Higher Goods

HAPPINESS: n. a state of well-being and contentment

The term happiness originates from the 14th-century Middle English hap, which means “chance, fortune.”

In fact, the words translated “happy” in most European languages originally meant “lucky.” While happiness first appeared in print in the 1520s, by the 1590s it had begun to carry the force of “a pleasant and contented mental state,” the usage 18th-century hymnist Isaac Watts employed when, in his book Logic, he wrote, “Happiness consists in the attainment of the highest and most lasting natural good.”

Watts’s straightforward statement makes clear that happiness is not a matter of chance or good luck. It also raises the question, “What is the highest and most lasting natural good?” Philosophers have cogitated on it from the beginning of Western thought. Socrates conceived happiness as a life of self-examination and reflection committed to the highest ideals. Plato found those ideals in four cardinal virtues: temperance, fortitude, prudence, and justice. In other words, happiness arises from good judgment, courageous perseverance, self-restraint, and a healthy balance between self-regard and selflessness. In a similar vein, Aristotle regarded happiness as the telos of life, the end to be realized by thinking well and living virtuously.

Eudaemonia versus Hedonic Pleasure

Following Aristotle, Cicero contrasted Eudaemonia —”happiness, flourishing, well-being” —with the hedonism championed by Epicurus, who saw pleasure as the ultimate human goal in life. While America’s founders, following Cicero, pursued balance, harmony, and ideals, today’s hedonists pursue the objects of appetite: food, drink, sex, and material trappings. Fittingly, Epoch Times’s Matthew Little observes that,“There are two key kinds of happiness, and while our society is gorging on one, it is starving for the other.”

The distinction between eudaemonic and hedonic happiness could not be starker. Hedonic happiness turns those who pursue it inward. The pleasure is fleeting; it is never enough. The end of hedonic “happiness” turns out to be misery. Eudaemonia, however,endures. It arises from and promotes wisdom, contentment, and stability.

God, the Highest Good

Influenced by the Greek philosophical tradition, St. Augustine commended the Neoplatonists for their perception that “the human soul . . . . cannot be happy except by partaking of the light of that God by whom both itself and the world were made.” Augustine further developed the Greeks’ ideas according to the biblical understanding of both God and man, writing that, “it is God who makes us happy, who is the true riches of minds.” Since God is the highest good, to recognize him, submit to him, know him, indeed, to love him, is to attain happiness.

Augustine posited that the essence of sin is disordered loves. If a person is unhappy, it is not necessarily because he does not love, but that his loves are not rightly ordered. As in Augustine’s day, many people today love things: food, clothes, cars, and all manner of “stuff.” Many love power —or what they imagine to be power. But as objects of love, these things never ultimately satisfy.

Beyond luck, beyond pleasures, beyond possessions, position, and power, Christ declares blessed happiness for the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, the merciful, and the peacemakers, even those who suffer. These beatitudes will be counterintuitive to us to the extent that we love ourselves and our “happy” lives first. Against all earthly pleasures and hedonic aspirations, Christ said those who lose their lives for his sake will really find life abundant. Happiness is to be found, then, in loving him first, and surrendering all subsequent loves to fall into their proper places in harmony with God’s created order —and this happiness is eternal.