I have in mind four such realms: work; love and family; community and country; and the pursuit of truth. Most of the life-affirming activities in these realms are accessible to most Americans, and all have this in common: we practice and pursue them not as diversions or escapes from reality, but because they answer truly to our deepest aspirations: to live a life that makes sense, a life that is worthy of the unmerited gift of our own existence.
Meaningful Work: Exercising Our Human Powers
Nearly all Americans must work to live. But there is also virtue in this necessity. Above and beyond the benefits of remuneration, there is dignity in earning a livelihood, in providing not only for oneself but also and especially for one’s family. Among the rising generations, gainful employment is an early sign of maturity and the first step toward self-reliance. Holding down a job requires not only know-how and competence, but also the virtues of diligence, dependability, and the exercise of personal responsibility. Unemployment, even if compensated, is demoralizing, degrading, and dehumanizing to any self-respecting adult who wants to work.
Yet even the moral praise of industriousness and self-reliance comes up short if we are looking at work as a possible source of transcendent meaning. For this we need an account of work as intrinsically satisfying, quite apart from the income it produces or the virtues it engenders. We need to consider work, as Dorothy Sayers put it, “not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do.” Work enables us to utilize and to most fully express our God-given talents, gaining meaning for our lives from fulfilling our nature, from seeing our work well done, and from delighting in the gifts our work provides to a world that needs and appreciates them.
True enough, work to many people is irksome, a mere “job,” worth only the wages it earns or the consumption and leisure it makes possible. (The word “job,” you might like to know, originally meant a mere “piece or gob of work,” defined in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary as “a low mean lucrative busy affair; petty, piddling work.”) True, too, not everyone can find work to which he or she is well suited, never mind called. Still, these empirical difficulties do not affect the main point: real work can – and for many people still does – all by itself provide a life that makes sense, a life of intrinsic meaning and purpose, a life that lifts the worker to the fullness of his or her being, and beyond. Most readers of this book are probably blessed with work of that sort. And all of us have encountered the joy of work among artists and artisans, teachers and nurses, firemen and police, soldiers and social workers, businessmen and clergy, and myriad other occupations, from the lofty to the low. Finding meaning in work generally depends less on the external task than on the attitude and manner in which the work is done. Witness the differing answers of three laborers who were asked to describe the work they were jointly doing: “I’m making a living,” said the first. “I’m dragging heavy stones,” said the second. Said the third, “I’m building a cathedral.” Only for the last laborer did the work possess its full human meaning. Only for him was his work a spiritual as well as a bodily exercise.
That work should be central to life’s fulfillment is a very old idea, and it persists because it is rooted in human nature. Aristotle argued that human flourishing is a life of virtuous or excellent activity, where “activity” translates a word of Aristotle’s own coinage, built from a root meaning “work”: energeia, literally, “being-at-work.” For the fullness of who we are is manifested only when we are active, when we are “at work.” To be truly human is to be humanly-at-work, exercising our humanity to the full. And doing so excellently is the heart of flourishing and fulfillment. The pleasure and subjective satisfaction that we feel as a result is merely secondary and derivative; the essence of our happiness lies in the activity itself, in our being-at-work.
Love and Family: Transcending Our Mortality
We human beings are at work not only when we are occupationally working. We are also deeply at work in the activities of love and friendship, and especially when we are actively engaged in family life, the domain of private life in which most Americans find the greatest meaning – and the second area where we need a revitalization of our thinking. Despite high-profile public controversies about the scope and meaning of marriage, millions of Americans still devote themselves, privately and quietly, to providing decent lives and future opportunities for their children. More to the point, many of us regard our families as the heart of what makes life worthwhile. We do so, in many cases, with greater difficulty and less cultural support than did our grandparents. And many of us openly worry that the American future may not be as bright for our children and grandchildren as its present and past have been for us. Yet this very concern bespeaks the importance of our children’s well-being for our own fulfillment.
Why is this so? People offering secular arguments for marriage and family often cite empirical evidence to show that married people are healthier, wealthier, and happier than unmarried people, and that children fare better by every measure when they are reared in a single home by both their parents. These utilitarian arguments are true, but they lack a deeper anthropological account of why love, marriage, and family continue to be central to human flourishing.
Such an account begins with human erotic desire. It is erotic desire that powerfully leads the soul away from its purely selfish preoccupations with comfort, safety, and gain. For many a callow youth, falling in love is the first soul-opening event. And while eros can be notoriously fickle in its choice of objects, when disciplined – especially by the vows and practice of a solid marriage – it can provide for a private life whose satisfactions are among the most enduring blessings life has to offer. Living life under a promise, husband and wife enjoy the practice of mutually giving and receiving love, one to the other. Through devotion and care, informed by the pledge and practice of fidelity, everyday life takes on the character of a sacrament. To be sure, the busy-ness, cares, and burdens of daily domestic life – not to speak of unforeseen economic and medical woes or difficulties with the in-laws – often obscure its deeper meaning, the profundity of the prosaic. But looking back on life’s journey, a well-married couple knows that even – or especially – in facing the most difficult challenges, oar to oar, they have enjoyed fulfillments not available to the unmarried.
But eros seeks more than loving companionship and the comforts of home, bulwarks against the loneliness of a solitary existence. Eros is at bottom also a longing for immortality in the face of finitude, and it seeks to give birth. Human love is not merely possessive and self-serving, a lack seeking to be filled; it is also generous and generative, a fullness seeking to give birth. Indeed, it is the common project of procreation that holds together what sexual difference sometimes threatens to drive apart. Flesh of their flesh, a child is the parents’ own commingled being externalized, and their unification is even more powerfully enhanced by the shared work of rearing. Providing an opening to the future beyond the grave, carrying not only our seed but also our names, our ways, and our hopes that they will surpass us in goodness and happiness, children are a testament to the opportunity for transcendence. A hope-filled repayment forward of the debt we owe backward for our own life and rearing, our children represent also our share in the perpetual renewal of human possibility. In this way, sexual eros, which first drew our love upward and outside of ourselves, finally provides for the partial overcoming of the limitation of perishable embodiment altogether.
It is for this deeper reason that marriage, procreation, and especially childrearing are at the heart of a serious and flourishing human life, if not for everyone at least for the great majority. Most of us know from our own experience that life becomes truly serious when we become responsible for the lives of others for whose being in the world we have said “We do.” It is fatherhood and motherhood that teach most of us what it took to bring us into our own adulthood, engaged in practices that are most fully rewarded when we live to see our children caring for children of their own. And it is the desire to give not only life but a good way of life to our children that opens us toward a serious concern for the true, the good, and even the holy. Parental love of children leads once wayward sheep back
