Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David K. Naugle (1952-2021) was distinguished professor of philosophy at Dallas Baptist University. His books include Philosophy: A Student's Guide; Reordered Love, Reordered Lives: Learning the Deep Meaning of Happiness; and Worldview: The History of a Concept, which won the 2003 Christianity Today Book Award in the Theology and Ethics category.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Reordered Love, Reordered Lives

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...............................................................ixPREFACE.......................................................................xi1. A Broken Heart and the Pursuit of Happiness................................12. Disordered Love: Everything I Love Is Killing Me...........................313. Disordered Lives: Seven (and Even More)Ways to Die.........................594. The Gospel: From Futility to the Living God................................875. Reordered Love: The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.....................1176. Reordered Lives: All Things New............................................1457. A Mended Heart and the Deep Meaning of Happiness...........................177Questions for Discussion......................................................207INDEX.........................................................................213

Chapter One

"And yet-happiness, happiness-where is it? Who can say of himself that he is happy?"

Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Introduction

I begin this book with the assumption of a broken heart. If my assumption is premature in your case, it's just a matter of time before the inevitable occurs. The world fractures everyone's heart sometime, somehow, some way, to one degree or another. No one is exempt. In the midst of our difficult circumstances, we feel the weight of our woes and long for some semblance of a happy life once again. Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

In the acclaimed Nasher Sculpture Center in the Dallas arts district, there is a beautiful bronze statue of a woman who seems to embody this inevitable condition of brokenness and pain. The work is by the noted French sculptor Aristide Maillol (1861-1944) and is provocatively titled "Night" (La Nuit). The female figure is folded in upon herself in an upright fetal position with her feet together and her knees pulled up tightly towards her chest. Her bowed head is buried in her crossed arms as they rest atop her knees in an apparent state of weariness and introspection.

What is she thinking about and feeling as she sits there in the dark all alone? Has she simply endured a difficult day? Is she mentally or physically exhausted? Maybe the ordinary challenges of life have just caught up with her and she is in a focused state of self-examination or prayer. Perhaps she is muttering to herself "I am a little weary of my life ... I am weary of weariness and strife," to borrow a wintry sentiment from George MacDonald. Whatever the causes of this woman's "dark night of the soul," we can be pretty sure that her overall happiness or sense of well-being is at stake and under negotiation.

Her crestfallen condition is not uncommon. We too may feel emotionally fragile and depleted; we too may consider our troubles as vast as the sea, as great as a galaxy. Maybe she's asking questions we sometimes ask: Who am I, and what is it I have become? How did my life wind up like this? Will it ever change? Whatever happened to my hope for a happy life? How am I supposed to be happy? What is happiness, anyway? Is the search for it fruitless? The woman represented in the Maillol sculpture, should she come to life, could probably empathize with Leo Tolstoy's conflicted character Anna Karenina, who on one occasion said, "I'm simply unhappy. If anyone is unhappy, I am."

Our lives are often miserable. Is there any sorrow like my sorrow? Is there any pain like my pain? Maybe those who once observed birthdays with tears and celebrated funerals with joy knew what they were doing! Given the injustices and sufferings that seem to rule in the world, perhaps those who believed it was best to expire quickly, or even better, to have never been born, showed remarkably good judgment. How unfortunate we were to be born! How lucky should we die soon!

Then I looked again at all the acts of oppression which were being done under the sun. And behold I saw the tears of the oppressed and that they had no one to comfort them; and on the side of their oppressors was power, but they had no one to comfort them. So I congratulated the dead who are already dead more than the living who are still living. But better off than both of them is the one who has never existed, who has never seen the evil activity that is done under the sun. (Eccles. 4:1-3)

Still, human beings are remarkably resilient. Despite the odds, the hope for a better and even happy life, whatever we think it is, endures in most of us.

Happiness and Human Nature

"Life is just a bowl of cherries." Anonymous

"Life is a bowl of pits." Rodney Dangerfield

Intense interest in happiness - especially our own - is constant in human history, and it is a constant in human history because it is a constant of human nature. As persons comprised of body and soul, we earnestly desire and seek whatever we think it takes to fulfill these combined aspects of our nature. We all aspire to felicity, both mentally and physically, whether we are willing to admit it or not. The components of our nature are fixed, and our compelling needs are unyielding. They scream for attention and demand a satisfying response. This is the unalterable human condition. As C. S. Lewis once noted, "nothing about us except our neediness is, in this life, permanent." Contemporary poet David Hopes agrees:

we are of one ambition and one lineage: Want. Want not in proportion to any need, want unreasonable and overflowing, our days and nights overshadowed with desire....

If we pay attention to our own lives and observe the lives of others, we will soon discern that a desire for happiness of one kind or another is the conscious, subconscious, or unconscious motivation for just about everything we do. Most of our daily lives and activities are aimed at the goal of experiencing and enhancing some measure of well-being and delight, even if such intentions are in the unacknowledged background of our minds.

What besides our own welfare could possibly lie silently behind our feverish educational, vocational, or economic pursuits? Why else would we seek knowledge, career success, or basic material provision, if our own good wasn't somehow at stake? What else other than a sense of joy and fulfillment motivates us in our family relationships, in our friendships, in our recreations, and in our faith? Food and drink, clothing and shelter, while necessary for survival, are also things we desire and seek to enjoy. Why do I do what I do? Why do you do what you do? Here is the answer: we want to live happily, both now and ever after! "In every real man the will for life is also the will for joy," writes theologian Karl Barth. "It is hypocrisy," he says, "to hide this from oneself." Perhaps this is why we tend to think that real gusto is just the next relationship, the next purchase, or the next achievement away.

Like Karl Barth, just about all the great religions, philosophies, and worldviews past to present have confirmed what our intuitions and experiences in life indicate...