Contentment

Reading these passages

The most quoted verse about contentment sits inside a thank-you note for money, written from prison by a man explaining that he did not need it.

That is the situation behind Philippians 4, and it makes the chapter harder to write than it looks. The church at Philippi had sent Paul a gift. He is grateful and says so. He is also, in the same paragraph, careful to say that his wellbeing was never contingent on their arriving — Not that I speak in respect of want — which is an awkward thing to tell someone who has just sent you something. The whole passage is Paul negotiating how to accept a kindness without letting it look like he was dependent on it. Read that way, the famous lines stop being maxims and start being a man choosing his words carefully in a difficult letter.

The word Paul borrowed

The word behind content in verse 11 is autarkes, and Paul did not coin it. It was a technical term of Stoic philosophy, one of their central ideals: self-sufficiency, the condition of needing nothing outside yourself, the state a sage reaches when circumstances can no longer touch him.

Paul takes the word and then, two verses later, breaks it. The Stoic version located the sufficiency inside the person. Paul's does not — his runs on something borrowed, and he says so plainly. What survives of the Stoic idea is the independence from circumstance. What does not survive is the self in self-sufficiency.

There is a second borrowed word in the middle of it. Where the King James has I am instructed in verse 12, the Greek is memuemai — the vocabulary of the mystery religions, meaning to be initiated. Paul says he has been initiated into the secret of being full and of being hungry. Both are described as things one has to be let into. Being full, in that sentence, is as much a skill as being hungry is.

The verse on the poster

I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me is probably the most repurposed sentence in the New Testament. It is printed on sports equipment and quoted before examinations and interviews, and what it is usually taken to promise is capability: that with enough faith the difficult thing becomes achievable.

Read the sentence before it. I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: every where and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. The all things of verse 13 are the things just listed. Being abased. Being hungry. Suffering need. Paul is not saying he can accomplish anything. He is saying he can undergo anything, which is a different claim and a considerably less comfortable one.

The verse has not been weakened by that reading. It has been pointed at its actual subject, which is not performance but endurance — and endurance in both directions, since Paul lists abundance alongside hunger as something requiring strength to survive.

Nothing in, nothing out

1 Timothy makes the case commercially, and Paul is being deliberately sly. He has just described people who suppose that gain is godliness — who treat religion as a source of profit. Then he takes their own word back: But godliness with contentment is great gain. The noun is porismos, a means of getting. Yes, he says, godliness is a way of making money, and here is the return it actually pays.

Then the arithmetic: For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. This is not a sentiment about mortality. It is a statement about the accounting period. Whatever is accumulated is accumulated inside a window with nothing crossing either boundary.

And the standard he sets is startlingly low. And having food and raiment let us be therewith content. Two items. The Greek behind raiment is skepasmata, covering, which most likely includes shelter as well as clothing — but even read generously it is a short list, and it is offered not as an aspiration but as a threshold already passed by most people reading it.

Why more does not work

Ecclesiastes explains the mechanism, and it is the most useful sentence on this page for anyone who has tried to solve the problem by acquiring: He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity.

The claim is specific. It is not that money fails to satisfy in general. It is that the person who loves silver will not be satisfied by silver — the appetite and its object are mismatched by nature, so the quantity is irrelevant. Increase cannot close a gap that increase created. Nothing in the sentence says wealth is wrong; it says this particular strategy does not terminate.

Jesus states the same principle as a fact about what a life is made of: Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. The word rendered consisteth carries the sense of what something is composed of. The objection is not moral in the first instance. It is a category error.

What "these things" are

Matthew 6:33 is usually quoted on its own, which detaches it from the antecedent that tells you what it is promising: But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

All which things? The two verses before it say exactly: Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? Food, drink, clothing. That is the whole inventory, and it is very close to the two items 1 Timothy settles for. Quoted alone the verse can sound like a promise of provision without limit; quoted with its antecedent it is a promise about eating, drinking and being covered, which is both more modest and easier to believe.

The reason attached is not that these things do not matter. For your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. The need is granted. What is reordered is the sequence.

And the psalm everyone knows makes the same move in six words. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. The English invites a misreading, because want now means desire and in 1611 meant lack. David is not saying he will stop wanting things. He is saying he will not go short — which is a statement about supply, not about appetite, and it is the first line of a psalm that goes on to walk through the valley of the shadow of death without claiming the valley is avoidable.

The promise underneath

Hebrews grounds all of it in a quotation, and the Greek is more emphatic than any English rendering manages: Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.

That final clause stacks negatives — five of them in the Greek across two verbs — in a construction that has no natural English equivalent. The effect is closer to "I will not, not ever, no not leave you; I will not, no never, forsake you." The writer is quoting a promise made to Joshua at the border of a country he had not yet entered, and applying it to people worrying about money.

Which is why the argument for contentment here is never that possessions do not matter or that wanting things is shameful. It is that the fear underneath the wanting has already been addressed. Whether that lands depends entirely on whether the promise is true, and the writer of Hebrews knows it — he does not argue for contentment as a discipline. He quotes a sentence and lets it carry the weight.

Proverbs, as usual, refuses to pretend the trade is painless: Better is little with the fear of the Lord than great treasure and trouble therewith. Not that little is good. That little, with something else, is better — which concedes that the great treasure was genuinely worth having, and still comes down on the other side.