In the recent BBC TV adaptation of the novel by Janice Hadlow, in which she constructs a plausible sequel to Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, the dreadful clergyman Mr Collins is found reading Aristotle; searching – as he says – for the way to be happy. Happiness is a fairly inadequate way of describing the best life as envisaged by Aristotle. In his view, happiness is not much more than a side effect; but the real deal, and the driving force towards it is eudaimonia usually translated as flourishing. We flourish when we practice the virtues – which can be expressed in a number of ways but to take just the foundational ones; courage, temperance, justice and prudence are some of the most important from a list that can be expanded to twelve or even more. If Mr Collins owned up to Aristotle that he was hoping to be happy as a result of reading a book, the philosopher might have made him write out 100 times – I must not be greedy, ambitious, hypocritical, grasping and in particular I must not render widows and their daughters homeless and dependent on the generosity of their rich relatives or hoping to be funded by marrying wealthy bachelors.
The virtues are not abstract bits of head knowledge but more akin to habits which – if we cultivate them – become embedded in our behaviour. We’re more likely to do the right thing without having to think it through each time. This all sounds a bit too intellectual but you’ll notice that all the virtues are relational; they’re to do with the way we relate to other people in our everyday actions. Kindness, loving, respectfulness, honesty, self control and courage, are not so much concerned with holding certain beliefs in our minds as with acting them out in the market-place of our lives.
Labore est orare
Sorry about the Latin, but it’s important. I first came across this saying – it means to work is to pray – many years ago in the context of Benedictine monasteries where, I discovered that in some of them the words labore est orare are inscribed above the chapel door as the monks leave and the opposite saying orare est labore –to pray is to work is written above the door as the monks enter. St Benedict wrote his rule of life centuries before the Greek text of Aristotle were translated but in a kind of wonderful evolutionary convergence, the Greek texts were translated by Benedictine monks centuries later and they became hugely influential largely through the writings of St Thomas Aquinas. I’ve only been to one Benedictine monastery and I very much regret not visiting the chapel to see if this suggestion is true. Anyway, it stuck in my mind as an almost perfect expression of the gardening life. Today I was on my hands and knees weeding (I’d also knackered my back digging out volunteer potatoes on one of the overwintered plots) – and I experience a prolonged contemplative moment when I lost myself even amid the intense noise of the building site across the road. I watched a holly blue butterfly, a small white, a brimstone and a red admiral all about their business in the warm sun. Yesterday I found a marbled white trapped in a greenhouse, and today small whites were about. An impudent jackdaw flew on and off the allotment stealing beaks full of sheep fleece from within five feet of us. The earth smelt beautiful as it always does around Easter time.
This connection with the natural world is a perfect example of the relational nature of the virtues. The reason we feel so content, so joyful when we’re gardening is because there is a kind of conversation going on between us and the soil and the plants. The seasons and the weather are all part of the great conversation that constitutes a season.
Our relationship with the earth is a lifelong conversation not a million miles from the great conversation of a long marriage. Kindness, loving, respectfulness, honesty, self control and courage are as applicable to the foundation and evolution of a garden, or a farm, or a nature reserve and SSSI as they are to human interpersonal relations. There’s always something to learn in a garden; a time to yield and a time to push forward. A time to bend every sinew and a time to rest.
And so it is, that labore est orare – to work is to pray – becomes the form of prayerful practice that leads to true, deep, inexpressible possibly even sacramental happiness rooted in commitment to one another -gardener and farmer with soil, human partnerships in all kinds of love. And the greatest thing about it is that it requires no dogma, no theology and no dressing up.
