What is joy, anyway?

Considerations on the Topic by Ratzinger, Pieper, Baars, and Schmemann

Prefatory Note: In a previous post, I announced that I was beginning a year-long effort to articulate the gospel according to Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. This is the third installment in that series.

The Gospel supposedly brings joy, but what is joy, anyway? What does this word mean? To what reality does it point? I concluded the preceding article by raising such questions. These are pressing, urgent questions, because they lay a foundation for Christianity. In fact, Fr. Alexander Schmemann says Christianity proclaims “the only joy possible on earth.” And, “without the proclamation of this joy Christianity is incomprehensible.” And, again, “It is only as joy that the Church was victorious in the world, and it lost the world when it lost that joy, and ceased to be a credible witness to it. Of all accusations against Christians, the most terrible one was uttered by Nietzsche when he said that Christians had no joy.”¹ To say Christianity has no joy is to say it is dead and we have killed it. To kill joy is to kill off Christianity.

Before speaking of Christian joy, the teasing-out of which will be done in successive articles, I would like to address a more foundational question: What is joy? I will briefly trace the considerations of four thinkers on this topic, before noting the points of convergence that will inevitably surface for readers.

Joseph Ratzinger

According to Ratzinger, joy is a certain peace or harmony one has, or enjoys, when he acquiesces with his or her own being. Joy is that resting in the “yes” that one utters towards his or her own existence — a sign of affection toward oneself that says, “It is good that I exist.” It is self-acceptance, and, as such it is peace and inner harmony. Ratzinger says:

The harmony [man] enjoys with himself. He lives in this affirmation. And only one who can accept himself can also accept the thou, can accept the world. The reason why an individual cannot accept the thou, cannot come to terms with him, is that he does not like his own I and, for that reason, cannot accept a thou.²

Quickly, then, we see that the kind of self-acceptance Ratzinger has in mind has nothing to do with the sickness of egoism. Instead, it has everything to do with love. For the one who loves himself or herself and who abides in this affirmation, this one can love others—love the neighbor as self. The command to love neighbor “as yourself,” means, as Ratzinger puts it, “that self-love, the affirmation of one’s own being, provides the form and measure for love of one’s neighbor.”³

The terrible reality, however, is that one cannot accept him or herself due to an awareness of one’s own fault in breaking down relationality with others through the failure to love. In other words, the reflective person sees his or her sin, sees him or herself as one who does not love others as one ought, and, as such, sees him or herself as who is unacceptable or unworthy of self-love. To say this again in simple terms, for Ratzinger, joy is the peace or harmony I experience when I accept myself. The problem is, he says, I cannot accept myself as I am. I, that is, the whole of me is wholly unacceptable. Incapable of self-love, one finds perfectly accepting others difficult or altogether impossible.

Is there any way out? Is there an exit from this ubiquitously lonely and maddening situation?

Ratzinger responds, saying, “Of ourselves, we cannot come to terms with ourselves. Our I becomes acceptable to us only if it has first become acceptable to another I. We can love ourselves [and others] only if we have first been loved by someone else.”⁴ He adds, “Man is that strange creature that needs not just physical birth but also appreciation if he is to subsist.”⁵ For Ratzinger, joy is only possible for the one who has been loved. It is a relational reality, then. Beyond mere feelings, it is a byproduct of love — an accepting of myself in light of the acceptance of another.

Let us leave the world of theology for a moment and cross over into philosophy (a line that does not have to be so black and white, and, indeed, has not always been so black and white). Ratzinger owes much in his treatment on joy, to his philosophy professor, Josef Pieper.

Josef Pieper

For Pieper, too, the basis of joy is love. Joy is something of a byproduct of love, of being loved. Here, Pieper quotes Sartre, who notes that we must “feel that our existence is justified” in order to be joyful and in order to love others. This is the way out of the conundrum Ratzinger notes above (i.e., joy resulting from self-acceptance, yet I cannot accept myself). The way out is love — being loved. Pieper elaborates, saying:

It does not suffice us simply to exist; we can do that “anyhow.” What matters to us, beyond mere existence, is the explicit confirmation: It is good that you exist; how wonderful that you are! In other words, what we need over and above sheer existence is:to be loved by another person. . . . Being created by God actually does not suffice, it would seem; the fact of creation needs continuation and perfection by the creative power of human love.⁶

To illustrate the point, Pieper offers the study of René Spitz, the Austrian-American psychoanalyst. Spitz studied babies born in prisons and raised by their mothers there, in those harsh confines. He compared these with other children who were raised without their mothers, but by nurses in impeccable children’s homes. The results were stunning: the babies raised by their own mothers fared far better than those without. While the nurses met the institutionalized babies’ basic needs, they were missing the sweetness of the mother’s smile.⁷ Georges Bernanos put this beautifully, when he says, “That very sense of powerlessness is the mainspring of a child’s joy. He just leaves it all to his mother…Present, past, future — his whole life is caught up in one look, and that look is a smile.”⁸ A mother gives her child not only physical life, but also love, appreciation, and acceptance. A mother gives her child a smile, and that smile says it all. And that smile is the source of the child’s joy.

With Pieper’s philosophizing, we’ve already crossed into the area of psychology. So, let’s officially head there next.

Conrad Baars

Conrad Baars, a Catholic psychologist writing in the mid-twentieth century, explains that our ability to perceive ourselves as good, lovable, desirable, and worthwhile is necessary to possess ourselves strongly and firmly. This sense of “firmness” results from having been affirmed. Consequently, it depends upon another human being’s gift of af-firm-ation. Affirmation offers what Baars calls a “psychic re-birth” — a becoming aware of oneself as good. “The earlier in life one receives this gift,” Baars says, “the sooner one’s growing interior sense of firmness and strength enable one to cope with the world, to contribute to the world one’s own strength, and to share one’s happiness with others.”⁹

Affirmation must be received as a gift given by another. It cannot be strong-armed out of the other, begged for, or striven for. You cannot go fishing for affirmation. Fishing for affirmation is the surest way to kill the chance of genuine affirmation because it eliminates the gratuity and initiative of the other. Instead, as Baars puts it, affirmation is a gift offered by one who:

1. is aware of, attentive, and present to your unique goodness and worth, separate from and prior to any good and worthwhile thing you may do or can do, and

2. is moved by, feels attracted to, and finds delight in your goodness and worth, but without desiring to possess you, or use you, or change you, and

3. permits his or her being moved by and attracted to you to be revealed simply and primarily by the psychomotor reactions—visible, sensible, physical changes—which are part of “being moved.”¹⁰

For Baars, one’s ability to stand in himself, to love himself, results from his own self-revelation (i.e., his being itself revealing its goodness to another), the reception and affirmation of that goodness (by simply receiving the goodness of my being and delighting in it), and the resulting peace and security that comes from being able to accept and delight in myself in light of the other’s delight. He explains:

What I am can only be received by the other who gives me his or her full attention, who is present to me and becomes aware of what I am, and knows that I am good and worthwhile. The other who wills his awareness of me opens his consciousness to my being and comes to know, that is, possess my goodness. The other’s evident finding delight in my goodness will be perceived by me. I am revealed to myself as good. I have received from the other what I am. I am no longer alone. I have been linked to another human being in this process of affirmation: not by communication of what I have, but by the revelation, the communion of what I am. In friendship, the greatest gift my friend can give me is himself. In affirmation, I receive an even greater gift: myself.¹¹

For Baars, then, joy results from affirmation. It is a byproduct of another’s loving acceptance and affirmation of the goodness of my being. Joy is a sense of security in oneself that depends upon the security of relationship.

Alexander Schmemann

Orthodox priest, Fr. Alexander Schmemann speaks of joy as a kind of “fullness.”¹² He calls it “a ‘jolt of happiness,’ of fullness of life.”¹³ For Schmemann, joy is a mystery. It is not something one can “define or analyze. One enters into joy.”¹⁴ It happens when something happens. When something bigger and more whole confronts man and invites him into it. Think, for example, of the Sabbath, “the participation by man in, and his affirmation of, the goodness of God’s creation.”¹⁵ The Sabbath celebrates God’s seeing that his creation was good and his blessing of it, and only then, his rest. “The seventh day,” Schmemann says, “is thus the joyful acceptance of the world created by God as good. The rest prescribed on that day, and which was somehow obscured later by petty and legalistic prescriptions and taboos, is not at all our modern ‘relaxation,’ an absence of work. It is the active participation in the ‘Sabbath delight,’ in the sacredness and fullness of divine peace as the fruit of all work, as the crowning of all time.”¹⁶ Sabbath joy, like all joy, comes from receiving something as gift, as good. Ultimately, it is the delight that results from God’s cosmic affirmation of the goodness of creation. And with this, we’re already sliding into topics for successive articles. So, I will stop here.

Conclusion

By this point, the converging lines of thought across disciples become quite clear: in every case, joy results from affirming love given to me by another. It has to do with the other seeing my goodness (i.e., the goodness of my being), delighting in it, and making that goodness and their delight known to me. In other words, my joy depends upon another. It is a relational reality and not a feeling that emerges within me at random. It is also not the result of my own efforts. Instead, it is a byproduct of being loved by another such that I can love myself in light of the love shown to me.

1. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 24.

2. Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 79.

3. Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, 98.

4. Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 79–80.

5. Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 80.

6. Josef Pieper, About Love, 27.

7. See Josef Pieper, An Anthology, 37–38.

8. Georges Bernanos, The Diary of a Country Priest, 14.

9. Conrad Baars, Born Only Once (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016), 12.

10. Baars, Born Only Once, 12.

11. Baars, Born Only Once, 15.

12. Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 67.

13. From The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann

14. Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 25.

15. Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 50.

16. Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 50.