SOURCE: "Happiness: The One Thing Everybody Wants" in The Primacy of Love: An Introduction to the Ethics of Thomas Aquinas, Paulist Press, 1992, pp. 44-62.

[In the following excerpt, Wadell discusses Aquinas's inquiries into happiness, including the requirements for attaining true happiness, the need to purify one's desires, false notions of happiness, and why perfect happiness can be found only in God.]

Anybody who promises to make us happy has our attention. We may be skeptical, but we will listen. Everyone wants to be happy, and if we doubt this we only have to recall how much of our energy is devoted to seeking what we think will bring us joy. This is why when Thomas talks about happiness we're hooked. We cannot help but want to be happy, so when Thomas tells us that "happiness is our true good," that it "is our proper and complete good," and that the most perfect happiness "essentially remains and is forever," we not only nod our heads in agreement, we want to hear more. Not to want to be happy is inhuman. All of us may slip into destructive patterns of behavior, but that is not because we spurn happiness; we simply have not yet understood where genuine happiness is found.

And that is what Thomas wants to tell us. He has watched us in our pursuit of happiness. He has seen all we chase after, thinking it will make us whole: money, pleasure, fame, honor. He has watched what our devotions do to us, how they change us, how sometimes they lift us but so often they drag us down. He has seen how we expend ourselves on whatever we think will bring us joy and he admires that, but he also wants us to be careful, for he knows we sometimes offer ourselves precipitately, giving ourselves to something not worthy of our preciousness.

That is why Thomas wants to talk to us about where true happiness lies. He wants to summon us to our most wholesome possibility for he knows that only in possessing that shall we find enduring joy. He knows when he talks about happiness he has our attention because he can count on happiness as the one thing every human being desires. We may not agree on anything else, but we do agree we want to be happy. We are seekers of happiness, but where should we search? We hunger for indefectible joy, but where is such bliss to be found? These are questions that stir the heart. Thomasasked them too, and he wants to tell us what he discovered. What is genuine happiness and where is it found? These are the things Thomas considers in each of the articles of question 2 of the Prima Secundae (ST, I-II, 2, 1-8) as he continues his inquiry into the moral life. They will be our focus in this third chapter.

I. Wrong Turns on Happiness

Once more Thomas begins by watching us. He starts by making himself a student of human life. He sees quickly enough that we are seekers of happiness, but a longer meditation before the tapestry of life shows him we do not all agree what happiness is. We seek it in different places and in different ways. We are one in our desire to be happy, but amazingly scattered in how we think the search for happiness will be resolved. In many respects, Thomas learns that the moral life for all of us is best understood as this ongoing search for whatever we think will bring us joy; maybe it is nothing more than a fabled odyssey to what we think will bring us peace. Thomas learns this: much of our lifetime is an investigation into candidates for happiness. If we look back over our lives, especially before we settled into commitments and promises, we see that much of our time was an ongoing experiment with all the things we thought would bring us joy. Thomas wants to examine these possibilities carefully and he wants to take them seriously. Even though he will conclude that there is one thing alone that brings final and everlasting joy, in no way does he want to disparage all the other devotions we form. He will acknowledge their goodness and he will grant that each in some way is essential to well-being; however, he will also always be calling our attention to something more, to something all-surpassing, because he is convinced it is only in union with this that we shall find the happiness we so relentlessly seek.

It takes time to discover what happiness is. We know this because we have learned by our mistakes. We have taken wrong turns on happiness, we have pursued dead ends. Sometimes we have been irreparably wounded because we have invested ourselves so thoroughly in something we thought would be our good, only to discover we were deceived; in fact, it may be true that often we are mistaken about happiness much more than we are correct. It is natural for us to want to be happy, but none of us naturally knows where happiness is to be found. Thomas knows this. He sees we are frequently mixed-up about happiness, so often attaching ourselves to what will harm us more than bless us, sometimes expending ourselves so destructively we wonder if happiness will ever be ours. Other times we form attachments which take us somewhere, but don't take us far enough, so we feel disappointed and perhaps slightly betrayed. There is pressure on us to expend ourselves on goods that are not worthy of us, much pressure on us to give ourselves away to the wrong things, not in the sense that they are bad, but are not good enough to bring us the joy and peace we seek. From his observations on life, Thomas learns what all of us experientially know. We are naturally heroic, inasmuch as all of us give ourselves wholeheartedly to something, sacrificing our time, energy, and our self to whatever we think will bless us most. But do we sometimes pour ourselves out in vain? Are our oblations sometimes deadly?

Thomas wants to speak to us about happiness because he cares for us and wants to help us avoid these destructive choices. He knows there is a natural generosity to the human spirit, but he also knows if we give ourselves to something less than ourselves, we drag ourselves down, we diminish ourselves, and sometimes we nearly destroy ourselves and that should never happen. Happiness lies insomething magnanimous, something not only capable of greatness, but something which can bring us, as Thomas puts it, to the "full and most perfect development of ourself' (ST, I-II, 2,4). Happiness is being related to whatever is best for us; it is lovelife with whatever good enables our most noble possibility; put differently, happiness is lifelong friendship with our most promising good. In relation to what is such fulness possible? This is the question guiding Thomas's investigation of happiness.

We can see a concern at work. Thomas fears bad attachments because he knows what they can do to us. Bad attachments come from mistaken notions of happiness, but such mistakes are not benign; they cripple us, they make us morally feeble, and if pursued they begin an interior deterioration we should desperately fear. It is natural enough to make mistakes about happiness, but we should learn from them, not embrace them. If we settle into bad attachments we disfigure ourselves, turning further away from genuine goodness and life. Bad attachments begin a decreation, for instead of inching us toward fullness of life, they pull us back into the abyss of chaos and confusion, making us the tragic antithesis of what God's love wants us to be. As we search for happiness we are bound to encounter dead ends. Our history may be a chronicle of confusion on where joy is found. Thomas knows this, and it is why he so aptly quotes Boethius: "'Anyone who chooses to reflect on past excesses will appreciate how pleasures have sad endings"' (ST, I-II, 2,6). Another way of translating Boethius here is, "Whoever wishes to reminisce about misplaced desires understands that such desires leave us sad." We feel the insight. Through Boethius, Thomas calls to mind a typical and powerful human experience. So often we learn the inadequacy of our devotions through the diminishment of their returns. They do not deliver the contentment we had hoped. We place our trust in them and come up short. We leave them feeling wasted, but at least having learned that a fuller, richer happiness is not to be found there, and so our odyssey continues.

As we travel with Thomas in this search for real joy we will notice that he thinks differently, even quaintly, about happiness. Unlike so many of us, Thomas does not think happiness is the freedom to pursue and satisfy our desires, irrespective of what those desires are; that is a therapeutic notion of happiness, not a moral one. Thomas agrees happiness entails the satisfaction of desires, but he also argues that part of becoming happy involves the purification of our desires. Often we are not happy, Thomas suggests, because we desire the wrong things, or else we desire some right things in the wrong way, giving them undue devotion. For Thomas, happiness depends on cultivating the right preferences and nurturing the proper desires. We have to learn where true happiness is to be found. We have to be educated in happiness, tutored in the love from which it is derived. And in order to be happy we probably have to change ourselves.

Thomas speaks of happiness as objective, not subjective, at least in the sense that for him happiness is not an open-ended, formless concept we are free to define in whichever way we want; rather, happiness has a precise meaning; it is the nurturing in us of the best and most promising desires, the richest and noblest love. Thomas says to be genuinely happy is to possess the greatest possible good in the deepest possible way; happiness is intimacy with loveliness, but that suggests if we have not found happiness it may be because we have yet to undergo the conversion which makes it possible. In order to be truly happy we must become the kind of person who loves the good where happiness is to be found. We must learn to desire this good and seek it more than we seek anything else. Part of the disquiet of our lives may be that we are not yet the kind of people who are able to love that in which happiness lies. Put differently, Thomas has a normative understanding of happiness, not anindividualistic one, and this means that in order to be happy we must be conformed to the good that offers it, we must be remade, redirected, internally transformed until we practice the love that brings true joy. Happiness hinges on becoming good.

Candidates for Happiness and Why They Fall Short

When Thomas begins his inquiry into happiness, he does not immediately tell us what happiness is; instead, he examines first what so many of us take happiness to be. He lets us begin the conversation. He lets us speak to him about where we have tried to find contentment in our lives, and he takes what we have to say seriously. Thomas watches us. He gains some initial understanding of where happiness might be by observing how we live. He studies our behavior. He apprises our objects of devotion. He considers our attachments. As before, his position is not formed in abstraction, but in response to how we actually live. It is in observing our pursuit of happiness that Thomas draws up an initial list of candidates for happiness. We can guess that Thomas will not settle with these, but he does respect them. As we shall see, he considers money, honor, fame and glory, power and pleasure each as candidates for happiness, and though he will not conclude that lasting well-being is found exclusively in any of these, he will say that a good and prosperous life must include them in some way. Thomas does not dismiss them. He considers them good, and even considers them necessary; when it comes to happiness, he takes each as far as it can go. If we think utter happiness might be rendered in wealth, Thomas will listen carefully to what we have to say because he appreciates the attractive power of wealth. If we suggest that deep happiness comes with honor and fame, Thomas will agree as far as he is able because he knows a good reputation is important in life. To a certain degree, each of these things he examines is plausible as a candidate for happiness because each is unquestionably good.

Thomas respects the hold money, reputation, power, prestige and pleasure can have on us because he respects their goodness. If he concludes that perfect happiness is not to be found in any one of them, he never concludes they have no value, nor that they do not hold an important position in any good life. If we have flirted with each of these as candidates for wholeness, Thomas does not blame us, he understands the hold such goods can have on us. He agrees there is something about each of them that goes a long way toward making our lives pleasant and good. They do provide happiness of a sort, and we would count any life lacking that would not include them at all. Thomas acknowledges how strongly all these goods can lure us, precisely because they are good. That is not the question. The question is whether any of them can carry the burden of lasting happiness, whether in any is the goodness requisite to bring peace to our hearts. This is what Thomas considers when he begins his investigation.

Since Thomas is a realist, it is not surprising that when considering candidates for happiness he begins with money. It might seem crass, but it is true that a lot of people, even if they would never admit it, live as if money is our ultimate joy. We might not want to think that about ourselves, but Thomas looks at how we structure our lives and where we expend our energy. If experience has any connection to the truth, we have to give money its due, and Thomas does. On the face of it, he says, there are many good reasons to think perfect happiness consists in being wealthy. Common sense suggests it. If we look about and see how many people live, it would not be amiss to say money is what makes people happy. Is it right to say happiness comes in wealth? Practically speaking, Thomas says yes, and the reason is so many people live as if this is true. He argues that whatever we think willmake us happiest is what we allow to win our hearts and master our affections, and for many this is money. As Thomas writes, "For since happiness is man's final end it must be looked for where his affections are held above all. And such is wealth, as Ecclesiastes remarks, 'All things obey money"' (ST, I-II, 2,1).

Can so many be wrong? Thomas wonders about this. If we look around us, he says, there seem to be many people who believe that if they are rich they will not be disappointed. If we consider the evidence, he suggests, a majority do think that money is the one thing that won't let them down; when it comes to happiness, that is where they place their wager. If money wins the hearts of so many, must it not be true that in riches is found our ultimate joy? Are we wrong to believe that wealth is what life is about and possessions should receive our supreme devotion? There is an initial plausibility to this claim. Besides, the evidence is that money brings happiness. Look at wealthy people. Most seem fairly happy, don't they? Money has enabled them to set up a comfortable life, a life of minimum inconvenience. Not only are they able to do what they want whenever they want, they are also able to use their wealth to keep at bay many of the misfortunes others suffer. Can these happy people be deceived?

In a tragic way Thomas says they are deceived; they have sold their hearts to what can never bring them lasting joy. Even though money and possessions are good and certainly necessary for human life, to think they constitute our most fitting good is a deadly illusion because they can never deliver the goodness that can bring us fully to life. Thomas's response to the claim that our ultimate joy is found in wealth is extremely blunt. He says that wealth cannot stand as our perfect good because it is less than we are; we will only be brought to fulness by something whose goodness surpasses us. What will make us happiest must be able to do great things for us. To be happy, Thomas reasons, is ultimately to possess the greatest possible good. If good things make us happy, then that which is best will bring us grandest joy. If we recall Thomas's point that our ultimate end is whatever finally quiets our desires, then our joy and happiness will reside in something so good that in possessing it our search for wholeness is over. It must be a good capable of bringing us to our fullest possible development, a good that stretches us, a good that consistently can carry us beyond previous levels of achievement and growth.

To think money can do this is preposterous. Our most lasting happiness resides in our most enduring wholeness. We shall find joy when we are one with whatever is most lovely and blessed. Can this possibly be money? Thomas argues that our happiness will be found in our ultimate end, and whatever that ultimate end is we are made for it, not it for us. We are to be turned toward it, we are to love and cherish it, we are to prize it as our most precious possession. Our ultimate end cannot be money, possessions, or any material thing simply because those things are made to help us, not rule us, and it is both silly and blasphemous to think we are made for them. This is why Thomas writes, "Man's happiness clearly cannot consist in natural riches. For they are sought for the sake of something else, namely the support of human life, and so are subordinate to its ultimate end, not the end itself. They are made for man, not man for them" (ST, I-II, 2,1).

Money is a means to an end, not the end itself. To turn money into our ultimate end is to take something less than us, and attempt to make it greater than us, even to make it our god. To worship at the altar of wealth is a sickening perversion of life, a cynical misunderstanding of who we aregraced to be. To make wealth our god is invariably to diminish and destroy ourselves because the only way to find lasting joy in something less than us is by making ourselves even less than it. That is why the humanity of those who worship money eventually disappears. To make any lesser good our ultimate good is a most destructive perversion because it is to take something made for us and make it that for which we are made. That is why all misplaced loves are idolatrous, and why all idolatrous loves are deadly. In expending ourselves on lesser goods, we are destroyed.

The Inseparable Connection between Happiness and What Is Good

What then is the relationship between ourselves and whatever is going to make us happy? First, Thomas suggests that genuine happiness resides in whatever good is sought for its own sake, not for the sake of anything else. Happiness is being at one with the good beyond which there is no greater good; it is possessing the good every other good serves. There is one such perfect good, a blessed variety of intermediate goods. These other goods point to our most perfect good, and indeed their value is found in being the means by which our lasting good is gained.

Second, whatever will bring us perfect joy is not something less than us, but something so superior that in loving it we are brought to our optimum wholeness. Happiness is a matter of development, it is coming unto fulness through growing in excellence. We are perfected, not through something beneath us, but in something so gloriously blessed that it is out of our reach save through grace. Money is a good, but it is not perfectly good, for in no way does it have the excellence necessary for lasting joy. It has tremendous power to entice, but absolutely no power to redeem. It can lure us, entangle us, seduce us, but it cannot complete us, which is why if we love it most of all we are morally disfigured. Whatever will be our lasting happiness has a power not only to take us beyond ourselves, but to restore us. It has to have the power to heal, the power to grace and bless, the power to be perfectly life-giving and redeeming. Whatever will count for lasting joy has to have that excellence; otherwise, our lives will end not in bliss but despair. Whatever will bring us joy has to be capable of making us so much more than we already are. Money cannot do this. If we love it above all we have no respect for ourselves. To worship it is a cruel perversion of the human spirit, for wealth cannot make us more than we already are; it can only make us less.

Third, having said that money and possessions are not the greatest goods, Aquinas nonetheless insists they are necessary for life to be human at all. This tells us something about how he evaluates material things. As Jean Mouroux says in his book, The Meaning of Man, there ought to be but one absolute love, and that is God. "Let God be the first desired, the first sought, the first served, since He is not only the Source and the End, but also the God of Benediction."¹ If we are focused on God, Mouroux suggests, we glean well the true value of everything else because our love is proper. If we really do desire God most of all, then we shall know how to cherish everything else. The value of all the things in this world, including wealth and possessions, is that "in the hands of a rightful love"² they help us gain God. "Thus the Christian loves the temporal as something that shall help him to rejoin his God. His love is detached and freed from bondage because it goes first to God and to the eternal,"³ Mouroux writes. The value in all these things is that they come from God to help us in our seeking of goodness and life, so they are to be cherished as gifts from God entrusted to us to enable the best possible life, which for Thomas is a life of love and worship of God. Our problems come when we sever the relationship between the good things of this world and the God from whom they came and to whom they are meant to direct us. This is why Mouroux is correct when he says, "The root of the mischief lies in the fact that temporal values have been severed from God. All come from God and are gifts of His love; all, therefore, should lead us to God and help us to achieve and fulfil our being by entering into union with God."⁴

Put differently, all the things of this earth, particularly material things, are not dangerous, but our love for them can be if we forget the purpose for which they are given. We can mold them into idols if we love them supremely instead of partially. It is not material things that are dangerous, but people of misdirected desires who are dangerous because they have yet to learn how to love all good things in a way proportionate to their goodness. By contrast, people who have charity—people who love God more than they love anything else—know rightly how to love all things because by keeping their love for God first they discem the true value of everything else. This is why Mouroux, following Aquinas, says:

We may now easily perceive that what the Christian so emphatically condemns is not the love but the idolatry of the temporal. For this idolatry is a complete reversal of values, it changes their signification, and ends by falsifying temporal things along with man himself. It is a degradation.… He was made for the love of something higher than himself, and when temporal things usurp the first place in his affections then, inevitably, he falls beneath himself.… The violation of order brings its own reckoning: disorder felt in the bones, wholly crippling and destructive.⁵

Still, despite Aquinas's analysis, what are we to make of the fact that so many people live as if money were the best of all goods? Can so many people be wrong? Thomas says yes and his reasoning is straightforward: in morals, not all opinions are equal. There are a lot of silly ideas around because there are a lot of silly people, and anyone who thinks money is the best of all goods is patently foolish. "That money can do everything is the mass opinion of silly people who recognize only the material goods which can be bought," Thomas says. "To estimate human values, however, we should consult the wise, not the foolish, just as for matters gastronomical we go to those with well-educated tastes" (ST, I-II, 2,1). Aquinas will never conclude that happiness is what most people think it to be, or that what counts for joy can be determined by what has captured the majority's affections, because for him it is not where most people's affections lie that determines happiness, but happiness that determines what we must learn to be affectionate about.

Happiness is not a majority position; rather, happiness is understood by those who know what it means to be good. This is why Thomas says if we want to know the truth about happiness, or any other moral question, we should consult people who are wise and good, we should listen to people of virtue. Just as when we want to know what a delicious meal might be we consult a gourmet (and a hefty Thomas could appreciate this), so, too, if we want to know more about what is good and lovely we should turn to those in whom goodness truly shines. People who live as if money and things are the greatest possibility in life are silly, shallow people who do not know life at all. We should not listen to them because there is so little they really understand. In morals not all opinions are equal; the good have an authority the vicious do not and the reason is this: people who adore money are victims of misdirected loves, and in so disfiguring themselves they have lost all sense of who a human being is. They should be pitied, but they should never be heeded.

II. What Happiness Is and Where It Is To Be Found

Thomas continues his investigation into various candidates for happiness. He asks whether happiness consists in fame and glory, whether it comes with honors, if it might be connected to power or physical skill, and if it has anything to do with pleasure. It is in examining each of these that he begins to build his own argument about where lasting beatitude is found. In what are we to be made perfectly happy? To answer this question, Thomas looks very carefully at who we are.

The first thing he notes is that men and women are not made for themselves (ST, I-II, 2,5). This is obvious, but it is important. We are not the purpose of our own existence. We are to live for the sake of something else. Aquinas's point is that we have life in order to be in relationship with something other than ourselves. We are not the greatest good, but we have life in order to find out what is and to love it. If we are not the purpose of our own existence, then we must search for what is. To be human, Aquinas suggests, is to be in love with this "something more." Put differently, we are not in virtue of ourselves, but in virtue of this something other, which is why we must search for it, learn to love it, and live forever in its presence. To know ourselves we must look elsewhere. If, as Thomas says, we are made not for ourselves but for something other, we must figure out what this something other is. All Aquinas suggests is that there is something vastly more important than ourselves in this world, and the most crucial project of the moral life is to find out what this something other is and to love it, for it is only in loving it that we can fully be. If we are made for something other than ourselves, then selfhood is a relationship with it. To be is to be in love with it. Mouroux captures well what Thomas means when he says about us, "… even to be itself it must needs seek something higher than itself,"⁶ which is a fitting definition of a human being.

Thomas underscores the relational dimension of human existence. We cannot have life except through relationships with others and ultimately, to be sure, with God. Personhood is a social creation, not an individual one, inasmuch as we come to life through the crucible of friendship, through the love, care, and affection given us by others. The more fully we relate in love and trust to others, the more fully we come unto ourselves.⁷ This is what Thomas means when he speaks of human existence as "participated" (ST, I-II, 2,5). We are in the measure that we participate in the lives of others; we have life to the degree that we live in communion with other people and with God. Our existence is not self-constituted, it is other-constituted; our self comes to us by participating in what is not ourself. Aquinas's point is that we do not have life when we stand apart, but when we stand in and from another. Isn't this why friendships are so important to us, and why we cannot think of ourselves apart from the people we love? We cherish our friends, not only because they are good to us, but because we also know it is in and through them that we truly are ourselves. Our friends are indispensable because we have this heartfelt sense that we cannot be ourselves without them—and we are right. We know it is in relationship with our best friends that we become our best self.

Secondly, if existence is not solitary but relational, then life is more than sheer existence. Thomas touches this when he says that "mere existence is heightened by an additional value" (ST, I-II, 2,5). What he means is that life is more than simply existing. If we are made not for ourselves but for the sake of something other, then life is living in relationship with this something other, and we sense this. We know the purpose of life is not simply to live, but to be related to something more. We know that life has to be more than day-to-day survival, for simply surviving never satisfies us. If that is allour life is, then likely it is empty and sterile.

We want more than life, we want love in life. We want more than sheer existence, we want to love and to be loved, we want to cherish something more and we want to be cherished ourselves. We want to hold something good in our hearts and we want to be held there in love by another. We want to be in love with life, others, and God, and we want them all to love us. The "additional value" that heightens "mere existence" is love, specifically to love and to be loved by the good that is our happiness. Life is more than existence; it is being in love with the greatest of all goods, it is friendship with that good, it is intimacy with that good, it is communion with that good. This is why Thomas says, "Manifestly man is destined to an end beyond himself, for he himself is not the supreme good. And therefore the final goal … cannot just be his own continuance" (ST, I-II, 2,5). We are not given life simply to exist, but to love and to be loved, to grow in that love, to be changed by it, to be freed by it, to find joy in it. This is why we can be busy and still feel haunted by loneliness and sadness. This is why we can look at our lives and say there is much good about it, but something vital seems to be missing. When we feel this we are searching for the something more, and when we sense this we are being called to deeper possibilities of love.

Third, and not surprisingly, Thomas says authentic happiness is connected to goodness. The only genuinely happy people are the virtuous. We may flinch at this, but Thomas will not be budged. When he says, "Virtue's true reward is happiness itself (ST, I-II, 2,2), he is following Aristotle's conclusion that happiness is not something other than the virtues, but is the virtuous life. Happiness is being good, it is participating in goodness and growing in goodness. For Aquinas, to be virtuous is to be happy, which is why we cannot find joy and peace until we become truly good, and it is also why the deeper our sharing in goodness, the happier we shall become. For Thomas, happiness is not natural, but is acquired and developed. Happiness comes through a certain way of life, a virtuous way of life. Moreover, happiness is doing certain things, namely doing good things. Thomas sees happiness not so much as a feeling, though it is partly that, but more as an activity, as living a certain way. Happiness is being virtuous, it is doing good and becoming good, it is love being practiced. Happiness is doing whatever will bring us to our fullest and most genuine development. It is our most proper and distinctive function, which is why we can say happiness is the best thing we can do.

Genuine happiness cannot be found in evil people, it can never be had through wickedness. Evil may bring pleasure, but it can never bring happiness because "happiness is complete well-being and incompatible with any evil" (ST, I-II, 2,4). Thomas grants that wickedness may thrive and evil people may often prosper, but they cannot be genuinely happy because they are involved in a deterioration of themselves. Wickedness brings decay, not life; it does not restore, it perverts. If happiness is being brought to the fullness of our most proper development, then we will be truly happy in the measure that we achieve our grandest possibility and share in our most promising good. This is why Thomas insists beatitude is not compatible with evil. Evil turns us away from life, it disfigures, it makes us morally ugly, while goodness is life and is beautiful and is freeing. To be happy is to live in and from the most beautiful good, it is even to grow in the likeness of this good, which is why, as we shall see, Thomas eventually insists that our happiness is friendship with God. If happiness is commensurate with goodness, then the greatest joy is in proportion to the greatest goodness. It is because of this that Thomas says our growth in happiness hinges on our growth in the goodness of God. This is why he also concludes that happiness is holiness, and that being godly is requisite for joy. Thomas hints thiswhen he says, "There is a drive within all things towards some likeness to God, who is their first beginning and final end" (ST, I-II, 2,4). But he captures it even more fittingly when he writes, "Therefore to show some reflection of God by their power does not approach to happiness, unless they [human beings] also become like God in goodness" (ST, I-II, 2,4). This is Thomas's most succinct definition of happiness: happiness is becoming like God in goodness.

Why Happiness Is a Quality of Soul

There is one obvious objection to this. Good people do not always seem happy. Their goodness does not protect them from adversity. They, too, are burdened with life's misfortunes, they, too, are often visited by bad luck; in fact, in many respects it seems good people suffer more, they may even suffer because they are good. The lives of the saints attest to this. They knew tragedy, in many respects their lives seem to have been an endless chronicle of being tested by adversity. How then can Thomas claim that the virtuous are the only genuinely happy ones?

Because he argues that happiness is not a mood or a feeling, but quality of soul. Here is how he reasons. He agrees that happiness is something outside us, if we are speaking about the object of happiness. He has already said that in order to be happy we must be related to what is good, and in order to know perfect happiness we must love the perfectly good. But then he added that our happiness grows insofar as we come to possess this good ourselves. By loving the good we begin to take on its quality, and it becomes part of us, an aspect of our being. We possess it internally because we have been formed in its likeness. What makes us happy is outside us in the sense that it stands apart from us, but we become happy when through love we have made it part of ourselves.

We are talking about intimacy, but about the most radical and enduring intimacy of all, the intimacy of likeness to what we most desire. We can see this in friendships when each absorbs something of the other's goodness. We can see it in marriages when a husband has been changed by the loveliness of his wife. We can see it in all those relationships in which we begin to take on aspects of the ones we love. Through love we become part of the other's being and they become part of ours. We have union by passing over into the other's self. Thomas makes this point about happiness when he says happiness is laying hold of our good, but laying hold of it internally. Happiness is being united with our good, but it is a union of likeness, a kinship of similarity. To be happy is to have taken within ourselves our beloved, it is to have absorbed within our souls the goodness we endlessly seek. This is why Thomas says happiness is being "conjoined in any way with the thing on which we set our heart." As he elaborates:

If, however, by this we refer to the gaining or possessing, or to our being conjoined in any way with the thing on which we set our heart, then our ultimate end [happiness] implies something within us and on the part of our soul, for it is then that we come to happiness. To sum up: the thing itself desired as the final end is that which gives substance to happiness and makes a person happy, though happiness itself is defined by the holding of it. The conclusion to be drawn is that happiness is a real condition of soul, yet is founded on a thing outside the soul. (ST, I-II, 2,7)

We can understand what Thomas means if we reflect on who strike us as happy people. What are happy people like? What do we sense when we are with them? Their happiness seems to rise fromwithin them. In a sense, they are their happiness because it is hard to separate the joy and peace we feel in their presence from who they are. We do not think of their happiness as one aspect of who they are; rather, we think of them as happy in themselves. Their happiness is neither peripheral nor superficial, but is a personal trait, a dimension of their character. And we sense they are happy because they are one with what they love. There is little discrepancy in them between what they seek and what they possess. Happiness is holding to what we love, insofar as it is no longer something apart from us, but something whose likeness we share, and that is how these people seem to us. By loving something good for so long they have become like it. Every love brings likeness, and their love has brought likeness to something eminently and refreshingly good. By loving it, they have been transformed from within. They truly have been converted because the goodness and beauty of what they love has become transparent in themselves.

Perfect happiness is perfect assimilation with the best of all goods. As we shall see, Thomas says that happiness is the ultimate effect of what we love on who we are, inasmuch as loving something good and beautiful for a lifetime makes us rich in that same goodness and beauty. We absorb the preciousness of what we love, we take on its goodness, which is why we are happy; what we have sought for so long as our joy we possess, not in some transient, fickle way, but as an enduring quality of soul. We can say we are happiness not in the sense that everything always goes our way or that we are perpetually cheerful, but in the sense that we have absorbed the effects of our love. To be happy is to hold what we love, and for Aquinas we hold it in the most personal, enduring way possible: we are conformed to its goodness.

Why Perfect Happiness Is Found in God

Still, because happiness comes in the perfect assimilation of ourself into the most perfecting good, it is not something we have all at once. Happiness is gradually, sometimes painstakingly, attained. It is the work of a virtuous lifetime. We cultivate joy as we cultivate goodness. This is why we can say happiness increases with the ongoing and never-ending remaking of ourselves. Happiness is conversion because to be happy is to have been converted into the goodness of God. Happiness is surrender, because to be happy is to have handed ourselves over to the love that can do immeasurably more for us than we could ever do for ourselves. To be happy is to be transfigured in holiness, to shine with the goodness of God, but because God's goodness always infinitely surpasses us, our happiness can forever increase. Heaven may have to be everlasting because there is no limit to the happiness God's goodness can bring.

We know where Aquinas's argument is taking us. When all is said and done, our happiness lies not in any created good, but in the perfect, everlasting goodness of God. To be happy is to be united with what is most lovely and blessed; it is communion with pure goodness. Thomas has said from the start that our happiness is realized in whatever brings us to our fullest and most fitting development, and now he identifies this as God, for God can do more for us than anything else.

In God is a goodness that can bless us eternally, a goodness that can continue to change us and enrich us. In God alone is the goodness that brings fulness of life, that is why God is our happiness and joy. Every other good contributes to life, but is not life. Every other good leaves us desiring more. We taste these goods but we continue to search; we possess them but we are driven by longing; we have them and we still are lonely. The incompleteness of every other good points us to a better good. To be happy, Thomas says, we must know complete fulfillment and be lacking in nothing, but when we have wealth, honor, fame, power, reputation, and pleasure, as good and as necessary as all these things are, we know we are still lacking that something more that alone can draw us to wholeness. Only in God resides a good blessed enough to heal and redeem, which is why God is our ultimate good and the fulness of our joy.

But Thomas has a problem. He knows there remains one objection to his claim that God is our perfect happiness and our absolutely fulfilling good. The problem is this: how can we who are not God ever possess God in a way to know such lasting joy? How can we who are so different from God, limited, finite, and earthly, enjoy the splendid goodness of One who seems everything we are not? Granted we may desire God more than we desire anything else, but this does not mean we necessarily have a capacity for a relationship with God. Can the infinite, perfect good be the happiness of those who are creaturely and finite? Or do we simply, if tragically, remain worlds apart? If so, then those who argue that happiness is found not in God but in something of this earth are right, they are the realists. If so, people who seek their joy in wealth, fame, honor, power, and prestige have accepted who we are, creatures who cannot reach out to more good than the goods of this world.

Thomas grants the force of this claim. He knows there is no apparent reason we should believe that human beings who are so radically other than God can be united with God. In raising this point Thomas is not questioning God, but is questioning our capacity for God. Can we find joy in One so different from ourselves? Are we capable of relating to the God Thomas says is our only possible lasting joy? If God is to be our happiness we must have some capacity to be in relationship with God and truly love God. Otherwise, no matter how much Thomas might want to disagree, whatever happiness is possible for us must come through the things of this world. This is how Thomas poses the problem:

Again, man is made happy by an object which brings to rest his natural desire. This, however, does not reach out to more good than it can hold. Since he has not the capacity for a good beyond the bounds of all creation, it would seem that he can become happy through some created good, and here he finds his happiness (ST, I-II, 2,8).

Is seeking our happiness in God "reaching out to more good than we can hold"? Thomas says this point would be insurmountable if there were no way we could have a relationship with God. If God remains infinitely apart from us, God cannot be our happiness and joy; however, there are two reasons we can believe otherwise. First, there is grace. Grace is the gift of God's love which enables us to enjoy God in a way that otherwise would be impossible. It is through grace, which is always pure gift, that we are made capable of relationship with God. Grace, in Aquinas's language, "elevates" us so we can seek God, love God, and have communion with God. It is through God, and not ourselves, that this is made possible for us; the gift of God's love empowers us to love in return.

Second, if grace comes from God's side, desire comes from ours. Thomas grants that if we were finite in every way God could not be our joy, for we cannot "reach out to more good" than we can hold. But there is, he contends, one way we are not finite: we have unlimited desire. We are limited in every way but one—we have unlimited desire, unlimited longing. Our desire is the one thing about us that is not restricted and we know this. We feel the ongoing hunger for something infinitely good, we are stalked by the longing for something perfectly blessed and precious. Though we are limited, we wantunlimited good, though we are restricted, we want to love unrestrictedly. This is why we can never settle with created goods; they are too limited and restrictive for the boundlessness of our spirit. And so we keep searching for more, we continue to move to what seems forever beyond us because we know nothing less will satisfy us, nothing less will bring us peace. This is why Thomas says we "can reach out to the infinite" (ST, I-II, 2,8). We seek the infinite through the openness of desire, and only something indefectibly good will satisfy this desire. "For man to rest content with any created good is not possible," Thomas writes, "for he can be happy only with complete good which satisfies his desire altogether: he would not have reached his ultimate end were there something still remaining to be desired" (ST, I-II, 2,8).

We shall never find lasting joy if we remain restless of heart. We seek the good which heals our restlessness, and that is what joy is—it is longing, searching, hungering, desiring come to rest. For Thomas such peace is found only in God. God is our happiness because in God we want no more. God is our happiness because in God we find the joy we have always relentlessly sought. We seek, Thomas says, "the good without reserve," that alone will satisfy us, and such good "is found not in anything created, but in God alone" (ST, I-II, 2,8).

In this chapter we have considered the one thing everyone wants. We have spoken about happiness. We have said much about what happiness is not, but we have also reflected on what happiness is. To be happy is to be satisfied, but it is also to be made whole. It is to be content, but it is also to be perfected. To be happy is to be good and to be holy. Happiness is joy, but joy comes when we desire no more, when our searching has ended because we have found peace. After looking at all the ways we try to find happiness, Thomas urges us to look to God. There are many good things, but only God is perfectly good. God is our final, most perfect, and everlasting happiness because in God alone lives the goodness that heals, redeems and restores.

To be with God is to be happy, but Thomas understands this in a very particular way. We are happy when we have intimacy with God. We have found joy when we are so much a part of God's life that God and we are one. Thomas calls this happiness friendship. It is how he understands charity. Charity is friendship with God. It is an astonishing claim to say we can be friends of God. What Thomas means by it is what we shall next explore.

Notes

¹ Jean Mouroux, The Meaning of Man. Garden City, New York: Image Books, 1961, p. 24. I am grateful to Fred Sucher, C.P., for bringing Mouroux's works to my attention.

² Mouroux, p. 25.

³ Mouroux, p. 25.

⁴ Mouroux, p. 22.

⁵ Mouroux, p. 26.

⁶ Mouroux, p. 16.

⁷ An excellent analysis of this theme can be found in Robert Johann, S.J., The Meaning of Love. Glen Rock, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1966.