The Happy Life

Maybe another way of getting at what Augustine is about is to consider his understanding of happiness. As with Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, and Jeremy Bentham, Augustine is a eudamonist - one who considers happiness to be the fundamental end or goal of human life. A key question that must be addressed, though, is what happiness entails. Is it simply pleasure, as Bentham insisted, or do we have to distinguish between higher and lower pleasures - pleasures of the mind vs. pleasures of the body, as with Mill?

Augustine is also intent upon the task of defining and distinguishing between different kinds of happiness. After his conversion, he retreated to Cassiciacum with some friends to reflect upon his conversion. There he wrote De Beata Vita (The Happy Life) where he sets forth what the happy life is: to live in relationship to God as the Summum Bonum (the highest good). To be truly happy, we must seek God and recognize God as that which will make us truly and deeply happy. The human person is hard-wired to seek God - indeed, as we seek that which is less than God we are really ultimately seeking God. God has made us to seek Godself ("You have made us for yourself"); once we realize that and offer ourselves to God, we may be peacefully happy ("Our hearts are restless until they rest in You").

This does not mean we may not take any delight in that which is not God. Augustine recognizes that we need to survive and even to thrive and that means enjoying the good things that God gives. But he also recognizes that the human heart tends to fix itself upon what it loves - to elevate it to the status of God and to become like that which it loves. He really is talking about idolatry here. We make gods of things like money, power, sex, food, drugs. These become more important to us than willing to live "a good and upright life" in relationship to God. We make ultimate what is not ultimate: money, power, sex, drugs, food. But these cannot satisfy the will and the endless pursuit of these finite goods draws us away from God. We pursue these things and become like these things - superficial and self-centered - and less like God.