The World of Religions No. 61 – September/October 2013 –
As Saint Augustine wrote in The Happy Life : " The desire for happiness is essential to man; it is the motive of all our actions. The most venerable, the most understood, the most clarified, the most constant thing in the world is not only that we want to be happy but that we want to be nothing but that. This is what our nature forces us to do. " If every human being aspires to happiness, the whole question is whether deep and lasting happiness can exist here below. Religions provide very divergent answers to this question. The two most opposed positions seem to me to be those of Buddhism and Christianity. While the entire doctrine of the Buddha is based on the pursuit of a state of perfect serenity here and now, that of Christ promises the faithful true happiness in the afterlife. This is due to the life of its founder – Jesus died tragically at the age of 36 – but also to his message: the Kingdom of God that he announced was not an earthly kingdom but a heavenly one and beatitude was to come: “ Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted ” (Matthew 5:5).
In an ancient world rather inclined to seek happiness here and now, including in Judaism, Jesus clearly shifts the issue of happiness to the afterlife. This hope of a heavenly paradise will run through the history of the Christian West and sometimes lead to many extremisms: radical asceticism and the desire for martyrdom, mortifications and suffering sought in view of the heavenly Kingdom. But with Voltaire's famous words - " Paradise is where I am 18th onwards : paradise was no longer to be expected in the afterlife but achieved on Earth, thanks to reason and human efforts. Belief in the afterlife - and therefore in a paradise in heaven - would gradually diminish and the vast majority of our contemporaries would set out in search of happiness here and now. Christian preaching was completely disrupted by this. After having insisted so much on the torments of hell and the joys of heaven, Catholic and Protestant preachers hardly speak any more of the afterlife.
The most popular Christian movements—the evangelicals and the charismatics—have fully embraced this new reality and continue to affirm that faith in Jesus brings the greatest happiness, even here on earth. And since many of our contemporaries equate happiness with wealth, some even go so far as to promise the faithful " economic prosperity " on Earth, thanks to faith. This is a far cry from Jesus, who said that " it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven " (Matthew 19:24)! The profound truth of Christianity undoubtedly lies between these two extremes: the rejection of life and morbid asceticism—rightly denounced by Nietzsche—in the name of eternal life or the fear of hell on the one hand; the sole pursuit of earthly happiness on the other. Jesus, deep down, did not despise the pleasures of this life and did not practice any "mortification": he loved to drink, eat, and share with his friends. We often see him " leaping for joy ." But he clearly stated that supreme beatitude is not to be expected in this life. He does not reject earthly happiness, but puts other values before it: love, justice, truth. He thus shows that one can sacrifice one's happiness here below and give one's life for love, to fight against injustice or to be faithful to a truth. The contemporary testimonies of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Nelson Mandela are beautiful illustrations of this. The question remains whether the gift of their lives will find a just reward in the afterlife? This is the promise of Christ and the hope of billions of believers throughout the world.
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