By Stephanie Dowrick - The Australian - Australia
Saturday, September 9, 2006
Richard Schoch's invitation in The Secrets of Happiness is to look backwards rather more often than forwards. The view (and views) he reveals are, however, every bit as enticing. Schoch is an academic, professor of the history of culture at Queen Mary, University of London. He is a confident, gifted writer: a great bringer of reading happiness through his clarity, wit and contagious excitement. He opens his book with the glorious line, "Unhappy is the story of happiness", then keeps up the pace.
His take on happiness is to use it, and our desire for it, as a means, especially as a means to explore some differences and similarities in the great religious philosophical traditions, including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism, while also revisiting the theories of the utilitarians, the Stoics and the Epicureans to illuminate our contemporary confusions.
In his chapters on Christianity and Islam, Schoch focuses largely on Thomas Aquinas and the mystical path of Sufism, respectively. (Within Sufism he is especially interested in the work of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali.)
A man of his 13th-century times, Aquinas believed that true happiness could be found only through grace in the life hereafter. Sufis believe that union with God and the bliss that comes with it is entirely possible in this life through a process of spiritual surrender.
Without losing any of my happiness as I read, I did wonder if this was rather a dubious comparison. Christian mystics have also written extensively of divine union in this life and bliss therefrom. But this is not a book that seeks to create a hierarchy of experiences.
"Happiness," as Schoch most creatively shows, "is less an objective fact to be encountered in the world than an experience to be cultivated by each individual. Thus, we speak not of any single secret of happiness - applicable to everyone - but only of the secrets of happiness, a different one for each person."
The Secrets of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good Life
By Richard Schoch
Profile, 228pp, $39.95
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
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Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Book review: The Secrets of Happiness
By Stephanie Dowrick - The Australian - Australia
Saturday, September 9, 2006
Richard Schoch's invitation in The Secrets of Happiness is to look backwards rather more often than forwards. The view (and views) he reveals are, however, every bit as enticing. Schoch is an academic, professor of the history of culture at Queen Mary, University of London. He is a confident, gifted writer: a great bringer of reading happiness through his clarity, wit and contagious excitement. He opens his book with the glorious line, "Unhappy is the story of happiness", then keeps up the pace.
His take on happiness is to use it, and our desire for it, as a means, especially as a means to explore some differences and similarities in the great religious philosophical traditions, including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism, while also revisiting the theories of the utilitarians, the Stoics and the Epicureans to illuminate our contemporary confusions.
In his chapters on Christianity and Islam, Schoch focuses largely on Thomas Aquinas and the mystical path of Sufism, respectively. (Within Sufism he is especially interested in the work of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali.)
A man of his 13th-century times, Aquinas believed that true happiness could be found only through grace in the life hereafter. Sufis believe that union with God and the bliss that comes with it is entirely possible in this life through a process of spiritual surrender.
Without losing any of my happiness as I read, I did wonder if this was rather a dubious comparison. Christian mystics have also written extensively of divine union in this life and bliss therefrom. But this is not a book that seeks to create a hierarchy of experiences.
"Happiness," as Schoch most creatively shows, "is less an objective fact to be encountered in the world than an experience to be cultivated by each individual. Thus, we speak not of any single secret of happiness - applicable to everyone - but only of the secrets of happiness, a different one for each person."
The Secrets of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good Life
By Richard Schoch
Profile, 228pp, $39.95
Saturday, September 9, 2006
Richard Schoch's invitation in The Secrets of Happiness is to look backwards rather more often than forwards. The view (and views) he reveals are, however, every bit as enticing. Schoch is an academic, professor of the history of culture at Queen Mary, University of London. He is a confident, gifted writer: a great bringer of reading happiness through his clarity, wit and contagious excitement. He opens his book with the glorious line, "Unhappy is the story of happiness", then keeps up the pace.
His take on happiness is to use it, and our desire for it, as a means, especially as a means to explore some differences and similarities in the great religious philosophical traditions, including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Judaism, while also revisiting the theories of the utilitarians, the Stoics and the Epicureans to illuminate our contemporary confusions.
In his chapters on Christianity and Islam, Schoch focuses largely on Thomas Aquinas and the mystical path of Sufism, respectively. (Within Sufism he is especially interested in the work of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali.)
A man of his 13th-century times, Aquinas believed that true happiness could be found only through grace in the life hereafter. Sufis believe that union with God and the bliss that comes with it is entirely possible in this life through a process of spiritual surrender.
Without losing any of my happiness as I read, I did wonder if this was rather a dubious comparison. Christian mystics have also written extensively of divine union in this life and bliss therefrom. But this is not a book that seeks to create a hierarchy of experiences.
"Happiness," as Schoch most creatively shows, "is less an objective fact to be encountered in the world than an experience to be cultivated by each individual. Thus, we speak not of any single secret of happiness - applicable to everyone - but only of the secrets of happiness, a different one for each person."
The Secrets of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good Life
By Richard Schoch
Profile, 228pp, $39.95
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