Happiness

Mar 1
13 min read

Happiness. We all long for it — but how should we define it? How do we capture happiness and keep it? And just how important is it in our lives? What if, when we stand back and consider all things, happiness is the single main objective of everyone and therefore influences all our actions and thoughts — and yet we lack a clear understanding of what happiness actually is, and by extension, look for it in all the wrong places? What if instead of finding happiness we encounter the complete opposite, at best a kind of drudgery, at worst a nihilism that wades through depression, despair, and acedia, only to arrive at anti-creation, a hatred of all that is good, and a willingness to annihilate life itself.

In many respects, happiness in the true sense can’t be defined (or found) until we acknowledge a couple of basic concepts about human beings:

That there is a God, the creator of all the cosmos; and
We are made in His image.

There is no point in trying to define or find true happiness if these two minimum concepts are not accepted. I’ve mentioned the word “true” happiness a couple of times, as the real meaning of happiness is linked to those two concepts above. If these two truths cannot be accepted, then you are left with just the dictionary (Collins) definition, which seems vague and places little importance on the word happiness:

1. favoured by circumstances; lucky; fortunate

2. having, showing, or causing a feeling of great pleasure, contentment, joy, etc.;

joyous; glad; pleased

“Causing a feeling of great pleasure, contentment, or joy” all seem to indicate a fleeting moment, something that is hard to grasp and that disappears on a whim. But don’t worry, you’re not really in control of your happiness; you just have to be “lucky” or “fortunate” and happiness will drop in your lap at any moment.

Or, for those relying on a “scientific” view of happiness, the psychological definition provided by the American Psychological Association states that it is:

n. an emotion of joy, gladness, satisfaction, and well-being.

The key word in this definition is “well-being”, as this can cover such theories as life satisfaction and emotional states. And yes, how well your life is playing out and what your emotional state is do play a part in baseline happiness. But note how this definition narrows the sense of happiness down to emotion — a feeling — when happiness can be much more than this. Further, neither of these two definitions highlights the utmost importance of happiness in everyone’s life, and they render the word pithy and weak if we accept that there is a God who is the creator of the whole cosmos, and that He created us in His own image. If we believe these two truths, then the word happiness takes on a completely different meaning and illuminates the life that we are born to live — both in the material world and into eternity. It also means that the dictionary definitions of happiness that society sells us are a disposable junk word with a nice initial sugar rush, followed by a sickening realisation that behind the words “pleasure, joy, satisfaction, contentment, and well-being” there is no substance, and no real meaning to grasp on to. No wonder we become so unhappy when we make this type of happiness our goal.

There Is a God

This article is not intended to set out the argument for whether there is a God or not — but the acceptance that there is a divine Creator radically alters our understanding of happiness. It was Descartes who said God was:

“…immeasurable, incomprehensible, infinite … God is a cause whose power surpasses the limits of human understanding.”

Adding to this, Saint Augustine writes, “Even when He reveals Himself, God remains a mystery beyond words. If you understood Him, it would not be God.”

If we accept that there is a God, then He created us for a purpose, and that purpose (teleology) is to fully know and understand Him — something that is impossible while we live in a limited material world (it is these limits that prevent us from fully knowing God). However, we can move towards our telos, knowing Him more deeply as we accept His grace, and then, in eternity, we find our ultimate happiness (beatitude) in knowing and understanding Him completely — the fount of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty — united as one with Him, to be like Him, fully loved.

Humans Are Both Material and Spiritual Beings

“So God created mankind in His own image, in the image of God He created them; male and female He created them.”“God saw all that He had made, and it was very good.” (Genesis 1:27–31)

This “image” that we have inherited from God is His Goodness — God is all Being, which for Aquinas (building on Aristotle), Being is identical with Goodness. In other words, if we are made in the image of God (Goodness / Being), and God dispenses His Goodness throughout all of creation as an act of love, then our purpose and goals should also align with the very idea of God’s Goodness; that is, we too should dispense Goodness, not inwardly toward the self, but outwardly toward others. It is important to note that human beings stand between the material world and the spiritual world, which adds another dimension to our existence when compared to all other created beings, and this distinction plays an important part in understanding true happiness.

A God-Shaped Hole

In his book Confessions, Saint Augustine outlines his long march towards conversion, grappling with many questions about God and His relationship with humanity. Augustine notes the predicament of man:

“... since he (mankind) is a part of your creation, he wishes to praise you. The thought of you stirs him so deeply that he cannot be content unless he praises you, because you made us for yourself and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”

Some fifteen hundred years later, Blaise Pascal’s Pensées was released (posthumously), building on Augustine’s notion of our hearts finding no peace until they rest in God:

“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, yet none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words, by God Himself.”

At some point, this text was paraphrased (and attributed to Blaise Pascal) as:

“There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man, and only God can fill it.”

Still further, this “God-shaped vacuum” was shortened to “God-shaped hole”. Regardless of the semantics, the notion stands: man has a God-shaped hole that he longs to fill — in fact, one that must be filled. C. S. Lewis notes in Mere Christianity that:

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

And if that other world is found in eternity, then how can we possibly fill our God-shaped hole with temporal, worldly things? How can we possibly find the peace that Augustine was referring to? And the “true happiness” that Pascal says is now missing?

The notion of happiness has been a philosophical question for centuries. Even today, almost everything we do is aimed at being happy, or at the very least, avoiding being unhappy. We look for happiness in money, in power and privilege, in others, in self-help books, and in our desire to “be the best”. We try to find it in therapy, and we avoid unhappiness with addictions — whether drugs and alcohol, food, or anything that distracts us from being unhappy, such as social media, entertainment consumption, or excessive fitness and work regimes. If I am rich and buy more stuff, it is aimed at becoming happier; if I’m poor and commit a crime, it too is aimed at happiness. If I’m depressed, I take a drug (legal or illegal) to avoid being unhappy — in fact, drugs and alcohol do make us “feel” happy, such is their allure, but this emotional state of happiness is short-lived. In fact, all of the above are either short-term, dictionary-definition happiness hits (trying to fill the God-shaped hole through material things and ideals), or mere distractions from unhappiness. But how do we obtain real happiness that is life-giving and lasting?

Perfect Happiness — the End Goal

Ancient and religious theories have long stated that man’s true purpose in life is to be happy. For Aristotle, the “good with which man concerns himself is that which it is possible for man to reach in this life. The highest good is happiness. This must be the true purpose of life; for we seek it in all our actions.” However, for Aristotle, the highest attainable happiness is found only in intellectual actions — and more specifically, virtuous actions. In other words, the contemplative or philosophical life of speculation, in which the virtues of reason are explored through disciplines such as science and wisdom, places man closer to the realm of the gods — for it is in these activities that the gods themselves are at their happiness. For Aristotle, to pursue these virtuous actions is therefore to live a divine life.

That said, Aristotle also acknowledges that this divine, happy life is not for everyone, and that the majority of people will live a life of inferior happiness — though still happiness — through a life of non-intellectual action aimed at the goods of their being, such as food, shelter, family, and work, and so on.

For Saint Thomas Aquinas, beatitude, or perfect happiness, is the:

“true supreme, subjective end of man, and is therefore open to all people, but it is not attainable in this life.”

This is a key point in understanding Christian happiness; human life does not end in the temporary material world — there is life everlasting — and it is there, in eternity, that perfect happiness (beatitude) can be obtained. This beatitude is both the union of our being with God (the Supreme Being) and, in doing so, the full knowledge and understanding of God.

As stated above, this knowledge of God is not obtainable within the material world; this absence of knowledge is the “God-shaped hole” in our hearts (for the more we know someone, the more we can love them). That said, for Aquinas (like Aristotle), we can move towards this ultimate happiness through virtuous living (right action) and through our intellectual contemplation of the Good. Both of these ultimately bring happiness into our lives by aligning us with our true nature (Goodness) and allow God’s grace to be active in our everyday living. God is revealed to us more deeply through His grace.

Contemplative Life

“Contemplation is life itself, fully awake, fully active, and fully aware that it is alive. It is spiritual wonder. It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being. It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being. It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent, and infinitely abundant Source.”

That quote is from Thomas Merton (New Seeds of Contemplation), who became a Trappist monk in the 1940s. For Merton, the solitude of monastic life was the answer he was seeking after he had experienced all the world had to offer through life in New York — at the time, the epicentre of Western culture. We cannot all become monks; however, the need to embrace a form of contemplation in our lives is paramount to finding true happiness. This is because God’s moral law is written in our hearts, and to understand this moral law, our conscience must be engaged and listened to. If our actions and thoughts are not aligned with our true being (Goodness), then our true happiness is at stake — for if we deviate from Goodness, this becomes anti-good, or in simpler terms, evil or sin. In his classic book The Cross of Christ, John Stott makes the point that:

“The doctrine of original sin means that the very nature we have inherited is tainted and twisted with self-centredness.”

This inward-looking, self-serving nature is completely opposed to the framework of the Beatitudes and the example of Christ’s death on the cross — it moves in the opposite direction. It is the path to unhappiness (or worse).

John Stott continues with:

“men and women, unlike the animals, are morally responsible beings, who know what they are, could be, and should be … sin is not only the attempt to be God; it is also the refusal to be man by shuffling off responsibility for our actions.”

Every day we are faced with choices and decisions about how to act and think; moral landmines are everywhere, and without doubt we detonate these on a regular basis. That said, if our decisions and thoughts are directed inward to the self, this goes against our human nature of God’s divine Goodness, against the Beatitudes and the Cross, and can only result in unhappiness. Daily contemplation of one’s actions and thoughts enables us to engage our conscience and discern right from wrong — where we have fallen, where we could have done better — and provides the spiritual strength needed to avoid making the same mistakes again. An extension of this regular contemplation is prayer — the act of calling on God’s grace to provide insight and guidance for the moral choices we all face. If we are honest with ourselves, most of our unhappiness is caused by guilt from our past actions — actions that go against the moral law written on our hearts. Contemplation allows us to acknowledge this guilt, to take responsibility for our actions, to own them, and to move forward with divine forgiveness.

The modern world, however, has managed to tear down this great practice of contemplation by providing endless distractions; as a result, we have lost the ability to sit quietly and reflect on ourselves, the world around us, our interactions, and our relationship with God. In an experiment published in Science magazine, the extent of our ability to be alone with ourselves revealed the dire situation in which we find ourselves:

“In 11 studies, we found that participants typically did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think, that they enjoyed doing mundane external activities much more, and that many preferred to administer electric shocks to themselves instead of being left alone with their thoughts. Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative.”

How can we find true happiness without being aligned with our true nature (Goodness)? How can we know Goodness if we don’t reflect on our actions and thoughts? We need to get back to being comfortable with being alone — we need less meditation and more contemplation, because from this flow our actions into the world, actions that will bring true happiness.

By engaging in the contemplative life, we also engage in the virtue of Prudence — which helps us discern what is good (that is, wisdom). In fact, John Piper, in his book The Four Cardinal Virtues, states that Prudence is largely interchangeable with the word “conscience”; it provides us with the “knowledge of reality” and transforms that true knowledge into prudent decisions through deliberation and judgement. Piper notes that perfecting Prudence relies on three things: memory, a willingness and capacity to learn, and a well-formed ability to decide on the good.

To give a brief insight into how the contemplative life is so closely linked to the virtue of Prudence, consider the role of memory. We all have recollections of the past and of our past actions; however, there is a “true” memory — which Augustine related to a “spiritual proto-reality”, meaning that it is linked to divine truth, “from whom the Word and Holy Spirit proceed” — and there is also a memory we distort to satisfy our ego, shaped only by our engagement with the material world. In contemplation, we can engage our conscience to determine the prudent way of viewing our memory, and in doing so engage our spiritual nature to uncover the “true” memory of our past actions. Did we really perform that act of charity out of love? Or was it for prideful purposes? Was I truly with that person because I loved them? Or was it for my own self-pleasure? Or simply to alleviate my loneliness?

The answers to these questions are difficult to face, which is one of the reasons contemplation is so often shunned, and why we are drawn toward constant distraction rather than facing uncomfortable truths. However, it is through these ugly truths that happiness is ultimately found, either by rectifying past mistakes and/or learning from them in order to avoid future ones. More than this, John Piper notes that the virtue of Prudence is the:

“... mould and mother of all the other cardinal virtues … the others cannot fully exist if prudence is not present.”

Virtuous Living

“The goal of a virtuous life is to become like God” (Saint Gregory of Nyssa)

There are four human (or cardinal) virtues that the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes as:

“firm attitudes, stable dispositions, habitual perfections of intellect and will that govern our actions, order our passions, and guide our conduct according to reason and faith. They make possible ease, self-mastery, and joy in leading a morally good life. The virtuous man is he who freely practices the good.”

For Aristotle (and later the Church Fathers and Saint Thomas Aquinas), the four human virtues were the path to happiness in life because they were aligned with the Good (Being). These include:

Prudence
Justice
Fortitude (Courage)
Temperance

Above these human virtues are the three theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

“The theological virtues are the foundations of Christian moral activity; they animate it and give it its special character. They inform and give life to all the moral virtues.”

It is by living out these virtues that we find true happiness, as they are aligned with Goodness — our true nature. And, like God’s divine Goodness, which is infused and spread throughout all creation, these virtues also look and act outwardly; they are not self-obsessed, nor are they mere checklist items of some self-help ethos. Instead, they form our character and move us towards true human perfection, with a focus on others, thereby fulfilling the golden rule of “love one another”.

In Summary

It is important to note that God’s love for us — a love that desires us to truly know Him — is so profound that He sent His only Son into the world to be sacrificed for us, pouring out grace and revealing the ultimate way to true happiness, both through His teaching and His actions, which culminated in the self-sacrificing Cross. It is no accident that Christ’s high-water mark of teaching was the Beatitudes — the Sermon on the Mount — which point the way to true happiness and echo all the virtues noted above. Some biblical interpretations render the word as “happy” at the opening of each beatitude, while others use the word “blessed”, describing something greater than mere mortal happiness — a divine happiness:

Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

When we contrast these Beatitudes and character-building virtues with the watered-down dictionary definition of happiness (lucky, fortunate, pleasure, contentment, joy, glad, pleased, well-being), we see the true depth of what happiness actually is. It is not a floating ideal, nor something to be purchased, but a way of living that extends far beyond what most people imagine happiness to be — it is what you were made for, your destiny, to be lived and acted out in every moment of every day, and into eternity.

Author: DW Fraser

February 2024