True enough, work to many people is irksome, a mere “job,” worth only the wages it earns or the consumption and leisure it makes possible. (The word “job,” you might like to know, originally meant a mere “piece or gob of work,” defined in Samuel Johnson’s dictionary as “a low mean lucrative busy affair; petty, piddling work.”) True, too, not everyone can find work to which he or she is well suited, never mind called. Still, these empirical difficulties do not affect the main point: real work can – and for many people still does – all by itself provide a life that makes sense, a life of intrinsic meaning and purpose, a life that lifts the worker to the fullness of his or her being, and beyond. Most readers of this book are probably blessed with work of that sort. And all of us have encountered the joy of work among artists and artisans, teachers and nurses, firemen and police, soldiers and social workers, businessmen and clergy, and myriad other occupations, from the lofty to the low. Finding meaning in work generally depends less on the external task than on the attitude and manner in which the work is done. Witness the differing answers of three laborers who were asked to describe the work they were jointly doing: “I’m making a living,” said the first. “I’m dragging heavy stones,” said the second. Said the third, “I’m building a cathedral.” Only for the last laborer did the work possess its full human meaning. Only for him was his work a spiritual as well as a bodily exercise.
That work should be central to life’s fulfillment is a very old idea, and it persists because it is rooted in human nature. Aristotle argued that human flourishing is a life of virtuous or excellent activity, where “activity” translates a word of Aristotle’s own coinage, built from a root meaning “work”: energeia, literally, “being-at-work.” For the fullness of who we are is manifested only when we are active, when we are “at work.” To be truly human is to be humanly-at-work, exercising our humanity to the full. And doing so excellently is the heart of flourishing and fulfillment. The pleasure and subjective satisfaction that we feel as a result is merely secondary and derivative; the essence of our happiness lies in the activity itself, in our being-at-work.
Love and Family: Transcending Our Mortality
We human beings are at work not only when we are occupationally working. We are also deeply at work in the activities of love and friendship, and especially when we are actively engaged in family life, the domain of private life in which most Americans find the greatest meaning – and the second area where we need a revitalization of our thinking. Despite high-profile public controversies about the scope and meaning of marriage, millions of Americans still devote themselves, privately and quietly, to providing decent lives and future opportunities for their children. More to the point, many of us regard our families as the heart of what makes life worthwhile. We do so, in many cases, with greater difficulty and less cultural support than did our grandparents. And many of us openly worry that the American future may not be as bright for our children and grandchildren as its present and past have been for us. Yet this very concern bespeaks the importance of our children’s well-being for our own fulfillment.
Why is this so? People offering secular arguments for marriage and family often cite empirical evidence to show that married people are healthier, wealthier, and happier than unmarried people, and that children fare better by every measure when they are reared in a single home by both their parents. These utilitarian arguments are true, but they lack a deeper anthropological account of why love, marriage, and family continue to be central to human flourishing.
Such an account begins with human erotic desire. It is erotic desire that powerfully leads the soul away from its purely selfish preoccupations with comfort, safety, and gain. For many a callow youth, falling in love is the first soul-opening event. And while eros can be notoriously fickle in its choice of objects, when disciplined – especially by the vows and practice of a solid marriage – it can provide for a private life whose satisfactions are among the most enduring blessings life has to offer. Living life under a promise, husband and wife enjoy the practice of mutually giving and receiving love, one to the other. Through devotion and care, informed by the pledge and practice of fidelity, everyday life takes on the character of a sacrament. To be sure, the busy-ness, cares, and burdens of daily domestic life – not to speak of unforeseen economic and medical woes or difficulties with the in-laws – often obscure its deeper meaning, the profundity of the prosaic. But looking back on life’s journey, a well-married couple knows that even – or especially – in facing the most difficult challenges, oar to oar, they have enjoyed fulfillments not available to the unmarried.
But eros seeks more than loving companionship and the comforts of home, bulwarks against the loneliness of a solitary existence. Eros is at bottom also a longing for immortality in the face of finitude, and it seeks to give birth. Human love is not merely possessive and self-serving, a lack seeking to be filled; it is also generous and generative, a fullness seeking to give birth. Indeed, it is the common project of procreation that holds together what sexual difference sometimes threatens to drive apart. Flesh of their flesh, a child is the parents’ own commingled being externalized, and their unification is even more powerfully enhanced by the shared work of rearing. Providing an opening to the future beyond the grave, carrying not only our seed but also our names, our ways, and our hopes that they will surpass us in goodness and happiness, children are a testament to the opportunity for transcendence. A hope-filled repayment forward of the debt we owe backward for our own life and rearing, our children represent also our share in the perpetual renewal of human possibility. In this way, sexual eros, which first drew our love upward and outside of ourselves, finally provides for the partial overcoming of the limitation of perishable embodiment altogether.
It is for this deeper reason that marriage, procreation, and especially childrearing are at the heart of a serious and flourishing human life, if not for everyone at least for the great majority. Most of us know from our own experience that life becomes truly serious when we become responsible for the lives of others for whose being in the world we have said “We do.” It is fatherhood and motherhood that teach most of us what it took to bring us into our own adulthood, engaged in practices that are most fully rewarded when we live to see our children caring for children of their own. And it is the desire to give not only life but a good way of life to our children that opens us toward a serious concern for the true, the good, and even the holy. Parental love of children leads once wayward sheep back into the fold of church and synagogue. In the best case, it can even be the beginning of the sanctification of life – even in modern times.
It is true that many people are denied these blessings, while others practice childless marriage without regret. It is also true that legal definitions of marriage and social designations of “family” are undergoing major transformations. But these facts do not alter the truth of what I have suggested: that we can enunciate a deep understanding of love, marriage, and family – on universal anthropological rather than strictly religious grounds – that would both describe and explain the familial ideals to which many Americans aspire and that would make clear just why those practices embody a transcendent meaning and purpose for our lives. We all must acknowledge that there will be no going back to more traditional views and practices concerning sex and marriage. But it is still possible for us to articulate – and to celebrate – an account of human love and its generative fruit that can be affirmed under present and future family forms. At the center of such an account will be the insight that children are a gift of love, not a product of our will, and that we are most fulfilled in their rearing when we raise them to serve not our present ambitions but their future good, and, indeed, the goodness of life itself.
Love of Country: Fulfilling Public Service
Third, the objects of human loves and longings are not restricted to the private sphere of love and its progeny. Cooler than eros yet not for that reason less potent are the several forms of human philia: philopatria or patriotism, the love of country; philanthropy, the love of fellow human beings; and philosophy, the love of wisdom. Activities animated by these loves and longings still give meaning to the lives of many Americans, even if