Man's Search for Meaning: A Christian Reflection
“Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now.”
Have you ever asked, "What is the meaning of life?"
We have been navigating this unprecedented pandemic, with over 20 million confirmed global cases and 765,000 deaths, for the past five months. Reality has sunk in that things will not be back to "normal" anytime soon.
Coupled with the severity of COVID is the social racial unrest in the United States. And to wrap it all up, we are only several months away from our presidential election.
Worry, anxiety and depression are all on the rise. Within the midst of all the terrible news and fear surrounding the virus, I am sure more than normal, people are asking what is the meaning of life?
Viktor Frankl asked that same question as his train pulled into the Poland station in 1944. The first sign he read had big bold letters.
AUSCHWITZ.
Of the 1.3 million sent to the concentration camp, 1.1 million died.
It is week 29 of 52 in the Tim Challies 2020 reading challenge, and I chose Viktor E. Frankl's legendary book Man's Search for Meaning. It has been reproduced in 24 different languages and sold over 16 million copies. Originally written in 1959, it holds the incisive observations of a pioneering psychologist who personally experienced the horror of the holocaust.
Viktor's book needs no rating as history has declared its verdict. As a psychologist, Viktor had already written a treatise on a revolutionary way to treat patients that diverted to a modest degree from traditional school methods. My aim in this review is to analyze Viktor's logotherapy hypothesis from a Christian worldview while highlighting his most prolific observations.
Will to Meaning: Logotherapy
"Logotherapy… focuses on the meaning of human existence as well as on man's search for such a meaning. According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one's life is the primary motivational force in man" (p. 99).
Viktor identifies his "logotherapy" from the Greek word logos, which he states means "meaning." However, as any Greek student can attest, Greek words often have multiple definitions depending on their contexts. Keep that in the back of your mind for later.
This notion contrasts with the classic Freudian or Adlerian positions that adhere to either the pleasure or power principle. Instead, Viktor argues that happiness arrives from discovering meaning to personal existence. And this happiness can transcend circumstances.
When Viktor was finally sentenced to the camps, he was stripped of everything he had. Material possessions, clothes, hair, and even his name, all to dehumanize him.
"I was number 119,104, and most of the time I was digging and laying tracks for railway line" he recounted.
Viktor walks the reader through the psychological process of a person waiting in line while a German soldier decided their fate with a point of the finger. Right meant to live in pain and suffering in a camp. Left meant death in the gas chambers.
He recalled one time that a fellow prisoner was having a fitful nightmare. He went to wake him up but stopped short in absolute fright as what he was about to do.
"At that moment I became intensely conscious of the fact that no dream, no matter how terrible, could be as bad as the reality of the camp which surrounded us, and to which I was about to recall him" (p. 29).
How does a person find meaning in absolute suffering? Before that question is answered, Viktor says we must look at what is in the person.
Swine or Saint: An Optimists Perspective
"In the concentration camps… in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions" (p 134).
Is mankind primarily good while occasionally doing evil? Are there just a few rotten apples that cause mass chaos and evil upon otherwise good and kind people? Or is mankind evil with varying degrees of lesser evil? Or perhaps, people are neutral, a blank canvas as it were, and by their own volition, they paint themselves into saints or swine?
Immediately, I thought Viktor was talking about the Nazi's and the Jews, for there seems to be little doubt who the saints and swine would be. However, he is referring to those in suffering and how they responded to it.
Capos. These were fellow prisoners who were put into positions of authority. Viktor says of them, "often they were harder on the prisoners than were the guards, and beat them more cruelly than the SS men did" (p. 4).
Is evil a result of nature or nurture?
Sigmund Freud believed that if you exposed a large diverse group to the same type of suffering, the individual differences would blur as their natural humanity united itself against a cause. Viktor remarks, "thank heavens Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camp from the inside… [in Auschwitz] the "individual differences" did not "blur", but, on the contrary, people became more different; people unmasked themselves, both the swine and the saints" (p. 133-134).
Viktor's point is simple. All people in the camp were prisoners. The suffering that should have united them, only exposed their true nature. Some as swine and some as saints.
How does one then avoid the latter? Self-transcendence.
Survive through Service: Self-transcendence
"Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now" (p. 150).
Regardless of endowment or environment, Viktor believed every person's future to be a self-determined reality. He loved challenging his patients to look at their life like they were on their death bed. For him, death was an ever-present reality. Viewing one's life through its climactic point at death provides clarity of perspective in the present. But more than that, it helps in discovering the individuals meaning in life.
And how do you discover your meaning? Go outside of yourself.
"The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself… Self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence" (p. 111).
Viktor cites Nietzche, "he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." Therefore, the pinnacle point of human existence, Viktor argues, is to discover their unique purpose and their specific context and opportunity to implement it (p. 109).
Serve others. Forget yourself. And find the unique purpose of your life. And Viktor says, you will be able to respond saintly in times of suffering, and you will find true happiness.
"Once an individual's search for a meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering" (p. 139).
A Christian Reflection: Logoremedy
Viktor is right.
Humanity craves meaning. When a person has meaning, they are genuinely happier and can handle significantly more suffering.
But the quality of happiness and the extent of enduring suffering is determined by where meaning is found.
Viktor makes striking observations about humanity through his own experience and his studies in the humanities. However, in the end, even after he revises the book, he still cannot provide a universal "meaning" for humanity, since it is subjective to the individual. Nor does his position negate the possibility of an individual finding their meaning in the cruelty and terrorizing of others.
However, he has multiple points, gleaned from his observations, that are wholly true. My reflection of Viktor's work is to suggest a change to his Psychotherapy; from logotherapy to logoremedy.
Logoremedy: The Cure is Christ
I agree with Viktor that the logos should be at the center of human thought about the meaning of life. However, I take the definition of the logos from the particular context of John 1:1 & 14.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth."
True meaning in life is found in the Word (logos), who became flesh and brought us grace and truth. Jesus is the true logos. And in the good news of Jesus "is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes" (Romans 1:16).
There is no swine or saint in comparison to God, only sinners in desperate need of grace. We are not a blank canvas that is painted by our decisions. We stained fully and completely by sin so that no one is righteous, no one is good, all of us have fallen short of the glory of God.
But the gospel is that even while we were still sinners Jesus died for us. And if we confess with our mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in our hearts that God raised him from the dead, we will be saved!
If you find yourself seeking meaning in life, then you have missed the gospel of Jesus Christ.
As Paul says, "I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Galatians 2:20).
Viktor didn't go far enough with regards to self-transcendence. Transcending yourself isn't far enough. You must die to yourself and live to Christ. The uncircumstantial joy found in complete surrender to Christ provides the greatest comfort in suffering and absolute boldness in adversity.
Therapy, a Viktor puts it, is a term used to treat and illness or disease. But treatment isn't good enough. We need a cure. Our meaning in life must be absolute and based on objective truth. And that cure is Christ.
If you are struggling with finding meaning during this time. Consider Logoremedy, allowing Christ to captivate and cure your heart.
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John Owen came from Welsh descent, was educated at Queens College, and became a renowned Puritan theologian, Oxford professor, and passionate pastor who lived from 1616 to 1683. In 1647, he wrote the exhaustive treatise The Death of Death defending Limited or Definite Atonement against the Arminian view of Universal Atonement or Unlimited Atonement.