Book Review: Michael Dirda on 'The Ends of Life' by Keith Thomas

THE ENDS OF LIFE

Roads to Fulfillment in Early Modern England

By Keith Thomas

Oxford. 393 pp. $34.95

When young, we are all aesthetes, eager to enjoy a wondrous world full of beauty, promise and reward. The experience of life itself seems enough to keep us busy and happy. So we fall in love and go to work and find success or not, and the decades roll by.

In later years, however, we become unwilling philosophers. A parent unexpectedly dies. The now-grown children go off on their own. Work suddenly loses its savor. Before long, we are taking long walks and wondering about the old perplexities: What makes for a meaningful life? How should we pass our too few days upon this Earth? What really matters?

Keith Thomas's "The Ends of Life" examines the ways that people answered those questions from the early 16th century to the late 18th. To do so, this cultural historian -- author of the classic "Religion and the Decline of Magic" (1971) -- investigates six areas that have traditionally supplied aims for purpose-driven lives: Military prowess, work and vocation, wealth and possessions, honor and reputation, friendship and sociability, and fame and the afterlife. In each case, he presents his evidence largely through quotations from contemporary letters, memoirs, court testimonies and other documents. As Thomas's own connecting prose is graceful and sometimes crisply epigrammatic, "The Ends of Life" is a pleasure to read.

The book opens by exploring the very idea of personal fulfillment during a time when religion contended that it wasn't so much life that mattered as afterlife. In general, all people were supposed to be satisfied with their lot and to work out their salvation within it, whether they were assigned by God to be peasants or aristocrats. "Those who failed to adhere to conventional expectations," Thomas writes, "whether in their religion or their tastes or their personal behaviour, were accused of the great vice of 'singularity,' of following their 'private fancy and vanity.' 'Desire not to be singular, nor to differ from others,' warned a Jacobean cleric, 'for it is a sign of a naughty spirit, which hath caused much evil in the world from the beginning.' "

Nonetheless, throughout the 17th century the notion of individuality and personal uniqueness grew ever more prevalent. Long ago, Aristotle asserted that every man should aim to realize his inner nature, but now the "great motor behind the sense of individual identity was the growth of a market economy, in which land, goods, and labour were freely bought and sold. New economic opportunities gave rise to personal competition and mobility. They widened the scope for personal choice in such matters as dress and domestic equipment; and they made acquisitive and ego-centred behaviour increasingly common." People soon rose above their station: Isaac Newton's father had been unable to sign his own name. By the 1630s, the physician-essayist Thomas Browne could write that "every man truly lives, so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the faculties of himself."

Thomas's second chapter opens with a ringing sentence that calls to mind Gibbon or Macaulay: "Since time immemorial, all societies which depend upon force for the acquisition and retention of their means of subsistence have regarded physical courage as the supreme proof of manhood." For nobles, military valor provided the validation of their lives and status, and there was no more desirable death than a glorious one upon the field of battle. Yet even this heroic ideal was gradually ousted by a more civilian model of masculinity, "with the emphasis laid not on physical aggression, but on strength of character. Conquering one's own passions was a greater achievement than conquering other men."

In his third chapter, Thomas shows how work -- originally performed because of economic necessity or physical constraint -- came to be seen as potentially rewarding in itself. A person's job might be drudgery, but it could now also be a career, a vocation. Leisure consequently became suspect. The idle, Thomas Jefferson maintained, "are the only wretched," while Marx eventually promulgated the radical notion that labor could be the ultimate form of self-realization.