Religion and Human Flourishing

Adam B. Cohen, Adam B. Cohen

• Publisher: Baylor University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781481312875
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Psychology of Religion

When talking about the relationship between religion and flourishing, the first task is to frame the question theologically and philosophically, and this entails taking seriously the potential challenges latent in the issue. These challenges include—beyond the contested definitions of both "religion" and "flourishing"—the claims of some faith traditions that true adherence to that tradition's goals and intrinsic goods can be incompatible with self-interest, and also the fact that religious definitions of health and wholeness tend to be less concrete than secular definitions. Despite the difficulties, research that considers uniquely religious aspects of human flourishing is essential, as scholars pursue even greater methodological rigor in future investigations of causal connections.

Religion and Human Flourishing brings together scholars of various specializations to consider how theological and philosophical perspectives might shape such future research, and how such research might benefit religious communities. The first section of the book takes up the foundational theological and philosophical questions. The next section turns to the empirical dimension and encompasses perspectives ranging from anthropology to psychology.The third and final section of the book follows in the empirical mold by moving to more sociological and economic levels of analysis. The concluding reflection offers a survey of what the social scientific research reveals about both the positive and negative effects of religion.

Scholars and laypeople alike are interested in religion, and many more still are interested in how to lead a meaningful life—how to flourish. The collaborative undertaking represented by Religion and Human Flourishing will further attest to the perennial importance of the questions of religious belief and the pursuit of the good life, and will become a standard for further exploration of such questions.

1

Meanings and Dimensions of Flourishing

A Programmatic Sketch

Miroslav Volf, Matthew Croasmun, Ryan McAnnally-Linz

I

One of the major challenges in the current research about human flourishing—about the good life, happiness, well-being, the true life, the life worth living, and other designations under which the topic is discussed—is lack of agreement on what we mean by “flourishing” and its many near synonyms. The disagreement is not surprising. For there is no way to determine “objectively” what it would mean for human beings to flourish. The reasons for this are many, but first among them is that flourishing is a normative idea; it names what kind of beings humans ought to be and provides the orienting criteria—the “tables of value,” to use Friedrich Nietzsche’s phrase—for what they ought to desire and how they ought to live.

Given the normative character of human flourishing, it follows that the sciences have both an indispensable and limited role in helping clarify what we mean by “flourishing.” For no amount of knowledge about what was, what is, and what is likely to be can determine what ought to be. Various sciences can and should inform our reflection on the meaning of flourishing, but they cannot set its basic meaning. They must, rather, assume it. When it comes to flourishing, the main role of the sciences is to enlighten us about human behavior (in a given culture) and identify the most effective means by which we can come to flourish in the way we have on other grounds (or no grounds at all) determined that we ought to.

If we were to give up on privacy and allow all data about us to be collected—all our correspondence and other interactions, data about our health, the history of our purchases, all the books we’ve read and comments about them we’ve made, etc.—a complex algorithm would be able to come up with an exceptionally accurate account of our behavior, even know us in many regards better than we know ourselves; it would fairly reliably predict what we would do in many situations. But the one thing it wouldn’t be able to tell us is what we ought to do. The algorithm could tell us what we actually desire and what we find desirable, even what we aspire to find desirable, but it couldn’t tell us what we ought to desire. The same is true of science.

To get clarity on the meaning of flourishing, we need to engage not so much in scientific research as in philosophical and religious reflection. The great philosophers—from Socrates to Simone Weil—present us with the most rigorous forms of reflection on the meaning of flourishing. The great religious traditions—from Hinduism and Judaism to Christianity and Islam—offer the most enduring communities of living and attentive reflecting about alternative visions of flourishing. And of course, traditions that fall somewhere in between religion and philosophy, like Buddhism and Confucianism, do so as well. These diverse traditions have long been the main sources of our visions of flourishing life. They remain relevant even, and perhaps especially, in a modern world in which visions of the good life have been privatized and are often embraced as changing individual “dreams.”1

II

If we cannot derive visions of flourishing from the results of scientific research, what reasons do we have to embrace any of them? Most would agree that such visions, whether explicitly or implicitly held, are essential to human life. Some would argue that since they, ultimately, set goals for human action, their importance only increases with the exponential growth in knowledge and technology.2 But the need to have them in general is not a sufficient reason to embrace any one of them in particular. One option would be to say that all accounts of who human beings ought to be and what kinds of tables of value they should embrace are arbitrary. But then the best we could do would be to accept a kind of new polytheism of ultimate goals, a tension-laden pantheon of countless private and national gods.3 The unhappy marriage of science, which uses reason to pursue truth but cannot set human purposes, and myth, which articulates a vision into which human beings should stretch themselves but is devoid of reason, would then be our best option.

Advocates of the world religions and great philosophical traditions that emerged through axial transformations were never satisfied with a polytheism of values.4 As they saw it, visions of human flourishing and the accounts of the self, social relations, and the good upon which they rest, involve truth claims that can be rationally evaluated. They believed that the marriage of “mythos” and “logos” could be a happy one.5 Especially in recent decades, religious scholars and philosophers have developed sophisticated procedures to assess rationally the comparative epistemic advantages of rival versions of flourishing life and the interpretations of reality associated with them.6

None of us can stand outside of these rival visions of flourishing, even as we try to survey the landscape of contending visions and assess them. What follows is our proposal, as Christian theologians, of how best to frame the theological and philosophical reflection required to ground our research into—and pursuit of—flourishing life. We begin by articulating a three-part formal structure for visions of flourishing. We then illustrate each of the three aspects by considering thinkers who have placed just one of them at the center of their visions of flourishing. Finally, we sketch (in very broad strokes) an integrated vision of flourishing within our particular religious tradition by constructively engaging the theology of St. Paul.

While we expect that some aspects of the formal structure we propose will be useful as a heuristic through which to understand and compare different visions of flourishing across religious and philosophical traditions, it will also become apparent that this formal structure serves us well in our constructive work as Christian theologians. We invite others, working within other traditions, to offer revisions to our proposed formal structure, or, indeed, replacements for it that are more genial to their work articulating their own visions of flourishing.7

III

Our proposal builds on Nicholas Wolterstorff’s argument in Justice: Rights and Wrongs.8 Wolterstorff writes in opposition to a tradition of thought that is concerned mainly with the quality of humans as agents—their acts, practices, and virtues. He argues for a vision of the good life in which humans show up also as patients—“patient” being used here in the ancient sense of being affected. Humans are bearers of rights, he argues, and therefore certain things are owed to them; receiving what is owed to them, and not just doing what they ought to do, is essential to their flourishing. Leading life well is not all there is to flourishing. Life going well matters too.

Our proposal is an expansion of Wolterstorff’s: we flourish when, in addition to leading life well (agency) and life going well (circumstances), life also feels right to us (affect). It is predicated on the belief that emotions, such as joy or sorrow, are neither merely active (produced by the agent) nor merely passive (a reaction to some outside stimulus) but are activo-passive. As we experience an emotion, we are, in one undivided experience, both affected and active: we are, in a particular way, actively relating to the way “objects” affect us. Even more, emotions partly contribute to the construction of the objects that affect us, to their appearing to us as objects of a particular kind.

Life led well refers to the “agential” dimension of the flourishing life, to the good conduct of life—from right thoughts and right acts to right habits and right virtues. Life going well refers to the “circumstantial” dimension of the flourishing life, to the desirable circumstances of life—be they natural (like fertile, uncontaminated land), social (like friendships or the absence of war), or personal (like certain kinds of genes or a well-functioning body). Life feeling as it should is about the “affective” dimension of the flourishing life, about “happiness” (or contentment or joy), empathy, and the like.

Fig. 1.1 Three domains of flourishing: agency, emotions, and circumstances.9

IV

In acquainting ourselves with these three aspects of flourishing, it may be helpful to consider three thinkers that see the whole of flourishing life largely through the lens of just one aspect. Our account of each will be brief and insufficiently nuanced; its purpose here is to illustrate an option and cast the three aspects in sharp relief so as to make evident their distinction from one another.

Let the ethics of ancient Stoics, people like the emperor Marcus Aurelius, serve as an example of an account of flourishing, or the good and true life, understood primarily as a matter of agency, as life being led well. The possession and exercise of virtue, they argued, is not just necessary for flourishing, but sufficient as well. Flourishing human beings are self-sufficient. Reliance on external goods would make a person dependent and therefore detract from their flourishing. Though health and wealth are to be preferred to sickness and poverty, people can be virtuous and therefore happy even if they don’t get what they prefer. The Stoic relation to emotions was more nuanced than their relation to external goods like health and wealth. Though they viewed most “passions” negatively, as reflecting and reinforcing undue investment in things outside of one’s control, they insisted that certain “good passions,” including joy, will be by-products of the virtuous life. The flourishing life is preponderantly one of virtuous agency, not of positive feeling (which, in a strictly limited form, flows out of virtuous agency) or adequate external goods (which, strictly speaking, are irrelevant).

Fig. 1.2 Stoic priority of agential flourishing.

Fig. 1.3 Marxian priority of circumstantial flourishing.

Let the economic and social theory of a modern thinker, Karl Marx, serve as an example of an account of flourishing understood primarily as life going well—or, rather, let one plausible, though perhaps not the most compelling, interpretation of Marx serve as such.10 The communist society is primarily one of right technological, economic, and political circumstances. True, the revolution will bring about a transformation of moral agency; human beings will no longer treat either themselves or others as mere means and will engage in free, creative activities while their individual and communal interests coincide. But the revolution will neither come about mainly through moral critiqu...