Relocating To Elfland

“Happiness is . . . a word with multiple meanings. The question ‘What is true happiness?’ can only be finally answered on the basis of the answer to another question: What is the chief end of man? But the age of reason had banished teleology from its way of understanding the world, and so ‘happiness’ had no definition except what each autonomous individual might give it. Each individual has the right not only to pursue happiness but to define it as he wishes. Moreover, there is a further element of pathos in this idea of the right to the pursuit of happiness. Medieval people believed with great seriousness that final happiness lay on the other side of death. They did not expect it in its fullness on this earth. But the methods of modern science provide no grounds for belief that there is anything beyond death. Hence, the whole freight of human happiness has to be carried in the few short and uncertain years that are allowed to us before death ends it all. The quest for happiness becomes that much more hectic, more fraught with anxiety than it was to the people of the Middle Ages.” (Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, pp. 26–27)