Virtue is the path to happiness, according to St. Thomas Aquinas. What does that mean?
Here’s an analogy: If you had the goal in life of being a successful concert pianist,
there is a certain definite program of training and practice that you’d have to follow.
You’d not only have to learn basic things like how to read music, and the right way to hold your
fingers over the keys, but you’d have to practice for long hours, over many years, to acquire the
skills, the techniques, the good habits, the musical taste and the personal
character – in fact, what we might loosely call the “virtues” – of being a virtuoso pianist.
Not many of us will be concert pianists, but we find the same kind of pattern
any time someone sets out to achieve some definite goal or end in life, whether it’s
being a student, a basketball player, a lawyer, a doctor, a scientist, or a good parent.
In order to do any of these things well – in fact, to do well in any kind of higher-level
or sophisticated human activity – you will need to acquire certain skills, and more than this,
you’ll need habits, traits of character, and stable dispositions of your capacities and powers,
that make you apt, able, and ready to do it well, with pleasure and a certain creative freedom.
These habits, dispositions, and character traits are what we can loosely call virtues.
We’ll have more to say about precisely what a virtue is according to St. Thomas Aquinas, how it works, and how to distinguish
it from art in our next episode. For now, the point is that acquiring virtues
is what puts us in position to succeed and flourish at an activity.
It’s fairly easy to come up with a recipe for success in a particular zone of human
activity – like playing a musical instrument or becoming a good free-throw shooter – but
those things don’t define the whole of a human life. Does this same pattern hold when we’re
talking about the success of a human life as a whole? Are there human virtues that can
dispose us to reach some kind of all-encompassing happiness, to live a happy human life in general?
St. Thomas thinks so. He thinks that such deep and lasting happiness is really possible for us,
and that, if we’re to get there, it is extremely important for us to
think about what true happiness is, and then
to acquire the virtues that will enable us to live in such a way as to obtain it.
In fact, for Aquinas, this is the core of the branch of human knowledge and action that we call
morality. Most people today think that morality is about rules, rules that you have to obey, perhaps
rules that God or the Church imposes on us, which makes us to do some things that we’d rather not
do – and forbids us from doing some things that maybe, sometimes, we might even sort of want to do.
But for Aquinas, morality is about figuring out what will make us truly happy in a deep and
lasting way, by attaining what is truly good for us – and then arranging our lives so that we can
move towards that goal. Morality is therefore
not about rules and commandments, but about seeking for and obtaining what is good for us:
what leads us to our flourishing and success in the deepest sense of those words.
Virtues are an extremely important part of this picture – they’re an
important part of our moral development – because
they are what make it possible to move towards our true good and to act well in its pursuit,
with ease and freedom. St. Thomas thinks that there are a number of different virtues that we
need – intellectual virtues, moral virtues, and especially theological virtues – each of which
perfects different dimensions, capacities, and powers of the human person in different ways.
To understand the importance of these virtues,
it will help to understand a bit better what Aquinas means by happiness.
St. Thomas follows Aristotle in thinking that happiness is not so much a feeling or an emotion,
nor is it something that just happens to us – rather, he argues that it is a state or even
better, the activity of living a human life well, by which we attain to what is truly good for us.
We naturally desire those things that we perceive as good. And it is a characteristically human
activity to make a plan for obtaining the things that we perceive as good for us. We do this all
the time – we act with a purpose, with reasons, because we are thinking, deliberating, choosing,
purpose-driven creatures. In fact, human beings tend to be unhappy when they feel purposeless,
or when they are not able to orient their lives towards some larger goal.
We have purposes not only for individual acts, but for whole projects, with short-term goals and
long-term objectives. It’s possible, of course, to flit from good to good, from pleasure to pleasure,
but this is hardly the kind of life that satisfies us in any deep way. Rather, we are most human
when we make decisions for our future in view of some higher or overarching aim or goal in life.
In fact, Aquinas thinks that the moral life is about understanding what is truly good for us,
and then aiming at the right ends, doing the right sorts of things,
so as to move towards our true good. There’s a negative side to this, too:
if we’re misled or confused about what is good for us, or if we do the wrong sorts of things – even
with the best of intentions – we’ll tend to move away from what is really good for us.
That is the path to frustration and failure, and it can make us miserable.
What about our own experience of interior conflict: of having desires for what we know we
should not do, or of our conflicted loves? Aquinas would say that we have inherited
disordered passions and desires as a result of the Fall of our first parents. As a result,
we live with a kind of moral blindness to the truth about God and about ourselves, and about
what is truly good; and our lower passions and desires are unruly and even rebellious
against what is higher within us, our minds.
The drama of the moral life, then, resides first in the need to clear away the fog and
obscurity that blinds our mind, and then to acquire the good habits and virtues that will
bring our disordered passions and desires under control, so that we can govern our lives according
to what our mind judges is best – so that our minds can direct us towards what is truly good.
What should the aim or goal of the whole of life be? If there is an answer to this question,
then knowing it would be one of the most important ingredients for a flourishing human life.
The archer needs to know the target if he is to hit his mark,
and we should likewise think about the aim of our life if we want it to turn out well.
In the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas goes through a list of what goals people might pursue in the
search for happiness: money, honor, power, fame, pleasure. And after looking at all of these things,
he concludes that none of them can satisfy us in a lasting and enduring
way. None of them is worthy of being our ultimate goal, or what he calls our “final end.”
A “final” end isn’t the only end or goal you pursue. Rather, it is the most
powerful end, something that is like a final cause in the
Aristotelian sense – a final end is the ultimate goal we are seeking,
the one that makes sense of all of the other subordinate goals we might have.
There is only one thing that can fully satisfy us, Aquinas thinks,
the thing that will quell all our desires. And that is God himself, who is the infinite and perfect
good. Attaining to God – this is our final end, the most important goal for a human life,
the goal in view of which we should arrange every other thing we do in life.
That means that the activity of happiness can be real but imperfect in this life,
as we grow in the life of virtue, moving towards God through the ups and downs of
this world – and that, by God’s grace, we hope to experience it in full in the life of heaven,
where we will know and love God perfectly -- beholding, possessing, experiencing, even enjoying
the infinite perfection of him who is the source of every good thing,
and who bestows on us his life, his friendship, and his love, in superabundance.
This is a good that vastly surpasses what our nature is capable of, but with the
help of God’s grace, we can acquire moral and intellectual virtues -- and we can even receive,
by a divine gift, the theological virtues by which we are raised to supernatural life.
Endowed with these virtues, the greatest possible happiness really is possible to us.
That’s why virtue is the path to happiness.
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