Episode Transcript  

One

Happiness as the Starting Point

St. Augustine said that when we’re asking ourselves about how we want to live, the starting point should always be happiness. Why? For two reasons: First, because everybody can agree on it. Everybody wants to be happy. And secondly, because it keeps moral and ethical discussion concrete and practical. Whenever things start to sound abstract, you can just say, “Hold on. Let’s make it simple. Does this action really lead you to happiness or not?”

But in order to really use happiness as a clear standard for your life, you need happiness itself to be something you really understand. Something of which you have a clear, detailed idea. So what, exactly, does happiness look like?

Two

Ingredients for Happiness

To be truly, perfectly happy, you’d have to have every basic human desire satisfied. So, one way to think about happiness is just to list our desires and show how we all desire basically the same things. That’s why the late Catholic ethicist Germain Grisez came up with a list of every fundamental human desire.

Here it is, the seven basic things we all want:

1. First of all, we all want physical goods. We all want things like health and rest and nutrition, and hydration. That’s one. 

2. We all want loving relationships with other human beings. That’s why we want friends and family, why they’re so important to us. We are social animals, and other people mean so much to us. So that’s two. 

3. We all want to achieve something. That’s why we compete in sports, and try to do something worthwhile in our work, and why we form families. We want to make a good contribution to the world. So that’s three. 

4. We all want to know things. We want truth, which is why we read the news and watch informative videos and listen to podcasts, and value education generally. So that’s four. 

5. We all want beauty. That’s why we watch movies and listen to music, and are attracted to people of the opposite sex, and why we decorate and clean our houses. That’s five. 

6. We all want inner peace. We want not to be conflicted, or anxious, or depressed. The search for inner peace is why we go to therapists, and why some people do yoga or practice mindfulness. So that’s six.

7. As Christians, we want a good relationship with God. But all people want some relationship with persons that are beyond the human. This is why there are so many religions, and why even atheists are so desperate to try to make contact with aliens. 

That’s it. That’s happiness. That’s what we all want. The problem is, we really don’t stop and think about how we’re going to get it.

Three

The Temptation to Neglect and Attack the Basic Goods

When we don’t have a strategy or the discipline to really pursue happiness holistically, we end up chasing some goods while neglecting or attacking others. So, for example,  physical goods are often pursued without restraint, gluttony and drunkenness seek pleasure in food and drink until they destroy health. The desire for knowledge can also become disordered when it turns to gossip, scandal, or morbid curiosity about things that degrade us or are none of our concern.

The pursuit of beauty can be twisted through pornography, immodesty, or entertainment that mocks truth and holiness. Work and achievement, good in themselves, can consume our lives until family, friendship, and health are forgotten. Others idolize “inner peace,” refusing anything uncomfortable or demanding, saying things like, “That’s just not me.” But true happiness requires effort and sometimes change.

Personal relationships, too, can be pursued in destructive ways, through sexual intimacy outside of marriage, attempts to control or manipulate others, gossip and criticism, or by compromising truth and virtue just to gain approval. Even religion, when distorted, can attack other goods; when zeal loses truth and charity, it breeds division, pride, and even hatred in the name of God.

The point is, it’s not enough for happiness that we pursue these things. We have to pursue them the right way. And that’s what virtue means.

Four

Virtue – Pursuing Happiness the Right Way

The Cardinal Virtues help us become excellent at pursuing the goods and pursuing them in an integrated, not destructive way. Prudence shows us what the goods are, and how to strategically pursue them in a way that doesn’t damage any of them. Justice helps us preserve the goods of achievement and inner peace and beauty and truth in a way that doesn’t conflict with our relationship with God and neighbor. Fortitude gives us the energy and strength to pursue happiness relentlessly. It keeps us from neglecting goods we should pursue. And temperance gives us the self-control to not get off-track by pursuing lesser goods in a way that destroys our capacity for greater ones.

These are the virtues listed in the book of Wisdom (chapter 8:7) because the wise man makes a plan for happiness, and follows it, using these core virtues. But the wise man also knows that perfect happiness, the perfect attainment of all the goods, isn’t found in this life. And so the Theological Virtues of faith, hope, and love are what bring our earthly quest for happiness to its heavenly fulfillment.

Five

Faith, Hope, and Charity

Union with God Himself is the only complete happiness. The only utterly satisfying experience of bodiliness, of truth, accomplishment, beauty, peace, and community. By the virtue of Faith, we receive the instructions we need to arrange earthly goods so that they lead to heavenly goods. By the virtue of Hope, we keep our focus on perfect happiness in Heaven. And by the virtue of Charity, we experience the ultimate joy where we learn to delight in the supreme good, the good that contains all other goods, that is the love of God.

This is what the path to happiness looks like. This is how we get everything and lose nothing. This is what we should be working towards all the time.

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