Don’t Worry, Be Happy is a 1988 popular song by Bobby McFerrin that expresses something we all want – no worries, just happiness.
In my most recent column, I discussed some of St. Thomas Aquinas’ thoughts on “Man’s Last End.” In this column, we are exploring our “last ends.”
Most, if not everything, that we do in life is oriented to our happiness. Countless books and industries, the medical arts and on and on exist to help us be happy. I will be happy when I get this column done (smile).
Could you be happy without God? If so, there is no God. God is not God if He is not your ultimate meaning, end and happiness. For St. Thomas, human life has a purpose. Every human life has a goal, an end that brings perfect fulfillment, perfect happiness.
St. Thomas sees the person as a composite of body and soul with all sorts of potential and capacities that can be actualized (or effected by the will). When we act at our fullest potential (what we are meant to be), we are happy. But this happiness fulfills us only so much. If it fulfilled us completely, we would stop seeking anything else.
Perfect happiness (or beatitude) for St. Thomas is that which you seek for its own sake and not for the sake of something else. He then breaks down what people might deem obvious as making man happy – wealth, honor, glory, power, etc. – and demonstrates why they do not bring perfect happiness. These things are not sought for their own sake.
People seek those things to do other things, to live with their family, to stay alive, etc. Each eventually fades and needs to be continually sought to keep. Once people have them, there’s always something more. We keep moving from one degree of happiness to another, often with struggle and sorrow, as we pursue that perfect happiness that will satisfy.
St. Thomas thought that every creature has a purpose and is not perfectly happy until it fulfills that purpose. Our purpose, our predestination, is sonship with God.
What is happiness when it comes to God? We call it the “beatific vision.” The Church defines the beatific vision “in which God opens himself in an inexhaustible way to the elect, will be the ever-flowing well-spring of happiness, peace, and mutual communion.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1045)
At the end of the journey is total truth (the understanding of the ultimate reason for all things), total goodness (perfect holiness and the model for all holiness) and total beatitude (infinite, unending, ecstatic, incomprehensible joy).
What is meant by “vision”? St. Thomas writes, in Part 1, Question 12, Article 1 of the Summa Theologiae, “For as the ultimate beatitude of man consists in the use of his highest function, which is the operation of the intellect (mind, understanding), if we suppose the created intellect could never see God, it would either never attain to beatitude, or its beatitude would consist in something else besides God; which is opposed to faith. …
“Further, the same opinion is also against reason. For there resides in every man a natural desire to know the cause (reason, explanation) of any effect which he sees, and thence arises wonder in men. But if the intellect of the rational creature could not reach so far as to the first cause of things, the natural desire would remain void.
“Hence it must be absolutely granted that the blessed see the essence of God.”
Peter Kreeft, in Practical Theology: Spiritual Direction from St. Thomas Aquinas, explains, “‘Seeing’ Him, of course, means not just ‘perceiving’ Him with the eyes, or even with the abstract reason, but above all with the heart; ‘knowing’ Him personally, not just impersonally; as Father, not just Explanation. The I AM is not just AM (being) but also I (person).”
We get glimpses of heavenly happiness here on earth by participating in God’s existence, as God wills for us.
We’ll be satisfied only when we know not just lovely things but the God who is loveliness itself, Who is good itself. When we know not only true things but the God Who is truth itself, Who is all in all. That is perfect happiness.