HAPPINESS

Happiness, or beatitude, is the personal possession of a desirable good, ultimately the perfect good of an intellectual nature. Accordingly, God, the sovereign uncreated good, is happiness itself. Inasmuch as creatures participate in the perfect good, they possess created happiness under various forms and in different degrees. Happiness may be considered objectively or subjectively. The good that is capable of giving a person his ultimate perfection by fulfilling his every need is called objective happiness; this is God alone, who by His infinite goodness can satisfy creatures (see good, the supreme). The actual perfection experienced by the person through a realization of his potentialities is subjective beatitude; it is the possession of the desirable object. When this actualization is ultimate, the person possesses perfect subjective happiness; until then, it can only be imperfect. Ultimately, man has but one goal: perfect happiness, which is the full realization of his potentialities through intimate, personal union with God in the beatific vision (H. Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum, 1000). In this life, however, a limited participation in the perfect good through human activity (physical, spiritual, supernatural, both individual and social) produces a form of happiness, natural and/or supernatural, that, although imperfect, is a beginning of perfect happiness.

Each type of happiness can be discussed further within a philosophical-theological framework according to the historical development of the concepts. While philosophy has generally considered what object constitutes man's happiness, theology has always asked how a person through his intellectual and voluntary activity truly possesses the sovereign good in the beatific vision.

Objective Happiness. Philosophers have frequently placed objective happiness in the goods of this life: material goods—refined pleasure (the hedonism of Aristippus, Helvétius), social prosperity (L. bentham, L. S. mill, K. marx); spiritual goods—virtue (stoicism), human perfection (C. wolff, F. schleiermacher, W. Wundt); or progress—cultural-moral (J. fichte, I. kant), political (G. hegel), positivistic (A. comte, H. spencer). Others see the object of happiness in God, the supreme good transcending experience—plato, all scholastics, some moderns (e.g., R. descartes, N. malebranche), and Christian existentialists [e.g., S. kierkegaard, G. Marcel (see existentialism)]. For Aristotle, contemplation terminates the successive types of happiness in this life. The systematic Christian approach to objective happiness begins with St. Augustine, who held that God, the true and sovereign good to be loved for Himself alone, and not merely as the object of philosophic contemplation proposed by Plato and plotinus, is the object of happiness. Arguing from imperfect to perfect good in the realm of essences, boethius further developed the notion of objective happiness by concluding that God is indivisibly one with goodness, whose possession by participation makes man happy. The Platonic and Neoplatonic notion of the transcendent good (especially in pseudo-dionysius) and the Aristotelian concept of happiness as the last end (sovereign good) in the writings of the Fathers prepared the scholastics, notably Thomas Aquinas, for their systematic approach to happiness: only an infinite being can fully satisfy the spiritual faculties whose object is unlimited being and unlimited good; every other finite good, especially temporal goods, is incomplete. Emphasis on Biblical studies has led some contemporary theologians to return to the eschatological aspects of early patristic writings rather than to the philosophical notions of the scholastics in treating man's last end: the victory of Jesus Christ over death (see resurrection of christ, 2).

Subjective Happiness. The actual possession of God in the beatific vision (perfect subjective happiness of the supernatural order) essentially requires acts of both intellect and will. Augustine indicates this by considering happiness as a person's perfect knowledge of truth, truly enjoyable (frui ) through apprehension by love. Applying Platonic notions of beatitude, Pseudo-Dionysius focused attention on intuitive vision: beatitude conceived as objective divinization of the intellectual nature, although some Greek Fathers (e.g., Theodoret of Cyr) were reluctant to state that happiness is the vision of the divine essence. More precisely, the scholastics of the medieval period attempted to determine the formal constituency of happiness as the possession of the soverign good: intellectual vision (Thomas Aquinas); voluntarist love (Duns Scotus); vision and love (F. Suárez). The scholastics also attempted to explain how the souls of the elect behold God directly without any created intermediary: God Himself becomes the intelligible form, effecting what is necessary (e.g., the light of glory) to let reason enter into the possession of its object. Some mid-20th-century theologians (e.g., R. Troisfontaines, SJ) stress a personalistic viewpoint that true happiness consists in perfect dialogue between God and man, in the I-Thou relationship of Sacred Scripture, in which "to see" (vision) means to live in conscious, personal union with divine, angelic, and human persons.

Unending joy, rectitude of will, full appreciation of creatures, expansive friendship and ultimate glorification of the body accompany perfect happiness. While each person possessing God in the beatific vision is completely happy by reason of his full actualization of potentials, the degree of participation in the perfect good differs according to merit.

A purely natural happiness after death consisting in an acquired knowledge of God through created things (i.e., analogously) and a natural love, while speculatively possible, does not in fact exist: it cannot be a true termination of the natural desire to see god (the opinion held by many scholastics up to the 17th century). In this life, however, man can possess an imperfect natural felicity through virtuous activity in which temporal and spiritual goods, including friendship, are conditionally necessary. The problem, however, is to explain a purely natural happiness in a supernatural economy of salvation. In the supernatural order, the wayfarer actually possesses God, but in a manner proper to his state: operations of the theological virtues, the moral virtues, and the gifts of the holy spirit are most perfectly manifested in the beatitudes, which produce a happiness that is both terrestrial and a beginning of perfect happiness.

See Also: destiny, supernatural; elevation of man; heaven (theology of); man, 3; pure nature, state of; resurrection of the dead, 2.

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[t. f. mcmahon]