“If you are unhappy, I question whether you are truly Christian.” So concludes my columnist-colleague and brother Dominican, TJ Burdick, at the close of his latest column. And there is something to be said for Mr. Burdick’s conclusion: the happy are those who are blessed, and blessedness (ergo, happiness) is described for us by Jesus in the Beatitudes.
If happiness and blessedness are finally inseparable, it follows that misery and damnation are a common destination for those who will not be happy and blessed. What of attachments, as Mr. Burdick calls them—does it follow that those who are unhappy are overly attached? Conversely, does this imply that the key to happiness is detachment?
That most imminent of Dominican scholars, Saint Thomas Aquinas, considered the question of happiness at length in his Summa Theologica. Building upon the foundations of Faith and Reason—that is, Scripture and philosophy—Aquinas concludes that happiness ultimately lies in knowing God and loving Him, and following Saint Augustine, this happiness must ultimately be eternal lest it be marred by the prospect of its loss.
The good life is one which is spent with our first focus on God, pursuing Him as our highest good. All secondary goods—honor or friendship or wealth or pleasure—must give up pride of place to pursuit of God, that is, to knowing and loving and serving God. Only when we seek first the Kingdom of God will all of these others things increase our happiness.
With this first focus comes a measure of detachment: that which hinders us from knowing God, loving God, and serving Him faithfully in this life must be cut off and cast away [1]. This includes selfish desires, vainglorious ambitions, egocentric pride. It also includes counterfeited love, the feel-good sentimentality which substitutes itself for sympathy.
There are three enemies to our final happiness: the flesh, the world, and the devil. Detachment of the sort described by Mr. Burdick is meant to combat the first, and can help against the second and third, but selfish desires are not the only temptations of the devil, nor the only obstacles offered by the world [2]. One would expect the devil, for example, to corrupt even those things which are good, even virtuous things such as love. C.S. Lewis described this distortion in The Four Loves:
St. John’s saying that God is love has long been balanced in my mind against the remark of a modern author (M. Denis de Rougemont) that “love ceases to be a demon only when he ceases to be a god”; which of course can be re-stated in the form “begins to be a demon the moment he begins to be a god.” This balance seems to me an indispensable safeguard. If we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God….Every human love, at its height, has a tendency to claim for itself a divine authority. Its voice tends to sound as if it were the will of God Himself. It tells us not to count the cost, it demands of us a total commitment, it attempts to over-ride all other claims and insinuates that any action done “for love’s sake” is thereby lawful and even meritous….
Our loves do not make their claim of divinity until the claim becomes plausible. It does not become plausible until there is a resemblance to God, to Love Himself….We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance we owe only to God. Then they become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred….It follows from what has been said that we must join neither the idolators nor the “debunkers” of human love.
God is able to draw straight with crooked lines, as the saying goes. Satan can only find means of twisting the straightest lines so that even the straight and narrow path may seem to bend and curve away from our final goal. This is perhaps why there are three theological virtues, with faith and hope to supplement love. Love is the greatest, and will remain into eternity while faith and hope fade in the life of the world to come. But in this life, we need faith to overcome the devil and hope to overcome the world, even as charity overcomes the selfish desires of the flesh.
—Footnotes—
[1] Of course, to cut something off and cast it away implies that something else remain. True discipleship does not mean self-annihilation as the Buddhists seek, but rather making ourselves vessels for Gods Spirit and His grace.
[2] As an example of the type of temptation offered by the world, read Abigail Reimel’s latest column. We have a need to “belong,” as Miss Reimel puts it, but the world can work against us by offering us false communities. It can also offer us genuine communities which nevertheless impede our pursuit of happiness as followers of the Lord, hence Christ’s warning in Luke 14:26.
