Can limits be essential to happiness? The idea that limits contribute, let alone are essential, to happiness or living well is inimical to most modern views. Over 175 years ago the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote that “attempts are made nowadays in so many ways to free men from all bonds, beneficial ones as well.”[1]

In the previous post[2] we saw that Psalm 1 should be considered as a serious contribution to the philosophical question concerning the nature of human happiness. In this post we begin to look at how Psalm 1 answers that question.

With Kierkegaard, the Scriptures agree that there are “beneficial” bonds or limits, and they do so against the main currents of modern thought. Modernity’s rejection of beneficial bonds is so radical and permeates so much of our current attitudes, even on a subconscious level, that it is perhaps best to outline the general modern perspective before explaining the biblical outlook.[3] Beginning with modernity will then help us to appreciate better the biblical view of living well and enable us to examine whether or to what extent we have been influenced by modernity.

In this essay we shall examine four crucial issues in which the biblical worldview clashes with modernity’s. Here are the four main questions that relate directing to living well.

1. Are limits beneficial?
2. What is the consequence of belief in or the existence of God?
3. Who defines man?
4. What is human freedom?

In order to explain modernity’s answers to these four questions, we shall do this by looking briefly at Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean Paul Sartre, two of the most influential atheistic philosophers of the modern era.

Modernity: Friedrich Nietzsche

In The Happy Science, 343 Friedrich Nietzsche proclaims that “God is dead,” which he explains as “the belief in the Christian god has ceased to be believable.” The death of God is the “background of our cheerfulness,” he claims.[4] Nietzsche expresses his joy at the death of God in the following way. “How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns” (125)? Notice in this justly famous passage the elimination of boundaries and limits—wiping away horizons, unchaining the earth from the sun. In this “higher history than all history hitherto” (125) there will be no suns, nothing limiting man. Significantly, Nietzsche asks, “Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy” of causing the death of God (125)? The idea of God is the ultimate limit. Without it, we can be truly happy and free with no limits imposed upon us.

Modernity: Jean Paul Sartre

While Nietzsche is ecstatic over the death of God, Sartre, to say the least, is a bit more soberminded. He is also more consistent and insightful. In his book Existentialism and Human Emotions Sartre employs a helpful analogy of the paper cutter to explain the basic existentialist tenet “existence precedes essence.”[5] The craftsman has a concept of a paper-cutter to carry out the function of cutting paper. He then makes the paper-cutter. Therefore, the concept of a paper-cutter, its essence, precedes its existence. Analogously, God the creator has the concept of man and then creates a man. Therefore, like the paper cutter, man’s essence precedes his existence, and, crucially, is born with a nature given to him by God.

Atheistic existentialism, the philosophy Sartre adheres to, denies that there is a God and so there is no preexisting essence. “… man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards, defines himself.” His existence precedes his essence and therefore “there is no human nature, since there is no God to conceive it.” “Man is nothing else but what he makes himself.”[6] Of all the living things in the universe only human beings define who they are, thus creating their own nature.

The fact that there is no God that limits humans by defining them means that man is free, indeed, radically free. Freedom is not just the capacity to make choices; it is also the making of our own nature without a god who predefines us. However, Sartre famously states, “man is condemned to be free.” In every action, and he must act, man is defining himself, “condemned every moment to invent man”[7] In choosing, man also “invents values.” There is no externally imposed law. Without God “life has no meaning a priori.”[8] Man gives to life meaning and value. In contrast to Nietzsche’s joy at the death of God, Sartre states that the emotions of an authentic life are anxiety, despair, and forlornness. Since man creates his own nature, invents himself, and gives life meaning and value, Sartre concludes in a manner similar to Nietzsche, “man is the being whose project is to be God”[9]

Modernity: Conclusion

Modernity’s answers to our four questions of what it means to live well are:

1. Limits are not beneficial to living well.
2. Belief in the existence of God is the great limit that keeps man from living well.
3. Man defines himself.
4. Human freedom is choosing to be what we want to be.[10]

In different ways, both Nietzsche and Sartre agree on these basic points of what it means to live well. They see the existence of God or the belief in the existence of God as the fundamental limit on man. Once God is cast aside, man is not limited, but free. He is free to be what he wants to be.

As can be well imagined the contrast with the biblical view in Psalm 1 could not be starker. Let us turn to that contrast in Psalm 1.

Psalm 1: Law the Blessed Limit

After stating what the blessed man does not do, Psalm 1 affirms that the blessed man “delights in the law of the Lord and meditates on it day and night” (v. 2).[11] There may be no word that speaks to us more obviously of limits than the word “law.” It is true that most of us will admit, perhaps grudgingly, that the threat of punishment for breaking laws can keep us from harming one another. Law in this sense could be seen as a good, but only in a preventive sense of inhibiting human evil. However, even granting this limited good to law, most of us would say that delighting in it and meditating on it day and night is scarcely the hallmark of the happy or good life.

Before going too far, it is rightly pointed out that torah, the Hebrew word translated “law,” means direction or instruction. The biblical meaning of torah is not as limited as we normally understand law. Although it does include specific regulations and prohibitions, torah or the law is not merely a list of regulations that one must do or prohibitions against certain actions. Rather, torah is a comprehensive guide to thinking and acting wisely. While true, this broader understanding of torah or law will still be viewed by modernity as a negative limitation for three reasons: its source, its form, and its comprehensiveness. All of these reasons will lead back to the fundamental contradiction between the biblical view of reality, which is theocentric or God-centered, and modernity’s view, which is man-centered or anthropocentric.

Psalm 1: The Law is from the Lord

The source of biblical law is the Lord. Torah is authoritative instruction revealed by God. The law or torah is “of the Lord,” which clearly denotes the law’s divine authority. It comes from the Lord. The divine and authoritative nature of the law can be seen clearly in Deuteronomy 1 when Moses is restating the law to the people of Israel before they enter the Promised Land. “Beyond the Jordan, in the land of Moab, Moses undertook to explain this law” (v. 5). In his explanation he begins with “the Lord our God spoke to us in Horeb” (v. 6), which refers to the giving of the law on Mt. Horeb or Sinai in Exodus 20. The Lord spoke the law. He revealed it. As such, the law had divine authority. It did not and does not come from man. We do not establish what the blessed or happy life is. Its source is other than us. We do not determine finally what the happy life is. God does, and modernity’s anthropocentric philosophy at the outset is explicitly opposed to the Bible’s theocentric view of life.

Secondly, as coming from God, the law must be obeyed. Torah comes in several forms—promises, instructions, counsels—but one of its primary forms is that of commandments. As Deuteronomy 1:3 states, “Moses spoke to the people of Israel according to all that the LORD had given him in commandment to them (Deut. 1:3 ESV).” The Ten Words, with reason commonly called the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, consist solely of commands to do something or prohibitions that command us not to do something. We humans in this fallen world have a natural tendency to resist commandments that we must conform to. It should come as no surprise then that much modern thought strongly opposes the idea that anyone should define for me how I should conduct my life, especially a divine source from which there is no appeal.

Modernity’s resistance to the command form of the law becomes even stronger when we consider its third reason for opposing biblical law as the guide to living well—the comprehensive nature of the biblical concept of law. Three times Psalm 1 speaks of a “way.” There is the way of the sinners (v. 1), the way of the wicked (v. 6), and in contrast the way of the righteous (v. 6). The way is a defined pattern of life. There is no separate and limited religious category. The way is comprehensive, directing and shaping all of life. The righteous person conforms to God’s law, follows a path that God has laid out and that he approves of.

As we said in the previous post, Psalm 1 is a wisdom psalm. In the Bible, wisdom refers both to an understanding of reality and to how one is to relate to that reality in life. A true understanding of reality and actions properly conforming to that reality shape one into a wise person, or, in the case of Psalm 2, a wise ruler. For this reason, the wisdom psalms, such as Psalm 1, are addressed to all people calling them to live wisely. A life of wisdom is characterized by attitudes and actions that make for a blessed or fulfilling human life.

The Bible’s answers to our four questions of what it means to live well are:

1. Limits are beneficial to living well.
2. Belief in the existence of God enables humans to live well.
3. God defines man.
4. Human freedom is to be what we are.[12]

So, in contrast to the human-centered or anthropocentric views of Nietzsche and Sartre, Psalm 1 teaches that the good life is God-centered or theocentric. It is not to set out on one’s own without limits, making your own path and self. Rather biblically there is a path already laid out for us, which ultimately is the Lord’s path that we follow. One is not trapped or frustrated by something that is not our creation. One gladly enters the path, walks along it, and conforms to it. Freedom then is not to be what we want to be. Freedom is to be what we are, as created by God.

The next post will reflect on the benefits of the good life and how one obtains them. In the meantime, I would suggest examining your attitude towards law and meditating on Psalm 19:7-14 to appreciate the biblical view of the law.

[1] Works of Love, translated by Howard and Edna Hong (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) p. 119.

[2] “Psalm 1 Raises a Universal Question,” https://billisley.com/2024/07/psalm-1-raises-a-universal-question/

[3] I am using “modern” and “modernity” in a nonspecific sense of the major trend of philosophic thought beginning in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment up to today with regard to the four main questions discussed in this essay. I am well aware that one can distinguish between, say, Enlightenment rationalism and postmodernity’s critique of it or even post-post modernity.

[4] I am using The Portable Nietzsche, ed. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Viking Press, 1968). The work is a collection of aphorisms, hence, 343 in the text. I shall just refer to the aphorism number, which will make it easy to encounter the quotation in any edition of The Happy Science. I have refrained from using the common title The Gay Science because modern usage of the word ‘gay’ could create confusion.

[5] Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1957), pp. 13-14.

[6] Ibid., p. 15.

[7] Ibid., p. 23.

[8] Ibid., p. 49.

[9] Ibid., p. 63

[10] An interesting radical application of the modern rejection of limits is the identity issue, the right to choose one’s own gender, race, age, and apparently, even species. The biological limits in these areas are considered limits that inhibit one from choosing to be what they want to be. Appeals to the science of biology against this rejection of limits is considered oppressive and hateful. These issues would take up an entirely new post, but I will briefly state that this latest development in modernity is a kind of return to the ancient gnostic heresy in which the body is not the true you, but some internal and incorporeal reality is you, which needs to escape from or overcome the limits of the body.

[11] As always, unless otherwise noted, the English Standard Version of the Bible is used.

[12] The Bible’s answers to questions three and four will be developed more fully in future posts that discuss God as man’s creator.