Joy

I think that the thing that irks me the most about the world today is the reduction of all things to their utility. No doubt if anyone has taken an economics class they will be told that the value of a thing is found in its utility, or, to be more precise (as in the case of the water/diamond paradox), in a thing's personal utility. What this does, I think, is create a world of mediocrity; a world of power, fitness, and survival. Everything is good in so far as it achieves our ends. Indeed, the modern world hates excellence for the sake of excellence. The reason is that excellence is difficult to attain and it has absolutely nothing to do with gaining power, making money, or being biologically fit. Therefore, moderns try to reduce excellence to fitness and power. They think a scene beautiful because our ancestors found food or shelter there. They think love is good because it helped make society better. But can we really accept this? Why is it when all of the supposedly transcendent and excellent things in the world have been reduced, allegedly, to biochemistry do we feel so utterly disconcerted? Why must something be good simply for the sake of being good? I think because in the end we know that these things are not really what the moderns have reduced them to being. Its not merely that we like art or nature or good morals or that we think they are useful. They have an ought quality to them. They have a feeling of transcendence about them and we know by their very nature that they are intrinsically good. We know that ultimately they point to a reality that is above our own and no dose of doublethink can convince us otherwise.

What these things are, are pure joy. I think nothing can prove my case more than to point out that excellence has very little survival advantage. How can someone honestly think that love really has survival advantage? Maternal and paternal love and camaraderie may indeed be beneficial. But the belief that we should honestly "Do unto others that you would have them do unto you," or yet "Love one another as I have loved you" because it is beneficial for ourselves or even society is foolish. Take one glance modern politics, modern business, and every single civilization that has ever existed and you will see that the opposite of these values are the ones that truly have fitness. Every civilization has been assembled by violence and cruelness. Justice is a particularly annoying thing when it comes to constructing a nation or business; for everywhere we must sacrifice what really needs to be done for the sake of what is "right." The same with beauty. Can one really think expending time and resources to make art has survival advantage? It might be said that all art is a reflection of nature and artistry is tied to our desire for nature, but this just begs the question; why nature should be beautiful. Why should be find it beautiful, good, and desirable. True some aspects of nature should have been attractive (say a fertile river valley) because men would have settled there and survived there. But the irony is that it is not the tame things of nature that we find beautiful. Rather it is the most exotic things that fill us with a sense of beauty and joy. Seas and the rain forests are hardly suitable to survival. Neither are storms or dangerous animals. Yet all of these things exude beauty.

Ultimately, we pursue excellence and transcendent things for one simple reason; joy. And what is joy? Joy is God and enjoying him forever. This is because all of the joyous things were made by God and reflect his nature. Joy in the Christian faith is not an easy thing. It does not have fitness. As Christ said, "whosoever loses his life for my sake will find it." Neither does Christian joy produce material blessing and power. As James, the brother of our Lord, said, "Count it as all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds." The joy of a Christian is not in survival. Rather it is God, who gives meaning to our survival. We must seek God even if it means the end of survival for us, such as the martyrs do. Joy is ultimately to be complete in God and to find in His grace our adoption as sons. This is because, as St. Augustine said, our justification is in God since we are created beings and our being is derive from God. He who forsakes the things of God forsake a part of his very being. Is this not what the existentialists found? The nihilism of the modern age had severed people like Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus from all sense of being and thus they tried to regain that being through existentialism. But why, if we are all just part of nature and our being (i.e. the universe) just is and is not derived from anything else, should we need to anchor our being in something transcendent? The reason is we are made by God and our hearts can only find rest in him.