The Pursuit of Happiness: A Christmas Sermon

DECEMBER, 1919

BY ARTHUR CLUTTON-BROCK

I

WHEN I gave a lecture with this title to the Fabian Society in London, during the most miserable period of the war, my very chairman began by protesting that happiness must not be pursued. There we were, all of us unhappy together in the midst of a great unhappy city, with another great unhappy city hating us and plotting against us oversea — both cities doing their duty as bitterly as they could and preferring it to happiness, as men have always done for thousands of years; and still my chairman must needs protest against the temptation of my title. If I or anyone else, he thought, could once persuade men to pursue happiness, they would be following the shadow and losing the substance forever.

That is what the divines and moralists have been telling us for centuries. Even the painters — at least the bad ones—have supported them: they have painted their allegorical pictures of mankind vainly pursuing happiness in the form of a winged elf or will-o’-thewisp; and men have looked at these pictures, however ill painted, and said, ‘How true!’

But were all these warnings needed? Were not the divines and moralists and painters preaching to the converted ? If I read history, if I observe other men or myself to-day, it does not seem to me that we are in much danger of pursuing happiness, or that we have profited much in body or soul by our refusal to pursue it.

The Germans, for instance, refused firmly to pursue happiness when they seemed to have a good chance of attaining it. Mr. Owen Wister, in his Pentecost of Calamity, tells us how their orderly well-being before the war made him wish to be a German rather than an Englishman or a Frenchman or even an American. They seemed to have learned a secret unknown to the rest of us, a secret from their own orchestras, the best in the world; they did all things with momentum and purpose and power — and we know what use at last they chose to make of their power. If they had used it in the pursuit of happiness, would they have done worse by themselves or the rest of mankind? They have suffered so much that now there can be no word or feeling for them but pity. And we in England, who seemed to have the world at our feet after Waterloo — should we have done worse if we had pursued happiness instead of riches? Should we have been less rich than we are? It may be that, if we pursued happiness, we should miss it; it is certain that, in pursuing riches, we made poverty, just as the Germans, in pursuing power, have put themselves at the mercy of their enemies.

But let us leave the present and the immediate past and consider the evidence of religion all through the ages. In all the diversity of religions many must be false; they must express the instincts rather than the reason of mankind. If men had ever been in danger of pursuing happiness, they would have made happy, false religions for themselves and would have rejected them only when they proved disastrous. If you must tell yourself lies about the nature of the universe, why not tell yourself pleasant lies? Why not believe that there is a God who likes mankind as they are and will reward them for being what they are? Why not believe that we shall all go to heaven when we die? But no religion that I know of has ever affirmed anything so pleasant as that.

There was the paganism of the ancient world, which many suppose to have been gay and careless. But Lucretius, like any modern agnostic, found, or tried to find, freedom in not believing it. He said that, if there were gods, they cared nothing about mankind; and this indifference seemed to him better for mankind than the caprices commonly attributed to the gods. The Greeks and Romans did not believe that their gods were good-natured, or that, when they died, they would all go to the Elysian Fields. And, as for the Jews, their God was a jealous God. He hated all other nations and did not care much for his own chosen people; at least, He was constantly angry with them and made them angry with each other. Their whole religion, except that of a few great visionaries, commanded them to refuse happiness and to make themselves, and, still more, foreign nations, as unhappy as possible.

You may say that in all these religions mankind have expressed their experience of this life; but, if they had ever pursued happiness, they would have devised a religion to express something happier than this life. They would have said, unconsciously, ‘Let us believe that which will make us happy.’ Their very will to power, according to Nietzsche’s theory of it, would have impelled them to assert about the unknown future what would have given them joy, vitality, in the present.

If the pursuit of happiness were instinctive in man, like the instinct of self-preservation, that pursuit would express itself in cheerful affirmations about the nature of the universe; and, since no primitive religion has ever made such affirmations, we need not fear the instinctive pursuit of happiness as a danger to the morality or the reason of mankind.

The instinct of self-preservation itself certainly does not impel men to the pursuit of happiness; the more they are subject to it, the more they are filled with fears rather than hopes. It was that instinct which made men and women sacrifice their first-born to Moloch; which made the German, like the lobster, incase himself in shining armor; which set the English toiling desperately against each other and refusing pity to the poor, because they said the nature of the universe was such that it made pity a dangerous, misleading passion. No doubt it seemed so to the fathers and mothers who sacrificed their children to Moloch. They would have pitied and spared if they had dared; but Moloch, that is, the nature of the Universe, was against pity, against happiness. And who told them that, except themselves? We do not believe that Moloch revealed it to them; but still our divines tell us that God forbids us to pursue happiness; and, if we no longer believe in a God, still we think that nature forbids us. The refusal of happiness, the fear of it, is deeper than any difference of creed. If there is no God to be malignant, there is still the nature of things, still the struggle for life imposed on us forever, so that we are still ready propter vitam vivendi perdere causas.

And yet, nearly two thousand years ago, there was a happy affirmation made about the nature of the universe, and in one of the sacred books of the Christian religion. ‘God is Love,’ said St. John the Divine, or some other visionary — the name does not matter. There could not be a happier affirmation than that; yet it was spoiled by the statement that whom God loveth He chasteneth. If Christendom had really believed the words of St. John, it would never have believed those other words; for the love which chastens because it is love is not really love to us at all. We know the kind of parent who is always chastening his children because he loves them so well; the children resent the chastening all the more because of the reason that is given for it. ‘ It hurts me more than it hurts you.’ The very saying is a by-word to us now; but still we impute to God a state of mind which we ourselves, as parents, are outgrowing; still, though we may say that God is love, we cannot believe that the love of God is of the same nature as the love of man.

Yet one who has greater authority even than St. John, with Christians, tells us that the love of God is of the same nature as the love of man. He has gone out of his way to assert that whom God loveth he doth not chasten. He has indeed made affirmations about God, and so about the nature of the universe, so daring, so contrary to what anyone had ever said before, that to this day we ignore them.

The Parable of the Prodigal Son is constantly read in our churches, but it is not listened to. If it were, Christians would be forced, either to believe it, or to reject it as spurious. They escape from the difficulty by not knowing what it says. No doubt the words of that parable are familiar to everyone who reads this; but I would ask the reader, for once, to take the sense of them seriously. Remember that Christ clearly implies the behavior of the father in the parable to be the behavior of God; and now consider what that behavior is. Note, first of all, that the Prodigal Son repents only when he has spent all his money and can get nothing to eat but husks meant for the swine. ‘When he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger.’ That is the reason he gives to himself why he should go home. It might be the text for a satire on human nature and on the reasons why men repent. But Christ does not use it so.

And now turn to the father. He loves his son but he does not therefore chasten him. On the contrary, ‘When he was yet a great way off,’ he ‘had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.’ Then the son made his speech about having sinned; but still there was no chastening in reply, no improving of the occasion. The father — who, remember, is God — seems to have no sense of responsibility at all; he is foolishly, frivolously, pathetically happy, just because this poor creature has been driven home by his empty belly. He calls for the best robe and the fatted calf. He says, Let us eat, and be merry. Merry! He shocks the grave elder son with music and dancing. And note this also, that, when the elder son is angry and will not come in, this father, this God, does not put him in his place. He does not say, Remember, please, that I am your father. He ‘came out and intreated him.’ The elder son talks sense and justice, speaks of his years and service and obedience — yet he had never been given a kid. But even this sense and justice do not anger the father; he replies, still without any spirit, ‘Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It was meet that we should make merry and be glad; for this thy brother was dead and is alive again; and was lost and is found.’

But is it not the most beautiful story in the world, and the most daring? If we could see that father behaving so, we should weep happy tears; and if we could really believe that his behavior was the behavior of God, how foolish would all our worldly wisdom and most of our religion seem to us! But do we believe it, even if we profess and call ourselves Christians? I lectured on this parable once at Oxford, and in the discussion which followed, a clergyman reminded me that we were not told what happened the next day. Then, no doubt, the father recovered from his first joy, and said and did all that we should expect of him. That clergyman, perhaps a little crudely, expressed our common refusal to believe what Christ affirmed in the parable about the nature of God and the universe. Christ said that God is really good, according to our deepest and most instinctive idea of goodness; that He is what we at our best would wish Him to be; but we cannot nerve ourselves to believe that the innermost desire of our hearts is true; we are afraid of the God within ourselves, whom Christ and all the great visionaries would declare to us.

II

They say that this God will tell us how to be happy if only we will listen to Him; but we will not listen because each one of us thinks that the God is only in himself, not in other men, and still less in the universe. There is a conspiracy against this God within us, so that, if we obeyed Him, He would lead us into danger. Therefore we must always deny ourselves, and Him, and follow the devil, whom we call duty, common sense, patriotism —a hundred names with which we conceal from ourselves the fact that he is the enemy of man and man’s happiness, an enemy that man imagines and clothes with power against himself.

We talk of the seven deadly sins; but there is one behind them all that we cherish and never speak of: the one deadly sin whose name is fear, the sin that we clothe with power against ourselves and incessantly disguise as a virtue. For fear, being always ashamed of itself, is always becoming unconscious. It escapes from its own pain by becoming hatred; hatred indeed is the barren negative emotion of fear trying to be positive; it is fear taking the offensive and becoming proud of itself as if it were courage. And fear can pretend also to be religion and philosophy. When the great visionaries try to deliver us from it, it says that they are dreamers or blasphemers. So the scribes said that Christ cast out devils by the help of the devil; and He replied that, to believe thus the devil of fear, when it pretends to be wisdom or holiness, is the sin against the Holy Spirit, the God within us.

In our long struggle with circumstance we have inherited a fear of the essential malice of circumstance, as something which will surely frustrate us if we aim at that which we most deeply and permanently desire; and so deep is our fear that we will not confess, even to ourselves, what we do most desire. There are times when the words of a great visionary or the music of a great artist force us to confess it for a moment. The Parable of the Prodigal Son, the reconciliation of Lear and Cordelia, which is the parable of the Prodigal Father, the divine compassion of Mozart — in these we recognize what we desire for ourselves and for all men. Then we see that happiness and goodness kiss and are one; but, in a moment, we say, ‘This is art, or the Bible; this is a beauty, a happiness, denied to us by common sense, by each other, by the very nature of things. I myself may long for it, but I am alone in my longing, and I must suppress it lest men should think me a fool. I must run away from the very thought of this happiness, to business.’ It is beauty still to us, but it is not truth; the truth is that we must still fight and punish and deny ourselves and each other the happiness whispered to us by the God within us.

But Christ dared to say that this beauty is truth. In his parable He was an artist; but he went further and said, ‘Act according to this art, for it is the very nature of God.’ How little has Christianity understood Him in its faint insistence upon forgiveness as if it were a painful duty. In his parable Christ presents it, not as a duty, but as a pleasure; and many of us, if we met the father of the parable in real life, would condemn him as a hedonist. We should say that he forgave his son, not for his son’s good, but because he enjoyed forgiving him. But, according to Christ, to enjoy forgiving is the attribute of God, and so the highest virtue in man. There is no final opposition between duty and happiness, or even pleasure. Perfect love casteth out fear, even the fear of happiness; and Christ seems to prefer the word happiness to the word goodness; He does not say, Good are the meek, the merciful, the pure in heart; He says that all these are blessed, which means happy.

The beatitudes seem negative, to many Christians, even, because they do not understand that all the renunciations implied in them are possible only to those who are allured by the positive happiness that Christ promises. Still, we believe that man does naturally pursue happiness and that, if he is to be saved, he must renounce it and pursue goodness. But man does not naturally pursue either goodness or happiness, not so much because he is foolish or evil, as because he is not yet himself at all and has no clear or single aim in life. We are not born knowing what we want; we are not born with any singleness of self or of desire; and the true aim of life is to attain to that singleness. When we speak of humanity as something existing already, we flatter ourselves; the very word is but a prophecy for us, meaning what we shall be when we have become ourselves and know our aim.

But the Word also warns us that we cannot become ourselves by ourselves. The individual does not exist, and can exist only by attaining to a right relation with other individuals. Humanity is not an abstract thing, something which exists already apart from men; any more than beauty is an abstract thing which exists apart from beautiful things. Humanity is, or will be, men in a right relation with each other, as beauty is things in a right relation with each other; but the relation that makes humanity is one altogether right; and how are we to find the test or proof of this rightness? That is the question men have always answered wrongly; they have not dared to say that happiness is the test, the symptom, of this rightness. Often they have blindly pursued happiness for themselves alone, and have done so — as it seemed to them — against their own consciences, not knowing that they could not pursue happiness for themselves alone, any more than they could play lawn tennis by themselves alone; the lonely pursuit of it proves that they do not know what it is. And, finding that they could not pursue it alone and get it, they have despaired of it altogether, and have told themselves that it is not to be pursued. Denying it to themselves, they have denied it to others also; they have never seen that they can get it for themselves only by giving it to others.

Here I seem to be talking platitudes. Every preacher says that we can be happy only by making others happy; but those who say that so glibly do not convince either themselves or others of its truth, for they never state it rightly. It is not that we can achieve happiness only by denying ourselves for the sake of others; rather it is that happiness, in its nature, is a common thing, a right relation between us all which we have to achieve; and until we achieve it, we cannot deny ourselves or sacrifice ourselves, for we have not yet achieved a self to deny.

When Keats said that this world is not a vale of tears but a vale of soulmaking, he meant that it is a vale of self-making. The error latent in all our opposition of egotism and altruism is the assumption that already we are selves to be indulged or sacrificed. The egotist is really one who tries to indulge a self he has not yet achieved; and the altruist often is one who tries to sacrifice a self he has not yet achieved. If they both knew that their task was to attain to a self, and that it can be attained to only by a right relation with other selves, they would cease to argue with each other. It is the delusion of an achieved self that makes men hard with each other, and also with themselves. It gives them the wrong sense of sin, the sense that they and others are born ready-made and wrongly made; that they are tied and bound by their own past, and must punish each other and themselves for it.

This sense of sin is merely intimidating and cruel; it makes us look back to the past, whether of ourselves or of others, and think of all things in terms of the past. We and others have to pay for the past, and it is our duty to exact payment; we are debt-collectors for God. We cannot forgive, because, what a man has been and done, that he is forevermore. But the true Christian doctrine insists that we can escape utterly from our past, because we are merely raw materials, all of us; our task is not to mortify an evil self, in ourselves or others, — a self that does not exist, — but to achieve a self, which, again, we can achieve only by entering into a right relation with each other. And according to this doctrine there is still sin and a just sense of sin; for sin is the refusal to enter into this right relation, to attain to the self, and the freedom of the self, which is offered to all men by the very nature of the universe; and the right sense of sin is the sense of refusal, and of the great thing refused. This sense is not intimidating or cruel; it does not make men judge and punish and condemn each other or despair of themselves. It makes them aware, not of a law broken, but of a heaven renounced, and, more than that, of a great gift offered and coarsely rejected. For, even if we do not believe in God and his desire to draw us all to Him; if we cannot see him as the father in the parable; still, we are all blindly and pathetically offering happiness to each other, and at the same time refusing it when offered.

All mankind is, if only we could see and know each other, like a family that loves each other but quarrels incessantly over the breakfast-table, and talks always of its quarrels, not of its love. A family exists and lives together for the sake of that which we call domestic felicity; and in unhappy families, what secret repentings and yearnings there are! How often those who cannot meet without bitterness pity each other! all together they are missing a common happiness; willingly would they forgive each other for all bitter things said, but they cannot forbear saying them.

And so it is with all mankind. The Christian doctrine that we should love each other is not merely a command laid upon us by a God utterly and unintelligibly superior to us all: it is also the counsel of our own hearts, and that is why we know that it is divine. It is not a task imposed on us against our own natures, but the whisper and prophecy of our very selves that are not yet achieved, the promise of the happiness that we might win. If that were not so, Christianity would never have been even the ideal that it is; and those who insist that it is a revelation from without do it a poor service. It is also a revelation from within; it is what we ourselves hope, when we are not despairing. That is why hope is one of the three ’theological’ virtues; men who hope logically and consistently about their own nature and the nature of the universe must be Christians in faith; and they will lose their hope and their faith, if they are not also Christians in conduct, in love.

We fail still to be Christians in hope and in faith because after so many centuries we have not achieved any technique of conduct. Christ tried to teach us one in those of his sayings which seem to us most paradoxical; in them He pointed the way to happiness. But those sayings are too exalted and passionate for us; and we cannot reconcile them with the prose and routine of our lives, as we must do if we are to live according to them. What we need now is to translate them into prose, for we cannot go through life always at the height of emotion, always loving and forgiving and pitying; we need a technique that we can take as a matter of course, without strain or the sense that we are doing something surprising. The professional Christian, who is always turning the other cheek, is surprised by his own goodness; he is mirthless and uneasy, therefore not really delightful to us; he is a parvenu saint, who never makes us wish to be like him. He has the aim of self-denial, but not the aim of happiness. A right technique would aim at happiness, not as something romantic and far-away, to be achieved only in another world by irrational acts of self-sacrifice in this, but as a state properly normal, to be achieved by rational conduct here and now.

When we are told to love one another, to love our enemies, it seems to us an impossibility because we think of love as a state of rapture, — men fall in love, — and who could now be in a state of rapture with the Germans? So love seems to us a passion fit for heaven rather than for earth, where we continue prosaically to dislike each other. But as we like ourselves, so it is possible for us to like each other; as we tolerate ourselves, why should we not tolerate each other? And what we need is a philosophy, a logic, of toleration; out of that alone can love arise. The man who is most at ease with himself is he who knows himself to be an absurd creature, the mere raw material of a self, and who is always good-humored with himself even in his worst failures, because he expects them. So with the same good-humor we may be at ease with each other; and out of this goodhumor, this sense of human inadequacy as something absurd yet delightful, because full of infinite promise, love will spring.

A modern version might be written of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, without its intense and surprising beauty, but so that it would seem natural and probable, with the father a humorist, a good-humorist, forgiving his son easily, because he can forgive himself and is therefore constrained by the logic of forgiveness. And, if we fill out the original parable for ourselves with our own imaginations, we shall see that there must have been fun in that music and dancing and feasting; it was not all a ceremony like a service in church. The father laughed, and then the prodigal laughed; everyone laughed and was merry, except the elder brother, who was thinking about the kid that had never been given to him.

But ‘in our light, bitter world of wrong’ we are always thinking about the kid that has not been given to us, except a few divine humorists; we forget our own absurdity in the thought of each others’ sins; we put away happiness so that we may make an example of each other. Above all, we do not believe that any man will ever confess that he has sinned unless we pull long faces at him — the very thing which makes him deny his sin, even to himself. Now we insist that the Germans must make some national confession of their sin, if we are to forgive them. Many of us have looked forward to that confession as the final proof of our victory. But, so long as we all preach at the Germans, they will never confess; so long as we say they are a people unique in wickedness, they will repeat to themselves that they are unique in virtue and oppressed by the envy of mankind. That is human nature — a fact to be acknowledged in all technique of conduct. The way to make a man repent is to forgive him before he repents, as we ourselves would wish to be forgiven, and to forgive him, not as a surprising act of virtue, but in goodhumor, because we are all absurd and all need forgiveness. If we all had our deserts, who would escape whipping? Needless to say, we must prevent men from doing wrong, if we can; but in the spirit of policemen, not of avenging angels; for we are not angels, and vengeance is not ours.

Life is hard for us all and full of snares and temptations. One man fails in one way, another in another; but we all fail, and we have no right to say that another man’s, or another nation’s, failure is worse than our own. We have no right to put any man or nation outside the pale; we are not gods, with the right or power of damnation, but men, with the common promise of a humanity to which none of us yet has attained or can attain, without the help of all.

If we would attain to happiness and to a Christian technique, we must govern our behavior to each other by the axiom that no man is to be judged by his past; that we can help each other to freedom, to life in the present, to the creative power latent in ourselves, by forgiving always, not with ceremony, as if we were doing something unnaturally good, but as a matter of course and with a smile, as a mother forgives her child; as the father forgave the son in the parable; as people forgive each other in the operas of Mozart. They are comic operas because all the people in them are absurd, like mankind; but they are comedy, that surpasses tragedy in its beauty, because their laughter ends in forgiveness, being the laughter of men, not at, but with, each other.

And is not that laughter a thousand times more serious and profound than our fits of righteous indignation, when we forget our own sins for thinking of the sins of others? Those fits are frivolous because any theory of the universe reduces them to absurdity. If there is no meaning in the universe, why are we angry? But if it has meaning, then we are all children of our Father which is in heaven; and which of us is not absurdly inadequate to that lineage?

But always it is said, we must not encourage the evil-doer; we must make an example of him. We have been making an example of him for ages, but with little success; and, even if it were good for him, it is not good for us. ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child.’ Mr. Dooley, I think, added the comment that, if you don’t spare the rod, you spoil the parent. We might now try to be a little less self-sacrificing in this matter of punishment, might think of ourselves and our own characters more than of the characters of the criminals whom we labor so vainly to reform. We have built up a society on fear and punishment, and then we wonder that we are as far from happiness as ever; or we have told ourselves that happiness can never be ours, that we ought not even to aim at it. But is not that blasphemy, the only true blasphemy, as being a denial of the goodness of God? Is it not possible that, if we really and consistently aimed at happiness, we might discover what it is and so at last achieve it?