Radość człowieka cnotliwego, czyli o przyczynach radości w dobie saskiej

Contemporary thinking about happiness and joy specifies more precisely a lot of factors. In fact, it is said that there are plenty of “joyful movements of heart” and quite a lot of emotions generating happiness. However, to talk about such the experience and feeling happiness in the past, we should not use our matrix of mentality because people living in the past centuries mainly sought the cause of their  joy in God and salvation. And so the man of the Saxon era sought happiness in the spiritual space whereas the true joy being the only one was supposed to be his participation just after his death. Reading different sorts of historical sources such as: sermons or trip logs, we can clearly notice that the man who lived in the eighteenth century knew that happiness could not be found in his surroundings, in his fleeting and ephemeral worldliness, but in that what anchored in God. Living in harmony with the commandments, practising virtue and asceticism were perceived as the guarantee of the achievement of real joy in the eschatological reality. However, we must not forget, that with great delight as befits the Baroque, he indulged in the pleasures of his body, organized balls and parties and did not avoid luxury and wealth. The article is just an attempt to analyze and familiarize the issues and also to explain the reasons for happiness and joy in the Saxon era.