What makes people happy? And what is happiness anyway? My parish priest recently wrote in her bimonthly letter that happiness is something that comes and goes but joy lasts for ever. I must say I did a double take on reading this, since most people (including yours truly) tend to use those two words precisely the other way around. Happiness is usually taken to mean a long-term settled state, more or less synonymous with contentment but more intense (“...and they lived happily ever after.”). Joy on the other hand is a bird of bright passage which flicks you with its wing and is off again, leaving you with a startled smile on your face.
Everyone wants to be happy but happiness in this life is unevenly distributed and we have very little control over who is lucky enough to attain it. W S Gilbert put it very well in one of the lesser known songs in The Mikado:
See how the gods their fates allot:
For A is happy, B is not.
Yet B is worthy, I dare say,
Of far more happiness than A!
In English, the words ‘happy’ and ‘happiness’ are related to the verb to happen. Happy originally meant lucky. It still does in German, where the cognate of ‘luck’ is Glück and the word glücklich means both ‘happy’ and ‘lucky’. The translators of the King James Bible mostly used the word in that sense: “Happy is the people whose God is the Lord!” means, “Aren’t we lucky to have such a powerful god on our side and not against us!” It doesn’t necessarily imply that this will lead to a contented life. History shows just the opposite. Tevye the milkman in Fiddler on the Roof probably speaks for most Jews when he says, “I know we are Your chosen people, but can’t You just once in a while pick on someone else?”
The ancient Greeks were profoundly irritated by the idea that happiness was just a matter of good or bad luck. They thought that it ought to be attainable for any man who approached the subject rationally and was prepared to put in some hard work. A great deal of Greek philosophy is about how to be happy in your life. Aristotle thought that happiness came from living virtuously. Zeno and the stoics thought it came from apathea, a deliberate refusal to let adversity and bad luck upset you. Epicurus thought that the happiest lifestyle was one of austere simplicity liberally sprinkled with little carefully-rationed pleasures like raisins in a cake. He also emphasised the importance of staying out of politics! Diogenes and the cynics thought that the most important basis for a happy life was to “do your own thing” without caring what anyone else thought of you. But all of them, I think, were concerned with a settled state of being which, once attained, would remain with you.
Surprisingly the Bible has almost nothing to say about how to be happy and contented in the long term but a great deal to say about joy and rejoicing. Joy is one of the “fruits of the Holy Spirit”, meaning that it is expected (along with love and peace) to show up in the lives of mature Christians. That little flicker of amazed delight is apparently meant to come often. And the frequent instructions to “Rejoice!” suggest that we are expected to help it along and not just wait for it to happen.
The word ‘rejoice’ is interesting because it is clearly a verb corresponding to the noun ‘joy’ whereas there is no verb corresponding to the adjective ‘happy’. The philosophers may have agreed that there are ways of living that lead reliably to happiness (even if they could not agree on what these are!) but there does not seem to be a simple mental operation that you can carry out to make yourself happy right now. If there was, we would surely have a name for it. But we do have precisely such a word for a mental operation that produces joy. It is also a very common word in the Bible. We are constantly being ordered to rejoice. As, for example, in Philippians:
“Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say ‘Rejoice!’”
Since Paul wrote in Greek but probably thought in Hebrew, I can’t help wondering who he has in mind as the Lord in this passage: Adonai Elohenu, the Lord our God, whom he was brought up to worship, or Mar, the Lord Jesus. Probably it was both, since “I and my Father are one.”.