1. Happiness

Aquinas's study of human action leads him to draw two conclusions about the goal of human life. First, human beings, by their very nature as creatures of intellect and will, desire a perfect happiness which cannot be found in this life and can only be found in union with God. Second, union with God surpasses the very nature of every creature including the human being. These two conclusions create a paradox. The perfect and crowning good, to which we naturally tend, cannot be reached naturally. We have a natural desire for God which cannot be naturally fulfilled. Aquinas goes on to argue that there must be another way, provided by God, which can lead to our perfect happiness. Although Aquinas's work is thoroughly theological, he gives philosophical reasons for these conclusions, which do not depend on any appeal to revelation. In this article I will examine his understanding of happiness and show how it leads to these conclusions. Towards the end I will draw out some of the implications of this paradox, and point out the risks involved in trying to resolve it.

Happiness, beatitudo, is the satisfaction we hope to find when we reach our final goal and attain the perfection we have longed for. We can want many different things at the same time, large and small, yet at any one moment there must be a deepest desire which motivates us, an overriding goal that functions as an organising principle to our actions, one which we long for as our ‘perfect and fulfilling good [bonum perfectum et completivum]’.Footnote ¹ Happiness is the perfect good, ‘which satisfies the appetite altogether, else it would not be the last end, if something yet remained to be desired’.Footnote ² If we find the ultimate good we are seeking and fulfil our desire, then we will be happy.

Aquinas makes three important distinctions as he writes about happiness.Footnote ³ The first is between the general meaning of the last end (the ratio of the last end, the last end as such) and the particular object we are seeking as our last end (‘the thing in which the last end is found [id in quo finis ultimi ratio invenitur]’).Footnote ⁴ We all seek our last end as such, we all want to be happy and to find fulfilment in our perfect good. Yet we don't all agree on how to be happy, on where we will find that fulfilment. The second distinction is between beatitudo imperfecta and beatitudo perfecta.Footnote ⁵ Imperfect or incomplete happiness is simply happiness to the extent that we can find it in this life: it is ‘that which is had in this life [quae habetur in hac vita]’. Perfect or complete happiness ‘consists in the vision of God’.Footnote ⁶ Only perfect happiness ‘attains to the true notion of happiness’, while imperfect happiness ‘does not attain thereto, but partakes of some particular likeness of happiness [participat quandam particularem beatitudinis similitudinem]’.Footnote ⁷ The third distinction is between possessing an end imperfectly, ‘only in intention’, and possessing an end perfectly, ‘not only in intention but also in reality [in re]’.Footnote ⁸ The will can thus have a true but imperfect enjoyment of the last end even before it reaches it, through its active striving towards this goal.

Aquinas writes with great simplicity in I-II.5:3 that ‘perfect and true happiness cannot be had in this life [perfecta autem et vera beatitudo non potest haberi in hac vita]’.Footnote ⁹ This statement alone should puzzle us. On the one hand, the whole point of human life is happiness. On the other hand, Aquinas now insists, we can never find true happiness in this life. Aquinas believes that human beings by their very nature cannot find perfect happiness in this life – the ‘rest’ we can achieve is never total. As bodily creatures who exist in time and who have an infinite desire to understand and be fulfilled, we can never find the final rest we are searching for in this life. This is not because of some circumstantial difficulty or personal weakness, it is because of our nature as temporal creatures with intellect and will. The perfection human beings naturally desire is a synthesis that cannot be attained in this life. Whether it is possible for us to attain it in another kind of life, beyond time, is a separate question to which we will return later. We can now look more closely at the texts that support this interpretation.

Before launching into the texts I want to make a point about Aquinas's method. Aquinas is a theologian through and through.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet he is also able to make philosophical arguments that make sense in their own right without the need for theological convictions or faith in revelation. His analyses of intellect and will, of human action, and of the desire for happiness, do not depend on faith in God. The argument about happiness in the first questions of Part I-II is philosophical, even though the conclusion is also a theological conviction that would stand without the appeal to reason. So when Aquinas concludes that human beings cannot be perfectly happy in this life the impasse he reaches is philosophical. When Aquinas goes on to argue that we must be able to find happiness beyond this life in God, he is using the desire for happiness as an argument to lead one to God (even though he already believes in God). Aquinas does not use theology to plug a philosophical gap, he uses philosophy to open up a theological horizon.

2. The impossibility of perfect happiness in this life

In I-II.5:3 Aquinas asks whether one can be happy in this life. Happiness is the perfect and sufficient good which ‘excludes every ill and fulfils every desire’.Footnote ¹¹ He concludes that ‘in this life every ill cannot be excluded’ and ‘the desire for good in this life cannot be satisfied’.Footnote ¹² These are extraordinarily bold statements. Aquinas believes that human desire, in this life, never ends. As long as we are living we are unsatisfied with what we have. The desire for a good always reflects a desire to become what we are not, because in every good we seek we are always seeking our own good, that is, the being that we do not yet have.Footnote ¹³ So Aquinas is arguing that as long as we are living we are seeking to go beyond the present to a future perfection which we do not yet possess. It is an essential part of our nature as creatures in time to be incomplete and looking beyond. To be human is to lack the fullness of being which we could attain, which is to lack ourselves. Human beings, as far as the life we know is concerned, are an essential insufficiency.

The examples given in I-II.5:3 may seem too weak to support these sweeping ontological conclusions. Aquinas writes that this present life is subject ‘to ignorance on the part of the intellect, to inordinate affection on the part of the appetite, and to many penalties on the part of the body’.Footnote ¹⁴ One could argue that these ills might be removed in a utopian society, at least in theory. Yet for Aquinas they are identified with temporal, bodily life as such, and not just with the shortcomings of a particular culture or society. Ignorance, for example, is far more than the consequence of a bad education. Aquinas demonstrates in I-II.3:8 that the human intellect has a natural desire to know the causes of things. We wonder (admirari). This desire cannot be fully satisfied until we know the first cause of all created things through union with God. Even without the reference to God, Aquinas is saying something quite radical about human desire. It is part of our nature as intellectual creatures to question things, and as long as we are alive we will be questioning things and seeking more fundamental explanations, therefore our desire for understanding (and so for happiness) can never be fully satisfied in this life. The intellect takes us beyond to what we do not yet know, and there is no end to what we can discover. One proof of the endlessness of human desire is thus our incessant curiosity.

Human longing concerns much more than the desire for understanding. Question I-II.2 deals with a range of human goods which appear to promise happiness, such as riches, honour, fame, power, etc. Hidden in one of the replies Aquinas makes a kind of phenomenological observation that points to a larger truth. In the desire for riches ‘and for whatsoever temporal goods’, we find that ‘when we already possess them, we despise them, and seek others’. This is because ‘we realise more their insufficiency when we possess them [eorum insufficientia magis cognoscitur cum habentur], and this very fact shows that they are imperfect, and the sovereign good does not consist therein’.Footnote ¹⁵ Notice that this is not because some goods disappoint us with their inferior quality, it is because all temporal goods, when possessed, cause us to despise them and seek beyond them. We want to leave, as it were, as soon as we have arrived. Whichever goods we seek in time, the provisional happiness we might attain through them is always accompanied by a deepening appreciation of their insufficiency. However great the good we achieve, however secure the happiness we find, it is always threatened by the possibility that we will move on and desire something else. We can never force ourselves to continue to want in the future what we want in the present. To do so would be to abandon our freedom – which is impossible as long as we are creatures of intellect and will living in time. Our identity is never absolutely secure, and the most stable goals imaginable are always threatened, at least implicitly, by the possibility of appreciating their insufficiency and freely choosing something else.

The more our desire is fulfilled, the greater our desire becomes, since it inevitably carries us beyond the momentary fulfilment of the present towards a deeper fulfilment. In the final article of this question about the nature of the good that constitutes our happiness (I-II.2), Aquinas goes so far as to say that the good of which we are capable is infinitum, ‘infinite’. The good that intrinsically and inherently belongs to us in virtue of our existence is of course created and finite, since we are only creatures. But the good to which we are open, ‘as an object’ (of our intellect and will), is nevertheless infinite.Footnote ¹⁶ In other words, our understanding and desire are quite literally without limits, never ending, in-finite.

In a later article about enjoyment Aquinas admits that we find a kind of temporary delight in reaching certain goals, but this is never perfect enjoyment. He cites Augustine: ‘We enjoy what we know, when the delighted will is at rest therein.’Footnote ¹⁷ He then concludes that the will never rests completely [simpliciter]‘save in the last end: for as long as something is waited for, the movement of the will remains in suspense, although it has reached something’.Footnote ¹⁸ Aquinas thus believes that we must always be looking for something in this life. The desire to find rest and perfection necessarily brings with it a movement beyond any fleeting rest we might find in the goods of this world. The movement of the will ‘remains in suspense [remanet in suspenso]’ despite the fact that it has found rest in a provisional object of delight.Footnote ¹⁹ We always desire more even though we have attained what we previously desired.

Temporal goods are not only insufficient, they are also unstable. Aquinas writes in Article I-II.5:3:

This is an uncontroversial but nevertheless shattering point. Everything we attain will pass. It is not just the fact that particular goods may be lost, it is the deeper principle that all goods will be lost, and all meaning and happiness will thus be undermined. We cannot hold on to anything. There is no point in trying to suggest that we are indifferent to this loss. The starting point of Aquinas's anthropology is that human beings are seeking their own fulfilment through the pursuit of particular goods. It is our nature to seek happiness. Now we find that we will ultimately be denied happiness by the transitory nature of life as a whole and of all the particular goods of life. Aquinas returns to this need for stability in the following article.

This lack of stability, and the anxiety which follows with it, are a necessary part of temporal existence. Aquinas writes that vicissitudes such as these are ‘for such things as are subject to time and movement’.Footnote ²²

Even if we could somehow reach an infinite good in this life, and possess it without fear of ever losing it, there is still a final reason why perfect happiness would be beyond us. Aquinas writes in I-II.3:2 that insofar as happiness is a created reality in us it must involve our own activity (operatio). Happiness, in other words, is not just something which happens to us. Part of our fulfilment is to be actively involved in that fulfilment.Footnote ²³ It is not enough for us to be alive, we want to be actively living.Footnote ²⁴ But in this present life human activity can never be unified or continual.Footnote ²⁵ We have to act in time, in the present, moment by moment, and therefore our activity is necessarily fragmented. Even though contemplation of the truth is an activity which has more unity than an active life occupied with many things, Aquinas is realistic about the fact that even this has to be interrupted by sleeping and doing other things. So we can never act now in a way that ensures that all our future activity will be part of (or even consistent with) this present act. We cannot collapse the future into the present and take possession of a total, everlasting happiness. This is another example of how our failure to be happy relates to our nature and not to certain unfortunate circumstances. We are beings who operate progressively in time, and we cannot unify this activity and bring it to completion in one integrated movement.

For the many reasons outlined in this section, Aquinas is convinced that human beings cannot find perfect happiness in this life. We should not lose sight of the force of this conclusion. Aquinas does not say that perfect happiness in this life is a difficult achievement, one that is too much for us in practice, and that we therefore need God's help to find it. Instead he says that perfect happiness in this life is in principle an impossible idea. It would contradict our very nature to find perfect happiness. Human life itself is fragmented and we have only a precarious hold on ourselves. We are temporal creatures whose nature is to look beyond the present to the future, to the good we do not yet possess, to the person we have not yet become. Human beings in time are always seeking a further good. Aquinas is absolutely insistent on this point. The temporal goods we seek are necessarily insufficient and necessarily unstable. We have an infinite and therefore insatiable desire to have more and to know more, and we know that everything we do lay hold of will eventually pass. Aquinas has no conception of what it might be like for human beings to achieve their perfection in this life. A perfectly happy human being could bear no resemblance to the human beings that we know. Temporal human perfection is self-contradictory because it would mean that we had finally become all that we could be, which would be a kind of not-being-human. Aquinas believes that perfect human happiness is impossible in this life because it would mean the end and not the fulfilment of the human life that we know.

3. The possibility of perfect happiness in God

Perfect happiness, therefore, cannot be found in this life. Aquinas, as part of his broad theological project, gives philosophical reasons for this, as we have already noted. These reasons flow from a rationally argued account of human nature. By observing human life, by analysing the nature of intellect and will, Aquinas arrives at a philosophical impasse. We want to be perfectly happy, and we realise that we can never be perfectly happy in this life, so our existence is played out in this uncertain space between desire and frustration, between possibility and failure, between hope and despair. Aquinas, however, does not stop there, but goes on to state that despite the fact that human beings cannot find perfect happiness in this life it must still be possible for them to find perfect happiness. This seems like a contradiction, and we now need to explore why for Aquinas it is not.

‘Happiness is the perfect good, which lulls the appetite altogether, else it would not be the last end, if something yet remained to be desired’.Footnote ²⁶ We are characterised by our ability to understand all that is true and to desire all that is good. We are capable of an infinite good.Footnote ²⁷ The universal good, however, which alone can satisfy our will, is not just a theoretical synthesis for Aquinas, it must also be a real possibility, and he argues from the nature of our desire for the universal good to the possibility of our finding it. In Aquinas's understanding, it makes perfect sense to say that the existence of a desire or capacity is enough to establish that the desire or capacity could in principle be fulfilled (although it may in the circumstances not be fulfilled). Similarly, the existence of any potentiality is enough to establish that the potentiality could in principle be actualised (although it may in the circumstances not be actualised). Desire and potentiality are by definition aspects of a thing insofar as it relates to the fullness of being it could have. They signify a relationship with the perfection that is due to, appropriate to, and possible for this being.Footnote ²⁸ This is the metaphysical background that allows Aquinas to state with great simplicity:

It is an Aristotelian philosophy of nature and not just a Judeo-Christian theology of creation that makes Aquinas think that happiness must be possible for the simple reason that we are creatures who want to be happy. To say that a desire cannot in principle be fulfilled is to say that it is not really a desire at all. Appetite (whether that of inanimate objects, plants, animals or rational creatures) is an orientation to what can fulfil, it is a movement towards a good that perfects. There is a necessary correlation between the subject who desires and the desired state of fulfilment. Without this correlation it makes no sense to say that the subject is inclined to anything.

So there is no such thing as a natural desire which cannot in principle be fulfilled. This is why Aquinas can argue in I.12:1 that a created intellect must be able to see the divine essence, since otherwise ‘the natural desire [to know the first cause of things] would remain in vain [remanebit inane]’.Footnote ³⁰ It is true that he first gives a theological reason for this, and states bluntly that it is ‘opposed to the faith’ to suppose that the created intellect cannot find happiness in the vision of God, or can find it in something else.Footnote ³¹ Yet we should note that the argument from natural desire is explicitly given as an additional non-theological reason for thinking that the created intellect can see the essence of God.Footnote ³²

Aquinas makes a similar argument in the body of I-II.3:8, this time without the appeal to faith. He writes that our curious intellects, which wonder incessantly about causes, cannot be satisfied with knowing that God exists as First Cause, since we want to know what he is and reach ‘the very essence of the first cause’.Footnote ³³ Final and perfect happiness must therefore consist in nothing less than the vision of the Divine Essence.

Aquinas thus shows not only that we are capable of perfect happiness but that we can find this in God alone. Once again, I want to insist that there is a philosophical argument here which makes sense without the support of faith or religious revelation. Of course Aquinas never steps outside of the theological framework of the Summa, and he draws continually on biblical and theological resources. But he also recognises that a philosophical investigation into the nature of human longing would necessarily lead one to the idea of God. God is the universal good and the First Cause of all things who must exist if our infinite desire for happiness and for understanding are not to be in vain. Human desire necessarily points to God. Right at the beginning of the Summa Aquinas writes that we can be brought to an initial, imprecise conception of God by reflecting on the nature of human desire:

4. A natural desire for happiness which cannot naturally be fulfilled

The question of happiness has brought us to the brink of a philosophical theology, as we realise that human beings seek a fulfilment which can in principle never be found within this life. Aquinas suggests that perfect happiness can, nevertheless, be found, and it can be found only in God. Without entering too deeply into these theological aspects of Aquinas's anthropology, I simply want to make it clear that he is not sidestepping the very difficulties he has established. Aquinas continues to believe that perfect happiness with God is impossible for us to achieve in this life and is impossible for us to achieve in our own natural state by our own natural powers. The fundamental philosophical dilemma about human happiness remains for Aquinas even when God is present. Aquinas writes that the vision of the divine essence ‘surpasses the nature not only of human beings, but also of every creature’ and ‘neither human beings, nor any creature, can attain final happiness by their natural powers’.Footnote ³⁵‘It is impossible that it be bestowed through the action of any creature: but by God's work alone is the human being made happy [homo beatus fit solo Deo agente], if we speak of perfect happiness.’Footnote ³⁶

Aquinas states two conclusions with absolute clarity, and he is able to reach these conclusions without appealing to revelation (even though at various points he also draws on revelation): (A) Human beings, by their very nature as creatures of intellect and will, desire a perfect happiness which cannot be found in this life. This perfect happiness can only be found in union with God, since there is no end to our seeking in this life, and God alone is the universal good which can entirely satisfy our will.Footnote ³⁷ (B) Union with God, the vision of God's essence, surpasses the very nature of every creature including the human being. All creaturely knowledge falls short of the vision of the divine essence, ‘which infinitely surpasses all created substance. Consequently neither human beings, nor any creatures, can attain final happiness by their natural powers.’Footnote ³⁸

These two conclusions create a paradox. The perfect and crowning good, to which we naturally tend, cannot be reached naturally. The vision of the Divine Essence, which is absolutely necessary if we are to be happy, is beyond our natural powers. Put very simply: we have a natural desire for God which cannot be naturally fulfilled.

Denis Bradley gives a very helpful account of Aquinas's position in his book Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good, drawing on texts beyond the few we have been looking at in I-II. Bradley writes that the thrust of Aquinas's philosophical thinking about ‘the natural endlessness of human nature’ leads to an aporia. As philosophy, it cannot rest satisfied with the idea that human nature can find some natural fulfilment in this life, yet as philosophy it cannot ‘go forward to a theological affirmation of man's supernatural end’.Footnote ³⁹ Bradley believes that in Aquinas's view reason, without the aid of faith and revelation, can come to two conclusions that seem to be at odds with each other: (A) that ‘human nature is forever unsatisfied unless man attains the vision of God’ and (B) that the ‘attainment of this knowledge must be considered a supernatural achievement that is beyond any merely human activity’.Footnote ⁴⁰

I will not go into all the questions generated by these paradoxical conclusions – they have been fiercely debated through the centuries.Footnote ⁴¹ I just want to point out how tempting it is to dissolve the paradox in one of two ways. (A) One could insist that if we have a natural desire for God, then it must be possible for it to be fulfilled naturally. This would be a purely natural theology and it would do away with the need for God's ‘supernatural’ help.Footnote ⁴² (B) Conversely, one could insist that if the fulfilment of our desire for God is beyond our natural powers, then we cannot naturally desire it. This second type of thinking could go in one of two directions. It could lead one to conclude that some human beings do not desire God (if they do not receive his supernatural help), or it could lead one to conclude that all human beings desire God (in which case this desire must be a ‘supernatural’ gift laid on top of their human nature).

Aquinas does not give in to these temptations. He holds fast to the fact that we naturally desire what we cannot naturally attain. He does, however, go a step further, and ask whether there may be another way of finding the happiness that we cannot achieve by nature, a way which is natural to us but which does not depend on our nature for its fulfilment. He goes beyond the paradox without dissolving it:

So it is our part of our nature not only to seek happiness but also to have the ability to ask for what we cannot find through our own efforts. It is part of our nature not only to be frustrated but to find a way out of our frustration. The fact that the achievement of happiness can only be a supernatural gift from God does not mean that our desire or request for it needs some supernatural cause. We can ask God to allow us to share in this way of life, and perhaps he will grant it to us.

5. Conclusion: Human incompletion

Human beings are not inert and self-contained. We are ecstatic creatures. Aquinas believes that we exist outside ourselves in the things we understand and ahead of ourselves in the things we desire. We are restless and in via. Our identity is never fully fixed because we always see beyond what we are to the person we could become. Our present holds many possibilities yet we have to bring about only one particular future. We seek different things, but within each particular desire there is a deeper more universal longing for completion and perfect fulfilment. We don't just want to travel, we also want to arrive. We are frustrated that our understanding is limited, our possessions insufficient, and our identity insecure. In other words, we want to be happy. So we chase after an ideal moment in the future when desire as such will be fulfilled and when we will finally become the person we wish to be. This moment never comes, because desire is infinite and ‘self-coincidence’ impossible. Even though we may find a certain stability and satisfaction along the way, we always see a future opening up before us. We have some transitory experiences of happiness, but perfect happiness eludes us and is in principle impossible to achieve in the life that we know.

We are fragmented persons, internally displaced, perpetually going beyond ourselves to a future fulfilment. This prospect both liberates and terrifies us. We can try to escape the dilemma by pretending that we are perfectly happy in the present, or by pretending that we will be perfectly happy in the future, or by pretending that we do not care about happiness at all. Yet the dilemma comes back to haunt us, since it is a constitutive part of our nature to seek a deeper happiness and to be aware that any happiness we do achieve in the future will soon slip through our fingers. The whole paradox can be expressed negatively (‘human beings can never be perfectly happy in this life’) or positively (‘human beings can always seek a deeper happiness in this life’). Either way, it begs the question of whether there is another kind of life possible for human beings, one in which happiness could be found. Perhaps it is possible to attain to some God-like kind of life beyond all the contradictions of temporal existence. Perhaps it is possible to have all desire satisfied, and still to act; to understand everything, and still to wonder; to have one's life completed, and still to live; to arrive, and still to keep moving. Perhaps it is possible to be happy and to be free.

This article has shown how in Aquinas's thinking the question of happiness leads to the question of God. One's thinking about the possibility of final human happiness is part of what will determine one's thinking about the existence of God. Despite the identity we continually create for ourselves, and the commitments we freely make, human life is necessarily insufficient. We are constituted by incompletion since it is our nature to go beyond ourselves and beyond the present. Our desire always goes beyond anything in this life to an ideal of perfection which Aquinas associates with the divine. Aquinas is a theologian through and through, yet there are also enough philosophical arguments in the Summa to show that we cannot find happiness without God, and that we cannot reach him by our own unaided efforts.