Is Lasting Happiness Really Possible? | Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P.

pleasure to be here I am also taking up the question of happiness the pursuit of the good life is lasting happiness really possible so we you might think of the Declaration of Independence our own nation proposes to us that our country was founded to secure life liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all of us and that's something very common to our understanding of ourselves as a nation but we might ask well what is happiness father Brent was speaking about that already what is the best and happiest life that a human being can live or what kind of life ought I to be striving for or aiming at and I would submit as I think probably many of you would agree and certainly father Brent that these are some of the most important questions a person can ask there are classic philosophical questions but they're questions that are not only for philosophers because in fact no one is exempt from asking them and they touch every person every life so in a sense the answer that you give to that question to the extent that that you reflect on it and I think many people reflect on it only in a kind of imperfect way or kind of vague vague way but it is possible to reflect on in a more explicit way and that's part of what I'm trying to take up here the answer that you give to that kind of question will shed light on every action in your life in as much as every action has a goal or an aim in mind so my goal in this talk is to go a little deeper on this subject taking especially my cues from one of the Great's of the Western philosophical tradition that is st. Thomas Aquinas so no surprise to you there perhaps so let me just start by outlining just a few principles and for the Brent has already covered some of this material so I'm really just going to give you a few bullet points as it were framing it maybe in just slightly different terms than he did but basically the same picture from Thomas Aquinas on the issue of happiness so at first some of these ideas may not seem immediately obvious how they connect to the issue of the search for happiness but in fact I would say they're very important for setting us off on the right path so Aquinas begins with something that is a kind of centerpiece for his whole account which is that the human being is made in the image of God and that part of what this means for Aquinas is that we are creatures with reason and will so you heard that from father Brennan so in other words the image of God for Aquinas is not a physical resemblance to God I mean you don't have like gods nose or chin right God in his divinity does not have a body so if God is a pure spirit and you are in His image what does that imply about you well it's not a physical likeness it's a spiritual likeness or a spiritual capacity that in some way shares in what is most typically found in God and Aquinas says that this consists in our capacity to understand and to love or reason and we'll intellect and we'll on a very concrete level then this means that when we act we act or at least we usually act with reasons so that's the most typical characteristic of a properly human action now of course we sometimes engage in actions that we don't deliberate about or actions that don't have a good reason and sometimes we act positively irrationally but that's not when we are being most human I mean you can you can say about one of your friends you know like you party like an animal last night and maybe you mean that as a compliment but maybe it's not really that good of a compliment because yes we are animals but we are rational animals and that means we are animals who should act with reasons and one of the things that happens when you get really really drunk is you have very bad reasons and you will wake up the next day and you'll be like that was a terrible idea and and you you know I mean you notice the kind of self-evaluation that's happening there when you see that your reason was impaired and you did something that when you were thinking clearly you never would have done that and that's an indication that that's not when you're acting your best it's when you're acting in a kind of less than fully human way which is a good reason not to get you know as drunk as a perfect party animal or something like that okay but but more than than just being about individual actions we are the kinds of creatures that have purposeful individual actions but in fact whole schemes of acting right extensive plans we aim at more distant goals we can nest goals within goals and that's actually very characteristic of human behavior so think about yourself for those of you who are here studying for an academic degree at Yale you have embarked in a rather sophisticated scheme of activity to obtain that academic degree but that is going to have lots of subordinate activities nested within it that you're going to have to plan for and maybe even discipline yourself about so that implies getting up in the morning to go to your class because you know if you don't pass this class you're never going to get your degree and so forth but then again getting your degree may be nested within a larger scheme of goals accomplishing a larger set of goals for your career for example but we can keep pushing the perspective wider and ask well okay what's the next scheme that that fits into and that's exactly the kind of analysis that st. Thomas Aquinas and others of course Aristotle among them suggests that we should be doing when we raised the question of happiness now in the 20th century there was a much debated philosophical question is there what is called one dominant or all-encompassing end or aim to human life alasdair macintyre has called this a unitary but complex theory of the good or does happiness result from attaining a kind of basket of goods multiple and diverse goods so that you always have to have a kind of mixture in this basket so a certain amount of wealth a certain amount of friendship a certain amount of Honor certain amount of pleasure and so forth so we'll be talking about that I just wanted to flag that at the beginning but let's stay with Aquinas for a minute here Aquinas does think that there is one dominant all-encompassing end to life and that if you want to answer the question what is happiness you need to give some thought to what that end is but it's helpful to clarify what he means by that because there's very typical contemporary confusions when you ask this question because what Aquinas means by talking about one ultimate end for human life is not whether there is one good that is so good that you stop caring about all the other goods as if it pushed out of the picture all the other goods he's rather talking about it good then as certainly in Globes encompasses and includes all the others so that you can understand them in a kind of ordered hierarchy that has a kind of all-encompassing good at the top so actually to connect with what we heard from father James Brent just a few minutes ago the point of connection here he was talking about the teleological structure of reality that we find a kind of gold directedness not only in human beings but also in all kinds of natural kinds and you you could even say that you know you find it in inanimate things not that they have an intention to act for an end but they do sort of in a very ordered and consistent way behave with a kind of directedness there's a kind of direction so you can even say like contemporary astronomers studying star formation or a planet formation would say well you know cosmic dust has a kind of tendency an inclination to to coalesce and form planets that's kind of interesting and Aquinas understood that as a kind of inclination or goal directedness in inanimate nature but he certainly thinks that animate nature displays those tendencies bees and spiders behave in ordered patterns which seem to be kind of intelligible to us and also human beings but in a higher way so sort of that's what we're talking about insofar as we have a common nature a common human nature Aquinas thinks that the end of that nature is going to also be the same for us all and I think father Brent was talking about that so insofar as we are all natural beings of the same kind we have a certain directedness or pattern ordering of our life and our flourishing or our happiness will in fact look the same or will have the same structure it's not to say that everyone has to have the same career plan far from it but that the basic picture and in fact the ultimate end will be the same for us all okay now maybe that sounds like a very controversial claim but let's speak a little bit more about this I think the best way to think about this kind of all-encompassing aim or final end as Aquinas talks about it is just to think about our own activity as we've already started to do you act for a reason typically our human act actions are motivated by purposes or aims or ends which are in a certain way the cause of our actions like you did it because you were seeking some goal and in fact human beings typically become rather frustrated and unhappy when they don't have a sense of purpose so this is a kind of basic feature I think of our of our natural kind so Aquinas in acquaintances mind this this kind of end directed activity is tied to at least three things maybe I'm giving different enumerations of the men than father Brent but let me just cover this very quickly the first is Aquinas this philosophy of human action as motivated by the good so everyone seeks what he or she perceives as good and that's kind of a definitional thing we'll talk a more more about that in just a second just very briefly because father Brent has already covered a lot of that the second point is Aquinas this idea of happiness as something that will be sufficient for us in fact perfectly sufficient so we want if we're gonna try to identify what will make us happy it needs to be something that will satisfy us and satisfy us perfectly now on this point I'm gonna spend a fair amount of time and throw out some some objections and try and reply to them and then there's a third point about this kind of final end or way of thinking about happiness with respect to having a final end and this really moves us into the realm of theology although it's something we can begin to apprehend simply through philosophy as Father Brent did a very nice job at the end of his talk the possibility of communion with God knowing God contemplating God perhaps even sharing in his life okay so that's maybe a rather radical thing to talk about but a very important one from the perspective of Aquinas okay so let's go back to this to the first point so I'm gonna just go through basically these three points in connection with this seeking the end so human action is motivated by a good at least always a perceived good I'm just gonna say a few words about that for Aquinas everyone desires the good and there is a kind of universal inclination to the good and he even makes the point which father Brent was talking about that even animals plants even inanimate matter like cosmic dust has a kind of inclination towards some good for it now we could immediately start with a problem of definition here because often modern people think of something very different when we say the word good then Aquinas is probably trying to point us to so often a modern hearer of this word will think that good designates what conforms to some kind of moral law or precept some kind of commandment like it's good if you obey the law and if you break the law then it's bad but actually this is not what Aquinas means when he is talking about every one is desiring the good because obviously some people desire to break the law rather what acquaintance is talking about is something deeper that we are desiring something that is perfective and something that fulfills our appetites or our natural inclinations okay so what do we then mean when we save this word good this is a deep philosophical subject we'd have a whole conference just on this I'm just gonna give you two very very brief points Aquinas doesn't actually try to define the good because he saw it as a primary notion and he says you cannot define those kinds of prime realities you know them from their effects and so what is the effect of the good we reach out for it we we desire it we have an appetite for it so you can define the good simply as what is desirable or what all desire so the good is what we desire or we could even say what arouses our desire and our love or what we are desiring in all of our acts of willing now this has an interesting corollary which I'm just going to mention and then move on for Aquinas this this helps us see the place of freedom in our moral actions freedom is not just opposed to morality as if like moralities about laws that were then supposed to obey and so constrain our freedom and make us feel weighed down no actually morality is about seeking the good and the good is what we desire so our nature is built to desire certain things and our freedom actually arises from this you might say Aboriginal thirst or desire for the good because the freedom is the way our intellect engages in the search for the good your will is a rational appetite according to Aquinas ok so freedom has to do with how we as intellectual rational creatures seek the good we we do it in a different way than spiders or bees or dogs or lions do it we do it because we understand our goal and then order and choose our actions to attain a goal ok there's a second way of describing a good equally important to this first one the first one the good is what we desire the second way that Aquinas uses is to say the good is what perfects a being so the good is perfective and here again we see a connection to the kind of thing you are so Aquinas thinks there is a objective good for a human creature because of the kind of creature that a human being is alright but I'm going to move on very quickly past this beak this is a lot of the terrain covered in father Brent's talk and moved now to my second overarching point which is about what is happiness so what is happiness when Aquinas talks about that and he has a lot to say about this and here he's inheriting a long philosophical tradition and we have some real experts seated in the front row about this so I have to be careful I have to mind my P's and Q's here Adam itíll Candice Vogler are much more expert on this kind of thing but I'm going to give you just a kind of quick summary of Aquinas account of a kind of general idea of happiness and also the possibility of imperfect happiness so maybe we can talk about the second idea first imperfect happiness or you might say relative happiness happiness in a certain respect so perhaps you're familiar with these kinds of statements I'm happy in this job more or less you know I'm happy in this job I have a happy marriage I'm happy at Yale is this expressing that you have everything that you could possibly want or desire or that you've reached the end of your search for goods no you could actually ask someone who says yeah I'm I'm happy in my job you could say oh are you perfectly happy but is is there anything in your life that could improve and the answer to this will almost always be oh yes of course you know yes I can think of things that would be better Aquinas uses this kind of reasoning to show that we have some sense of and in fact a deep desire of or desire for a greater happiness then what we typically experience in our day-to-day lives so we experience all kinds of things that are really good having a good job having a happy marriage having good friends getting a good education being honoured being wealthy or something like that those are all good in a in a partial way but they don't quell all of our desires and it seems that we can always formulate some deeper thirst that no amount of those things will satisfy now you might think at this point well actually this maybe is a false question a false quest maybe it's simply impossible to fully be satisfied maybe all we can ever hope for is some kind of imperfect happiness so therefore it would be useless to try and pursue this kind of quest which is really just tilting it at windmills and I think Aquinas might say that if your horizon is only in this world only in this life and certainly if your horizon is only in the domain of my career my friends my wealth my pleasures then perfect happiness is impossible but Aquinas does think that there is another possibility a greater possibility a possibility that actually can give us a full measure of happiness a true and perfect and lasting satisfaction of our desires okay father Brent is already kind of advertised where we're going with this but it might be helpful for us to go through what Aquinas says about specific possibilities specific candidates for happiness and Aquinas following a venerable philosophical tradition goes through a list of goods that can give us some partial satisfaction but only partial so the classical candidates for what will make you happy and when I've taught this material in the classroom I've always found students get very interested at this because usually we kind of uncritically include these things in our own picture of happiness but it's helpful to like philosophically critique whether these this really good idea to make our life aiming at these things so the first we might say is wealth there are a very large number of people who kind of uncritically assume that more wealth will make them happier and maybe even organize their lives around acquiring wealth there are a lot of people you can find who do that maybe you maybe you know some of them even here Aquinas distinguishes between two kinds of wealth artificial wealth money and natural wealth things that you can use and he says well artificial wealth cannot be ultimately what you're seeking like dollar bills because they only are good for you insofar as they can get you something else so dollar bills are not what you're pursuing because of themselves dollar bills are not very useful they're only useful if you can get something else with them and of course if the if the US government changed the currency tomorrow and said all of the dollar bills you have in your wallet or all of the dollars that you have in your bank account are no longer valuable and now we're switching to some other some other measure of wealth like you wouldn't try to be getting those dollar bills anymore so artificial wealth is only for the sake of other things natural wealth perhaps okay natural wealth think here like a house or a car or an iPhone or food and things like that well is that the ultimate end of human life to have this kind of natural wealth well natural wealth is important it supports our bodily existence and so in a way we can't do without some of it for sure but isn't it also true that there's only so much of it that you can have and enjoy and it's finite it's passing it's very limited so once you've got a sufficient quantity of natural wealth like one more if you if you have like 25 islands in the Caribbean like one more island in the Caribbean might not actually help you very much it becomes less and certainly that when you get to the thousandth Caribbean island like you're you're really not helped by having more of that more I phones when you've already got a warehouse of them is not really desirable for you I mean even if you had one that you used you know you're gonna use a different one every day it just well actually I'd probably be a real disadvantage if you had to keep changing your phone number but it's it becomes a real problem to have too much of this natural wealth what do you do with it curiously Aquinas notes along with with others that it seems that we have the capacity to have a kind of endless desire for artificial wealth but not an endless desire for natural wealth so that's kind of curious so that like you you wouldn't actually try to get a hundred thousand iPhones but you might try to get enough money to buy a hundred thousand iPhones even though you will never actually use all that money and that's that's strange okay what about other candidates honor or fame Aquinas as critique here is very simple we can state it very quickly for the sake of you you want to be praised for the sake of some excellence in you like if all of a sudden I called one of you up and gave you this you know very important award but you knew you had done absolutely nothing to deserve it even if we all applauded you how important or good would you really feel about having gotten that reward or or think about it this way how many veterans would proudly wear a decoration that they knew they didn't deserve it's like stuff of a movie or vittor of a novel like a guy gets mistaken for his buddy who's killed in he gets the Congressional Medal of Honor even though he didn't do anything courageous at all maybe he ran away and then for the rest of the life the rest of his life he's he's fetid as the hero of this military action and what what kind of psychological effect does that have on the man well it might actually lead him to all kinds of terrible complexes of guilt it doesn't necessarily make him happy to be honored for something that he knows he doesn't deserve so Aquinas says honor and fame operates this way actually you you you want to be famous you want to be honored because of some excellence not without that excellence and so really what you should pursue is the excellence not the honor or the fame itself what about power well what is power it makes you able to do something but is that just a good of itself to be able to do something but not yet be doing it a power in other words is a means it's a an important means perhaps but it's a mean to do something and don't you actually want to use the power that's the point so power is a means not an end but actually what we're looking for is the goal like what is your goal if you just say well to acquire power it will just for the sake of having power you've never really answered the question what you're actually trying to aim at so power to do what and in fact we know that power can be used also for evil and often the powerful are unhappy paradoxically so are famous people often that's kind of also curious okay the last candidate that I will talk about here is a pleasure now Aquinas thinks that this hits closer to the mark that might surprise you he thinks an Aristotle also thinks that pleasure is actually a really important category for our reflection on happiness so getting a right understanding of pleasure in relation to happiness is extremely important because how you experience pleasure or the things in which you take pleasure actually has a lot to do with virtue and with how good you are Aquinas thinks so he would even say in a certain way it's a measure of your moral goodness or of your virtue that might not be a welcome thing for the party animal you know if you'd principally seek being absolutely blotto drunk you know if that's what you really take pleasure in it's not a very noble thing but Aquinas actually says this this helps you get some clarity on what really is your you know the moral maturity that you have reached according to Aristotle being rightly trained to take pleasure in the right things and not in the wrong things is the essence of the moral life ok so what are some wrong views of pleasure I'll just very quickly review these this is perhaps very basic there's a utilitarian view that thinks that all pleasures are essentially the same or can be reduced to some univocal common denominator like pleasure units you know economists will sometimes speak of utils or something like that which if wrongly understood could be you know used in this kind of utilitarian way Aquinas does not think an aerosol does not think that all pleasures are essentially the same or can be reduced in this way he thinks that that's reductive ok but that's that's one one view there's a hedonist view of pleasure which would say something like well you know in the end all there is is pleasure so you should just seek to maximize your own pleasure and minimize your pain Aquinas would identify this with the the ancient philosophical school of Epicurus or the Epicureans generally this kind of view is coupled with a materialist view of the world so that the only real pleasures are like sensory pleasures pleasure is being reduced to bodily sensation there's other objections that can be brought to bear against this now another school of thought actually anta dating aquinas Stoics thought that pleasures were evil and we also encounter famously here at Yale at least in terms of Yale's own religious history a Calvinist view that's very skeptical about pleasure worried that pleasure is perhaps morally bad or at least suspect and you might even think that Immanuel Kant would lead you a bit in this direction insofar as he thinks pleasure taking pleasure in an act might diminish its moral value so insofar as you enjoy an act you're not doing it simply to satisfy your duty okay I'm I'm kind of just giving a very very rough sketch of these views of course which are much more complicated and have more to be said in their favor but I think it's helpful to just sort of outline that what does Aquinas think is the right way to think about pleasure he says actually pleasure should be thought of in terms of a pleasure of what kind of thing you are doing in other words pleasure is not itself a thing pleasure is the flowering of a certain activity done well it's like a rose blooming so it's not a thing that you can aim at directly it's a good activity done well a good activity that attains to a good end and the result of doing that is pleasure so if he's right about this then pleasure is not a single thing like the utilitarians would say it can't be reduced to like utils or something like that in a kind of monistic or reductive way and it can't even really be aimed at directly apart from the activity that you're doing because it's not itself the goal or the end or the object of what you're pursuing it's that you're doing that thing well and then it becomes pleasant so even to just reach this level of clarity about pleasure I think is very useful that what should you aim at if you want to like even hedonist get this wrong like they aim at pleasure and so they just try to have more of that pleasure more of that pleasure or more that physical stimulus more of that physical stimulus and after a while what happens it becomes less and less effective right you have to have more and more of the stimulus in order to get the same result because they're aiming at the wrong thing they should be aiming at doing the activity well and then the pleasure comes as a kind of a crowning of that good activity so Aquinas would say that pleasure like goodness is analogical it's an analogical notion which means it's not just all the same but it it's a word and it's an idea that applies to different things in different ways but with a kind of proportion between them or an order of analogy between them so there is a pleasure of eating a chocolate bar there is a pleasure of a hot bath these are not the same they're not reducible to each other there's the pleasure of a good meal eaten with friends there's the pleasure of a glass of wine there are I mean you might immediately be thinking of sexual pleasure that means to be done well and in the right way if it's going to be most pleasant actually so Thomas would say like having a right understanding of human sexuality and putting it in the context of a permanent and committed relationship of marriage is the right way that will make it more pleasurable that's something you don't often think you know or hear but that is Aquinas as view there are likewise pleasures of for example doing a sport well so if you run well or you play tennis well there's a certain pleasure that you take in that which is irreducibly different from the kind of pleasure you get from eating a good meal there's a pleasure of winning at tennis as well not just playing well but winning there's a pleasure of reading a good book or watching a good movie or studying something and understanding it do you remember the feeling you had as a kid in math class when you finally got it and you have a kind of self-satisfaction that that happened these are all irreducibly different pleasures there can even be a pleasure in ironing your clothes you know I learned this when I got the dominican habit which sometimes requires ironing it's like you know there's lots of things in my life that I cannot control but I can make sure that this habit is well ironed you know there's a kind of pleasure that you can take in that maybe you don't take pleasure in it but I I sometimes do and there are spiritual pleasures I've already sort of talked about a few of them in a kind of a brief way there's the pleasure of teaching someone the pleasure of giving a gift to another that they really like the pleasure of helping someone in need okay those are not material pleasures they're not sensory pleasures but they're pleasures that actually can be much more valuable than sensory pleasures and then there are pleasures that are proper to the spiritual or supernatural life and these are pleasures that are harder for us to envision if you haven't already experienced them a point I'm going to come back to there is a pleasure to knowing God a pleasure to loving him a pleasure to praising him and giving your life to him now that's a very refined and high pleasure but Aquinas is not the kind of philosopher or theologian who is suspicious of those pleasures and you see now we are starting to see that those things are really good for us and when you seek the good in the right way it is very pleasant so that's why pleasure is actually a tricky category many people will say that they're that they're seeking pleasure and in a certain since it's not so wrong to seek pleasure it's actually better to seek pleasure in a certain way than to seek wealth but pleasure in itself should not be the end why because it is just the crowning of seeking the goal in the right way so this means we have not yet found the ultimate aim of our study here of our inquiry is there some all-encompassing aim of human life and the answer can't be just pleasure the answer answer has to be something deeper and I'll try to get there very quickly but let me cover a quick - quick objections here one objection we've already seen or I've already mentioned it the basket of goods theory may be actually what we just need is not just one pleasure but maybe we need a kind of mixture of things like certain amount of pleasure a certain amount of wealth certain amount of friends certain amount of power and so forth I think you can give a series of answers to this objection from the classical tradition one answer might be the Augustinian answer so think of st. Agustin these all these things are our time-bound they're all in time they're all only going to be temporary and we have a kind of thirst for something that is not temporary so maybe that is indicative to us of that the basket is not going to be good enough but let me then move quickly to another objection you find this in Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics in book 1 and he puts it on the lips of Saul on Saul on says call no man happy while he lives you must see his end what does he mean by that well you know it might look like everything's working out for Jeffrey Epstein but no no I don't think so right ok so at a certain moment in time it might look like a certain pattern of activity that is actually profoundly wicked is working out but when you see the end you're now able to judge that it didn't really work out it was only apparent for a little while but it might not even happen that way for someone who's wicked it might be that someone seems to be doing very well and is not intrinsically wicked and it still doesn't work out well maybe a less dramatic example than than Jeffrey Epstein Jay Gatsby in the great gatsby if you haven't read the book I won't give away the ending somebody did that to me in my freshman year of college and I still am struggling with forgiveness about that suffice it to say the Great Gatsby is not a story that ends happily and they all lived happily ever after right okay it's actually that isn't that kind of interestingly we have that kind of standard ending to children's stories if the stock market crashes and you have a lot of wealth in the stock market then overnight it might seem like maybe this plan of life was not such a good idea and it didn't end well okay so that's a kind of central problem to the basket of goods view they're all like very tenuous and we can be quite vulnerable but you know what Aristotle doesn't even think that that's the main problem with this position consider this objection or consider this problem which he which he articulates in the ethics even if a man has lived happily up to old age and is high to death worthy of his life many reverses may befall his descendants some of them may be good and attained the life they deserve well with others the opposite may be the case and clearly to the degrees of relationship between them and their ancestors may vary indefinitely it would be odd if the dead man were to share in these changes and become at one time happy at another time wretched based on like how it turned out for his children and actually we do care deeply about how things turn out for our children so that's kind of unstable you know if you think that the basket of goods theory is going to work for you because it's in its of itself always going to be mutable and vulnerable and susceptible to loss even after you die in a certain sense history could judge you that you were on the wrong side of history a more metaphysical critique of all of this I think Aquinas would offer and say all of this is finite and we want the infinite or as st. Thomas often says we want something that perfectly quells our appetite so only that can be the ultimate candidate for real happiness the question is is there such a thing okay let me just throw in one more brief objection and it's the problem of original sin or the fall now here we're stepping into the realm clearly of theology but according to the classic Christian understanding we all have inherited a human nature which is afflicted or defective in a certain way we've inherited a kind of effect of something that has gone wrong before we were even born so we are afflicted by the two great afflictions of original sin ignorant about what is really good so we might want the good but we don't know where to find it and we find it very difficult to figure it out and concupiscence especially disordered can keep a sense what is that a wrong desiring of pleasure we have a very very hard time putting our pleasures in right order we want to desire them out of order not according to reason and everyone probably has had the experience of saying I should never have eaten that second piece of cake you know that's exactly what we're talking about when we talk about disordered concupiscence your mind is telling you you probably shouldn't eat that but your body is telling you that you want it and you you give in to that and we all struggle to to master that in that area and in many others so due to the wounds of original sin we're in an even more difficult quandary than a purely philosophical count might suggest that is we have an inclination towards the good we have a desire for some perfect good which would quell our appetite perfectly but we don't know what that is because of the problem of ignorance or at least it's not immediately obvious to us what that is and we have all kinds of desires that we know are actually going to lead us in the wrong direction but we have a very hard time resisting them this is why Aquinas says in the end the search for happiness requires grace now okay I'm stepping fully into the realm of theology now it's not only natural virtue that we need to acquire but also God's help to show us what we ought to be pursuing to show us in fact that it's really possible to have in a way that surpassed Aristotle's imagination the kind of goal of contemplating God that father Brent was talking about not only is it possible to know God as the source of being the author of the universe or the cause of all that is it's actually possible to know him as your father to know him as your friend it's possible to be invited into his life and to share in a way in his unsurpassable life and love and joy and peace and he might be saying that sounds like a very tall order it is not naturally possible for us to attain to that but because God reaches down to us and bestows this gift on us it actually is possible to us through grace so this is ultimately the answer that Aquinas gives about how to seek happiness we can seek it in a certain way according to philosophy but if we really want to get there if we really want to get to the all-encompassing aim something that will really satisfy us that will satisfy us in the deepest possible way such that there will be nothing left to desire there can be only one good that can satisfy us like that that good must be infinite and perfect and therefore it is only God and in fact we are made for this as intellectual creatures rational creatures because we are made to know and to love and the full perfection of that image of God in us which we started with at the beginning in the talk the full perfection of that image is that we would know and love God and actually know and love him as perfectly as it is possible for a creature to do which God grants us in what Aquinas calls the bayit avec vision the loving vision of God himself let me end with just two final very brief points about the difference between our appetite for material things and for spiritual things because when I read this in Aquinas it I found it to be a tremendous revelation and really helped me a lot it's a I think it's a very simple but deep insight that that can give some help too many people in thinking about what our our desires are for think about it this way when you are hungry what are you desiring well food right your body needs food when you're thirsty you're desiring something to drink because your body needs hydration at base okay when you've had enough to eat are you still hungry no you stop being hungry at a certain point if you're forced to continue eating food becomes positively repulsive to you and it will make you sick now isn't that curious our appetite for material things is an appetite for what we do not have but need and then when we have them we don't desire them anymore so our appetite for material things works that way you desire what you don't have when you get it you don't desire it anymore but your appetite for spiritual things Aquinas says is the opposite and that's what's so interesting when you don't have it you don't desire it because you don't even perceive as a possibility for you so when you don't think that it's possible to have some knowledge of God or some communion or friendship with him or to share in his life or in the peace that he offers you don't even desire it and you begin to desire it when he begins to give it to you so that grace is the beginning of the spiritual life and of a supernatural life and as you obtain those spiritual Goods your desire for them increases this means that in heaven in a certain way you will love God the most as is possible as you possess him the most perfectly it's the opposite of the way you love food you do not love the pizza after you've eaten an entire pizza but you do love God when you have God perfectly so let me just conclude with a kind of statement from Aquinas there is an end to human life it's an end that corresponds to our nature and as you seek what human beings are made for and ultimately they are made for God you will find more and more happiness but we might also put this in a much more personal and direct way which is to say that God also desires he loves and he he has created us out of love this is another beautiful point that Aquinas makes really as a kind of he says it with respect to creation but it it reaches its pinnacle in speaking theologically God has created us out of love he has created us for himself he has created us as creatures designed to know and love him and more specifically he has created you to know and love him and he has a plan he has a purpose for your life and ultimately that purpose is to know and love him but more concretely each of us has to find the path to that ultimate end which is going to vary for us because we are each different so it is very important for us to examine not only what end we are aiming at but also the means we are going to use to get there and how God is perhaps offering us particular means particular opportunities particulars that will correspond to who we are as individuals and I think that's a wonderfully rich point and I will stop there with just a kind of recognition that I think what st. Agustin said in his confessions which Aquinas repeats and and believes in very much is is profoundly true that we were made with a built-in desire for God and he is what will make us ultimately happy or as he says it's so much more poetically our hearts are restless until they rest in thee Oh God thank you [Applause] how would you resolve the tension if there is any between the idea of natural law and natural order the scientific idea of the increasing entropy of the universe and the idea of concupiscence okay that's a probably a very difficult question so I'm gonna do my best to improvise here and give I mean I think there is a lot to be said there so maybe we could start with entropy in the universe and say okay do we see do we see chaos and randomness in the universe is that actually the most characteristic thing that we observe and I think actually science sees that there is a kind of order actually in the universe and where we see chaotic you know that what seems to be chaos actually that the great advances in science come as we begin to recognize that within this there are patterns and in fact may be a stable order standing behind it so that I think it's a certain presupposition of science that we can find principles of order and intelligibility in the universe around us and that's precisely what we do in science and the presupposition I think is profoundly true that okay there is actually some intelligibility out there that our minds can know it's not imposed by our minds on what is essentially random or unintelligible we don't we don't create the intelligibility we discover it and when we discover it then we sort of marvel at the the wonder of this intelligibility and we even will you know we can talk about how beautiful it is so I would suggest that there's already something very deep there and that that cohere is very much with acquaintances view that the universe is not just random chaos that has no meaning but actually there's deep intelligibility there and the whole project of contemporary science is based on on that premise okay so as we begin to discover that order now this is connected to natural law what is natural law according to Aquinas natural law is he says this very interesting definition our participation in God's eternal law now you might say that's not illuminating at all to me okay so can you explain that okay what is what is the eternal law it is God's plan for the cosmos so according to Aquinas coin is a view God is the source of all that is and all that is emerges from him according to an ordered plan in his mind so all the order that we discover in the cosmos actually originally is from God and we it's intelligibility is there because it is from God for the God who is logos okay so this order is discoverable by the human mind and that's precisely what we're doing in one-one domain of research which we call natural science but we also want to engage in purposeful actions in our own lives okay so what what does all this have to do with with what I'm saying well Aquinas thinks of natural law that it is the way we with our minds grasp the order that we find in the cosmos around us which we recognize has come from God and therefore we order our actions according to our place in that order so whereas other beings you know cosmic dust does not consciously coalesce into planets it doesn't think about it and choose to do it but we are the kind of creatures that can understand what is our place in the cosmos and we can intentionally put ourselves in that place or even better we can in the in the whole trajectory of the cosmos we can participate in it we can even be Provident for other people and help them find their place in it or even even animals and plants and I mean you can be a gardener and help the plants flourish right so and that is the natural law now you asked a third thing which may be about concupiscence yes okay so that's a big bug in the system right so it seems like we should have desires that just fit into that order but we don't why is that we don't actually find this dramatic of a problem in other animals now there are that could get complicated because we could talk about some apparent exceptions and we'd have to go into that but the human animal seems to be much more prone to self-destructive behavior than a lot of other animals or plants that kind of thing so Aquinas the answer is well that's because of the fall that's because of sin that we have that problem which doesn't afflict other other animals oh yeah that's a great one so now father Brent spoke about the five inclinations and no no that's that's all right because this is easy too easy to miss so we have kind of basic inclinations given the kind of creatures we are and you can kind of work your way up the ontological ladder which father Brent did did but didn't maybe flag as clearly so on the lowest level like there's the desire to stay in being you know rocks have that desire desire right okay it's it's in a certain a rock resists being broken apart takes a lot of work to do it so in a certain sense you could say a rock wants to stay together and stay in being as a rock but then you move up and then you have like the desire to reproduce and other lots of other animals have that inclination to but when you move up to the top level of human inclinations like to live in society to have friendship and to know the truth and these are particular to the human being unlike other creatures and why precisely because we have intellects and Will's so we're capable of a kind of relation relationality that other creatures don't have in true friendship and love and we're capable of knowing the truth you know at a higher level than other animals now by the way just footnote Aquinas does not think that animals do not have any like knowledge or knowing they don't have abstract or intellectual knowledge according to Aquinas but he does have a whole theory of animal cognition animal memory animal emotion kind of animal psychology so that's often not perceived in Aquinas what he thinks that is unique to us is our ability to know the truth abstractly and that's a part of our nature because of our because of our Constitution as human beings as rational animals ok so what does it have to do with curiosity well that's precisely the desire to know as it plays out in our lives and then you have a virtue connected with that so if we want to reach our real end we should or our knowing so that we we proceed in a kind of ordered way a rational way in acquiring knowledge and Aquinas actually identifies a vice which he this is maybe just a play on words he doesn't mean curiosity in the way that that we mean it or the way that your question presupposes but he does identify a vice of curiosity us which is like the vice of the web-surfer you know the like the 2 a.m. web surfer you know this is curiosity us ok if you have that Vice watch out especially fatal for university students why because you think that you are acquiring knowledge but actually you're just wasting your energy because you're acquiring useless knowledge that doesn't actually point you towards anything and you're not doing it in an ordered way like you're not integrating it into some larger activity so Aquinas actually thinks we need to discipline our desire for knowledge because it can go astray it's not that he thinks that that knowledge is bad he just thinks that it's like it's a it's a it's a laziness of the intellectual creature to scatter itself in all kinds of kind of pointless inquiries instead of doing what our minds were made for and so he wants you to like focus on what your mind is made for so the next time you're thinking about like going one more time to that website at 2:00 a.m. you know resist and there's sort of the other extreme as opposed to the sorta mystic one the other extreme which is this or stoic position right where you just need to be living in accordance with virtue for a single instance and you know even if you were to die at that moment and you would have lived a happy life and then taken the position that you know Thomas is the one that you're staking out and they lecture is that really in order to have a happy life it has to be an infinite life as they last you know into eternity and so I'm just wondering you know whatever how you would respond to this or a stove in there stealing it's a stove will say well you they're living in accordance with virtue or not and that's all there is happiness so it doesn't matter how long it lasts it's just all about virtue and there's tuning will say well it just have to be complete life and something like infinity is just not what humans deal and we deal in completion like you can have your bird you have your dad and did you do a good job in between it's more or less like the other animals yeah that's it that's an excellent question thank you for that I think it's probably a complicated answer maybe some of our other speakers would also have something to add to it but let me just do my best which is to say I think on our finest acknowledges that there is a way to speak about a kind of imperfect happiness or a happiness that is less I mean I don't mean imperfect in the sense that it's like there's something wrong with it but just in terms of not in the fullest measure and he thinks that the only perfect happiness in the end is going to be found in God so it's not to say that the other things are not happy or that living a virtuous life or living virtue for one moment is is not right or something like that but especially when you look at how he approaches things from a natural perspective in philosophy and then when you add a supernatural dimension to it so he certainly thinks that the ultimate end is a supernatural end like the true end of human beings is like the supernatural end but it's not knowable by reason and it needs you need grace to even know about it and also to get there so we can speak intelligibly just about within the frame with you might say within the natural frame or the this-worldly frame and there those other cases like you know an Aristotelian position or a stoic position they gain a lot more traction once you say well okay we we just have to bracket this question or maybe even say we shouldn't even talk about her or pretend we don't know about the possibility of life after death or eternity with God and really we just have to be focused on what are you gonna get in this life and okay if you if you put it into those terms then I think you could engage in that that kind of dialectic over you know how whether you want a basket of goods or is there still some all-encompassing aim and people interpreted Aristotle disagree very much about what he thinks about that so you have some philosophers who read Aristotle in one way and others who read him in another way Aquinas I think in the end would a well you know the the supernatural aim relative eise's all of those time bound ones and puts them in a perspective that divine revelation gives you that that's in a way why we need divine revelation because it's pretty hard to figure it out if you just stay within the frame of this world and it's the only one that's really going to fully satisfy your your desire especially when that desire is awakened if I can just make one final point and this is just for those theologians in the room who might have like pressing questions about 20th century and 21st century theology probably that's a very small minority of you but there was a very big controversy in the twentieth century over the natural desire to see God on read and luboc famously disagreed with some standard two mystic interpreters in the 20th century arguing that there is a natural desire that is before supernatural grace to say see God directly or have the Bata vision basically to get to the life of heaven and I would I think that is not I think that is clearly not Aquinas as view so he thinks that there is a kind of naturally intelligible desire for a finite happiness but once you are awakened to the possibility of a perfect happiness which is supernatural then you see that that finite happiness is very relative and now it will it will not satisfy you like now you you actually will want to go all the way to the top as it were if I can just use one other analogy for understanding this it's a sci-fi you know space analogy which I I like those kinds of analogies because I've always been fascinated by like the Apollo program and going to the moon and things like that okay so if if you you we could imagine having a kind of sci-fi desire to like fly to the center of the Sun but you know wouldn't there be some physical problems with that yes okay you know this it's hard to build a spacecraft that would get there and then probably the heat would kill you and would destroy the spacecraft before it ever got there and then there's the radiation and the pressure and like you're in the center of this fusion reaction in the Senate or a star okay it's just not going to work right we're not going to be able to build a spacecraft that will take a human being to the center of the Sun she's not possible for us but it's still imaginable to us that we would like have a kind of sci-fi fantasy about this like oh I wish somehow it were possible but you see no one actually orders a life around that unless they're insane like maybe a crazy person would try to build the spacecraft in his backyard to go to the center of the moon but like no one does that and Aquinas thinks that in a certain way the desire for seeing God is like that without revelation so without revelation you would never imagine that you could share in the divine nature and be friends with God and that he would give you a share in his eternal life and peace and love but this has been revealed to us as possible and once we realize that it's possible of course we really want it and we reorder our lives around it but it's I mean as living in a kind of Christian culture maybe post Christian Christian culture that idea is so deeply suffused in our in our culture like the possibility of some kind of heaven that people assume that it's kind of naturally accessible to us but Aquinas of you was it is not naturally accessible and it's only like in it's only because we've sort of absorbed it through kind of cultural osmosis in a Christian or post Christian culture that we can even talk about it and that's only because it was divinely revealed a long time ago but an excellent question thank you

Channel: The Thomistic Institute

Views: 9,492

Rating: 4.9679999 out of 5

Keywords: aquinas, thomasaquinas, philosophy, theology, awesome, wisdom, faith, reason, science, thomism, summatheologiae, scholasticism, saint, belief, christianity, catholicism, aquinas 101, aquinas101, happines, summa, goodlife, Fr. Dominic Legge, op, o.p., The Pursuit of the Good Life, Is Lasting Happiness Really Possible?, O.P., made for more, yale, yale university, fr james brent

Id: 52LKIWQ-ALY

Length: 69min 39sec (4179 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 11 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/LogicIsBased]

Seems like a good priest

[u/FultonSheenisBased]

A good talk