A text search of the Bible yields 154 verses containing the word ‘joy’. Here are two, one from the Old Testament and one from the New, both selected as generally representative:
Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of my heart: for I am called by thy name, O LORD God of hosts. (Jeremiah 15:16)
Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name; ask and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full. (John 16:24)
In my prayers and mediations, I have sometimes asked for a life of joy or remarked upon my joy. In seeking faith, I seem to be seeking joy in my life, either as a consequence of faith or as a part of it – I am not sure what is the exact relationship, here: joy does seem to accompany faith. I would say that it is not joy per se that I seek but rather faith and that joy is the happy companion of faith.
A doubt sometimes nags at me: why do you seek the joyful life? What good is it? Is it a worthy preoccupation of a man? Are there not better, more serious goals in life?
This crabbed, Nietzschean voice (perhaps an injustice to Nietzsche, though I think that he has these unlovely moments) is answerable, if not definitively. First, we may distinguish joy from the emotion, happiness and from generic pleasure; second, we can note that seriousness is not incompatible with joy (compare Camus’s Sisyphus); third, even in the terms of the criticism it is hard to see any failing in joy.
First, then, joy is not a selfish emotion in the way that happiness or mere pleasure can be. I do not seek a self-satisfaction in joy but rather I seek to be good and worthy and find joy in doing so. This question then resolves to the worthiness of the good and worthy. Some of the things that we call good and worthy are subject to Nietzsche’s criticism as slavish, but we needn’t be distracted by his benighted family life. The good I seek to do has no part of repressing either myself or others: it is respectable, dignified. And there may be good evolutionary reasons why we experience joy in uplifting ourselves and others. But we commit a genetic fallacy if we conclude thus that joy in itself has no spiritual significance.
Second: perhaps joy is antithetical to seriousness, and perhaps the “subterranean seriousness” to which Nietzsche enjoins us is itself desirable for its worthy, dignified results. Joy is glad; it is blissful. There is a bubbling, giddiness in the heart of joy. Can I be all bubbling and giddy while I concentrate on the analysis of a concept, on pressing with all my might against this great stone the size of my life? The answer is yes, exactly yes. To fully master the stone of life is also to master the emotional and spiritual terms of existence. I cannot, it is true, at every moment, stop to enjoy my giddy joy. But I can notice it out of the corner of my eye as I strain, and the small smile that crosses my face as I turn back to my task will carry with it a renewed, joyful energy to that task. If joy and seriousness are antithetical, then I want to preserve that antithesis, the kind of oscillation of opposites whose synthesis creates a being in time – if Hegel and Heraclitus have it right. This places me at the tippi-tip of existence.
Third, what is there to object to in joy? Nietzsche himself recommends the joy of the Blond Beast. Joy is a healthy animal’s revel in its power. Joy is the wondrous realization of this world’s ample, generous beauty. The modern world presents its own dialectic: we have come to know the terms of the empirical world; but we have also come to recognize the limits of these terms and their world. The resolution of this antithesis takes various forms. For the atheist, it takes the form of the absurd. For the theist, it takes the form of the divine. The effect on the human heart is the same: joy.
Religion, as I understand it, is a means of finding joy in existence. Joy is not itself our sole goal, but joyful life is, where this means the thrill and bliss of rolling our rock to heaven, creating what we can from what we have.
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