A worthy life is an ordered life.
Did you ever not stand up for a friend because you wanted to fit in? In the moment, you wanted to fit in so bad, you didn’t speak up when someone was mocking your friend, or you didn’t make sure your friend was included in something that you know they would have wanted to be invited to? In that moment, you weren’t a good friend. But you got to be included in something. Being included is a good thing. Being loyal is also a good thing. That moment you still remember, maybe from when you were a kid in high school and you so wanted to be in with the popular kids you threw your old friend who you grew up with under the bus? (figuratively speaking here, please – if literal, we have bigger problems)
You felt bad, but you did it. You knew it was wrong, and you did it anyhow. How many times have you been presented with two good things, and chosen the one you knew was wrong in that circumstance? For me, too many times to count. The problem isn’t the thing you chose, it’s the ordering that is the problem. Being included in the in-crowd in itself is fine. But loyalty to friends should come before being included in the in-crowd. What you did wrong was you got things out of order.
Did you play the game of desires that I talked about in last week’s RWL #454? Let’s refresh - pick from the list the thing you are most willing to have less of:
· Pleasure (enjoyment of experiences)
· Wealth (financial success)
· Power (influence)
· Honor (respect)
The question is less of, not none. For example, if you choose wealth, it doesn’t mean you have no money and live under a bridge. It means you have less than the average person. Maybe just a little less. For your average person, consider your peer group, and base your responses on them as a reference point.
You progress through the list, identifying your next least important until you get through all four. This gives you your order of desires. The last one standing is the thing you desire most. The thing is that all of these are good things, and it is natural to desire all of them, but we don’t all order them the same. I like the elimination approach because I think it is easier to say what you don’t want.
Unlike being disloyal to a friend, there isn’t a right order to the four desires. The way you order the desires will shape your life. If you really value wealth most, you will likely come to have more wealth than your peer group, because your attention will bend toward the generation of wealth. You will build your life around it. If it is honor, you will make different choices, and if it is power, different again. We may not be able to articulate these preferences initially, which is why playing this game is useful. The four desires are directional in a macro sense. They will predict what you will be drawn to, and what you will pursue. You can pursue these desires in a good way or a bad way. In my example of betraying a friend so that you would be included in the popular crowd, you put your desire for honor over justice (shame on you!).
As I talked about in last weekend’s FITW, the thinkers of Classical Antiquity (the Greeks and Romans), believed that there was a natural order to the universe, and that included a right order of living. They appreciated each of the four desires, but to live rightly, you must subordinate those desires to higher goals, such as justice. So, while it doesn’t much matter the order of the four desires, it does matter that you pursue them in a right manner, putting virtues, such as justice, above your own achievement. As I talked about in The Very Happy Gangster, you can achieve deep meaning but still be unworthy by violating the tenets of commutative justice (violating someone else’s person, property, or promises made to them).
The early Christian theologians placed honoring God at the top of a properly ordered life. In The City of God, St. Augustine wrote, “When the miser prefers his gold to justice, it is through no fault of the gold, but of the man; and so with every created thing.”[1] Like you, betraying your friend, Augustine’s miser chooses wealthy over justice. So the miser might know he could do good with his gold, but chooses to simply hold on to it because he desires wealth more than justice. This is a disordered preference. It’s not wrong to want to be wealthy, but it is wrong to not use your wealth to do good. (Not wrong in the legal sense – wrong in the sense of leading a worthy life.)
Augustine argues that since God is behind all creation, all created things are the result of Him.
These are Thine, they are good, because Thou art good who didst create them. There is in them nothing of ours, unless the sin we commit when we forget the order of things, and instead of Thee love that which Thou hast made.
Since he has made everything, we should love Him and remember that everything springs from Him. He uses the example of beauty to make his point:
And thus beauty, which is indeed God’s handiwork, but only a temporal, carnal, and lower kind of good, is not fitly loved in preference to God, the eternal, spiritual, and unchangeable good.
Beauty is one of God’s creations. To love beauty (in this case he was talking about men desiring women) and not recognize that beauty is impermanent, and only a Platonic emanation from God, is to fail to see and appreciate the true order of things. The right order of love for Augustine is to love God first, then love his creations. To love things more than to love God is to be disordered in your loves. Sin springs not from loving things other than God, but in getting them out of order. Beauty is good, but to love beauty (I would lump beauty under pleasure, but it could also be wealth, honor, power) over higher goods is to be disordered. A disordered life is likely to be an unhappy one. Augustine goes on to say:
For though it be good, it may be loved with an evil as well as with a good love: it is loved rightly when it is loved ordinately; evilly, when inordinately.
The problem is not loving good things but getting your priorities right.
I don’t think we have to engage God, as Augustine does, to appreciate his lesson about ordered loves (though you certainly can). You can think of the pinnacle as an abstract set of higher virtues, such as justice and being just, loyalty and being loyal, that you put ahead of all other desires. You will pursue wealth by being an honest and hard-working person, not by stealing. You will pursue honor by earning it from developing your talents and helping people, not by being manipulative and deceitful.
I think a lot of people are unhappy because they have a disordered view of life. They lose sight of virtue and assume all rich people must secretly be thieves, so they can be dishonest in their dealings. They assume honored people must secretly be hypocrites, so there is no harm in deception. People who put career (wealth, honor) before family have a disordered life. When their marriages fail, when their kids don’t want to be around them, it’s because they have failed to properly prioritize. Career success is good. Family is good. Career success to some degree is necessary to care for family. Going too far, becoming disordered, is the problem.
For me, proper ordering is to first not violate commutative justice. Then, to the degree it is different from complying with commutative justice, to meet all your obligations. From there, the road to worthiness, which is the ultimate goal, is almost always through service. I think that is fairly consistent with Augustine. A worthy life is an ordered life.
[1] Augustine quotes are all from Augustine, City of God, XV.22, trans. Marcus Dods, https://www.logoslibrary.org/augustine/city/1522.html