, Bernard 62n.20 Sumner, L. W. 75n.35, 78n.39 Svendsen, Lars 122–3 Swinburne, Richard 23n.22

Saiving, Valerie 29–30, 99n.24 Salieri, Antonio 111, 156 salvation 28–31, 43, 48–9, 114, 181–2, 193–4 salvific inclusivism 181–3 Satan 44–7, 100–1, 135, 153, 165–7 Savulescu, Julian 67n.26 science: and the Enlightenment 8–9, 94 and religion 24–6 Schellenberg, John L. 32n.38, 48n.2 Schimmel, Solomon 114n.36, 118n.42 Schopenhauer, Arthur 1–4, 4n.5, 21–2, 90, 125–6, 129, 141–2, 149 self-deception 44–5, 62–3, 70–1, 77, 97–8, 125, 169, 194–5 self-love 28, 90–3, 96–9, 105–6, 163, 165–6, 187, 194–7 seven deadly sins 104–5, 113, 194–5; see also capital vices Shaffer, Peter 156, 157nn.52,53 Shattuck, Roger 91n.11 Shih Tzu, Bear the 64 friends of 64 Shuster, Marguerite 23n.22 Simon, Caroline 192–3 Sisyphus, see Camus, Albert skeptical theism 40–1, 55 skepticism 50–1, 180–1 about moral theory 54–5 about moral judgments 54–5, 179 about well-being 55–7, 71, 179–80 about happiness 71–2 sloth: and despair 114, 139, 157, 195 and laziness 113–15, 118

Taylor, Shelley, E. 86n.8, 161n.2 temperance, virtue of 161, 165–6 Tennant, F. R. 23n.23 Teresa, Mother 181n.20 theodicy 34–42, 55 theological virtues 115–16, see also principal virtues Tiberius, Valeria 62n.19 transhumanism 67 Unamuno, Miguel de 20, 131–3, 143 universalism 36–7 see also salvation utilitarianism 54–5, 179 Vahid, Hamid 95–6 vainglory 103–4 VanderWeele, Tyler J. 85n.4 van Inwagen, Peter 23n.23, 26n.26, 65n.25 Wasserstein, Wendy 113 welfare, see wellbeing wellbeing: desire-fulfillment theories of 60–2, 68–9, 80–1, 172, 194 hedonistic theories of 57–60, 69–70, 74, 74n.34, 194 hybrid theories of 71n.30, 172 objective-list theories of 68–71, 80–1, 81n.42, 160 obedience-primed 172–4, 178–80, 184–5, 196 of non-human individuals 53n.11, 65 perfectionistic theories of 64–70, 80–1, 115–16

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 Westphal, Merold 186, 187n.27, 192 Whitcomb, Dennis 163n.6 Wilde, Oscar 148–50, 149n.40 Wiley, Tatha 23n.23 Williams, N. P. 23n.23 Williams, Thomas 91 Wolfe, Thomas 20

Wood, William 23n.23, 96–9, 127 wrath 103–4, 104n.28, 106, 111, 115, 142 Xerxes 168n.14 Zamir, Tzachi 122n.2

213