Aug 08 2008
Friday with the Church Fathers: St. Augustine on Happiness
Last week, we started looking at what St. Thomas Aquinas has to say about our ultimate end. We noted that in order to understand Thomas, we need to understand his notion of human freedom — namely, that all people seek the (perceived) good and avoid the (perceived) evil. In other words, we all choose courses of actions by whether or not we believe they are good for us or bad for us. Therefore, the only way we can pursue the true good and avoid the true evil — not just those things we perceive to be good and evil — is to know what our ultimate end is.
St. Thomas was a university professor and not a parish priest, so therefore his writings can be abstract and obscure. So in this edition of “Friday with the Church Fathers” I thought we’d look at an extended passage from St. Augustine of Hippo (d. 430), in which one of the greatest bishops and pastors of souls speaks about our desire to seek the good and avoid the evil with words that are more easily grasped than those of St. Thomas.
This passage is taken from Augustine’s Commentary on Psalm 32.
All men love happiness, and therefore men are unreasonable in wanting to be wicked without being unhappy. And whereas unhappiness is the inseparable companion of wickedness, these perverse folk not only want wickedness without unhappiness, which is an impossibility, but they want to be wicked on purpose to avoid being unhappy. What do I mean by saying they want to be wicked on purpose to avoid being unhappy? Consider this point for a moment: in all the wickedness men commit, they always desire happiness. A man steals; you ask: “Why?” For hunger, for need. So he is wicked for fear of being unhappy, and all the more unhappy for being wicked. For the sake of driving away unhappiness and obtaining happiness, all men do whatever they do, good or bad; they invariably, you see, want to be happy. Whether they lead a good life or a bad one, they want to be happy; but not all attain to what all desire. All wish to be happy; none will be so but those who wish to be good. And then, lo and behold, someone or other, although doing wrong, wants to be happy. How? With money, with silver and gold, with estates and farms, with houses and servants, with worldly magnificence, with fleeting and perishable honors.
