The Pursuit of Happiness, Your Highest Good
David A. Horner
Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas on morality and happiness
To anyone with an open mind, one huge fact stands out in the history of morality: for the ancients, Christians and pagans alike, the question of happiness was primary. As they saw it, morality in its totality was simply the answer to this question. The thing was obvious; it never occurred to them to talk about it. —Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics
A right to the “pursuit of happiness” is enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence. But is happiness really something we should be pursuing—especially as followers of Jesus? Isn’t our problem, morally speaking, that we pursue happiness at the expense of doing what’s right? For many, questions like this haunt the subject of this issue of The Table. Happiness may be good for us. But is happiness good? Is it morally good?
The answers will depend on what we mean by “happiness”—and how we think about morality. A look at our past can give us some needed perspective.
These days we tend to see morality and happiness as unrelated at best, and incompatible at worst. But as moral theologian and Dominican priest Servais Pinckaers suggests, our ancestors had a very different view. Virtually everyone until the late Middle Ages (and many since), including Christian thinkers like Augustine, Aquinas, and Jonathan Edwards, understood the pursuit of happiness to be what morality was all about. This perspective is called ethical eudaimonism, from the Greek word for happiness, eudaimonia. Although classical thinkers differed among themselves as to what true happiness actually consists in and how one should go about pursuing it, they all agreed that pursuing happiness is what life itself—including morality—is about.
So did our forebears miss the point of morality? Did they reduce morality to feeling good? To see how they didn’t, we need a glimpse of the visions our ancestors had of happiness and morality.
Today we tend to think of “happiness” as a subjective feeling of contentment or experience of pleasure, but classical thinkers had a very different understanding. Although it is commonly translated “happiness,” the Greek eudaimonia carries none of the English term’s modern connotations. The ancients saw eudaimonia, not as a subjective feeling but an objective state of flourishing or well-being. A eudaimon life is one that expresses the highest good, the summum bonum, for human beings, and most classical thinkers understood this in terms of moral excellence and virtue. The pursuit of happiness, they thought, is a quest for that kind of life, a life of true flourishing. “It seems to me,” says Augustine, “that it is characteristic of all men to seek the happy life, to want the happy life, to desire, long for, and pursue the happy life…. The man who asks how he can enjoy the happy life is indeed asking just this: ‘Where is the highest good?’”
Where, indeed, is the summum bonum to be found? What kind of life is a truly happy one, one that satisfies our deepest desires for meaning and well-being? As did other Christian eudaimonists, Augustine was “happy” to join the universal discussion of this topic and argue that the human longing for happiness points ultimately to friendship with God, who is our true highest good. “[God] himself is the fountain of our happiness; he himself is the end of all of our longing. In choosing him, or rather, since we had lost him through neglect, in re-choosing him… we strive toward him by love, so that by attaining him we might rest, happy because we are perfected by him who is our end.” Only in relationship with God can we truly flourish, because, as Augustine famously prays, “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
Thinking of morality as the pursuit of happiness in this way does not lower our view of morality; it raises our view of happiness to moral significance. Our ancestors had a far richer and more significant vision of happiness than does modern culture. At the same time they also had a far richer understanding of morality. Modern views of morality focus on rules and restrictions—limits or boundaries on what we should do. As long as we don’t transgress the boundaries, on this view, what we pursue in our lives is not morally important. For classical thinkers, by contrast, our chief pursuit is what is most important, morally. Morality encompasses all of life—how and why we do all that we do. The quest for true flourishing is the pursuit of what we take to be supremely good, what we value above all else—a quest that engages our affections, our passions, and our aspirations. This is a far richer vision of morality than merely denying what is bad; it’s a life oriented to pursuing what is good.
So what goes wrong when the pursuit of happiness conflicts with doing the right thing? The problem is not that we pursue happiness, according to our ancestors; that’s a given. Our desire to flourish as human beings is as natural and essential to us as breathing. The problem is that we are seeking happiness in the wrong place. The desire is God-given, but we often settle for too little, for lesser goods. As C.S. Lewis put it most memorably:
“[I]t would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by an offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
