Lesson 11: Happiness and Virtue

AGENDA

• Categories of Moral Theology: Happiness and Virtue
• Augustine on Happiness and Virtue
• Aquinas on Happiness and Virtue

CATEGORIES OF MORAL THEOLOGY: HAPPINESS AND VIRTUE

1. The next categories we will be discussing are happiness and virtue, categories which were well expressed in Aristotle’s philosophy and were also basic (to very different effect) for modern philosophers such as Kant.
2. Reflection on happiness and virtue in Catholic moral theology are closely related to Christian thinking about love and the order that God intends for the world, as we discussed earlier. Consider two ways that love grounds Christian reflection on happiness and virtue.
3. Love: Precondition for All Life (Happy or Unhappy)
1. The Love of God is the basis of all that exists. For the Christian, if God did not love the world, the world would not be consigned to flames; it simply would not exist. (Therefore my early point that God’s love is an answer the basic human question: why is there something rather than nothing?)
4. Love: Precondition to Happiness and Virtue
1. The Love of God is, for the Christian, the only context in which one can find true happiness and live a life of authentic virtue. However, we can note a natural inclination in all human life, as Aristotle suggested, that all people want to be happy.
2. The problem comes in discerning which form of life will actually bring about real happiness rather than false promises for happiness.

AUGUSTINE (354-430 CE) ON HAPPINESS AND VIRTUE

1. Apologetics: Communicating the truths of faith through a reasoned defense accessible to those who do not accept all the teaching of the faith as true.
1. Assumes that whatever we know through reason cannot be in conflict with the truths that are revealed in faith.
2. Faith is the perfection rather than the destruction of reason. Reason can teach us certain things about the world and about God, but not what is highest or the truth in its fullness.
2. Augustine's Method
1. Two possible starting points for arguing about the nature of happiness and the life of virtue: (1) authority and (2) reason.
2. He suggests that the best way is to begin with authority (“the congenial shade of authority,” perhaps counter-intuitive for us), because it precedes reasoning in the order of nature.
3. Example of parents and children.
4. Our minds are not clean slates: rather they contain inherent imperfections and tendencies to do violence in the form of self-interest.
5. Authority (ideally) helps to root this out, so that our minds can reason rightly.
6. But he says he will begin with reason, (1) to meet his audience (the Manichaens) where they are, but also (2) to imitate Jesus and thereby in confront evil in the service of the Gospel which frees people from death.
3. Rationale for the Treatise:
1. To outline that form of life by which we become worthy of what we believe (Ch. 20)
4. Begins with the Question: What is the nature of happiness?(A question we also find in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics)
1. Happiness is the enjoyment of man’s chief good
2. Chief Good must satisfy two conditions: (1) there is nothing better than it, (2) cannot be taken away against one's will
3. Four scenarios (Ch. 3)
1. Unhappiness₁: not having what is loved (good or bad)
2. Unhappiness₂: having what is loved but the object of love is hurtful
3. Unhappiness₃: not loving what one has, even if it is the proper object of love
4. Happiness: having and loving what is the chief good of human beings (which is a proper object of love)
4. Chief Good of Human Beings:
1. Human being is a unity of body and soul
2. Must be a good of the soul because the soul, as what gives life to the body, is higher than the body
3. Must have something to do with the soul loving rightly (activity of the soul)
4. Chief good is God alone (that which is really the highest and cannot be taken away against one’s will
5. Following God is the happy life (Ch. 6) and is the attainment of virtue.
5. Basic Human Problem:
1. Loving lower good sin place of the highest good.
2. (Ch. 20) “God then alone is to be loved; and all this world, that is, all sensible things, are to be despised—while, however, they are to be used as this life requires.
3. All things, so far as they exist, are good. The problem comes when we try to make into ultimate goods those things which are subordinate goods.
6. Virtue is the term we give to the soul loving rightly (Ch. 15).
1. “I hold virtue to be nothing else than the perfect love of God. For the fourfold division of virtue I regard as taken from four forms of love”
2. “Temperance is love giving itself entirely to that which is loved.”
3. “Fortitude is love readily bearing all things for the sake of the loved object.”
4. “Justice is love serving only the loved object, and therefore ruling rightly.”
5. “Prudence is love distinguishing with sagacity between what hinders it and what helps it. The object of this love is not anything, but only God, the chief good, the highest wisdom, the perfect harmony.” (Ch. 15)
6. Virtue is not, then, a life of total self-denial and asceticism, as the Manicheans taught, but rather a life of loving God rightly, using lower goods as appropriate and loving God alone.
5. How then do we relate lovingly to our neighbor?
1. To love one’s neighbor as oneself requires that one know how to love oneself properly, which means that one must love God above all things. (Ch. 26)
2. So to love a neighbor rightly involves primarily teaching him or her to love God above all things (rather than to focus exclusively on material help), although we must use the goods of this world as life requires.
3. This focus places the evangelical and missionary impulse of Christianity in context.
4. Must serve what benefits the body (medicine) and the soul (discipline). (Ch. 27)
5. Discipline: restraint (which implies fear) and instruction (which implies love) [Ch 28]

AQUINAS (1225-1274 CE) ON HAPPINESS AND VIRTUE

1. Begins with the question of the connection of goodness to being.
1. “Every being, as being, is good.” (Q5, a3
2. This is a particular judgment about the meaning of Genesis and God’s creation of the world. It also assumes that we can know something about God’s presence in the world and God’s order precisely because we have been created by God and endowed with rational capacities to discern this order
3. Things are only said to be evil because they lack some perfection intrinsic to them. Recall that this was one of the basic points we made earlier about the connection between law and love in our discussion of Genesis. Law is an expression of God’s love for human beings and not an arbitrary imposition intended to be burdensome or to contradict freedom
4. For Aquinas, all things have potentials which we can actualize, and we speak of something as good when something that has potential becomes actual. (Reducing potency to act.) We only speak about potential for good things, not potential for evils, precisely because evils are not positive forces to develop but lacks of actualized potentials.
2. So all things seek the good, but human beings alone are able to know and order their actions toward two kinds of goods.
1. Natural goods (that they share with other animals)
2. Highest good (Supernatural goods) which they alone can know, and are confirmed through faith
3. Examples: What is the difference between a good baseball, a good cat, a good friend and the goodness of the love of God
4. REVIEW Handout on Happiness and the Good Life
3. "Virtue is understood as the perfection of a power." (Q55, a1)
1. Beings have certain natural powers that characterize them as the kinds of things they are
2. We develop virtues through practicing actions that actualize the relevant potentials. So virtues are understood as habits (things we develop over time that become our future tendencies towards actions of certain kinds). He speaks of these as selective habits
3. These are what we call traits of character. The sorts of character traits that we develop over time through repeated actions that seek the good are called acquired virtues.
4. Among the acquired virtues, the four cardinal virtues are particularly important.
4. Two basic structures for understanding the cardinal virtues:
1. Internal Principle which guides “Pursuit of the Good Identified by Reason” (Q61, a2)
1. For Aquinas, when we start to develop habits, they become internal guides, or standards, that assist us in making future decisions.
2. We have the ability to identify what is good in all of our particular activities, precisely because all of these activities are previously united in a single good creation of God.
3. Yet this becomes clearer to us, and stronger within us, as we act to pursue the good in each case.
4. So prudence is the perfection of the rational potential in all human beings to seek to identify the good and order things to achieve the good in any situation in the midst of complex realities. (Note again, therefore, the close connection between prudence and the creation account expressing law as a form of love.)
5. Justice is the perfection of the will (that part of us which moves us to carry out actions which we judge (through prudence) to be good. [Intellect, appetite, and will]
6. Temperance is the right ordering of our natural concupiscible powers (such that we desire rightly)
7. Fortitude is the right ordering of our irascible powers (such that we respond rightly).
2. Virtue Has Two Senses: Best (highest development of a potential) but also a Mean (between Excess and Deficiency in Naturally Occurring Character traits).
1. Following Aristotle, temperance as mean between an excess of concupiscence and the deficiency or insensitivity; fortitude as mean between an excess of foolhardiness and a deficiency of cowardice.
5. Theological Virtues (Infused, Supernatural) [Q62, a1,3]
1. Certain level of happiness we can obtain through our own best efforts to live rationally by our human nature. But there is a higher level of human happiness achievable by human beings, through God’s help.
2. Faith: supernatural perfection of the intellect (where we believe things for which we have no final rational proof); includes specific things about the nature of God (beyond the mere existence of such a being)
3. Hope: supernatural perfection of the will with respect to directing toward/orienting toward the proper end
4. Love: supernatural perfection of the will with respect to movement toward the proper end, spiritual union
6. Problems with Christian Life Built on Virtue Alone:
1. How do we know virtue when we see it? By keeping company with the virtuous, who come to be such by their formation in a community of virtue (such as the Church).
2. How do we develop virtue? By emulating those who possess it. In the Christian tradition, this means primarily Jesus, and secondarily Mary and the Saints.
3. Problem of Circularity: it would seem that in order to be virtuous, we would need to be able to identify the virtuous person; but our ability to identify a virtuous person is conditioned by the extent to which we have already developed virtue in ourselves. (consider campus and family examples)
4. Problem of Conflicting Goods: is it sufficient to say that all real conflicts of goods can be resolved by the prudent person? Is there not eventually some need of a standard or law?
7. Transition Question: Why is seeking happiness and pursuing a virtuous life not a sufficient guide to the moral life?
1. We might be tempted to violate some real good (perhaps even the life of another) in pursuit of goods that will make us happy.
2. We might think that as long as we are pursuing goods and loving God, we are somehow above the laws of God.
3. This brings us to our next topic: freedom and the moral law.