Keywords

A pastoral care team from a local church located in a Christian-minority area of the U.S. recently visited an elderly member, Jane. Suffering pain from terminal cancer, she was bedridden and preparing to enter hospice care. The team expected despondency, but she was deeply content, grateful that she was in good hands. Her main concern was for the daughter of a fellow church member who was also fighting cancer. The visit concluded happily when the team promised to visit her friend and joined her in prayer.

Contemporary psychologists have much to offer in understanding and helping this extraordinary woman. Scientists in the field of positive psychology (PP) focus on advancing scientific understanding of virtues, strengths, and well-being, so they could help the pastoral care team by sharing relevant research findings about how and why people’s character virtues often enhance their well-being (see Ratchford et al., Chap. 4, this volume). PP practitioners could help by offering research-supported interventions to help Jane cope with her illness, prepare for death, and enact her virtues during her remaining time. In the same way, scientists in the psychology of religion/spirituality (PRS) field—which focuses on the scientific study of people’s search for sacred meaning and connection—could share helpful scientific findings about how people’s religiousness/spirituality reliably leads to growth in virtues and enhanced well-being (see Davis et al., Chap. 18, Appendix 18.S2, this volume; Long & VanderWeele, Chap. 25, Appendix 25.S2, this volume). Practitioners from the PRS field could share spiritually integrated psychological interventions that could help Jane to enhance her well-being (see Captari et al., Chap. 26, this volume). There are also rich possibilities for collaborations between the fields (Barton & Miller, 2015; see also Davis et al., Chap. 1, this volume).

An understanding of history provides two critical pieces of information that help us understand the potentials and challenges facing these fields. First, PP and PRS have shared methodological commitments that have emerged historically, and although these commitments offer some advantages, they are based on dated philosophical positions that can hinder research and its practical application. Second, although history reveals that interest in positive human states and their connections to religious or spiritual life goes back many centuries and incorporates many insightful ideas, researchers in PP and PRS have sometimes misread and redefined foundational concepts like “happiness” or “spirituality,” leading to problems in research and practice (Martin, 2007). It is always desirable for scientists and practitioners to look carefully at their presuppositions and methods so that they do not hinder progress toward valued, important goals. This chapter takes a somewhat critical tone, not because we do not appreciate the terrific successes of PP and PRS, but because we hope historical material in this chapter will help individuals in these fields better realize their distinct and shared goals.

Historical Development of PP and PRS

PP and PRS involve exciting attempts to understand important but often neglected aspects of human experience and behavior, potentially generating knowledge of great benefit to individuals and society. The current incarnation of PP has its official beginnings in the late twentieth century with the work of Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi (2000), whereas PRS has slightly older roots going back to the work of William James and his contemporaries in the late nineteenth century.

In early PP, the goal was helping individuals or groups achieve what Martin Seligman (2002) called “gratification” through strengthening latent, natural characteristics. For Seligman, the definition of the good life was “using your signature strengths to obtain abundant gratification in the main realms of one’s life” (p. 262). In later writing, Seligman (2011) seems to prefer to define the good life through using the term and concept of “well-being” (pp. 5–29). The goal of PP then became the understanding and enhancement of well-being. By comparison, PRS is “the empirical or academic study of spiritual experience or organized religion from a psychological perspective,” including “ways in which religious faith affects the behaviors and cognitive processes of believers” (VandenBos, 2015, p. 860). Both fields make frequent use of universal categories and are deeply committed to utilizing the scientific method, as practiced in mainstream psychology. This method is a historical development with strengths and limitations.

Positivism and the Development of Method

With origins in the early and later twentieth century, science in PP and PRS typically assumes the philosophical viewpoint of positivistic naturalism (PN). Unrelated etymologically to the term “positive” in PP, PN is a cluster of beliefs about science and the world that developed in the sixteenth through twentieth centuries, at the time psychology was attempting to define its place as a science. Positivism assumes that all knowledge of reality must be empirically verified using the scientific method, and naturalism assumes there are no realities beyond the material world, which operates according to fixed, natural laws. Naturalistic assumptions are particularly tricky in the field of PRS, because these assumptions often conflict with beliefs of the religious traditions they study.

In the Early Modern period, science was redefined through the work of scientists and philosophers such as René Descartes. Their viewpoints encouraged the development of universally applicable models based on perceived general natural laws (Dijksterhuis, 1961; Nelson & Slife, 2013; Wootton, 2015). The view of humans as machines, promoted by writers like Descartes and de lá Mettrie, also emerged at this time, leading to scientific atomism, the idea that people can be understood by disassembling them and studying component parts.

The increasing emphasis on objectivity and empiricism in Early Modern and Enlightenment thought eventually reached its peak in the philosophy of science known as positivism. Positivism was a creation of the early nineteenth century philosopher Auguste Comte, who argued that an idea can be true only if it is backed by empirical data obtained by an investigator who is a detached, impartial observer. He believed that human inquiry was passing through “primitive” stages of religious and philosophical thinking, eventually to be replaced by scientific inquiry that would propel human advancement. This view of history led to scientism, the belief that only the scientific method can produce true knowledge (Comte, 1839). Because history was seen as positively progressive, there was little to be learned from studying the past, other than to produce triumphal accounts about how we are moving to a glorious future (e.g., Seligman, 2019).

Adherents of PN trust a basic method of organizing knowledge. This method is thought to give them correct feedback about their perceptions, but it automatically invalidates other types of knowledge. It limits inquiry only to statements directly verifiable by sense perception; other types of statements are judged “metaphysical” or “armchair speculation” and thus meaningless (Feigl, 1949). Mechanistic models eliminate ideas of final purpose or transcendence, rejecting philosophy and theology as valid ways of knowing about the world (Dijksterhuis, 1961). PN can thus become not just a philosophy of science but a kind of alternative worldview.

The sole focus of naturalism is on universal laws, which marks a large departure from previous thinkers such as Aristotle. Aristotle argued the principles of eudaimonia or the good life—the foundations of ethics—are natural and thus necessary. Because these principles are a certain knowledge accessible to reason, they were viewed as epistēmē, a kind of scientific knowledge (1926, VI.iii.2–4). However, Aristotle felt such principles were largely inadequate by themselves, because applying them in specific situations required practical reasoning and virtue (phronēsis), the principles of which are not “scientific” truths because what is best changes based on particular situations (1926, VI.v.1–4). A scientific statement thus can never completely capture what the virtuous person needs to know in daily pursuit of the good life in a particular context. Taking this view of Jane’s situation, one would argue that any set of universal statements will not provide much of what is needed for Jane to live a good life in her current circumstances.

In PN, moral statements are not viewed as facts but instead are seen as expressions of emotion or attempts to rouse them (Ayer, 1952, pp. 102–108). This emotivist position is a type of moral nihilism, where moral positions have no mind-independent enduring reality and are outside of the possibility of direct scientific study (Hunter & Nedeliski, 2018; cf. Willard, 2018). One can scientifically study the effects of a particular behavior or belief, but science by itself cannot support claims about if these effects are good or bad. In the emotivist view, behaviors are bad only if they become the occasion for either producing offense or undesirable feelings. This would be in contrast with Jane’s point of view, which focuses on her obligations to others rather than on her feelings. Interestingly, this view of emotions is a philosophical (and not scientific) viewpoint that automatically rejects absolute moral knowledge. It also leads PP to a paradoxical position whereby virtue is subjective to individuals but also a universal, acultural phenomenon.

A key point is that these methods are not necessary to scientific practice. Rather, they are one of a set of possible choices regarding what constitutes good science, including scientific investigations of interest to psychologists in PP and PRS.

Effects of PN for PP

Although PN has been debunked in moral philosophy and rejected in the general philosophy of science (Willard, 2018), it remains the unspoken position in mainstream psychology and much of Western culture. Many researchers in PP and PRS would not identify as positivists, but they continue to practice (or unconsciously hold to) many tenets of PN. Their research often focuses on stating universal laws that apply across individuals and situations, limiting how the results can be applied to particular cases. Feelings of scientism and disdain for philosophical and traditional religious perspectives limit the ability of researchers to appreciate, understand, and engage concepts and successful methods from the past. A mechanistic/atomistic view of the human person often leads to unrealistically decontextualized and simplistic results, in contrast to more complex models found in some excellent recent PP and PRs studies (Kashdan & Steger, 2011; McNulty & Fincham, 2012). There is frequent discomfort with the idea that there might be universal moral truths or religious/spiritual phenomena that influence our well-being.

Atomism and reductionism can be beneficial, as they motivate and simplify scientific study, but they also have limitations and even incoherencies. For instance, Hunter and Nedelisky (2018) note that happiness levels were high in Hitler youth groups. Shall we thus put everyone in Hitler youth groups as a “positive” intervention? Most would say no, because such a decision misunderstands the full implications of such a move. From a religious/spiritual and philosophical point of view, we can say that the way of life in which the Hitler youth groups participated involves a violation of other goods that we value, such as respect for human beings regardless of ethnicity, handicaps, religion, or spirituality (Ivtzan et al., 2016, p. 11). Atomistic research in PP has these limitations.

The case of Jane raises similar issues. It is impossible to understand her virtue of gratitude separately from her altruistic character, her religious faith that was nurtured in the context of her faith community, and the religious/spiritual way of life that she has lived for many years. For her, religion/spirituality is not just taken up for its health benefits, but it is something that gives her a connectedness and prudence that reaches beyond the sum total of her other virtues. This leads to further questions. Why does her character development seem unlimited, despite the limitations of death and suffering? What is the role of her religious/spiritual community and friends in this process? PN limits PP’s ability to research these issues, because it often negates the objective desirability of a religious/spiritual way of life and the ability of this life to carry one beyond “normal” in character development. Furthermore, even if we knew the general answers to these questions, we would still lack the knowledge of how to apply those principles to others in different situations. The attempts in PP to develop specific interventions (e.g., the work of Enright on forgiveness) are a step in the right direction (see Captari et al., Chap. 26, this volume), but these systems often provide inadequate guidance for how they can be deployed in the way of life of specific individuals. As Aristotle argued, what works for Jane may be unlikely to work for others.

Effects of PN for PRS

For much the first half of the twentieth century, despite a promising beginning with works of researchers like William James and Edwin Starbuck, negative views toward religion/spirituality (which are endemic to PN) abounded, as seen in works by Sigmund Freud and James Leuba. These views suppressed research in PRS. Freud (1927/1961) argued that religious/spiritual experience had no veridicality, was a liability, and was an emotional defense mechanism against powerlessness, and Leuba (1912) argued that psychology could assist in the formation of a way of life to take the place of religion/spirituality. Leuba believed all religious/spiritual experiences or needs were simply psychological phenomena that should be studied by psychologists using positivist, scientific methods (and not by religious practitioners or theologians, whom he viewed as ignorant and biased). This stance provided little incentive for psychologists to study religion/spirituality, except as a kind of psychopathology.

The undermining of religious/spiritual and philosophical ways of thought created a vacuum of ways to address issues of human struggle. Faith in medicine replaced them. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the widespread establishment of mental hospitals and the explosion of diagnostic categories, such as in the works of Pinel and other writers (e.g., Pinel, 1807). Moral questions were explicitly discussed from a medical perspective, as in the work of James Prichard (1835) on “moral insanity” (pp. 12–26). In the twentieth century, the medicalization of what were formerly human problems continued, despite protests (Horowitz, 2002; Jahoda, 1958).

Many researchers in PP and PRS are aware of at least some of these deficiencies. However, professional training in psychology deeply embeds PN attitudes and methods into the thinking of budding psychologists, and even those who recognize the problems have difficulty moving beyond them. For instance, most scholars would reject the PN idea that the measures they use in studies somehow fully capture the underlying phenomena; however, researchers often speak or act as if the measured phenomena are now understood and universal naturalistic principles have been uncovered, assuming for instance the meaning of a particular phenomenon is the same or similar for all individuals and across all cultures, situations, and time periods.

Historical Reactions and Resistance to PN

Many twentieth century psychologists were unhappy with psychodynamic psychology and PN. They tried to develop alternatives, notably in the “third force” of humanistic psychology. In the first edition of Motivation and Personality, Maslow (1954) articulated a vision to move the field “toward a positive psychology” (pp. 353–363) that would study a widened set of problems. Challenging the positivist orthodoxy and psychology’s sole focus on pathology, he later advocated a holistic and moral perspective based on the positive potential of the human person. This new psychology would abandon the atomistic approach and be attentive to the interactions of individual problems within the context of the well-being of the human character.

Existential, phenomenological, transpersonal, and some personality psychologists worked with goals similar to those of Maslow (Froh, 2004). For instance, Gordon Allport argued that even though universal “nomothetic” laws might exist and be describable, they were so general as to be worthless in understanding the individual in their “idiographic” reality (Allport, 1961, pp. 8–9). However, humanistic psychology’s rejection of the PN worldview and its methods led to marginalization within professional psychology, so that its ideas are rarely referenced today even within PP (Rich, 2018). Founders of PP like Martin Seligman have sometimes claimed that the PP’s movement beyond focus on pathology is a new undertaking, although this claim has been disputed (Held, 2005), and Seligman appears to have stepped back from this claim at times.

In one of the founding documents of PRS, The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James (1902/1961) displayed discomfort with the PN emphasis on natural law, quantification, and mechanistic models; he preferred the qualitative method of case study. James affirmed the usefulness of religion/spirituality, as perceived by those who participated in his case studies, and he took the view that suffering, indecision, and conflict could lead to personal growth. However, he also subscribed to the PN view of moral nihilism—the idea that the truth values of religious/spiritual feelings could only be evaluated based on a pragmatic standard of their effects.

After psychodynamic psychology was dethroned in the 1960s, PRS became an academic field. On the organizational side, psychologists with personal religious/spiritual commitments who did not share the PN allergy to religion/spirituality formed professional groupings, beginning with the American Catholic Psychological Association in the late 1940s and eventually becoming Division 36 in the American Psychological Association (Reuder, 1999). Intellectual developments included the work of Gordon Allport, who developed the concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic religious motivation, which he used to challenge the accepted connection between religion and prejudice (Allport & Ross, 1967). Researchers and statisticians like Richard Gorsuch (1984, 1988) soon developed sophisticated measurement techniques for phenomena related to religion, leading to an explosion in empirical inquiry and publications. This research also challenged PN stereotypes of religion/spirituality as psychopathology, as it empirically demonstrated that religious/spiritual participation had many advantages (Bonelli & Koenig, 2013). Gorsuch also pointed out the limitations of nomothetic naturalistic research, arguing that ideographic inquiry focused on the individual and their context was essential. However, even in its study of religion/spirituality as advantageous, PRS accepted the constraints of PN methodology and its bracketing of moral issues (Hood, 2012). This strategic move bypassed psychology’s opposition to non-PN viewpoints and helped it succeed.

The Current Situation

In theory, PP are PRS undermine the PN view of religion/spirituality and philosophy because PRS treats religion/spirituality as a worthwhile object of study, and PP allows moral virtues inspired by philosophy to form the basis for experimentation and treatment. Both areas set out to objectify their areas of study, but this objectification still assumes the naturalistic and atomistic approach of PN (Fernández-Rios & Novo, 2012; Hill & Hall, 2018). PP and PRS make their objects of study more objective by developing broad abstract categories like “spirituality” in order to generalize about aspects of happiness and spirituality that are purportedly universal in every culture. The approach is commonly atomistic, where for instance ethical and religious/spiritual categories are separated from each other in research, even though historically their integration in the human personality was viewed as necessary. In their theorizing and research, positive psychologists frequently follow an atomistic line, which for instance focuses on one virtue without regard to other virtues or their practical context, contrary to Aristotelian virtue ethics (Vaccarezza, 2017).

In order to maintain acceptance and relevance, PP has historically been forced to deal with medical models of the good life, which can view the good life as “the phenomena of a superstate of good mental health, well beyond and above the mere absence of disability illness [but which] has yet to be scientifically demonstrated … In contrast, the benefits of disease prevention and control have been tangibly demonstrated” (Barton, 1958, pp. 112–113). In consequence, many past and recent articles in PP tout benefits to physical or mental health as a reason for pursuing PP practices, which could be taken to imply a kind of implicit endorsement of medical model thinking. In the medical model, the case of Jane would revolve around possible diagnoses, rather than problems in living or exceptional aspects of her life, and in so doing, it would miss vital aspects of Jane’s exceptionality.

History and the Development of Concepts in PP and PRS

Modern psychology overall has relatively little interest in human potential, especially as it is related to religion/spirituality, leaving the field quite thin in terms of native concepts and theory. In order to correct this, PP and PRS have mined the resources of philosophy and theology. However, PN assumes these traditions are inferior ways of knowing the world, so PP and PRS have frequently rechristened and altered ancient terms and concepts with more acceptable, secular meanings. Unfortunately, this can undermine our ability to form the deep and clear definitions necessary for research (Reich & Hill, 2008), and it precludes a common understanding even of basic concepts like PP (Lazarus, 2003). The rechristening of the terms “happiness” (eudaimonia) and “passion” (pathē) are especially important.

The Good Life, Virtue, and Happiness

Positive psychologists often argue their field has two approaches to understanding the good life. These are a hedonic approach (where the good life is associated with happiness or well-being) and a eudaimonic approach that connects it with the development of positive virtues.

Early treatments of emotions like happiness appeared in the work of Carol Ryff, and the hedonic approach has been more recently championed by Ed Diener (2000) under the construct “well-being,” which he has advanced as a scientific approach to studying happiness. Diener defines well-being as a universal variable involving “peoples’ positive evaluations of their lives, includes positive emotion, engagement, satisfaction, and meaning” (Diener & Seligman, 2004, p. 1). In theory, this is a very broad concept, but in practice the term well-being is often associated with feeling good or positive subjective experiences, and discussions of issues related to life meaning were relatively few until Seligman’s (2011) PERMA model. In more recent work, Diener and other positive psychologists have argued for the broadening of the well-being concept so it can better be applied to the benefit of individuals and societies.

The eudaimonic approach of Seligman and others is different in some ways, but fundamentally it is not very different from the hedonic approach. It spends considerable time talking about character development and virtue, but like the hedonic approach, the good life ultimately comes down to “subjective well-being,” which is often conceptualized as an individual feeling state, even though the concept can also be applied at a group or societal level. This perspective leads research to largely coalesce around a subjective, emotivist point of view that tends to emphasize an individualistic view of the person (Ivtzan et al., 2016).

The emphasis on feelings or subjective experience can also be found in PRS discussions. In the nineteenth century, modernist writers like Schleiermacher (1897) saw feelings as the center of religion/spirituality. This idea was key in the work of William James (1902/1961), who argued that a psychological understanding of religion/spirituality must focus on “religious feelings and religious impulses” (p. 22). James (1902/1961) identified two types of religion/spirituality, one of “healthy mindedness” (connected to a straightforward experience of “religious happiness”) and the other of the “sick soul” with a deeper emotional experience of “the depressed and melancholy” (connected to an acute awareness of evil; pp. 78–142). Psychologists could talk about the religious/spiritual experience but not talk about the power of religious/spiritual practices. In this situation, “spirituality” can become a more key topic than “religion,” and both can be objectively studied and measured based mainly on categorizing the types of feelings people feel during their experiences. This kind of division must be approached cautiously, because for people like Jane, spirituality and religion are intertwined.

The PP understanding of eudaimonia may be based on a misunderstanding of the Classical concept. For Aristotle, eudaimonia was the positive goal of life. The term literally means “gifted by a good daimon,” but translations from the past couple of centuries misleadingly render the term as “happiness.” Eudaimonia actually equates with the good life (eu zēn), a life lived with our natural final cause or purpose in mind (1926, I.iv.2). Eudaimonia is thus not an emotion or feeling. It is a form of life (de tithemen ergon zōē tina) that involves the “exercise of the soul’s powers” according to a rational principle (logos) and virtue (aretē) across a lifetime (1926, I.vii.14–16), where virtue is a disposition to act in praiseworthy ways (1926, I.xiii.20). The end of virtue is virtue itself, just as the best life is one in which a person’s natural, latent faculties are exercised to the fullest ability in accordance with reason. This could be a pleasant life (hēdus), but any pleasure is a byproduct of living a rational life, not life’s goal (1926, I.viii.10–11). Importantly, it is a state of being and way of life lived in the context of a community (koinōnia politikē; Slife & Richardson, 2008) and cannot be thought of in strictly individualistic terms. A key aim of Classical philosophers was the attempt to create communities that would not just discuss eudaimonia as an idea but develop it as a way of life for its followers (Hadot, 1995).

Early Christian thinkers likewise believed that human flourishing, eudaimonia or beatitudo, does not consist of bodily pleasure; instead, it consists of finding personal or communal meaning as given by God in the present moment, which may or may not have an accompanying sense of enjoyment (Aquinas, 2012, Ia-IIae Q2 A6, A8; Q3 A8). A good life can be had even when one does not have pleasurable feelings, if one is finding meaning in their life. Beatitudo and eudaimonia are related to the kind of life we live and the meaning we find in it, so happiness can be found even in the midst of suffering—as is amply demonstrated in Jane’s case.

As part of its relational view of persons and the good life, Christianity attempted to create communities that would promote the development of a good life—not just to a select few but to all who desire it. Judeo-Christian thought holds that we are created in the image of God (eikona theou), and as a result, human potential both transcends imagination and the human condition itself. Our potential as created in the image of God is both a gift and a goal (Nellas, 1987). The term deification (theōsis) describes the process of the human person becoming more like the objectively good Divinity, through God and the person mutually approaching (perichōrēsis) each other (Maximos Confessor, 1857–1858). It leads to a reconstruction of our nature beyond individual human effort, dependent on grace and aided by the Christian community. The human person was intrinsically relational, both with God and other humans (Nelson & Slife, 2017).

Virtues, Vices, Passions, and Emotions

From its modern inception, PP has attempted an analysis of virtues and positive feelings. A key work was that of Peterson and Seligman (2004), who made an inventory of strengths, called Values in Action, based on a selective review of materials from the Western, South, and East Asian traditions, using the atomistic criteria that “each element can be defined and measured independently of the other elements” (p. 2). The definitions of the values usually differed from their original meaning, and Peterson and Seligman (2004) admitted “it proved beyond our ability to specify a reasonable theory” that would underlie a taxonomy (p. 6). The virtues are viewed as isolated scientific entities in that they can be measured, and they are thus claimed to express intrinsic and universal truth. Individual instances of religion/spirituality in history are summarized in one word, such as transcendence (Slife & Richardson, 2008). Such operational definitions can be highly reliable, but they may have questionable validity.

The PP analysis of virtue differs substantially from the Classical view. For Aristotle, virtues (aretē) are habits that operate in unison, forming the stable character traits (hexis) necessary for eudaimonia. For example, acquiring prudence (phronēsis) is impossible without possessing the other virtues (1926, VI.xii.10). A unity-of-virtues view allowed Aristotle to claim that health is associated with a harmonious balance of the virtues, not the pursuit of individual virtues. He also argued that it was impossible to understand virtues without considering vices, habits that undermine our pursuit of the good life. Many early Christian authors were trained in Classical thought and creatively synthesized the ideas of virtues, practical reasoning (phronesis) in individual situations, and eudaimonia with Christian theology. As in Aristotle, negative characteristics needed to be discussed in order to identify and encourage positive growth better.

Another difference between Classical and PP concepts revolves around the terms “passions” (pathē) and “emotions.” Classical authors were primarily interested in the passions, which were viewed not just as emotions but as complex cognitive and feeling states that interfered with the good life. Christian thinkers developed sophisticated mental practices to eliminate the barriers to flourishing produced by inordinate passions, sin, and ordinary human limitations. This changed in the Early Modern period, when the term passions (with its philosophical and theological linkages) began to be replaced by the term emotion (Descartes, 1909; Dixon, 2003). Emotions like pleasure became the key to eudaimonia, and the PN reduction of ethics to emotion tied the worth of virtue to feelings (Willard, 2018). Note that this is not a scientific “truth” but a historically conditioned position that we may or may not adopt.

Effects of Conceptual Developments on PP and PRS

In PN, a universal human nature selfishly prioritizes individual survival and happiness, which transferred to the Western cultural movement of modernism as a value for individualism (Sugarman, 2007; Taylor, 1989). The growing restlessness in PP seems related to discomfort with these roots in inherited modernist individualism and the problematic methodology of atomistically separating virtues from each other. Post-Enlightenment sources are the only ones that tend to make the cut, and pre-Enlightenment sources tend to be interpreted within twentieth or twenty-first century ideological priorities, apart from the relationality of persons and virtues.

Some researchers in PP want to move the field in new directions. The use of concepts like forgiveness could derive consistent meanings based on Classical concepts. Paul Wong (2011, p. 69) has suggested a “PP 2.0” that would focus on meaning and other issues. Some authors also feel uncomfortable with the current emphasis on positive emotions, neglecting to address negative emotions and vices and the positive value of suffering in developing virtue (Kidd, 2015; Kristjánsson, 2013, pp. 86–150; Lazarus, 2003). In addition, a rising chorus notes how most PP research has been conducted within the cultural framework of the Western values and methods of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially in the individualistic focus on subjective happiness rather than communal flourishing (Koop & Fave, 2013). An allergy to religious and philosophical ways of thinking is problematic, because religious and philosophical traditions can provide conceptual categories and structures that can strengthen psychological investigations into questions involving life’s meaning (Ivtzan et al., 2016; Kaczor, 2017). Concern over decontextualized models has led some researchers to begin exploring the use of qualitative methods, although in practice many of these studies diverge from basic tenets of this type of research, as used in other social science disciplines like anthropology.

Conclusion

Many helpful premodern ideas about the human person and various ways of life are difficult to access today. A PN approach, based in antiquated philosophy of science, rejects a historical understanding of how the good life can be studied and achieved in various religious/spiritual and cultural contexts. A movement away from positivist views of virtues—and towards an interdisciplinary pool of Classical and Christian or other religious/spiritual strategies (e.g., material drawn from Buddhism) for maximizing positive potential—could benefit PP and PRS research and practice. This chapter has offered a foundation for correcting these problems in PP and PRS.

PP could improve its potential contributions to therapy as it moves away from universal naturalistic understandings of virtue to definitions more appropriate to diverse contexts. With less vague generalization and more basis in specific historical and religious/spiritual examples of virtues and religious/spiritual practices and beliefs, PP and PRS will be more empirical. An understanding of the complexity of virtues can reconcile the points of view of the psychologist and the patient more quickly and enable a patient to become more proficient in virtuous habits appropriate to their practical individual situation. As informed by PRS, one key PP goal should be helping people cultivate objectively good virtues or habits that work together harmoniously to support character stability and enhance health and well-being (see Davis et al., Chap. 18, this volume).

Jane is a rare example of a person who lives the good life under extraordinary circumstances. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if PP and PRS could make Jane’s resources accessible to others? This twenty-first century potential cannot be attained using approaches mired in nineteenth century prejudices. Instead, PP and PRS can work together to bring the good life to an ever-expanding number of people in our global society. Patients like Jane, positive and concerned about the needs of others even in circumstances that often dampen character, are realistic possibilities.