The Intellectual Ground of Contentment

Pietas Quest Question: Does true contentment rest on circumstance, or on right knowledge joined to duty?

True contentment is not the product of quiet circumstances. Witherspoon shows that it is generated when desires contrary to the love, fear, and trust we owe to God are restrained and brought into subjection. That trust requires sufficient understanding of God as a loving Father; without it, contentment collapses into self-sufficiency. The cultivation of pietas therefore depends on understanding, not will alone—and the moral realists who teach that truth remain eminently practical guides.

The third great duty is trust. This is a continual dependance on God for every thing we need, together with an approbation of, and absolute resignation to his providence. – John Witherspoon, Lectures on Moral Philosophy

There is an erroneous conception of contentment that treats it as the product of circumstance: when all is quiet, and when all my immediate wants and needs have been met, then I can be content. But such contentment lacks any virtue because it depends entirely on forces outside my control and requires nothing of me besides passive enjoyment. This is good fortune, not contentment.

Conversely, Witherspoon observes in his Lectures on Moral Philosophy that contentment is a product of fulfilling our duties to Providence: “When our thoughts or desires are such as to be contrary to the love, fear, or trust we owe to God, then they are to be restrained and brought into subjection—Thus are generated the virtues of humility, contentment, patience, and such as are allied to them.” For Witherspoon, contentment is the product of a willing and consistent resignation to Providence, regardless of one’s circumstances. It is an internal, rather than external, state of affairs.

This virtuous contentment can only be formed on a foundation of sufficient understanding of God as a loving Father. If we conceive of him as indifferent to our well-being, malicious, or nonexistent, then we have no reason to trust in his providence and are thus left to ground our contentment in our own self-sufficiency (which eventually proves to be insufficient). Even the pagan Epictetus, parting ways with many of his fellow Stoics, gives “thanks to God” for “the truth which makes us blessed,” namely, the truth about God’s nature and ours as his creation (Discourses I.4).

From this it follows that the cultivation of pietas is a function of one’s understanding, and not one’s will alone. It is this dynamic that undergirds Project Pietas’ emphasis on the intellectual aspects of the cultivation of conscience and why we take the great moral realist thinkers of history seriously. Their insights are more than just interesting pieces of trivia; they are guides to meaning rooted in the divine.

When it comes to cultivating pietas and grounding contentment in something more solid and real than the whims of fortune or our own imperfect capabilities, such intellectual explorations prove to be eminently practical.

For the fuller treatment of Witherspoon’s moral philosophy in the American founding, see the forthcoming American Pietas.