Adam Potkay. The Story of Joy: From the Bible to Late Romanticism, Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN-13: 9780521879118. Price: $99.00

What is ‘joy’? Is it a universal experience, easily translated into common equivalents in every major language, or is it a culture-specific phenomenon, peculiar to the European Judeo-Christian traditions? Is it a recognizable constant across the centuries, or has it, like so many words, evolved and changed over time so that the so-called joys of the early Christian mystics and Desert Fathers would be scarcely recognizable as ecstatic pleasures today? By confining himself to the biblically-based cultures of Europe and America, Potkay makes no attempt to answer the first question, which is a pity, since it would have been interesting to know if religions of total renunciation, such as Buddhism, have a place (and, indeed, a separate word) for the absolute heights of personal happiness. Is it possible, for instance, that, as some have claimed for the idea of being ‘in love’, the idea of joy was unique (at least in its early stages) to the kinds of personal self-consciousness that grew out of the Western literary tradition, and is absent from other parallel cultures? It is the kind of question that might fascinate a Theodore Zeldin. But for practical reasons Potkay is probably wise in confining himself to the mainstream European tradition where there is enough material for half-a-dozen such studies without venturing further afield. But within his given framework Potkay has several theses to explore simultaneously. One concerns the historical progression already mentioned. Starting with the Old Testament (but not entirely neglecting Classical Greece or even the Upanishads), he notes the joyous expectations of the early Christians, and follows joy down the centuries through the erotic/religious joys of the middle ages, past the Reformation and Enlightenment to nineteenth century Romanticism and its many (often contradictory) offshoots. Here Potkay’s progress is mostly predictable, and, though not without interesting and even quirky insights, is more a matter of heaping up and adumbrating examples than tracing continuities or radical changes. Though frustrating for the reader looking for the ‘story’ of joy as a progressive narrative, this is understandable. As Potkay shows very effectively, what starts primarily as a religious experience transfers by analogy to erotic love, and finally to aesthetics and even tragedy. But this ‘evolution’ does not mean that the original forms: religious ecstasy or erotic love then cease to happen. St Teresa of Avila is a contemporary of sixteenth-century love poets; John and Charles Wesley write of joy in the same era as Fielding; Hans Urs von Balthazar writes of the ‘irruption’ of divine joy in the middle of the twentieth century long after Nietzsche has proclaimed the death of God, and the Nazis ‘strength through joy’. Alongside this, however, is a second thesis, drawn from popular post-Freudian psychology (Kristeva, Nussbaum etc.) which seeks to ‘explain’ joy in terms of the adult’s indebtedness to infantile pre-cognitive experiences. For me, at any rate, this was an unwelcome distraction for two reasons. Firstly, it tacitly assumes that whereas early Christian mystics or seventeenth-century lovers were driven by desires and reflexes they did not (and could not) understand, we, with our superior knowledge of the human mind, can suss them out for what they really were – a view that seems to me both patronizing and parochial. Moreover, this assumption is a piece of false logic: it assumes that the higher (in the form of aesthetic expression – whether religious or erotic) can be ‘explained’ by the lower (early childhood experiences). We were all children; by definition very few of us reach the spiritual or aesthetic achievements of the great mystics, saints, and poets. This uneasy sense that what Potkay calls the …