The Road to Happiness: Have You Found It?

I've been re-reading the Masterful Monk series by Owen Francis Dudley which explores the "problem of human happiness." Interesting phrase isn't it; human happiness described as "a problem." But isn't it? Our founding fathers included the "pursuit of happiness" among mankind's unalienable rights in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

But reading the document carefully one sees no definition of human happiness. What is it exactly? How does one "pursue" it if what it is escapes us?

That's the vacuum Dudley's study intends to fill. The series includes six books. The first, Will Men be Like Gods, is non-fiction and is followed by five very engaging novels looking at different aspects of the "problem" of happiness. Dudley writes a short introduction before each book which describes the landscape:

Will Men be like Gods? is an answer to Humanitarianism; The Shadow on the Earth, to the Problem of Evil; The Masterful Monk, to the present attack on man’s moral nature; Pageant of Life, to the particular moral cowardice of the moment; The Coming of the Monster, to Bolshevism. The Tremaynes and the Masterful Monk is a character study.

To put the series and the first book in its historical perspective, the title links directly to H.G. Wells 1923 novel, Men Like Gods in which a journalist has left home on a trip and, along with two other cars, enters a time warp that takes him into another world. It's Wells' idea of Utopia. The men of the new world have advanced from the distant "state of confusion" into a time of perfect happiness that is basically a successful anarchy with no government only five universal rules: privacy, free movement, unlimited knowledge, truthfulness, and free discussion. The new arrivals, except for the journalists, begin plotting to overthrow the perfect community and impose their own ideas.

Wells' father was a freethinker, his mother a Protestant. He himself was a hedonistic atheist who had many love affairs including one with Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood's founder who was a fellow believer in "free love." He was a "progressive" at a time before it became a popular term and some of the villains in Dudley's novels are obviously modeled on Wells and other materialists writing at the time. Wells was also a eugenicist, a fact often displayed in his novels. He embraced the obviously erroneous view that man, freed from superstition and religion, would create a paradise. Meanwhile, he created hell on earth for the women in his own personal life with his many mistresses one of whom attempted suicide by slashing her wrists. He thought nothing of moving on leaving wives and children behind.

Interestingly, Wells and Dudley were both contemporaries of G.K. Chesterton who had connections to both.  Chesterton had the talent of remaining friends with those he publicly challenged over their evil philosophies. He remained on friendly terms with Wells who once wrote that, “If I ever get to Heaven, presuming there is a Heaven, it will be by the intervention of Gilbert Chesterton.” We'll have to wait until Judgment Day to see if Chesterton's intercession was enough. Wells died as he lived.

There is little information about the relationship between Fr. Dudley and Chesterton although each wrote an introduction for the other. Chesterton wrote the introduction to Will Men Be Like Gods; Dudley wrote an introduction to A Chesterton Catholic Anthology. They both wrote about similar subjects defending and evangelizing. Dudley was the better novelist; Chesterton the better essayist. But they both had the same core belief that the answer to human happiness lay in the Catholic Church, because that's where the fullness of the truth can be found. I highly recommend Dudley's novels which are as relevant to our decadent age as they were to his. And it goes without saying that Chesterton is always worth reading.

I plan to write more about the "problem of happiness" and Dudley's books, but will stop here with some recommendations for further reading if you're interested. 

Owen Francis Dudley website

Chesterton vs. H. G. Wells

AMERICANS COULD LEARN A LOT FROM THE FRIENDSHIP OF H.G. WELLS AND G.K. CHESTERTON