The Paradox of Joy

Abstract

Can joy be a guide to good decision-making? If every form of joy is not life-enhancing, a concrete and practical account of the Good – or Blessed – Life is required in order to discern true joy. Jesus’ teaching in the Beatitudes revolves around a paradox, when he identifies as “blessed” those experiences, such as poverty or disability, which appear to be the opposite of joyful. For it turns out that true joy lies beyond the ego’s projects for happiness, in becoming reconciled with our lost other, and with aspects of the human experience we would prefer to avoid.

Keywords:

• Gospels
• intellectual disability
• L’Arche
• systematic theology

Notes

1 “Joy promotes trust in oneself; when we are joyful, we feel self-confident and accept ourselves, knowing that our existence is not a matter of indifference.” (Kast, 1991, p. 45-6)

2 So Gregory of Nyssa writes, “Gluttony over food is stopped by fullness, and the pleasure of drinking is quenched along with the thirst; and in the same way the other things also need an interval of time, so that the appetite for gratification, blunted by pleasure and surfeit, can be aroused again.” (Drobner et al., 2000, p. 54)

3 On θεωρία as the supreme expression of the good life, see Rackham and Aristotle (1934, 1177a).

4 For example, Eberhard Jüngel’s claim: “To think God without joy in God is a self-contradiction which must lead even the most logical proof of God to absurdity.” (Jüngel, 1983, p. 192)

5 What Augustine says is missing in that tradition is “to know the way that leads to the blessed country, not only so as to behold it, but so as to inhabit it as well – viam ducentem ad beatificam patriam, non tantum cernendam sed et habitandam” (Augustine, VII, 20, 26).

6 This second meaning of enjoyment, which links the factual assessment of a benefit with the delight we would take in it, is found in other European languages. In German, sich etwas freuen (to enjoy the benefits of something) is etymologically linked to die Freude (joy). The same goes in French: jouir de quelque chose (to enjoy the benefits of something) and la joie (joy).

7 Mακάριος is the Septuagint’s translation of the Hebrew אֶשֶׁר.

8 Since the Law gave the criteria for what would count as blessedness, Jewish thinkers referred to a morally “good” life as being righteous (צַדִיק), i.e. a life lived in conformity with that Law.

9 For example, Assumption of Moses, 7.1; cf. the history of the end-times recounted in 1 Enoch 91.12-17 & 93.1-10

10 This growing consensus is not, however, a straightforward linear development. For example, the eschatology in the Psalms of Solomon (1^st century BCE) emphasises the present reign of God (in the heavens) as much as any future kingdom (contrast Ps.S. 2.30-32 with 3.11-12). Or again, the Assumption of Moses (final redaction probably in the 1^st century CE), whose radically future-oriented eschatology is not cosmic, but nationalistic.

11 Aristotle adds the words “unless simply for the sake of argument (εἰ μὴ θέσιν διαφυλάττων)”: in other words, no one would seriously argue that people experiencing misery or misfortune might count among the blessed.

12 Romano identifies four principal characteristics of the event: 1. It does not merely happen, but carries a “univocal ontic assignation”, i.e. it always happens to someone. 2. It cannot be understood against the settled interpretative horizon of the world, precisely because its effect is to open up a new horizon of meaning. 3. Because of this, the event is always without cause or origin (“an-archic”): qua event, it precisely breaks through the causal nexus through which we normally understand what occurs as “fact”. 4. As distinct from facts within the world, which we can assign to a precise time and date, the event cannot be pinned down in time; for what makes it an event rather than a mere fact, is that it opens up time for the person to whom it happens, turning the temporal future into that person’s “adventure”. (ibid, p. 40-69)

13 It is generally agreed that the first three of Luke’s four Beatitudes are likely to be the authentic teachings of Jesus, and that the three groups named – the “poor”, the “mourners” and the “hungry” – in fact refer to the same group of people, “the needy ones of Israel” (Viviano, 1990, p. 640).