Christians Should Be Successful

A thought experiment: think of people you would call ambitious. Now think of ambitious people who have died happy. If the first list was easier to populate than the second, perhaps this points to a problem with the concept of ambition. Without a natural object (ambition can aim at wealth, fame, reputation, pleasure, or any other object) and a natural limit (its desire is always for more than it currently possesses), ambition can never have any natural satisfaction.

We might think that most successful people are ambitious people. Ambition is the gnawing hunger that drives the eventual achievement of success. But a person is successful when they realize their goals – when their desire rests in the attainment of its object. Thus we can more easily think of ten successful people who have died happy than we can ten truly ambitious people who have died happy. Success is difficult to reconcile with ambition, which is rarely satisfied. And those who strive for a successful life need moral resources beyond just ambition if they are going to achieve the excellence of success.

Christians sometimes get queasy when talking about ambition. It can sound too much like the pride and presumption of the Greco-Roman world that Christianity sought to displace and transform. The Romans yearned for honor, grandeur, and glory, but Christ taught us to be humble. Christians strive to be faithful, not to be successful – so the argument goes. But there are good reasons for a Christian to keep the concept of success, provided it is rightly understood. In its most virtuous form, striving for success is the refusal to squander gifts, opportunities, and resources one has received and instead to build upon those endowments toward the attainment of some noble good. This form of nobility and human grandeur fits squarely within the Christian moral life, though Christians have often had to argue for this point against their detractors.

Giorgione, Three Philosophers, oil on canvas, ca. 1505.

When he was not busy inventing chemistry, Robert Boyle worried that a misconceived version of Christianity would rob humans of their grandeur. So when his personal papers were posthumously published in 1691, included among them was “The first chapters of a discourse, entitled, Greatness of Mind promoted by Christianity.” The phrase “greatness of mind” is one English translation of the ancient virtue of magnanimity. In antiquity, magnanimity gathered and perfected the concepts of grandeur, nobility, and virtuous striving. Boyle’s aim in this discourse was to show that “on account of future Rewards, the Christian has much greater Motives to heroic virtue, than the heathen moralist, or philosopher.” By arguing that Christianity promotes human greatness rather than suppresses it, Boyle was anticipating and refuting Nietzsche’s argument to the contrary by about two centuries.

The critique that Christianity robs humanity of its splendor, grandeur, and ambition is often tied to Christianity’s advocacy of humility. Humility is the virtuous refusal to think more highly of oneself than one ought. While it is sometimes thought to be a distinctively Hebraic moral concept, its Greek counterpart is the story of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and plummeted to his death. Icarus lacked the humility that would have saved his life by reminding him of his limits. But humility can go wrong by excess as well as by deficiency, as when the unduly humble person revels in self-loathing or luxuriates in the contemplation of his or her failures and finitude.

It is not too difficult to find various forms of Christian spirituality – from the Desert Fathers to The Valley of Vision – that present this temptation and perhaps even fall into it. This vice of wrongfully lowly self-regard has a name: pusillanimity; it’s a smallness of soul, a fearful devotion of the soul to that which is below its dignity. Christianity commends no vices, therefore pusillanimity ought to be avoided as much as pride. The theological remedy to this kind of self-abasement is to recognize oneself as the recipient of God’s gifts and graces that are renovating and reconstructing all the features of our humanity. Human beings have grandeur and glory resulting from God’s work toward them. If God is the giver of good gifts and his grace is still operative in the human being even after the fall, then the temptation to abase oneself and curate one’s lowliness becomes not a virtue, but a denigration of the graces of God that still mark the human creature.

This self-abasement is not only objectionable for theological reasons. It is a particular danger for social and political reasons as well. While Augustine’s insistence upon human depravity and finitude was most fitting in cultural moments of wild and unbridled optimism, utopianism, and progressivism, such are no longer the times in which we live. Our times are despondent ones, in which innumerable opportunities are offered to us to flee from the task of being human, as if the demands of humanity – childbearing, decay, death – are all just too much for humans to bear. This flight from our humanity appears equally in the fantasy of transhumanism and the nightmare of physician-assisted suicide.

When humanity is in such a state, the self-abasing person needs a virtue that complements humility and prevents it from devolving into the mediocrity and smallness of soul that Robert Boyle worried about. Boyle’s answer was the virtue of magnanimity.

It is likely that a success-driven young person today, bent upon a life of grandeur and nobility, puts more effort into cultivating the skills for a prestigious career than the skills to be an excellent parent.

He argued that for its adherents, the Christian faith held out the same kinds of goods that the ancient Romans and Greeks had desired: immortality, glory, and “a Good Name, Honour, and Dignity.” After all, there are no true human excellences which are not elevated and perfected in the system of the Christian virtues. Paul tells his readers that God “will render to every man according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life” (Rom. 2:6–7).

So then, striving for glory and honor is not only permitted to Christians, but even encouraged by Paul himself. Yet this does not tell us precisely what form of life is the best to attain glory and honor. The Greeks struggled with this uncertainty as well. When Aristotle discusses the forms of life that are honorable, he mentions not only civic leaders and statesmen, but also those who teach us philosophy, who “can get no honor which will balance their services, but still it is perhaps enough, as it is with the gods and with one’s parents, to give them what one can.” Aristotle believed that relationships with one’s parents are always asymmetrical in that one can never fully pay the honor due them for bringing us into this world and giving us the life that is the precondition for all our other gifts. The benefaction of the father “exceeds the [benefaction of kings toward their subjects] in the greatness of the benefits conferred,” which is part of “why parents are honored.” But if the statesman is one candidate for magnanimity, and parents perform even greater benefaction for their children than do kings for their subjects, it seems plausible that virtuous parenting might be a candidate for, or at least expression of, the virtue of magnanimity.

It is likely that a success-driven young person today, bent upon a life of grandeur and nobility, puts more effort into cultivating the skills for a prestigious career than the skills to be an excellent parent, despite Aristotle’s argument that parenting is more honorable than most careers. Parenting, like all forms of care work, is frequently overlooked in the economy of honors. Therefore, one searching for honors and renown might shirk the work of parenting for the work of banking or warfare or other grand endeavors more likely to catch the eye of historians and other luminaries in the economy of honor. But one possible way to relate rightly to an unjust distribution of honors in a society is to opt out of that system and instead to entrust oneself to the honor economy that God confers. This is what the martyrs do, which is why they are exemplars of magnanimity. It is likewise what parents and other caregivers do when they retire from the public eye to perform the honorable (though commonly not honored) work of caring for their loved ones in obscurity. Since it is true that the good of the world “is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs,” as George Eliot writes, it cannot be that our world properly and justly apportions honors in accordance with their due. Sometimes nobility consists in disregarding those honors and continuing with our hidden lives.

When the ancients considered what form of life was the noblest, they would sometimes pit the active life of the statesman or general against the contemplative life of the philosopher or mystic. At the heart of that disagreement is the problem of incommensurability. There are simply too many good things in the world for one life to contain them all. Philosophical inquiry is worthwhile, but so is statesmanship. The writing of sound laws is admirable, but so is leisure. When Christianity came along, it did not solve this problem but radicalized it. The world is so overwhelmingly good, the Christians claimed, that innumerable forms of life could be admirable and praiseworthy. No one life can contain every good – not even the life of Jesus, who never participated in the goods of marriage or parenting or statesmanship or intercontinental exploration or natural science. It is impossible to be both a professional ballet dancer and an NFL linebacker, which does not cast doubt upon the excellence of either vocation. Instead, the wild proliferation of goods in the world points us to the fact that we need a community of people, all pursuing varied forms of honorable success and excellence, to sufficiently enjoy all of God’s goodness. Countless forms of life are open to followers of Jesus – especially modern followers whose lives are a product of choice and curation to a greater extent than most people in history could have imagined.

On first glance, this is a paralyzing thought. The Christian gospel does not deliver precise, action-guiding instruction into which endeavors are worthwhile and which ones are not. Sin is to be avoided, and some fields are inherently sinful, like pimping and lending money at interest. But one looks in vain (though many have) in the pages of scripture for a script of life that details where one ought to live, what career to pursue, what subjects to study. These are questions of prudence, not of direct revelation. What the Christian virtue of magnanimity adds to this is the knowledge that triviality is a threat to the flourishing life. Today’s temptations toward triviality include consumerism, conformism, and the rejection of interiority by subjecting oneself to the economy of reputation management on Instagram. Christian magnanimity is the virtue that refuses each of these temptations by refusing to devote the soul to that which is below its dignity. And Christian magnanimity knows what Aristotelian magnanimity could only dimly suspect: human grandeur, like Christ himself, plays in ten thousand places, all and any of which can be the setting of a noble, grand, and successful human life.