If happiness is something that you have a right to pursue and not something that you have a right to, then, be aware of the fact that wishing someone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year does imply that you hope and trust that the recipient of your wish will make a serious effort to pursue happiness. If this is indeed your intention, you might do well to accompany your New Year’s wish with a hint as to how that pursuit of happiness might bear fruit. Quite miraculously, that hint can be found in the very word happiness, be it that we first have to translate it into French.
Bonheur
While he served as United States Minister to France from 1785 until 1789, Thomas Jefferson translated into French the Declaration of which he was the principal author: The Declaration of Independence. In his translation, Jefferson, who was well versed in the French language, chose the word “bonheur” for “happiness”. This is how the key part of the Declaration’s Preamble …
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
came to read in French as follows …
“Nous tenons pour évidentes pour elles-mêmes les vérités suivantes: tous les hommes sont créés égaux; ils sont doués par le Créateur de certains droits inaliénables; parmi ces droits se trouvent la vie, la liberté et la recherche du bonheur.”
Celestial beatitude
While, in the simplest of terms, “bonheur” means “good fortune” and “good luck”, according to the Académie française, it also means a state of perfect internal satisfaction (“état de parfaite satisfaction intérieure”), “supreme and eternal happiness” (“le bonheur suprême, le bonheur éternel”) and even celestial beatitude (“la béatitude céleste”). Given the fact that, at least according to Jefferson and his fellow Founders, the unalienable right to pursue “bonheur” was endowed to Man by his Creator, it’s safe to say that the Latter had celestial beatitude or eudaimonia in mind when He endowed the former with this right.
The Great Between
This explains why, inevitably, the pursuit must take place in the reality that has always existed between Man and God, between the World’s Genesis and the Beyond, between the Mundane and the Divine Ground of Being, between the “plain” and the “mountain”, between death and immortality, between the finite and the infinite. Philosophers conscious of this “Great Between” named it metaxy. The metaxy, so they said, engenders a gravitational interaction between its poles, a “pulling” and “thrusting” force whose natural orientation steers Men’s search for order and meaning in the direction of their own Beginning and their Genesis at the Divine Ground of Being.
Pursuing eudaimonia
How then, one may ask, does Man pursue eudaimonia? The answer to this question can be found in the very word “bonheur”, which is composed of “bon” and “heur”. “Heur” comes from Latin “augurium” (augury), which means a divination based on the close observation of signs and omens, and, by extension, a prediction, foreboding or prophecy. A “bon heur” thus means a good prediction. This is how the word bonheur not only defines eudaimonia as the goal of the pursuit, but also provides guidance as to how the pursuit can be successfully accomplished. Man was endowed by his Creator with the unalienable right to pay close attention to those signs in the metaxy that show the way to the encounter with his Creator as his eternal Partner in the search for his Genesis at the Divine Ground of Being.
Overcoming challenges …
Admittedly, the metaxy is not the Garden of Eden. It is the playground where the raw physical and the ethereal metaphysical worlds meet and intertwine, where human meets human and divine. So it is that any truthful and honest metaxic search inevitably engenders an immediately perceivable and experiential ‘First Reality’ that necessarily involves the tensions that the sometimes challenging and unhappy clashes between the incompatible aspects of that reality will entail. In fact, the tensions and challenges become an integral and configurative part of that reality. These tensions, and the opposing elements of reality that cause them, must be confronted, defined and made intelligible for them to be dealt with, overcome and resolved, so that, eventually, eudaimonia, Happiness, Bonheur will befall.
I wish that your New Year will be filled with …. BONHEUR !!!
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