The Four Levels of Happiness^®

Happiness is the only goal that people pursue for its own sake, which makes it an ideal lens for explaining why people and organizations behave as they do. The Four Levels of Happiness model shows leaders how to elevate the powerful drive for happiness and direct it toward shared goals, strong ethics, and great performance. Click here for a full description of the Four Levels.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ask Fr. Spitzer

Can You Be Ultimately Happy Without Faith?

Q: I know from the Four Levels Defined page on your website that the fourth level is ultimate or transcendent happiness. My question is, can you be a Level 4 person but not be religious or practice any faith in the traditional sense of that word?

A: Let me offer you my opinion on that. I think people of all backgrounds and beliefs can experience transcendent happiness – and I believe we all have an innate desire for it – but it is a rare thing to find a person who is a Level 4 dominant without faith in God. And the reason it’s rare is that Level 4 without God is impersonal, and it’s harder to make something impersonal the center of your life than it is to put a relationship at the center. I’m not saying it can’t be done or that there aren’t people who do it – there are. But it’s rare.

I could give examples from history of people like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who really tried to live a life devoted to transcendental principles – ultimate good, truth, beauty, justice, and love.  At times, they described these ultimate principles in an impersonal way, and at times, they described them in ways that sounded more personal – more like God. So they did have a form of faith and piety. In fact, they weren’t atheists; they were rational monotheists – believers in one God – which got them in trouble with the authorities. They were accused of corrupting the youth, because they distanced themselves from the gods of Athens.

More recently, you had the transcendentalists, people like Emerson and Thoreau. They believed in an ultimate unity or transcendental principle that pervades nature and points beyond nature. They didn’t pray to it, but I think they felt at home with this transcendental principle in as much as it was manifest in nature. But I don’t think you could say that they lived for it.

Today, you have people who may not call themselves transcendentalists, but they also believe in an underlying unity in the cosmos, and they may pursue it through science, or philosophy, or art, or nature. You can call it the searching soul or the searching mind, but we’re hard-wired to look for ultimate causation, ultimate purpose, and ultimate beauty and love.

You can call it the searching soul or the searching mind, but we’re hard-wired to look for ultimate causation, ultimate purpose, and ultimate beauty and love.

Even if you don’t believe that the ultimacy you’re searching for will respond to you, you could still be transformed by contemplating it and feeling absorbed by it. And there are people who feel that getting close to this ultimate but impersonal principle is at the center of their life, so in that sense, you could say they are living for it. But it’s far more common to find people who believe in a transcendent, non-Godlike principle but don’t live for that principle, day in and day out. It’s an affair of the mind, not an affair of the heart.

And frankly, many people of faith are in the same boat. They believe in God and they try to live their faith, but their faith isn’t so deep and pervasive that a relationship with God has become the dominant source of happiness in their lives.

So although we’d love to achieve Level 4 happiness through our faith, many of us won’t make the choices one needs to make to get there in this world. But our faith tells us that we can get there in the world to come.

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Last changed: Oct 22 2009 at 10:17 AM