Morality, happiness and setting our hearts on God

This episode in Mark’s gospel, in which a rich man’s great wealth prevents him from doing what his heart desires most, is one of the saddest and most sobering. The problem is that his heart is divided and when that realisation dawns on him, his sadness is palpable. Jesus, it is implied, is also saddened: “he looked steadily at him and loved him”, we’re told. Whatever else wealth brings, it cannot guarantee happiness and the fulfilment of our deepest desires. On the contrary, it may prove an intractable obstacle to both, if we value it above all else. St Paul will later famously say that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” (1 Timothy 6:10) Notice: the obstacle is not money itself, but the love of money; that is, making money our priority. The point Jesus is making would not have been as straightforward at the time as it might appear now.

No one hearing this account would have doubted the then unquestioned view that health and wealth were unambiguous indications of divine blessing. Conversely, disease, disability and poverty were unmistakeable marks of divine disfavour. It was taken for granted that wealth was the reward of virtue, poverty condign punishment for sin. But, yet again, Jesus questions conventional assumptions. Sympathetically, but bluntly, he tells the rich man that what he desires most, namely, the happiness of eternal life, will be his only if he gives away to the poor everything he owns and follows him. His stark injunction echoes what is said with equal starkness in the Sermon on the Mount: the “poor in spirit” – or, in Luke’s gospel, even more starkly, “the poor” – are genuinely happy.

The counter intuitive suggestion is that dispossessing ourselves of what we own – or, what we think we own – is indispensable for lasting happiness and genuine fulfilment. I say, “what we think we own”, because, except in a legal sense, we can’t be said to own or possess anything. How could we, if we don’t possess even our lives? We may succeed in preserving our possessions from rust, moths, burglars and recessions, but we cannot preserve our lives endlessly to enjoy them.

Ownership, in other words, is an illusion, as pertinacious as it is, potentially, pernicious. What is urged on us, then, is that we dispossess ourselves of ownership itself. But this typically radical teaching of Jesus is not just about possessions and ownership: it is also about the heart itself and its desires.

When the rich man asks what he must do to attain the happiness of eternal life, he’s not asking simply what rules he must keep and which duties he must fulfil, to achieve his goal: we’re told that he has observed all the rules and fulfilled all his obligations all his life. His question goes deeper. He is giving expression to the desire planted in the hearts of all of us that makes the human heart what it is. The rich man has everything, we’re told but stills lacks that which we desire and seek above all else, not so much by choice as by nature, namely, happiness: not fleetingly felt, but perfect and lasting, happiness, that quietens all yearning and fulfils every desire.

Contrary to what most of us have been taught, happiness is the central question with which morality is concerned. Long before he turns to what would now be conventionally called ‘moral questions’, Aquinas spends a considerable amount of ink asking: what makes human beings genuinely happy, in what does the well-lived life consist? For him (and a much more genuinely traditional moral outlook than the one which most of us inherited), morality isn’t primarily about duties and obligations, but about opportunities to flourish and grow into the fullness of our humanity, seen most perfectly in Christ himself. Obligations, of course, play their part in all our lives: love and loyalty create all manner of duties and obligations. But obligations and duties don’t create love and loyalty or ground authentic friendship. According to Aquinas, “God is happiness” (ST 1a 26.3): the desire for happiness is the desire for God, even if we do not know it.

Of course, we do not automatically or instinctively know from birth what will make us happy, just as we don’t know intuitively what is good for us: it is a lifetime’s work both to learn and to grow into what we learn. Equally, even when we come to know, our desire and search for true happiness can be sidetracked and subverted, or just obscured, by all manner of distracting, ephemeral, superficial desires that hold out illusory promise but never deliver. Such is the universal experience of original sin. But equally important: to set our heart on God, wherein lies perfect happiness, is not to detach our hearts from everything else, and certainly not everyone else. On the contrary, it is, to be attached to all that is good; or, as Saint Ignatius Loyola has it, ‘to find God in all things and all things in God’. Only then do we see and understand God’s creation, including ourselves and each other, for what it is, namely, a gift, given out of love.