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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
The most famous book that talks to us of precisely “human” happiness, the proper happiness of man in so far as he is man in this world, is, no doubt, Aristotle’s Ethics. Here he tells us, as if looking into our own souls in our own time, that everything we do, all the particular, singular things in which our actions exist and which constitute the outlines of our lives, we do because we seek to be happy by the doing of these actions. This seeking to be happy in each particular act is what unites all the things that do exist in so far as they are touched by human minds and hands. All human beings reveal the same curious variety of longings in their origins. The world, in other words, is full of things that came to be because someone sought to be happy and did something to attain this purpose, albeit not always the right thing or the best thing..
Aristotle next explains to us that we can have differing ideas of that in which this happiness consists, but even here, the general diversity is not so great when we come to examine it. The great variations that seem at first sight evident in human searchings can be subsumed under four general headings. Some think that happiness is money, some pleasure, some honour or power, and still others think it consists in human contemplation of truth, of knowing the things that are. Happiness, Aristotle tells us; is an activity, it is an activity of our highest faculties on the highest objects
1 Boswell's life of Johnson (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), I, 290.
2 Simon, Yves, A General Theory of Authority (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, [1962] 1980), 152Google Scholar.
3 Tolkien, J. R. R., The Two Towers (New York: Ace Books, 1965), 25Google Scholar.
4 Chesterton, G. K., Heretics (New York: John Lane, MCMXIV), 38Google Scholar.
5 Pieper, Josef, Happiness and Contemplation, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Pantheon, 1958), 38–39Google Scholar.
6 Boswell, ibid., II, 150.
7 Jaki, Stanley L., “The Intelligent Christian's Guide to Scientific Cosmology,” Catholic Essays (Front Royal, VA.: Christendom Press, 1990), 164Google Scholar.
8 “The human intellect, knowing the essence of some created effect, does not know anything of God except whether He exists; not yet has His perfection attained simply to the first cause, but there remains to him still the natural desire of inquiring about the (first) cause. Hence he is not yet perfectly happy. For perfect happiness, then, it is required that the intellect attain to the very essence of the first cause. And thus he (man) will have his perfection through union to God as to an object, in which alone the happiness of man consists.”
9 Simon, Yves, An Introduction to Metaphysics of Knowledge, trans. by Kuic, V. and Thompson, R. J. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), 24–25Google Scholar.
10 Chesterton, G. K., Saint Thomas Aquinas (Garden City, N. Y: Doubleday Image, [1933] 1954), 135–36Google Scholar.
11 St. Leo the Great, “Sermo 6 de Quadragesima,” 1–2, Roman Breviary, Second Reading, Thursday after Ash Wednesday.
12 Boswell s Life of Johnson, ibid, I, 590.
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