What is happiness, and how can it be obtained? The question of happiness is a perennial human concern, one for which all people seek an answer. The question may be answered, and happiness itself defined, in various ways, and these ways are fundamental to the religious, philosophical and artistic traditions of the world. In the history of Catholic philosophy, particularly during the Middle Ages, two of the greatest thinkers - Boethius (most notably in his classic work, The Consolation of Philosophy) and St. Thomas Aquinas - gave their own answers to this question, and while they diverged on some points, they agreed on the essential concepts. Through an examination of the conceptions of happiness and its means of attainment given by these two philosophers, happiness may be more fully understood, modern understandings of it examined in a new light and obstacles to becoming happy more readily overcome.
In the Scholastic tradition which Boethius helped to begin and whose most eminent champion was St. Thomas Aquinas, it is fitting to first give the definitions of happiness offered by these two philosophers. For St. Thomas, happiness consists in the acquisition of the last end, the highest perfection or summum bonum, namely eternal life in union with God. “[S]ince everything desires its own perfection, a man desires for his ultimate end, that which he desires as his perfect and crowning good.”[1] No actions are done without purpose, whether by natural instinct or by the free will of a rational agent; this teleological purpose or goal of action is the ultimate end, the highest perfection possible for the agent. Human acts are thus performed for the perfection of the individual person, and this perfection is the intended end of each act, even if intermediate ends are pursued as means to or substitutes for this ultimate end. The perfection of human nature, which St. Thomas understood to be the condition of happiness, is the “perfect and crowning good,” whom he identified as God, the principle and source in whom all created goods participate. Edward Feser, in his book Aquinas, explains St. Thomas’s use of the term “desire” more precisely:
[B]y ‘desirable’ Aquinas does not mean that which conforms to some desire we happen contingently to have, nor even, necessarily, anything desired in a conscious way. Here as elsewhere, it is the notion of the final cause – the end or goal towards which a thing is directed by nature – that is key.[2]
St. Thomas’s definition of happiness is largely consistent with that of Boethius, as both were heirs of the Platonic, Aristotelian and Christian philosophical traditions. However, while Boethius’s Catholic worldview is more explicit in works other than The Consolation of Philosophy, the most significant philosophical difference between the two thinkers is that Boethius was primarily Platonic in influence, seeing Plato (and Socrates through him) as the greatest philosopher and Aristotle as admirable but more derivative, whereas St. Thomas held Aristotle to be “the Philosopher,” and in his own work he perfected the fusion of Aristotelian philosophy with Platonism and Catholic doctrine sought after by medieval thinkers for decades. Accordingly, the description of Boethius’s understanding of happiness as given by St. Thomas accurately distills the disparity between them:
Boethius, in defining happiness, considered happiness in general: for considered thus it is the perfect common good; and he signified this by saying that happiness is ‘a state made perfect by the aggregate of all good things,’ thus implying that the state of a happy man consists in possessing the perfect good. But Aristotle expressed the very essence of happiness, showing by what man is established in this state, and that it is by some kind of operation. And so it is that he proves happiness to be ‘the perfect good’.[3]
Boethius and St. Thomas thus share the same essential definition of happiness, but by Aristotle’s insights St. Thomas apprehends not only the state of happiness as “the aggregate of all good things,” but also the essence of happiness itself as “the perfect good” and the proper means of attaining it via an intellectual operation. Boethius also understood the intellectual nature of happiness, as he observed, “you, made in the likeness of God by virtue of your reason,”[4] agreeing with St. Thomas that the intellect is the means by which we behold God and thus gain happiness.
Happiness, from these definitions, may be further clarified by distinguishing between what St. Thomas calls perfect and imperfect happiness. The form or degree of happiness attainable in this life is only the imperfect, because our ultimate end of union with God as the highest good and perfection of our nature can only be gained through the elevation of the human intellect by grace to directly see and thus perfectly know God in the Beatific Vision of Heaven. St. Thomas uses an admixture of theology with his philosophical treatment of happiness, but even the recognition of our perfect happiness as consisting only in beholding God, alongside our incapacity to reach this goal prior to death and without the personal elevation of God, is a truth that can be known by reason alone; St. Thomas simply gives the revealed answer to this dilemma in the salvific joy promised by Jesus Christ in Scripture.
Based on this, St. Thomas described, in a sense, two forms of imperfect happiness which are indeed obtainable in this life. The first form of imperfect happiness is gained through virtue, in “an operation of the practical intellect directing human actions and passions.”[5] However, because the practical intellect only pursues actions ordained to ends other than themselves, it cannot perfect human nature, and thus happiness is obtained rather through the speculative intellect, which apprehends and possesses goods as fitting for their own sakes. The end of the speculative intellect is the contemplation of truth and the supreme good as known. Since we cannot behold ultimate truth perfectly in this life, we can only contemplate in a lesser way, and this is the second form of imperfect happiness attainable in this life, consisting in the contemplation of participated truths and goods through the medium of the senses, but St. Thomas says that we can live an authentic contemplative life, as the highest fulfillment of human nature, even in the midst of the active life, the latter of which can aid the former via virtue, if we orient our lives to contemplation: “since he can always easily turn to it, and since he ordains the very cessation, by sleeping or occupying himself otherwise, to the aforesaid occupation, the latter seems, as it were, continuous.”[6] While imperfect happiness is available in this life as a kind of consolation, St. Thomas does not see this as a substitute for or alternative to perfect happiness; rather, he sees perfect happiness as natural to man and the ultimate end of all our acts: “man is ordained to happiness through principles that are in him; since he is ordained thereto naturally.”[7] Thus, since anything to which we are ordained for our perfection cannot be to its imperfect form but only its perfect, we are made for union with God by nature and cannot be satisfied by imperfect happiness.
Boethius largely shares St. Thomas’s view of perfect happiness. For him, happiness is a partaking of the perfect happiness or goodness of God, whose happiness is his essence, whereas for us happiness is created as our possession of God who is the perfection of the good. While he, like St. Thomas, believed that material goods can be enjoyed as such, they cannot bring true happiness and thus happiness is only perfected in union with God. While he did not seem to explicitly distinguish perfect and imperfect happiness as did St. Thomas, Boethius still described the possibility of happiness in this life as deriving from virtue, which is immune to the whims of fortune or any changes caused by the finitude of the world; only the voluntary choices of the individual can cause virtue to grow or be lost, and as a kind of means toward or preparation for the attainment of the highest good in God, virtue is the highest possible satisfaction of the human soul obtainable in this world.
The greatest and most common struggle humans face in this life is the discernment of what happiness is and what means to pursue in order to attain it. In this lifelong yearning, worldly goods are frequently confused for higher goods, and this is due, St. Thomas explains through his Aristotelian lens, to the fact that all human knowledge begins in the senses, and so material goods are the most easily recognized. However, according to St. Thomas, goods which are exterior to man or are purely bodily “are ordained to the goods of the soul, as to their end,”[8] since man’s highest power and that which makes him to be human is his intellect and thus happiness consists primarily in the perfection of the intellectual soul. The senses aid happiness because the intellect comes to know the truth which is its perfection in this world antecedently through the senses. Even in the New Heaven and Earth, when, according to revelation, the saints will be given spiritual bodies and will behold God in the Beatific Vision in a more corporeal way, “at the resurrection, ‘from the very happiness of the soul,’ as Augustine says, ‘the body and the bodily senses will receive a certain overflow, so as to be perfected in their operations’.” Nevertheless, at that time, “the operation whereby man’s mind is united to God will not depend on the senses”.[9] Thus, material or bodily goods in this life, since they are only possessed in a finite, temporary way, often dependent on other people or situations and on worldly fortunes, can never perfect our intellect and bring true happiness.
Boethius, through the poetic figure of the “goddess of fortune,” gave the understanding of material goods which St. Thomas and countless other philosophers through the ages would adopt in its essence. Goods which are finite, temporary, exterior or dependent on others can never bring true happiness, since only the full and complete possession of the highest good with permanence can perfect human nature and bring eternal happiness. As St. Thomas would echo centuries later, these goods are also “goods of fortune,”[10] often dependent upon chance beyond one’s own control and as such cannot be truly possessed. As Boethius explained, “One service only can Fortune do, when she reveals her own nature and distinguishes true friends from false.” (22) As Thomas Albert Howard explains Boethius’s position, “Philosophy suggests to Boethius that misfortune can have a salutary effect insofar as it reminds us of the true nature of things and prompts us to seek more enduring forms of joy.”[11] By giving and taking away its goods arbitrarily, fortune can serve the purpose of reminding people that we cannot be satisfied by that which can be obtained through fortune, and the perceptive can thus be led to the Good which is immune to fortune’s inscrutable will and is truly permanent and authentic. This supreme Good is known through the intellect, and thus Boethius further counters the desire for external goods: “Have ye no good of your own implanted within you, that ye seek your good in things external and separate?” (35) As Matthew D. Walz explains, “[A] thing of fortune is good if and only if it always makes good that to which it is joined. Lacking universal beneficiality, a thing of fortune must be intrinsically indifferent.”[12]
In the human struggle for happiness and the attempt to discern the perfect good amidst worldly goods apprehended by the senses, an equal or even greater source of confusion is in interior rather than purely exterior and material goods. However, because interior goods are still only imperfect in themselves and subject to our fallible grasp, they cannot bring perfect happiness:
For that good which is the last end, is the perfect good fulfilling the desire. Now man's appetite, otherwise the will, is for the universal good. And any good inherent to the soul is a participated good, and consequently a portioned good. Therefore none of them can be man's last end.[13] (I-II, 2, 7)
St. Thomas explains that the speculative or sapiential sciences, although they are studied for fitting objects rather than as mere means to other ends, can still only come to know and contemplate truths which are participations of that truth that is essentially true, i.e. God, since “the entire consideration of speculative sciences cannot extend farther than knowledge of sensibles can lead”[14] (ST I-II, 3, 6) through abstraction, and these participated truths cannot fully perfect the intellect because they only give imperfect knowledge. St. Thomas does, however, in his In libros metaphysicorum, emphasize that the sciences are ordered toward happiness: “All sciences and arts, however, have a single aim, man’s perfection, which is his happiness.”[15] Similarly, pleasure, while an interior experience, is either delight or bodily pleasure. Delight as the result of the possession of a fitting good is only derivative and is not the fitting good itself, being an accident of happiness rather than pertaining to the essence of man’s happiness itself, and in this world, it can also lead to sadness through excess or by confusedly taking pleasure in what is not good. Worse still, bodily pleasure is not even a proper accident of true happiness but is only fitting to the body whose good is inferior to the good of the soul. Even the goods of the soul, through which man attains happiness as the perfection of the intellect, are only means to the perfect end of union with God as good done for its own sake and as that which constitutes happiness in its essence, and so these cannot give perfect happiness.
On this point, Boethius also points out the limitations of human pleasures and knowledge and identifies the highest good as God alone. However, from his more Platonic angle, he also emphasizes the value of interior goods as the means for achieving happiness, writing: “‘Why, then, ye children of mortality, seek ye from without that happiness whose seat is only within us?” (31) Note that Boethius does not say, “that happiness which is within,” as if the content of happiness were to be found in interior goods, but rather that the “seat” of happiness is within, thus agreeing with St. Thomas in identifying the intellect as the instrument and possessor of happiness.
Finite goods cannot be the ultimate end of human action and thus are incapable of constituting true happiness. The immediacy of the senses and the desirability of pleasure greatly obscure this point, since “[t]he essence of goodness consists in this, that it is in some way desirable,”[16] (ST I, 5, 1) and so goods which are attainable in this life can seem to guarantee happiness more than union with God, whose existence is not self-evident and whose essence cannot be seen in this life due to human finitude and sin. However, Boethius, and St. Thomas who condensed his model in the Summa theologiae, examine the goods of this world individually and prove that none are capable of granting happiness.
Riches, which seem with worldly eyes to be the surest and most important means of attaining the good, can in fact only grant the goods of the body, for which wealth is made. As such, wealth is only “ordained to man as to its end,”[17] and thus are below us and cannot be our ultimate end. They are also finite and incapable of bringing infinite satisfaction, and, as being easily subject to the whims of fortune, inevitably lead to fear of their loss, pain from the envy of others, and even if they are given away, “riches cannot pass to many without being lessened in the process.” (33) Since “[m]an’s good consists in retaining happiness rather than in spreading it,”[18] as we cannot be happy in something that brings good only by its loss, happiness cannot consist in wealth. As Dr. Peter Kreeft explains what could appear to be St. Thomas promoting selfishness,
When St. Thomas says that happiness, unlike wealth, is good when possessed, not when spread, he does not mean that our happiness is not in fact increased when we make others happy, but that the essential meaning of ‘happiness’ is the satisfaction of an individual’s desires [for his highest good, the summum bonum]. These may and should include the desire to make others happy too.[19]
Further, wealth is only a means to the ends of bodily goods and is not an end in itself, and even in this usage it can only bring temporary relief to bodily needs, eventually requiring more wealth and thus never being truly satisfactory and perfect. “How in the world, then, can want be driven away by riches?” (54)
Honor, glory and fame, similarly, are not goods in themselves but only derivative of some other good, namely virtue or excellence (whether real or artificial), and are not held by the honorable but only in those who hold someone in honor due to their perceived virtue: “Happiness is in the happy. But honor is not in the honored, but rather in him who honors, and who offers deference to the person honored.”[20] As the good which constitutes true happiness cannot be mixed with evil, honor cannot constitute happiness; “hence arises our indignation that honours so often fall to the most iniquitous of men.” (55) Like riches, they are finite and exterior to man and so cannot be happiness or be the means to possessing it, nor can they even satisfy urges to the degree possible through riches.
Power, pleasure and other bodily goods, as well as the goods of the soul, as explained above, cannot constitute true happiness anymore than can riches or honor for similar reasons, since none of these goods are goods in themselves, nor are they infinite and thus fully satisfying of man’s desire for the highest goods. Further, each of these lower or participated goods, while they can bring an inferior measure of satisfaction or, in the case of the powers of the soul, can be means to achieving happiness, are in fact possessed in their perfection and wholeness by God, who is the summit and principle of all goodness without any limitation, and so only union with God can bring true, permanent and satisfying happiness through the perfection of the good. “Final and perfect happiness can consist in nothing else than the vision of the Divine Essence,”[21] (ST I-II, 3, 8) and this vision is called Beatitude, granting all the interior and personal goods which people seek from worldly goods, delineated by Boethius as “independence, reverence, power, renown, and joy of heart,” (50) achieved only in union with God through the elevation of the intellect by grace. Because all created goods can bring evils with them, such as envy and greed from wealth, falsity from honor or fear of retribution from power, they can never constitute Beatitude: “since happiness is man's supreme good, it is incompatible with any evil.”[22]
Boethius further explains that those who are wicked do not in fact possess worldly goods as it may appear or be claimed, and that virtue, as the goodness of the soul, is the only real source of those goods sought through material gain. True power, for example, is not in the body but in the capacity to satisfy the goal of all human action, namely happiness; only the virtuous can accomplish this, while the wicked are impotent regardless of their physical or political power. Similarly, honor without real virtue is false and only leads to hypocrisy and dishonor, whereas true honor derives from virtue, and so even if one loses public honor, as did Boethius, one retains genuine honor due to the possession of authentic virtue. In this way, virtue can grant a happiness in this life far surpassing all worldly goods, and even perceived bad fortune can work to increase virtue, instructing about the futility of worldliness, punishing and thus correcting wrongdoing, and giving outward signs of interior goods whenever a worldly good is possessed: “the good are always strong, the bad always weak and impotent… vices never go unpunished, nor virtues unrewarded… good fortune ever befalls the good, and ill fortune the bad.”[23] Fr. Francis Selman explains further the benefits of delight from the virtue of wisdom for happiness in this life:
“Another way that sorrow is lessened is by contemplation of the truth, which brings the greatest of delights. Since this is the highest joy, we can have this joy even in the midst of suffering when we raise our minds to divine things. Thus, in the midst of tribulation and discomfort, Boethius and St. Thomas More alike found comfort by turning their minds to things above this world.”[24]
While virtue and limited contemplation can grant an imperfect happiness in this life, as a foretaste of perfect happiness in the Beatific Vision, vice or sin is based in the corruption of the intellect in its disordering of lower goods above higher goods, particularly without reference to the ultimate Good as the principle and rule of all goodness, and in the subsequent corruption of the will in desiring the good in a disordered way. As St. Thomas explains, “Those who sin turn from that in which their last end really consists: but they do not turn away from the intention of the last end, which intention they mistakenly seek in other things.”[25] The will remains fixed on the ultimate good of perfect happiness as its last end, but confuses lesser goods for its last end, caused by the confusion of the intellect in its misjudgment of the order of goods. No one commits sin or falls into vice believing their end to be evil, as it is impossible for the will to desire anything other than its own happiness; sin is rather a confusion of goods and of false goods for the highest good: “For the desire of the true good is naturally implanted in the minds of men; only error leads them aside out of the way in pursuit of the false.” (48) By the habituation of sin and the darkening of the intellect, vice can enslave the will, destroying its freedom to choose the good in fulfillment of its ultimate desire and preventing the attainment of true happiness. The life of virtue, especially the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity infused by grace, empowers the will to be liberated from sin, for the intellect to know the proper order of goodness and to thus pursue the perfect happiness of Beatitude.
From this comparison of the “theories of happiness” given by Boethius and St. Thomas Aquinas, it is possible that many could be given the impression that the fundamental premise of both great thinkers is this: we are doomed in this life to unhappiness and can only wait for the afterlife to be truly fulfilled. While both Boethius and St. Thomas describe a kind of imperfect happiness that is in fact attainable in mortality, it is ultimately unsatisfying and can even become a hindrance to the beatification of perfect happiness in Heaven if treated as an end in itself, and this final hope would only be held by those who accept not only those ideas of Boethius and St. Thomas founded solely upon the natural light of human reason but also inspired by Christian revelation. However, two answers can be given for this dilemma: first, even without revelation one can know through reason that human nature is designed, and all our actions tend for their last end, to the possession of the perfect good, who is God. Thus, while Christian revelation provides an answer to this natural human predilection for divine happiness, the desire itself is undeniable and demands an answer, proving in itself that the answer is indeed available, since as St. Thomas wrote, “[A] natural desire cannot be in vain.”[26] Secondly, for those who recognize the supernatural end of happiness in God and place their hope and joy in the contemplation of his mystery, the goods of this world need no longer be used as substitutes for God, as though they can be our last end or provide true happiness on their own. Instead, they can be enjoyed for what they are, and we need not excessively fear their loss, nor envy the goods of others or be enslaved by our passions which cling to worldly comfort. We can live in the expectation of hope, growing in wisdom and virtue in preparation for our promise of eternal happiness.
[1] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I-II, q. 1, a. 5, at New Advent, www.newadvent.org.
[16] ST I, q. 5, a. 1.
[17] ST I-II, q. 2, a. 1.
[18] ST I-II, q. 2, a. 1.
[19] Peter Kreeft (ed), Summa of the summa (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 361.
[20] ST I-II, q. 2, a. 2.
[21] ST I-II, q. 3, a. 8.
[22] ST I-II, q. 2, a. 4.
[23] 89.
[24] Francis Selman, Aquinas 101 (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 2007), 114.
[25] ST I-II, q. 1, a. 7.
[26] ST I, q. 75, a. 6.
