11/03/2024
Saint Thomas Aquinas' Three Steps to Being Constantly Happy All the Time Forever
What makes us happy? Money? Connections? Power? Sex? Drugs? Rock and roll? A collection of little figurines based on the characters that have appeared in recent Super Smash Bros. games? If your guess was going to be any of these, especially that last option, I have some good news and some bad news.
The bad news is that it's not any of those. Sorry if you already had all of the Smash Bros. amiibos. Maybe there's amiibos in heaven. But the good news is that thanks to the power of God, you can actually be happy all the time, always, forever and ever. And ever. All it takes is three easy steps, says our good buddy Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Saint Thomas Aquinas was known for his love of church-shaped bird houses and oversized books.
I don't share these steps as some kind of philosophical or religious thought exercise, but as an actual series of things to consider and practice as a way of being happy. If you want to read about Saint Thomas Aquinas and the example of his life, click somewhere like here, as I'd like to jump right into things. Also, given that a lot of people in the western world agree with some of Aquinas' philosophy, I will be skipping over "proving" certain dictums for the sake of sharing some more "immediately useful advice." If you want to dive more into Aquinas, DO NOT go off and read his Summa Theologiae right away, but go read/listen to something like this or this. Lastly, although I started with a mildly amusing list in my first paragraph, I can attest that the greatest times of my life have been whenever I've remembered and kept the following items.
1. Everything is made good. Like, REALLY good. Yes, including you.
Lots of people remember the opening of The Book of Genesis where God creates everything and calls everything good. But what people don't remember is that God also called humans good. And notice as several other horrendous things go on in Genesis, God disciplines His creation, but never does He go back on His word that creation is good overall.
Like others, hearing that iconic phrase "and God saw that it was good" can be an opportunity to tune out the depth of that statement. What Saint Thomas Aquinas did for me whenever I first started reading his philosophy and theological systems is teach me the weight of that statement, "God saw that it was good."
In taking a page from Aristotle, Aquinas' philosophy sees existence as metaphysically positive, in contrast to non-existence being a negative thing in relation to some creature's essence. (Very, very briefly: existing = good, non-existing = bad. Yes, there's more naunce, no time to explain here.) While Aristotle embraced something along these lines even before the time of Christ, it becomes especially fitting in a Christian context. God our Father, all good and all knowing, chose to create every individual thing intentionally.
God had no second guesses designing the leaves of the trees to sway in such a melodious fashion. God did not stumble when choosing to make cats so weird that people want to upload millions of hours worth of footage of them for others' amusement. God was serious whenever He made the earth move and shift the way it does, causing the mountains to stun everyone who sees them.
And God certainly made no mistake when creating you and me.
The fact of omnipotence and omniscience becomes even more befuddling to the human mind - if God was serious about sin, would He not have smitten me by now? I have made mistakes, you have made mistakes - everyone has made at least one embarrisingly life-changing mistake at some time or another. Yet because God only makes good things and we retain that core of goodness from the creator Himself, God still maintains that He did not make a mistake in loving you into existence. Loving us into this world chock-full of good, great, beautiful, amazing, crazy things.
2. Mistakes and sins are not the end of the world if you're striving for virtue.
Having that essential goodness baked into us no matter what we do is great, but what about the dark side of humanity? Making a mistake is one thing, but people have the ability to kill, cheat, murder, steal, or worse. Are we still good if we do that? Well, yeah, go read the last few paragraphs again until you get that answer: yeah.
For better or for worse, people do have agency. Legitimate free will. What do we DO in life then? How do we live the best life possible when there are so many good choices and so many bad choices? Well, go read the Bible. We're talking Christian stuff here, after all. I'll wait.
For you cheeky readers who didn't stop to read the entire Bible just now, Aquinas has another gift for us: his system of virtue and vice. Maybe some of you are saying, "wah wah wah, I don't want to read that medieval virtue crap," uh... why are you still reading this text that has the name of a medieval theologian smack dab at the start of the article title?
Anyways... Aquinas and the Catholic Church has a very simple definition for virtue. "The habitual disposition to do the good." Say it with me. "Virtue is the habitual disposition to do the good." Easy, right? Again, actually, yeah.
Things like the life of Christ and His saints are obvious places to turn to to learn about what is right and wrong, but for our day to day lives, Aquinas says we can detect virtue by finding the mean between two seemingly good extremes.
Some examples: between the extremes of greed of wanting every material thing possible and some destitution of calling all material goods bad and owning nothing, we find the mean of living as generously as possible and not hoarding. Between the extremes of being some sex-crazed maniac and detesting the flesh entirely is the mean of chastity according to one's state in life. Between the extremes of gluttony and starvation is moderation. Between the extremes of pride and self-deprecation is contentment where one is at in life.
Perhaps that's all well and good, but what does this have to do with happiness? Let me address that with another question: have you ever felt happy and proud being stuffed to the brim with food you didn't need? Did you feel happy and proud from having played the same video game for 16 hours straight? Have you felt happy and proud for being constantly jealous and judgmental of other people? j
You have a conscience that will inform you of other examples. But the bottom line here is that vice does not make us happy. Virtue does. And that virtue is based on the teachings of Christ who exemplifies that "there is no greater love than this: that one lay down one's life for one's friends." (Another version of this that I try to keep as my life motto is from Pope Saint John Paul II: "man finds himself in a sincere gift of self to another.")
Briefly, then: or the majority of human history, some really smart people have been teaching about and developing morality not chiefly because humans need rules, but because striving for virtue and avoiding sin and vice actually leads to happiness. The virtuous one is one who is content with life as it is and striving for personal greatness in every way for love of God and others. I hope you have met someone that fits this description, but all the great role models I've known personally have had the most amazing ways of life and simply the best smiles, even, because they never stop trying. Never stop getting back up from their mistakes. They never stop loving and seeing what others need. After all, it is in giving that we receive.
3. Spend time with God.
Uh oh, very explicitly Christian/Catholic content ahead. Be warned. But this warning is only for people who seriously want the truth, want the good life, want happiness. The following advice is especially tough in today's environments, but please consider this:
Be quiet! For like, an entire hour. Especially if it's by Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. But not just quiet - receptive. Lovingly listening.
Let's start here with a story. Saint John Vianney, one of two or three actually good French people, was a Catholic priest sent to serve the backwater town of Ars in France. He had tough work ahead of him - the church building was in disrepair, drunkards abounded as people lived aimless lives and people hardly knew of the good life to be found in God. He worked tirelessly to build up the kingdom of God there, often just eating some old potatoes as his only food, sleeping in dingy places, physically repairing the church himself at times - months and years went by, and he actually saw the fruits of his labor! Many people started to turn to God, and his sanctity began to attract people from outside of town too this nowhere-location. In short: he of all people have certainly deserved to be called "saint."
Perhaps as a reminder of humility or maybe as a distillation of Vianney's own practices of hours of prayer and silent meditation, St. John Vianney came into the church building one day and found a man he had seen at times before. The Catholic church ought to be a place of silence ripe for holy encounters, and so the two often did not speak if they passed each other inside. But one day, Saint John Vianney had to ask what the man was doing. The man said he was praying - not with any manual describing long, drawn-out prayers to recite for a month to obtain something specific. But the man simply said his prayer was: "He looks at me, and I look at Him."
Only by the grace of God have I been that simple farmer. You can be, too. After all, blessed are the poor in spirit and the meek, yes? But in this time of silent prayer that anyone can do, many things can happen. Your worries about your mistakes can be relieved as you recall the fact that the God of all creation looks at you with love and mercy rather than fury. Your way in life can be made clear as you pray with Jesus and scripture. Your stress can fade away as the Holy Spirit gently reminds you that God provides for you day in and day out, and with God, we have nothing to fear.
If being quiet for an hour listening for God sounds intimidating, it means you have a great opportunity in front of you. (Of course, I recommend starting small in how you pray and how much time you take. Why not start by sitting with Matthew chapter 6?) Note well that even someone like St. John Vianney had many years of formation, years' worth of mistakes, years of seemingly fruitless toil until he was finally called home to the Lord. What hope have we to achieve such great virtue and love in this life? Thankfully, while Aquinas had three steps that he carefully outlined in things like his Summa Theologiae, there's still another few hundred years between us and him where something amazing could have happened. From that time in between then and now, I introduce the secret step four:
4. Give up.
Sorry to say, but everything I described above is actually impossible on our own.
Good thing we're not alone though, baby!!!! The secret weapon in being happy is from none other than Saint Therese of Lisieux, whom some popes have called "the greatest saint of modern times." So listen up.
St. Therese knew all of this above stuff, as she grew up Catholic and wanted to be a religious sister in a convent. So she learned her catechism well and wanted to please God more than anything else. But life kept beating her down - family members constantly died or left all around her, she was a nervous wreck (no, like actually, clinically speaking for a while in her life) and in her time, it was very popular to remind even little kids that God was actually a vengeful God, especially whenver it came to sin. Things were not looking good for St. Therese.
But God gave her the good grace of realizing that all of that stuff working against her really IS insurmountable on her own. (I venture into using a bit more of my own words here.) We cannot handle life on our own. Our attempts at virtue seem pitiful compared to Jesus or canonized saints. Just from these facts alone, we may think we are hopeless, but giving up at this point is actually the best thing you can do. But this means giving up to God. Saying directly to God, "I can't handle this stuff. I want to be good, but I keep failing. Help me to try. I offer myself to you, to lead me, to guide me in all that I do."
Giving up to God in this way allows one to be happy even in the face of our failures. Mistakes become opportunities to say to oneself, "oh yeah, that's what happens whenever me, this child, this beginner of a person tries to take the entire world by the reigns - I get bucked off. Thanks for sticking with me God! Help me back up!" I have said such things to myself in the face of horrid mistakes I've made and smiled where I may have otherwise berated myself for the next week.
In summary:
1. God is good and all that He created is good - nothing can take away that core goodness that you and I have.
2. Virtue and love make people happy - not vice. Virtue is the middle between two extremes of vices that appear good at first but are actually mutations of the median virtue in question.
3. The only way one can keep all this in mind is to spend some silent time, especially with God. Being by Jesus in adoration is great, but I've done holy hours out in the woods a few times. Why not.
4. Remember everything above, but also remember that you're probably going to fail at it. So just give up - give everything to God, and since God loves us and has mercy on us despite our mistakes, if you ask, He will guide you into being reasonably happy in this life, and perfectly happy in the life He has for us in the next.
Rather important post-script.
This subject is a bit more serious than other things on my website. I only share it because I want to help out anyone else who has a similar path of life or mindset to me. In a sense, this one is dedicated to everyone else out there who has less-than-normal mindsets, worldly-speaking.
I use lots of my own phrasing and wording here about relatively serious subjects, but I mean every word I write - but if something was confusing or came off as weird, an article like this is usually best discussed one-on-one. So please feel free to email me at jojo2k@jojo2k.com
I mention them elsewhere, but let me take this space again to plug The Modern Scholar: The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas by Peter Kreeft again, which, after having had a college's worth of experience on philosophy and the like, is still one of the best introductions to his work that I've heard. I listened to it recently as a refresher, it's fantastic. And I make this plea to everyone on earth: please check out 33 Days to Merciful Love. If anything in this article resonated with you, then this book will likely change your life for the better, giving you new and lovely avenues for happiness.
Very lastly, this stuff can make you happy, but the title might be a little clickbait-y, I admit. Now go call your local parish and get baptized. Or if you're already Catholic, go get some free grace from Reconciliation if you haven't been in a minute 😎
Pax et bonum baby!!
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