The Not Martian but Human Complete Set of Working Instructions for Happiness

Own CJS Hayward's complete works in paper!

Michael: Robert Heinlein, in Stranger in a Strange Land, wrote, "Happiness is a matter of functioning the way a human being is organized to function... but the words in English are a mere tautology, empty. In Martian they are a complete set of working instructions." Would that we had such a set of working instructions!

Photios: But such exists, or rather such is not needed.

Michael: How? I've read Stranger in a Strange Land and can still only guess at it.

Photios: This reminds me of a forum where a young Asian told of some white guys driving by in a car and making "Chinese-like sounds" at him, and asked, "What about these white suburbanite middle-class..." and one of the more liberal members of the forum said, "Question asked, question answered."

Michael: Ok, I'll bite. What's your point?

Photios: Well it's hard to talk about Stranger in a Strange Land without discussing sex, and I'd like to start there.

In the real world, outside of the novel, there have been many studies to determine which maverick experiments make for the greatest sexual happiness. And to the dismay of the people running the study, the answer, unless they are willing to lie outright, is that a married couple in the traditional sense, straight, faithful, lifelong, no porn, open to parenting children, experiences far and away the greatest pleasure and overall happiness. And this is a finding of dismay because the assumption is that if you're really going to have a good time, you've got to be breaking rules, and the question "Which rebels against traditional marriage have it best?" meets the one entirely unwelcome answer: "Traditional marriages have it best."

Heinlein posits one maverick arrangement. Ok, this doesn't constitute maverick now, but it did when Stranger in a Strange Land first came out, and it was a point Heinlein needed to make with a sledgehammer. He posited free love within a tightly guarded nest. And on that point I would recall a counselor who said that after decades of seeing people in every conceivable living arrangement and some he couldn't conceive, only underscored more strongly that the traditional rules about sexuality are intended for our benefit and not to keep us away from the good stuff.

You seem to assume that the "complete working manual" would be some super-secret or super-elite document only available to a few, or some super-secret way of reading the Bible or whatnot. But remember the maxim learned by many in the military: "When you assume, you make an ass out of U and me!" There is something as good as a complete working manual, and your assumption is one best dismantled.

Michael: Oof. What about the Paleo diet or lifestyle: what do you think about that?

Photios: I practice a modified form of it, but I don't preach it much more than I preached about the diet I practiced before then. And to be an un-modified form of the Paleo diet is at least a concession in Orthodoxy.

Michael: So Orthodoxy and its cooking traditions have a scientifically better basis than the Paleo diet?

Traditional Orthodox diets are based on the kinds of food people ate after the agricultural revolution; unless you believe the earth is younger than the agricultural revolution's dates, no matter where you draw the line for the first humans, the departure from hunter-gatherer living is only an eyeblink compared to the total time people have been around.

Photios: And most Orthodox saints believed in a young earth; I don't share that belief, let alone the crypto-Protestant "Creation Science" that was popular with Fr. Seraphim (Rose) and unknown to most saints. But that is beside the point.

Michael: Then what is your point? Why is the Paleo diet not scientifically superior?

Photios: I do not hold any other diet to be superior, on scientific grounds, to the Paleo diet. But scientific grounds are not the only grounds to judge by. Never mind that the authors of Proverbs were scientifically illiterate by our standards. The proverb still stands: Better is a dinner of herbs [including bread] than a fatted ox and hatred with it.

Michael: Can't we allow for greater ignorance in the past?

Photios: We can allow for different ignorance, but not greater ignorance—and what an odd thing for a Paleo devotee to say! And thinking about some things on materialistic terms is a material error.

Michael: Such as?

Photios: Once upon a time surgeons would do surgery with dirty hands, horse spit and all, and Pasteur's revolution came by and said to be sanitary, which is why to this day the preferred medical practice is for surgery to be done in as sanitary and sanitized conditions as possible.

And over-zealots of Pasteur's style of sanitization thought that the best way to give an infant a best shot at life is to keep things as sanitary as possible, and for all this "Emperor's New Clothes" improved sanitary conditions, the infant mortality in hospitals was atrociously high. And then someone had the very unscientific idea of bringing in old women to touch, cuddle, and hold infants for half an hour, or an hour, or two hours or whatever each day. And infant mortality plummeted overnight. With that one change, many more infants survived early hospitalization.

And something of the same error relates to kissing icons. Materialistic-minded people wince at kissing something that other people have kissed—but it is an overall strengthening, not weakening, that comes from paying reverence to icons and relics. And you can push it more forcefully and say that it's as unsanitary as kissing all those people on the mouth, and for that matter the two or three kisses on the cheek given occasionally in some jurisdictions and frequently in other jurisdictions are a tamer version of kissing on the mouth—in fact, by liturgical implication, the kiss on the cheek by implication is a kiss on the mouth. And in areas of helping infants survive the beginning of life, or kissing icons, or kissing Orthodox Christians, the Pasteurized version is the wrong route.

It's not just that we are justified in taking a health detriment if we do not practice Pasteur's idea of sanitation. We actually are better off even in matters of health. With what is known about touch and the beginning of life, it would now be a foolhardy proposition to eliminate touch as far as possible from a baby's life in order to obtain good sanitation. And with what is known about touch at the beginning of life, it is not considered ethical to explore the effects of reducing touch in infants' lives. It is, however, ethical to explore the effects of increasing touch in infants' lives, for instance by placing a newborn infant against its mother's body for thirty to forty-five minutes before going to business as usual, and the effect of increased touch is not only decreased mortality but greatly improved well-being.

And if I may quote a second snippet from the Bible: Train yourself in godliness; for while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come.

The Paleo Solution says that exercise is important and diet is indispensible. I would rather say that exercise and diet may be important, but godliness is indispensible. Perhaps the past few thousand years have been aberration from the naturally good diet our race has enjoyed, but however adamant we may be that Paleo living is better, keep in mind that the Bible and many of the Fathers lived in cultures where everyone up to the king ate bread as the main food, and it is bread and no other food that is honored in the Eucharist and in prosphora. You may hold if you want that it is seriously damaging to eat even the purest organic whole grain bread, but the Bible got its work done during millenia and cultures where the main staple food was bread, and the Gospel was much deeper than getting back paleo hunterer-gather eating and living. And hospitality trumps fasting in Orthodoxy, hospitality should trump diet as well. And that is the biggest area where I make the most concession against the paleo diet; I gratefully accept hospitality as it is given. If you're far enough in the paleo diet that breaking its rules actually makes you sick—I'm not—then maybe it is appropriate to explain your dietary needs, but insofar as much as it is possible, let hospitality alike trump fasting and diet.

Michael: None the less, there is something haunting, something I wish to be true, in "Jubal learned that... (f) it was not possible to separate in the Martian tongue the human concepts: 'religion,' 'philosophy,' and 'science'..."

Photios: Well said indeed, and you can have something better than a hope such things can be. Instead of hoping for things from another world, you can enjoy, in the legal sense, the things in this real world from whose pierced side they were taken. Religion, philosophy, and science are inseparable in "Physics", and I encourage reading it.

But let me take a step back, far back. Let's look at the world of television commercials, or a glitzy animated commercial on the Internet. Whether selling cars or clothing, internet access or movies, they are selling escape from the here and now. It may be a car, almost invariably portrayed as sensual, mysterious, and intimate—which are really not what we would best do to seek in a car—but a car that delivers from the burden of the here and now. Clothing adorns the wearer and relieves the wearer of the necessity of appearing as she appears here and now. Internet access is more than just bandwidth; it is portrayed by people who have escaped the here and now. Or a movie or a video game; you have seen the commercials blanketing people recently and saying everyone has a bit of a soldier in them. What they are selling is escape into another world.

On this point I would like to talk about the predecessor to the present Archdruid of Canterbury, who would have flatly have denied that any escape from reality satisfies, or perhaps that there is anywhere to escape to but reality. And even that way of talking violates his writing; in the ancient world, one said, "_______ said _______," while in the modern world one says both "_______ said _______," and "_______ would have said _______." And this transformation is deep enough that students, trying to understand what a past author wrote, find it natural and not in the least provocative to ask, "What would _______ have said about ________?" when everybody in the room knows that the author never touched on the matter in question.

On this point, Anselm, admittedly after the schism, and for that matter Muslims are right. It is not the case that there are a large number of "possible worlds" and we happen to inhabit one of these fantasy-like worlds; there is a reality that Allah or God has created, and it is fundamental confusion to escape it, even in thought. So Stranger in a Strange Land makes a world where free love within a circle of people is allowed—and after ripping marriage apart re-constructs quite a large chunk of marriage in his free love. A man is not forbidden to seek love outside of his nest, but once inside the nest he is entirely free from desire for anyone outside of the nest. That is a reconstruction of what Heinlein has dismantled in marriage: one might speak of marriage as a nest of two, only a nest where fidelity represents not an inescapable preference but a legitimate and freely given choice. Heinlein divorced repeatedly, but a nest of water brothers is permanent. Stranger in a Strange Land's nest of water brothers is drawn from the wounded side of reality, only this time it is not the Lord's doing. Eve may have been drawn from the wounded side of Adam, and the Church may have been drawn from the wounded side of Christ, pouring out blood and water, but this is a matter of "Satan cannot create, he can only mock", and having rejected the real cistern: [M]y people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. And this is the choice of escape: to forsake the fountain of living water, and draw frorm the wounded side of reality broken cisterns that can hold no water. If you read Within the Steel Orb, it peddles escape and seemingly alien wisdom, but it is a mutilation of reality that is offered: the session about controlling the telescope is in fact based in riflery, but if it were not taken from riflery it would have to be taken from somewhere else. And the session about dropping Einstein's name and claiming to ponder the deeper implications of relativity could just as well have been written in a story set in this world, or for that matter in actual live discussion.

And the emphatic choice of cannibalism among the book's features is if anything further proof that there is no other reality out there to draw on. In terms of épater la bourgeoisie, cannibalism delivers shock and presumably offense. But, while Heinlein compares the alien Martian world's cannibalism to the Eucharist at some point, and indeed it is an obvious comparison, one has to ask, "Where is the profound draw to cannibalism except for allowing something that is forbidden?" It is not clear to me, or to many others, what the advantage is of having one more form of meat available and even in the book the prevalence of cannibalism does not offer clear and sincere benefits like the water brotherhood, or great psychic abilities (or both water brotherhood and great psychic powers) that Heinlein builds up in the book. If you want to eat forbidden food, forbidden at least in American culture (which does not offer the only set of rules around), you can eat animals that are kept as pets and companions: eat dog, cat, or horse. All three of these are edible, and for that matter there are cultures on earth where any or all of these are permitted food. But if the question arises, "What is the benefit of eating these animals beyond the foods permitted in American culture?" I don't see what the substantive answer would be, except for something related to our emotional reaction at the thought of eating a pet. The Paleo Solution and the call to return to more recent historical diets in Nourishing Traditions might never forbid eating cats, dogs, or horses, but neither one paints a nutritional picture where we are advised to eat the kinds of animals we keep as pets because they provide something we can't get, or can't as easily get, from eating animals Americans think of as meat. Come to think of it, neither text suggests that Jews or Muslims are missing out on any needed nutrients if they don't eat pig or other unclean animals. The Paleo Solution argues that there are essential amino acids and essential fats but no essential carbohydrates: "essential" meaning something we need and our bodies cannot make from other foods. However, there is no suggestion at all that we need to eat more types of meats, let alone cherished dogs, cats, and horses, let alone human flesh, to be properly nourished. Now the Martian culture which was big on cherishing things admitted cannibalism of loved ones was a way of cherishing them, but even then the Wikipedia provides a motive for cannibalism that offers a more serious incentive than having yet another form of meat: "Both types of cannibalism can also be fueled by the belief that eating a person's flesh or internal organs will endow the cannibal with some of the characteristics of the deceased." This belief, which would offer some real motivation to desire "Martian" cannibalism, is entirely absent in Stranger in a Strange Land, and friends and killed enemies are both eaten without distinction for "food".

Michael: Who are you to make such a judgment?

Photios: Let me tell you about one person who decided he was going to be an icefisher, so he purchased a bunch of equipment, walked over on the ice, and started to drill down. He got down two inches before a deep, booming voice said, "There are no fish there!"

He looked around and quietly moved his equipment over 50 feet, and started to drill there. No sooner had he started than a deep booming voice said, "There are no fish there either!"

He picked up his equipment, moved over a hundred feet, looked around before drilling, when the same voice said, "Nor are there any fish there!"

He looked around and said, "Who are you, God?"

The voice said, "No! I'm the arena manager!"

I'm not the arena manager, but I am an arena employee.

Michael: [Pause] So we should all become monks, or something like that? I've heard some people say that every Orthodox Christian is called to be a monastic.

Photios: Every Orthodox Christian is called to be an ascetic, and asceticism, or spiritual struggle, is the beating heart of monasticism. And monasticism is higher than life in the world.

Michael: So married life in the world is sort of a "monasticism lite"?

Photios: Erm, kind of.

Michael: Meaning, "No."

Photios: Meaning, "No." The monastic who is saved is saved through the struggle of monastic ascesis, and the married man who is saved is saved through the struggle of caring for a family. Monasticism is higher than married life in the world.

Married life in the world is not the highest path, but it is not improved by trying to make it "virtual monasticism." Maybe a monk requires obedience to a spiritual father, and an intentionally disruptive sleep cycle, and food deliberately cooked to be as bland as it can be. Married couples have another yoke to bear, and it is a sad thing for people to get married and then "try to make up for it" by imitating monasticism. Marriage is not a sin, but holy matrimony. And it brings with it childbearing, if God so wills, so that the couple is no longer living for themselves alone but for their children. You might have heard the saying, "Men love women. Women love children. Children love pets. Life isn't fair." But if we return to the Heinlein quote you gave a while back, "Happiness is a matter of functioning the way a human being is organized to function... but the words in English are a mere tautology, empty. In Martian they are a complete set of working instructions." Happiness in monasticism is functioning the way the monastic ascesis is organized to function, and happiness in married life in the world is functioning the way the married ascesis is organized to function. It may happen that a couple marries, has children, much later live together as brother and sister, and then split off to separate monasteries. In that sense celibacy and marriage are not mutually exclusive, and the couple is still considered to be married even if they have passed the realm of carnal knowledge. But even this is not normative to marriage; it is one of many forms holiness takes.

And here a man is reminded of Confucius's Analects, and its "ritual", which the Western mind may have trouble understanding because in the West "ritual," if not used metaphorically to speak of someone always giving a speech at family reunions, has a religious center of gravity. But in Confucius's whole realm of thought, "ritual" was something like a graduation ceremony or a town parade, with a civic center of gravity. And on that point someone speaking to Confucius praised someone else for doing ritual very well. And Confucius, answering somewhat indirectly, essentially said, "Ritual dictates that only a monarch may place a gate in front of his door, but he has a gate in front of his door," and mentioned one or two other areas where the man in question usurped privilege that did not belong to him. The implication is a strong criticism: this man, who is praised for his performance in ritual and who probably worked much harder to do ritual correctly than most, undercuts it in a way that is reminiscent of tithing mint, dill, and cummin, and neglecting justice, mercy, and faith. Performing the details of ritual correctly really didn't help much for someone who lacked the humility that ritual was designed to foster. At heart, placing a monarch-like gate in front of his door made him less, not more, like a monarch, and in fact placed him further from the monarch than if he did ritual, in a way that was proper to his station, without copying the privileges of people in a higher place.

Michael: Well, at least it's an obscure phenomenon, limited to people who are trying to be devout in the wrong way.

Photios: Obscure? Obscure? Obscure? The entire question of feminism hinges on a confusion that is the fruit of the same tree.

Michael: How so?

Photios: Let me quote three passages that sometimes you'll see even conservatives trying to balance out, for instance by comparing what is asked of wives with what is asked of husbands:

But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.

I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet woman will be saved through bearing children, if she continues in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.

Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, be subject to your husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. "For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh." This mystery is a profound one, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church; however, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

Michael: And what do conservatives have to say for these, besides the fact that they are old and are culturally conditioned?

Photios: Well, they might start with the obvious and say that you are culturally conditioned.

Michael: And then what?

Photios: And then that someone who eats from the million year old paleo diet as the food that is optimal for Homo sapiens should not dismiss a two thousand year old text as just too old to be worth listening to.

Michael: Ouch. And then what?

Photios: Well, in the last and longest quote, compare what is asked of husbands and of wives and who bears the brunt of the pleas. The wife is told to submit to her husband as if to the Lord. And yes, I've checked the Greek. "Wives, submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord" is a minor mutilation. The text says, "Wives, submit to your husbands as if to the Lord."

But the burden of the text—incidentally, in the densest passage in the New Testament for references to the Church—falls on husbands. If wives are called to show the Church's submission to Christ, husbands are to lay down their lives and die for their wives if needed. If wives bear the duty of submitting to their husbands as the Church submits to Christ, husbands are called to lay their lives down for their wives as Christ laid down his life for the Church. Wives are called to give to their husbands what the Church gives to Christ; husbands are called to give wives what Christ gives to the Church. One might say that the sigil of male headship and authority is not a crown of gold, but a crown of thorns. People coming to this text afresh might be staggered at how much more is expected of husbands than of wives. And the same people might be even more staggered that the text is politically incorrect because of the claim it makes on wives.

Michael: So the text evens out to be egalitarian after all.

Photios: What was the venom the Serpent poured into Eve's ear? Egalitarianism! "You shall be as gods," meaning "You shall be equal to some greater than you." And let's pause for a moment.

There was a time—it happened to be brief, but that is beside the point—when the Serpent had stung Eve but Adam still reigned as mortal. Eve already felt the seed of death growing in her heart, even though it would be long years before the venom grew to the point of killing her completely. And let's think about what was in her heart. She was mortal; Adam was still immortal. At some point she would die, and then what? God said, "It is not good for man to be alone;" would Adam simply be celibate? Or would rather God not give her another immortal wife, to be his forever? Was there anything Eve could do to prevent Adam reigning immortal as another woman's husband?

Michael: Ouch.

Photios: It is said in some witchcraft that you knowingly allow a demon to possess you. And when that moment comes, you realize that you have allowed evil into you the same way you know that you are violently ill. You may not repent in the least, but demons are never merciful to those they inhabit. Perhaps they enable magic; but they never give the glow of spiritual health, nor can they.

Eve knew and felt the seed of death growing in her heart, that in her attempt to be like gods, she had lost her godlike ladyship over the whole Creation. And she made her second egalitarian move. The first move was to try to be equal to "gods", perhaps exalted ranks of seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, powers, authorities, principalities, archangels, and angels. And her second egalitarian move was to make Adam her equal in mortality. And she succeeded; as the Serpent stung Eve, so Eve stung her then-immortal husband who would otherwise outlive her and belong to another woman.

This is the politics of envy. This is the root of the war on educational excellence. This is the radix of Janteloven. This is the vice that moved Saul to seek David's murder as soon as he heard, "Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands." Envy says, in essence, "I don't care if we're three feet tall or ten feet tall. All I want is that you not be taller than me." In conversations that cross denominations and confessions, one can say with Calvinists, "We are totally depraved and stunted in our spiritual growth; we have a spiritual height of about three feet." Or one can say with Orthodox, "The image of God is present even in the most hardened sinner; the most spiritually astute Orthodox, especially monastics, find much good in the people they see; so we are at a spiritual height of about six feet." But woe to the unwary soul who says, "Monastics are six feet tall and laity are five feet tall," or "Clergy are six feet tall and laity are five feet tall," or, to give a hypersensitive trigger, "Men are six feet tall and women are five feet tall." That will unleash an explosion that dwarfs any response to Calvinists saying, "We are totally depraved and steeped in sin; we are spiritually three feet tall, if even that." Better to say that everyone is exactly one foot tall than to say that heights vary somewhere around six feet and on average most men are taller than most women, let alone that men have one role and women another.

And this general point, perhaps more focally dealt with in matters of men and women, has to do with a broader sense of pseudomorphosis affecting all modern life. Are you familiar with the term 'pseudomorphosis' in its usual Church usage?

Michael: I've heard... things like icons being painted in a more Western fashion, or that figure... what was it... Cyril Lucaris, the bishop whose "profession of faith" really had much more to do with Calvinism than Orthodoxy; there was that book, called Protestant Patriarch, which I suppose I should read. I think there's more, but I'm forgetting the examples. Wait, there was also something about people thinking theology was philosophy whose subject-matter was God...

Photios: Yes; the term 'pseudomorphosis' in Orthodox culture is something like the term 'Oreo' in African-American culture, for someone who is black on the outside but too white on the inside, and acts white. The examples you gave of pseudomorphosis are all valid.

Michael: Ok, so we've established the meaning of 'pseudomorphosis.' What next? Do we need to say anything more to establish that the politics of envy, as you call it, is no ingredient to human happiness?

Photios: We haven't quite established it, not yet, because I want to use it as a metaphorical springboard to discuss something else.

Michael: What is that something else?

Photios: 'Pseudomorphosis' in standard Orthodox usage is a bit of a hydra; it's not easy to pin down, but in traditional Orthodox unsystematic fashion, it is possible to get a sense of it. As I am using here, it has to do with all sorts of things in modern living. The paleo dietis one attempt to remedy a pseudomorphosis. I will not say if it succeeds or fails, but what it attempts to do is replace "foods" that are an anomaly in the human diet and which our body is not really well served by eating, with foods that are the standard tradition diet of the human race. The book also covers some other things, like what kind of artificially added exercise will best simulate the active lives of our forbears, and here at least I am not so interested in whether it succeeds or fails as the implicit powerful recognition that we are in an iron mask under unnatural conditions. If one were to ask Robb Wolf who he would intend The Paleo Solution to, if economics etc. were no obstacle, I believe he would answer, "Everyone who is not a hunter-gatherer today."

That is one aspect of pseudomorphosis. Another aspect is how men and women are understood, or misunderstood, and how sex is seen. Another aspect is the politics of envy. Another aspect is how so many of us spend large chunks of time looking at a flickering screen.These are five of maybe a hundred holes that are being drilled down into the ice, and the arena employees' lungs are sore from shouting, "There are no fish there!"

Michael: Then where are the fish?

Photios: Some centuries back, though this may seem hard to imagine now, philosophy was understood differently; in our day philosophy is understood as an academic discipline, as something with arguments you study and respond to, and philosophy has always been that to an extent. But in ancient times philosophy was first a way one walked and secondarily about ideas. And a number of people, all men I think, arrived at the conclusion that the truest way of philosophy was that of monasticism, which kept things alive from Plato, for instance, that do not necessarily live in a philosophy department today.

The observation that monasticism is the height of a certain understanding of philosophy, where like Mike's Martians' philosophy, religion, and science are inseparable, is a profitable observation whether or not one is a monk. The Ladder of Divine Ascent, to pick one classic, addresses perhaps two sentences of exhortation to those outside the monastic world, but it has been read, it is said, with utmost spiritual profit to Orthodox in all walks of life. Perhaps the letter in its strict sense should not always be applied to laity. There is still much of benefit, as with the Philokalia the book Orthodox Psychotherapy is essentially a realization that before Freud began positing theories about what can go wrong with us, and how what is tangled in us can be untangled and freed, the Orthodox Philokalia which could be called 'the science of spiritual struggle,' takes on that territory and does a better job. And perhaps it would be better to talk with one's priest about reading selections; reading the Philokalia when one has not been prepared for it can be an exercise in frustration. But this is best done with the consultation of one's priest.

Michael: So, with all of this said, what can I get that will make me happiest?

Photios: Well, if you're thinking in terms of dollars, let's say you get however many million dollars you think would make you happy. Then you will discover that you still have all of your problems and the money doesn't keep you happy—at least not for long. So you will have the rare opportunity to be wealthy beyond your wildest nightmares, and perhaps after you have one luxury after another lose its glamour, failing to give either lasting satisfaction or happiness, that you will come to a realization worth every penny of your millions of dollars: in seeking happiness from wealth, you might as well have been trying to coax a stone to lay an egg.

Michael: Then is there no hope?

Photios: So faith, hope, love abide, these three. Hope remains; you just have to look for it in the right places. You are assuming that your happiness will come from what you get, but you make a living by what you get and a life by what you give. [T]he Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many, and this is the key to the happiness of functioning as a person is organized to function. Forbes's survey of the happiest jobs in America found that there was little correlation between job happiness and the amount of money made: and in fact one of the twenty happiest jobs is one of the few Americans feel the need to cover up with euphemisms: no one is a plain old secretary any more; they are all executive assistants, administrators, and the like. But notwithstanding the fact that America thinks being a secretary needs a euphemism, being a secretary ranked as one of the twenty happiest jobs in America, alongside bank tellers who serve clients by helping them with financial nuts and bolts, and some customer service representatives. And there is a very simple reason for that. Among many others, secretaries serve.

And that is, if we may return to Heinlein one of the three keys that unlocks "Happiness is a matter of functioning the way a human being is organized to function... but the words in English are a mere tautology, empty. In Martian they are a complete set of working instructions." Now Michael Valentine Smith mentions 'faith' as belonging among the list of obscene words Jubal told him not to use, and he is emphatic: not faith but climbing the peaks of spiritual discipline. However, the Philokalia in its embrace of faith does climb the peaks of spiritual discipline. And all of these are a preliminary that many people don't need; human fulfillment is found, not in being served, but in serving. Such was Christ's act; such was his example.

Not that reading the Philokalia is necessary to salvation. Monks have reached the peaks of mystic contemplation without having any books; among the many notable monastics who never read anything, and in fact did not know how to read, is St. Mary of Egypt. And one minor clergy said, "There are two books you do not read: the Philokalia and the Rudder," not because they are bad—they are arguably the second and third most important collections to Orthodoxy outside the Bible—but because they have raw industrial strength power that has not been selected, boiled to essentials, and then packaged in a way that will just fit anyone who reads it. The Philokalia is a collection of texts at all various levels of spiritual maturity, and the Rudder is basically a book of rules for bishops to apply with strictness or leniency as is pastorally appropriate to the situation. And the Rudder has some of the most valuable rules the Orthodox Church owns; but it still should not be confused with ordinary devotional materials designed to build up and edify the lay faithful. And one may adapt St. Paul and say, "If I have all manner of knowledge of antiquarian texts and I read the Philokalia and the Rudder, but I do not serve in love, I am nothing."

Michael: So then it's all we learned in kindergarden?

Photios: There are all sorts of minor insights along the way. There is a Rabbinic tradition of having a kelal, a nutshell that for its brevity none the less concentrates the distilled essence of Scripture; such as, He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?, and what I am going to quote is not a kelal; it's from the rest of the Scripture and has something of a character of a footnote. But Ecclesiasticus tells us, Honor the physician with the honor due him, according to your need of him, for the Lord created him; for healing comes from the Most High, and he will receive a gift from the king. And there is a place for exercise; there is a place for diet. There may be also a place for "Let the buyer beware", because fads come and go; the author of The Paleo Solution all but killed himself trying to eat healthily by being a vegetarian; the paleo diet is posed to be the next fad diet and that is reason to view it carefully. The medical community, like many others, has its fads and changes its conclusions much more quickly than developments in research would warrant. Still I wouldn't make these things the center. "Honor the physician..." is not a kelal at all, let alone one that should be the rudder of your life.

Michael: If I may ask, what is the greatest kelal?

Photios: It's one endorsed by a rabbi you've heard of.

Michael: Sorry, but I'm really not up to par on all things Jewish. Could you quote it for me?

Photios: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.