Endangered bliss: Reflections on joy and religion

Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 35, No. 3, Fall 1996

Endangered Bliss'. Ref lect ions on Joy and Rel igion

PETER H. VAN NESS

ABSTRACT: This essay begins with the observation that experiences of intense joy are increasingly absent from the religious lives of many Americans. Examination of the linguistic history of the words '%liss" and "bless" suggests the origins and implications of this loss of joy. A case is made that bliss is crucial to vital Christian life, so long as it occurs in the context of disciplined behavior productive of moral and aesthetic value.

Introduction

In this essay I will reflect briefly about ecstasy and enthusiasm, rapture and exaltation, about joy, and especially, about bliss. These are topics about which I personally know little, but to know even a little about bliss can mean a lot. What prompts me to think philosophically about bliss is the supposition that intense joy has become increasingly disconnected from many sectors of American religious life. Of course, this surmise may be unfounded, erro- neously inferred because television cameras most often focus on religious communities at times of tragedy and newspaper reporters characteristically quote clerics about sober issues of public morality. Appearances can deceive.

By bliss I mean experiences of supreme well-beingmvital health, ~reat achievement, intense belonging, the joy of being extraordinarily alive. There are plausible reasons to believe that such experiences have become estranged from at least public expressions of religious life. For instance, the increasing religious pluralism of the American populace renders religious expressions of joy somewhat parochial and private. Different communions have different pi- eties, and as forms of happiness, they seem less universally accessible tlhan, for instance, celebrating a sports team victory or marveling at a popular movie and its stars. Also, if secularism has not deprived religion of its influence, it has at least ensured respect for the pretense of rationality. Intense religious joy can appear extreme, cultist, or even mad.

Peter H. Van Ness, Ph.D., is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Religion at Columbia University in New York.

215 �9 1996 Institutes of Religion and Health

216 Journal of Religion and Health

God's diverse blessings

The alienation of feelings of ecstatic joy from religious life is certainly not a general feature of religious behavior. The ancient Greeks associated ecs tasy- - the state of being outside oneself with j oy - -wi th enthusiasm as the experience of being possessed by a god. Nowhere is this more evident than in the cu l t of Dionysus as portrayed in The Bacchae of Euripides. The first Chorus describes the Bacchantes as experiencing both madness (otoTQ~0~tg Atovvoco-- 119) and delight (~lSo~eva 5 'aQa--163) through the influence of Dionysus. The celebrants are absented from their mundane selves in order to embrace extraordinary pleasures. Euripides also bears witness to the role of music, dance, intoxication, and savagery in Dionysian practice and gives tragic testi- mony to the refusal of some Greeks to sanction unrestrained ecstasy.

Ear ly Christians were more uniformly opposed to this variety of religious behavior. Clement of Alexandria, in his polemical tract The Exhortation to the Greeks, prominently features the cult of Dionysus in his denunciation of the immorali ty and irrationality of Greek mystery religions. He describes this pagan god as "raving Dionysus (Amvvoov ~aLvo~.llv--2.12)," using the same Greek root word as Homer does in The Iliad (~aLvo~vog ALovv~og--6.132), but adding to it a connotation of moral contempt.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche completely reversed the judg- ment voiced by early Christians like Clement. His slogan "Dionysus versus the Crucified" celebrated Dionysian excess as a sign of heal thy life and interpreted the cross as a decadent valorization of suffering. 1 Nietzsche is no less polemical than Clement (and no less tendentious in describing historical religious phenomena); yet his formula does correspond to a vivid historical contrast. Compare, for instance, the beati tudes of Euripides' Chorus (lines 72 - 82) and of Luke's Gospel (6.20-22).

Blessed (co ~ta• are those who know the mysteries of god. Blessed is he who hallows his life in the worship of god,

he whom the spirit of god possesses, who is one with those who belong to the holy body of god.

Blessed are the dancers and those who are purified, who dance on the hill in the holy dance of god.

Blessed are those who keep the rite of Cybele the Mother. Blessed are the thyrsus-bearers, those who wield in their

hands the mighty wand of god. Blessed are those who wear the crown of the ivy of god. Blessed, blessed are they: Dionysus is their god! 2

And Jesus looked up at his disciples, and said: "Blessed are you who are poor,

for yours is the kingdom of God. "Blessed are you who are hungry now,

for you will be filled.

Peter H. Van Ness 217

"Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.

"Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets2

The recipients of blessings in the two passages seem remarkably different. In the Lukan passage the blessed are identified by what they lack and endure; their intentional acts are promised for a future day when they will "laugh" and "leap for joy." Very differently, the Bacchantes are identified by what they know, wear, and carry. Their joy is manifest in worship and dance in the moment of their blessing. Nietzsche finds in the latter a religious affir- mation of embodied, willful, ascendant life and in the former a sacred excuse and validation for passive suffering. The salubriousness of Bacchic frenzy is questionable, however, as is Nietzsche's narrowly literal and rationalistic reading of Jesus's sayings. So vividly rhetorical in his own writing, Nietzsche fails to appreciate that the structure of the Lukan beatitudes can be interpreted as constantly accenting the intensity of joy promised in God's Kingdom.

I n a more generously metaphorical interpretation, the futurity of God's blessings does not provide a timetable for the surcease of pain, but instead highlights the contrast between an old life and a new one joyously trans- formed. That even the most unexpected persons will know peace and joy dem- onstrates God's power and fidelity. More generally, for a Christian to l~aow about the highest form of human happiness is to know about God's purpose for humanity. The Easter event, wherein the sorrow of the crucifixion pre- cedes the glory of the resurrection, teaches that this happiness cannot be had without travail. The bestowal of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost teaches that it should not be enjoyed without witness to its author. The Christian beatitudes vividly portray Jesus as the medium of God's blessing and a burdened humanity as the recipient of an astounding joy.

Thus, contrary to Nietzsche, early Christianity did not always sever God's blessing from embodied human bliss. Medieval Christianity institutionalized occasions for religious bliss. The cult of the saints frequently involved claims of infused well-being when a person touched a holy relic--the presumed bone of a saint or fragment of the cross of Jesus. Pilgrimages to cathedrals, where relics were often housed, offered sensations of transcendent space, resound- ing music, and solemn ritual that brought pilgrims into transformative rela- tion with sacrality. Of course, these religious institutions are not nearly so vital in today's more rational culture, nor are they so remarkable amidst the present-day plethora of alternative therapies and thrill-oriented theme parks.

"Bliss" is an Anglo-Saxon word of relatively late coinage, and thus not di- rectly evident in the Greek New Testament or ecclesiastical Latin. The lex- icographers say, however, that the meanings of the words '%liss" and "bless"


have mutually influenced one another in early English linguistic history. One way of stating this relationship is to say that bliss is that form of human happiness that accrues to one who is divinely blessed. 4 John Wyclif (Sermon, Selected Works, II.234) makes a similar association in a sermon in which he speaks of two types of blessings--'%lesse [with an 'e'] of the soule and blisse [with an T] of the body." Bliss here is the embodied fruit of God's blessing. It recalls the Hebrew sensibility that God's blessing is manifest in very tangible ways, in milk, honey, and many children.

The use of the word "bliss" by English poets is instructively varied. In Wil- liam Shakespeare "bliss" takes on a secular as well as an embodied meaning; in Sonnet 129 he writes that lust is "A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe; Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream." That '~bliss" is paralleled with joy and descriptive of lust shows the extent to which Shakespeare shears the word of theological meaning. Then John Milton re-Christianized the term, albeit in a heterodox way, using it frequently in his great epic poems Para- dise Lost and Paradise Regained. "Bliss" in these poems becomes almost a synonym for Paradise itself; for instance, Satan and his cohorts in the former text are said to be "driven out from bliss" (2:86). In the Romantic poets "bliss" contributes to an elevated diction that celebrates a vaguely spiritual, but de- terminedly nontheological human condition. In his Intimations of Immor- tality, William Wordsworth enjoins his reader to "Behold the Child among his newborn blisses" (87). Bliss is here not a gift redeemed, but an original inno- cence threatened more by the body's mortality than by the soul's misdirection. Wordsworth communicates the felt experience that human happiness is flawed because it cannot endure: he does not announce the theological convic- tion that human happiness does not endure because it is originally fallen.

The vicissitudes of bliss--its changing usage by poets and others--is in- structive. As human happiness becomes something less readily attributable to God's blessing, the language of bliss becomes something less readily spoken. Not only has bliss fallen from the vocabulary of poets and people, but it has taken on a somewhat ironic meaning in the verbal phrase "to bliss out." Sharing a semantic zone with expressions like "space out," "freak out," and '~r out," this phrase characteristically signifies a pleasant, but questionable, spiritual disengagement from the world.

An endangered bliss

Should Christians bemoan this loss of bliss? Certainly the word's fate is not paramount, but the loss of religious experiences of intense joy is cause for real concern. It should concern Presbyterians like myself: Milton made bliss the spiritual desideratum of English Calvinism, but I expect that few people today cross the threshold of a Presbyterian church in search of bliss. (To do so would be a somewhat quixotic quest: my closest approach to bliss in such a


place was singing--poorly but hear t i ly-- the Chorus to Handel's Messiah in a Christmas Eve service.) This loss of bliss is not, however, restricted in its implications to one middle-class denomination.

Religion without bliss devolves into moralism2 It becomes more a mat ter of telling others what they should do by invoking God's authority than of show- ing others what they can be by realizing God's power. This moralistic attelm- ation of religion is partly a caricature imposed by unsympathetic secularists; it is compatible with the view that theology, worship, and spiritual practices are basically epiphenomenal means by which the religiously devout get their way in the larger venues of family and society. More sadly, it is the result of the efforts of religious leaders whose vocations are distorted by their preoc- cupation with behavior of which they disapprove. They make subscription to certain moral principles the criterion for being authentically religious.

A cautionary note should be attached to any spiritual recommendation of bliss: Bliss without discipline devolves into hedonism. When unrelated to disciplined practice, the pursuit of intense joy can easily become a convenient ethos of momentary pleasure seeking, albeit in moments commemorated as the fruit of God's blessing. All people have a natural propensity to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Hedonism results when this behavior is unmediated by deliberation in the service of more expansive meanings and selfless values. It is an ethos that prevails by default, that thrives on inattention. Philosophical reflection characteristically tempers hedonism, even among those philoso- phers who espouse it. This is especially true of Epicurus and his followers. Early Christians counted them as atheists, though they were not; arguably they were the originators of a very influential but nonreligious spiritual sensibility. 6 This same principle applies to more contemporary forms of reflection. For instance, Julia Kristeva's literary and psychoanalytic recommendations ofjouissance includes a certain type of discipline, and it too contributes to post-Christian spiritual sensibilities that very much emphasize joyous living. 7

The yogic traditions of ancient India impressively integrate disciplined practice with the pursuit of bliss2 In the Yoga Sutras (1.17), Pantafijali says that yoga practice seeks a state of superconsciousness, or samadhi, of which one of the highest stages is ananda. This Sanskrit word is customarily translated as '%liss" and interpreted to mean a tranquillity so profound as to be radiant? Prerequisite to achieving this state of heightened well-being is the regular practice of the body postures, breathing exercises, and meditation techniques that Westerners identify with Hatha yoga. The Bhagavad Gita is even more insistent u p o n m a k i n g bliss the hallmark of a spiritually disciplined life. The yogic paths of dutiful action and meditative renunciation are said to secure a happiness (sukha) that is imperishable (sukham aksayam-- 5.21), endless (atyantam sukhamn6.28), and absolute (sukhasyaikan- tikasya 14.27). 1~ Even a Westerner's non-Hindu practice of Hatha yoga can confirm how it can combine bodily regimentation and spiritual exaltation in surprising ways.


Historically Ha tha yoga practice was associated with s tages of life (as- ramas) during which yogins are not actively engaged in the social affairs of their communities. It is easy u n d e r this arrangement for religious experiences of bliss to be understood as compensatory--as rewards for worldly la- bors. Religious experiences of bliss, I think, should not be understood as sacred compensation for the travails of profane life; ra ther they should serve as insight and incitement for discovering the meaning of life in its broadest hori- zons and in its most enduring forms. For broaching this spiritual meaning, a Scripture passage that reflects the Jewish conception of blessing is insightful. Genesis 27.26-29 reads:

Then his father Isaac said to him, "Come near and kiss me, my son." So Jacob came near and kissed him.; and Isaac smelled the smell of Jacob's garments, and blessed him, and said,

"Ah, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field that

the Lord has blessed. May God give you of the dew of

heaven, and of the fatness of the earth, and plenty of grain and wine.

Let peoples serve you, and nations bow down to you.

Be lord over your brothers, and may your mother's sons

bow down to you. Cursed be everyone who curses

you, and blessed be everyone who blesses you!"

Isaac's blessing of Jacob is, in fact, a communication of God's blessing, and God's blessing is depicted in quite tangible terms: "May God give you of the dew of heaven, and of the fatness of the earth, and plenty of grain and wine." The blessing of Jesus, at first glance, seems quite different and literally compensatory: "Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled." One might read these beat i tudes to say, "You may be poor and hungry, but you do have God's blessing, and the value of this favor will be realized in the world to come." This reading por t rays the blessing of J e s u s as more other-worldly than Isaac's, and so more spiritual.

There are, however, several things wrong with this reading. Contemporary biblical scholarship cautions against interpret ing references to "grain and wine," or the "poor" and "hungry," in narrowly literal ways. Contemporary ecumenical theology warns against interpreting New Testament themes as supersessions of related ideas in the Hebrew Scriptures. However, the tension


between these two biblical portrayals of God's blessing should not be ignored. They suggest that the urgency with which we seek God's blessing should not be translated into a certainty about what constitutes that blessing--worldly goods or their absence. Indeed, it suggests to me that the Christian's bliss is an experience that conjoins embodied human happiness with a sensitivity to the ways in which human goods can be abused by those who have them ,and are often denied to those who need them. Christian bliss is not then a tenta- tive joy, but a continually self-transcending bliss that constitutes a vital state of human devotional activity and a keen attentiveness to God's redemptive actions.

"Blessed is the one who stays awake," says John, the author of the Book of Revelation (Rev. 16.15). Writing, perhaps as a refugee, to churches undergo- ing persecution, John surely knew God's blessing amidst much travail. He was inspired by this blessing to give one of the most imaginatively rich testi- monies to the meaning of God's will. What bliss we know today likewise occurs amidst a world beset by immense suffering and injustice. I do not believe, though, that this implies that we should forsake the quest for intense spiritual joy and its fruits. It should make us properly suspicious of ersatz joys of promiscuous sex, binge drinking, and violent behavior. The hallmark of such falsity is when an experience of bliss renders one '%lissfully unaware" of the ambient world, and so morally insensitive and creatively sterile. In my view, sexual ecstasy need not have this irresponsible quality, nor even must all forms of euphoric inebriation; yet neither do they have the beneficial duality that I sense in a biblically rooted notion of joy. This duality involves a plenteous celebration of embodied life--as communicated in Isaac's blessing of Jacob--and a responsive sensitivity to the absence of life's good things--a sensitivity affirmed in the Beatitudes of Jesus. It contributes to a complex and wondrous experience of being fully awake, alive, and creative.

A critique countered

It may be doubted whether bliss and discipline can so readily combine in. the religious figures of yogins and prophets. Is the above portrayal an abstract construction that betrays psychological realities? I contend that it is not and would cite the psychological literature from James to Maslow to Csikszentmi- halyi as evidence that joy, discipline, and moral responsibility are not incompatible. 11 In concluding this brief reflection, however, I will respond to Nietzsche's criticism that says creative joy and religious feeling are incompatible. He draws this conclusion because he sees the origin of religion in the human unwillingness to claim its own most extraordinary powers:

The psychological logic is this: When a man (sic) is suddenly and overwhelmingly suffused with the feeling of power--and this is what happens with all great


affects--it raises in him a doubt about his own person: he does not dare to think himself the cause of this astonishing feeling--and so he posits a stronger person, a divinity, to account for it . . . . Among the sick the feeling of health is sufficient to inspire belief in God, in the nearness of God. 12

Contrary to a common stereotype, Nietzsche did not identify power with violent domination, but instead with a vitality so rich that it overflows in creative efforts tha t rightly eclipse others. Such creativity is manifest in new va lues - - in achievements of moral and aesthetic excellence, i.e., in jus t the sort of things that the pious and sick (for Nietzsche, this means preeminently Christians) could not achieve because of their inability to claim their own strengths and their proclivity to resent the powers of others.

Nietzsche's critique is not without merit, but it is predicated upon a melo- dramatic conception of human creativity in which the poet or philosopher creates as if he or she were a god working with unformed primordial ele- ments. Zarathustra 's poetic teaching of the doctrine of eternal recurrence is a paradigm of this conception (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 3.16). I shall emphasize another classical model of creativity, tha t of the sculptor hewing a s tatue from a block of stone. Of course, this was Aristotle's favored example when he presented his fourfold notion of causality in book five of his Metaphysics (5.2). Crucial here is the recognition that the hammer blows of the sculptor consti- tute but one causal agent (later called the efficient cause) responsible for the resulting statue. The stone itself is spoken of as the material cause of the statue. Hence artistic creativity here is portrayed as a collaboration of nature and ar t is t ; this collaborative aspect is even more prominent when the final cause - - the prefiguring of what the statue will be - - i s acknowledged to be a social product and not the artist 's pure conception.

According to this model of creativity, God's activity in nature and society is not incompatible with the artist 's tempered claim to his or her own agency. Furthermore, Aristotle's metaphor was extended by Plotinus to be emblem- atic of disciplined agency in its spiritual as well as its artistic form:

Go back inside yourself and look: if you do not yet see yourself as beautiful, then do as the sculptor does with a statue he wants to make beautiful; he chisels away one part and levels off another, makes one spot smooth and another clear, until he shows forth a beautiful face on the statue. Like him, remove what is superfluous, straighten what is crooked, clean up what is dark and make it bright, and never stop sculpting your own statue, until the godlike splendor of virtue shines forth to you. TM

This use of the sculpture analogy by Plotinus suggests that the privative discipline of the saint and the productive discipline of the artist share a common sensibility: in search of a supreme experience of joy they both creatively coop- erate with the initiative of God and nature. The two examples also suggest a s t rategy for seeing that bliss and discipline remain joined in spiritual life: it


is to celebrate the beauty of God's natural creation through being a witness and inst rument of beauty oneself. Beauty weds bliss and discipline. Hans Urs von Balthasar, pioneer in the field of theological aesthetics, calls the spiritual experience of beauty "a double and reciprocal ekstasis'--of God's beauty become incarnate and humanity's carnality become elevated to God's glory. The intricate description of this process he calls "a theory of rapture. "14

Conclusion

Experiences of intense joy seem absent from much American religious life. This absence of bliss threatens to have religion devolve into moralism. The religious cultivation of bliss, however, is not without dangers; it may nurture a spiritualized hedonism if it is not related to some variety of disciplined practice. The Biblical message of the Beatitudes of Jesus effectively conveys that God's greatest blessings are not separate from compassion for a suffering humani ty that seems least blessed. In seeking ways to keep bliss and discipline joined in spiritual life I suggest the celebration, as witness and instru- ment, of divinely sanctioned beauty. In response to the Nietzschean critique, this celebration acknowledges that spiritual bliss and discipline be productive of values both moral and aesthetic. In consonance with von Balthasar's theory of rapture as the basis of theological aesthetics, it anticipates a future Kingdom of God wherein a travailed humanity and a scarred nature are redeemed in glory and splendor. More plainly stated, disciplined practice in compassionate pursui t of beauty is recommended as the deliverance from jeopardy of endangered spiritual bliss.

References

1. For the phrase quoted, see Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, bound with On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New Yorki Vintage, 1969, p. 335. For Nietzsche's most sustained and coherent critique of Christianity, consult On the Genealogy of Morals, especially the third essay.

2. Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. William Arrowsmith, in The Complete Greek Tragedies. Chi- cago: University of Chicago Press, 1959.

3. The Holy Bible--New Revised Standard Version, trans. Bruce M. Metzger et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989; subsequent Bible citations will be quoted from this version.

4. This relationship of ~blissful" to "blessed" is not confined to English usage; selig in German and bienheureux in French have a similar duality of meaning.

5. On the topic of joy in the Christian life, like many others, Karl Barth defies conventional categories. In his reflection on joy in his Church Dogmatics he reads the Bible as containing a moral commandment concerning joyfulness: "It is certainly required of man (sic) that he should continually hold himself in readiness for joy." See Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, eds G. W. Bromily and T. F. Torrance. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1961, 3.4, p. 377.

6. On this point see Peter H. Van Ness, review of The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics by Martha C. Nussbaum, Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 48, pp~ 1-2, Summer 1994, pp. 198-199.


7. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora et al. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, pp. x, 148, 263.

8. Tantric-yoga techniques are infamous in this regard for their inclusion of erotic practices, though it should be quickly acknowledged that such practices seldom culminate in seminal emission. See Mircea Eliade's chapter 'Toga and Tantrism" (especially page 266) in Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969, pp. 200-273.

9. Yoga Philosophy of Pantagjali, trans. Samkhya-yogacharya and P.N. Mukerji. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1983, p. 41.

10. The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Winthrop Sargeant. New York: Doubleday, 1979, pp. 275, 311, 601.

11. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: 1902. Abraham Maslow, Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences. New York: Kappa Delta Pi Publications, 1964. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.

12. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage 1968, p. 86 (2.1.1).

13. Quoted from Pierre Hadot, Plotinus, or The Simplicity of Vision, trans. Michael Chase. Chi- cago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 21 (Ennead 1.6.9.7-18).

14. Hans Urs yon Balthasar, Seeing the Form, vol. 1 of The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, eds. Joseph Fessio and John Riches, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikatis. San Fran- cisco: Ignatius Press, 1982, p. 126.

Documents

Endangered bliss: Reflections on joy and religion