Why Happiness Is Not Power, Bodily Goods, or Pleasure (ST I-II q.2 aa.4-6)

Orientation #

He says nothing explicit about last time except that Thomas is “following the great Boethius” in treating false happiness before true, and that “beatitude is more known to you than the true beatitude”. He notes that pleasure will come “not the next one, the one after that” (a. 6) and reaches it before the end. The previous class treated honour and glory (q. 2 aa. 2-3) and the next takes up aa. 7-8.

The class, in order #

1. Article 4, the objections for power (“it seems that beatitude consists in power”) #

False happiness is more known to us than true; Chesterton’s reason that truth is stranger than fiction because fiction is our mind’s product and truth is not. He reads the three objections:

1. All seek to be like God; men in power are most conformed to God (the creed begins “God the Father Almighty”); Scripture calls them gods (Exodus 22, “you will not detract from the gods”). His mock endorsement: “I’ll be most like God Almighty when I’m… commanding you guys” — against which Lord Acton: all power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely.
2. Beatitude is a perfect good; most perfect is to rule others, which needs power over them.
3. Beatitude, most desirable, is opposed to what is most fled; men most flee servitude, whose opposite is power.

• Aside: Kennedy amazed that a president’s orders get lost in the bureaucracy; “ask the Pope about that one”; Stalin’s subordinates obeyed a little more.

2. Sed contra from Boethius III (“human power expels anguish of care”) #

Boethius: power cannot expel the anguish of care nor avoid the darts of anxiety; the powerful man depends on those he terrifies and fears them still more. Examples of what this shows: Stalin knocking off those close to him; ancient tyrants trusting only a daughter to shave them (“that’s why monks grow beards”); James I of Scotland killed as king amid the chaos of bumping off whoever might bump you off; Jesse Jackson’s brother in prison for attempting to kill business associates; the monk shaving the abbot who threatened “one more word out of you”. What good is such power?

3. The response: two reasons proper to power (“power has the notion of a beginning”) #

1. Power has the aspect of a beginning — the fourth sense of beginning in “the fifth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V] — but beatitude is a last end. His gloss: power is an ability to do something, a source, as the ability to see is for the sake of seeing.
2. Power is open to good and bad use (an argument he remembers from Boethius); beatitude is man’s proper and perfect good. So beatitude is more able to consist in the good use of power, through virtue, than in power itself. Most men abuse power: Aristotle in the Rhetoric on things to be feared lists being in another man’s power, “men do evil whenever they can”. His St. Mary’s story: a sophomore making a freshman carry his books — with only that much power, “what do you expect?”; with absolute power he would be completely corrupt.

4. Four general reasons against all exterior goods (“four general reasons… in none of the foregoing”) #

Thomas now knocks down many birds with one stone: power, glory, fame, riches together.

1. Beatitude, man’s highest good, is incompatible with anything bad; but all these are found in the bad as well as the good (the bad famous, honoured, wealthy; the bad “tend to be” powerful). An argument Thomas gives in the Contra Gentiles and Boethius before him in Consolation III.
2. Beatitude by definition (Ethics I) is enough to itself; but with each of these, goods necessary to man may be lacking — wisdom, health of body. Euclid to the king: no royal road to geometry; the student who asked what he gains gets a slave paid a coin per theorem; “he’s profiting nothing”.
3. Beatitude, a perfect good, can bring no evil; but Ecclesiastes 5:12, riches sometimes kept to the harm of their owner, and likewise men killed for their power or fame.
4. Man is ordered to beatitude through interior beginnings, being naturally ordered to it; these goods come from exterior causes and, ut plurimum, from fortune. This returns to the etymology of “happiness” (hap, luck; fortuna). The etymology need not be the meaning, but it shows the order: false happiness is more known than true. Aristotle uses eudaimonia in the Ethics but eutychia, good fortune, in the Poetics — Friar Lawrence’s messenger waylaid, so the word never reaches Romeo: bad luck. He remarks that Thomas groups these four and keeps bodily pleasure for a. 6, as Aristotle in Ethics X returns to pleasure when saying more distinctly what happiness is, because of its great likeness to it.

5. The replies and a digression on wicked power (“divine power is the same thing as his own goodness”) #

• Reply 1: God’s power is his goodness, so he can only use it well; not so in men, who can have power without goodness. So likeness to God in power does not suffice without likeness in goodness. “Isn’t that a beautiful reply?”
• Reply 2: as it is best to use power well in ruling many, so it is worst to use it badly; human power stands to good and bad.
• Digression on why the worst men get the most power: Hitler with the atom bomb would have used it on London and New York; Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt; scientists who regretted the bomb but found it too dangerous not to build; the long-range bomber over the Pole; agents sent to find what Heisenberg was doing (“uncertain” — “that’s a joke”); the play Copenhagen on Heisenberg’s wartime visit to Bohr; Heisenberg’s mother phoning a Nazi mother. Jeremiah’s question, quoted by Hopkins, “Iustus quidem es tu, Domine” — why does the way of the wicked prosper? Thomas: Christ chose to overcome the devil by justice on the cross rather than by power, the devil being a lover of power and not of justice; a modern book’s chapter on Hitler and Stalin called “the Devils”.
• Reply 3: servitude impedes the good use of power, so men naturally flee it — not because power is the highest good. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
• Break.

6. Article 5, the goods of the body: objections and sed contra (“goods of the what body”) #

1. Ecclesiasticus 30: no riches above the health of the body (census: from counting, hence wealth). Beatitude is in what is best. TV ads: got your health, got everything.
2. Dionysius, Divine Names 5: to be is better than to live and to live than what follows; being and living require the safety of the body.
3. The more common a thing, the higher its beginning; as the efficient cause’s causality is by influence, the end’s is by desire; the first efficient cause flows into all, so the last end is desired by all; being is most desired; so beatitude is in what pertains to man’s being, like health. Sed contra: man excels the animals by beatitude, but in bodily goods the elephant beats him in length of life, the lion in fortitude, the deer in running — else “a healthy dog would be better than a man”.

7. The response: the helmsman and the ship (“the helmsman does not intend as a last end”) #

Impossible, for two reasons:

1. What is ordered to another as end cannot have its own conservation as last end. The helmsman does not aim at conserving the boat entrusted to him, since the boat is for sailing; so man is entrusted to his reason and will (Ecclesiasticus 15, God left man “in the hand of his own counsel”). Man is not himself the highest good, so his last end is not the conservation of his being.
2. Even were it so, man’s being is soul and body; the body’s being depends on the soul, not the soul’s on the body (shown in the prima pars): the form is the beginning of being. Body is for soul as matter for form, and as tools for the mover, to exercise his actions; so all goods of the body are ordered to goods of the soul.

• One can also argue: bodily goods are common to the beasts, but beatitude is proper to man. St. Jane de Chantal reminded herself of this going to the refectory (“off to the trough”); telling the cat “we’re having steak”.

8. His own classroom arguments and the replies (“the outside goods are for the sake of the inside”) #

His way of arguing to students who don’t yet know the soul: take the Greek division of goods into those of the soul, the body, the outside.

• The end is better than what is for the end; the chair and food are for the body, the book for the mind; so inside goods beat outside goods. Objection: carpentry or cooking, inside virtues, are for outside things — but the chair or dinner is in turn for the inside, so it still comes back to the inside; the tasty dinner is better than the art of cooking, and again for the inside.
• Man is better than the beast (admitted), so goods man has beyond the beast are better than shared ones; else the beast would be as good as we.
• God is better than man, and the goods of the soul are more like God’s; the soul is more like God than the body.
• Thomas can argue directly from matter being for form because the prima pars has treated the soul. Most people think reason is for the sake of the body, since most of life goes to necessities; the paradox of parents existing for children, who are yet being prepared for adulthood, which is better than childhood; candy was a great good when he was small but now sits lower on the scale. Replies:

1. As body is ordered to soul, exterior goods to the body; so bodily good is preferred to exterior goods (signified by “riches”), as the soul’s good to all bodily goods. Books are for the mind, not for building muscles carrying them; Emily Dickinson’s poem on the reader who “ate and drank the precious words” — reading is for the spirit.
2. “To be” taken simply, including every perfection, is preeminent to life and the rest: ipsum esse, God himself, “I am who I am” — this is how Dionysius speaks. But being as partaken in this or that creature is imperfect; so being with perfection added is more eminent, and Dionysius says the living are better than what merely exists, the understanding than the merely living.
3. Since the end corresponds to the beginning, the last end is the first beginning of being, holding all perfection; its likeness is desired by each according to its proportion — some as being only, some as living, some as living and understanding, and some as blessed, “and this is what few”.

9. Article 6, pleasure: objections and sed contra (“whether the beatitude of man consists in pleasure”) #

“This is what we all think.” Augustine, quoted earlier, calls beatitude gaudium, as if joy or pleasure.

1. The last end is desired for its own sake; this belongs most to pleasure, since it is ridiculous to ask why someone wants to be delighted. He grants “a lot of probability” here.
2. The first cause impresses itself more than the second (Book of Causes); the end’s influence is in desire; what most moves desire is pleasure — a sign: it absorbs will and reason so as to make one hold other goods in contempt.
3. What all desire is best; all desire pleasure, wise and foolish, even those lacking reason. Songs: “Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think” and its parody “Deny yourself, it’s later than you think”; carpe diem. Sed contra, Boethius III (Thomas “has Boethius on his mind”): sad are the outcomes of pleasures, as whoever recalls his lusts knows; if pleasures could make blessed, the beasts would be called blessed.

10. The response: essence vs. property (“other is what pertains to its essence”) #

Bodily pleasures are known to many and take the name of pleasures (Ethics VII) — most men think pleasure is bodily, though one can enjoy a theorem of Euclid or understanding what the soul is. There are other, more potent pleasures, but beatitude does not consist even in them, because essence differs from property:

• two vs. half of four: two is more “two” than half of four or a third of six, which are its proper accidents;
• man vs. capable of laughter: rational mortal animal is what he is, risibility a proper accident. Every pleasure is a proper accident following upon beatitude or some part of it: one is pleased at having a suitable good, in reality, in hope, or in memory (Aristotle). If the good is perfect it is beatitude; if imperfect, a partaking, near, remote, or apparent. So pleasure following the perfect good is not the nature of beatitude but a per se accidens — same meaning as proprium accidens, what Porphyry or Aristotle call a property. Bodily pleasure cannot follow the perfect good even this way, since it follows the good sense apprehends, sense being a power using the body; and the rational soul exceeds the proportion of bodily matter. How this is known: understanding the universal is not in the body (On the Soul III), for what is received in a body is individualized; his other way — reason understands the continuous in a non-continuous way (the definition of a triangle has no parts meeting at a common boundary), and that is not due to the object, so not due to a body. The same holds of willing. The part of the soul free of the body has a certain infinity against the powers concreted in the body (sensing, digesting, growing); sign: the universal is said of infinitely many, as understanding number understands infinitely many; form through matter is contracted, form free of matter in some way infinite — Aristotle: the soul is in a way all things. So sense knows the singular, understanding the universal containing infinite singulars; the good of the body is “something least, a trifle” against the good of the soul: Wisdom 7, all gold beside wisdom is a grain of sand; Thomas would have exchanged Paris for Chrysostom on John. So bodily pleasure is neither beatitude nor its property — “he’s really kind of polarizing everything”.
• Aside: the cat in the back of the car; “I love my cat”.

11. The replies: pleasure as rest in the good (“pleasure is nothing other than a certain resting”) #

1. It is the same reason that makes the good desired and pleasure desired, since pleasure is the resting of desire in the good: as in the old physics the same natural power bears the heavy down and rests it on the ground; the weight of the soul (Augustine). So pleasure, like the good, is sought for its own sake if one speaks of the final cause; Aristotle in the Ethics: pleasure perfects the perfect doing as beauty perfects youth — not what youth is, but something following on it. But as to the formal cause, or rather the motive, pleasure is desirable on account of the good, its object, which is its beginning and gives it form.
2. The vehemence of desire for sensible pleasure comes from the operations of the senses, beginnings of our knowledge, being more perceptible (as with “fruit” earlier); one grandchild: “it’s got to have sugar in it”.
3. All desire pleasure as they desire good, but by reason of the good, not the reverse; each pleasure follows some good, and one pleasure follows the per se greatest good — the Psalms speak of that. He stops here.

His words #

• beginning; his rendering throughout for principle [ed.: principium], as in “fourth sense of beginning”, “interior beginnings”, “first beginning of being”
• the fifth book of wisdom; where Aristotle takes up the senses of beginning [ed.: Metaphysics V]
• ut plurimum; for the most part
• fortuna; Latin for hap or luck; bona fortuna, goods of fortune
• eudaimonia vs. eutychia; happiness in the Ethics, good fortune in the Poetics
• salut / salvation of the body; the health or safety of the body [ed.: salus]
• census; from counting, hence wealth
• doings; his word for operations
• ipsum esse; being itself, God, “I am who I am”
• proprium per accidens / per se accidens / proprium accidens; a proper accident, what Porphyry calls a property
• gaudium; Augustine’s word for beatitude, joy
• reasonable mortal animal; the essence of man against “capable of laughter”
• rest of desire in the good; his gloss of pleasure

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 2, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 2, a. 5 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 2, a. 6 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy III (as quoted in the sed contra of aa. 4 and 6)
• Emily Dickinson, “He ate and drank the precious words” (lines quoted)

Mentioned

• Exodus 22; Ecclesiastes 5:12; Ecclesiasticus 30; Ecclesiasticus 15; Wisdom 7; Psalms
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (inferred; “fifth book of wisdom”), Ethics I, VII, X, Rhetoric (on fear), Poetics, On the Soul III
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (the argument that these goods are common to the bad); prima pars on the soul
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 5; Book of Causes; Augustine (gaudium; weight of the soul); Porphyry
• Chesterton on truth and fiction; Lord Acton; Hopkins’ poem on Jeremiah; Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet; the play Copenhagen; a modern book with a chapter “the Devils”; Chrysostom on John
• handouts “Causes of Love” p. 2 and “The First Definition of Reason” p. 86 — listed by the matching system as read; nothing in the transcript shows them being read.

His questions #

• Who wants power? Politicians.
• What good is that power, when you have all that fear of your associates? None worth having; Boethius’ sed contra.
• Can the ability to see be the end itself? No; it is for the sake of seeing, as power is a beginning, not an end.
• Why do bad men seem to be those who most get power? Left open; Jeremiah’s question, with Thomas’s remark that the devil loves power and not justice.
• Which is better, the art of cooking or the dinner? The tasty dinner, and it in turn is for the inside.
• Do most men think of pleasure as something bodily? Yes; bodily pleasure is more known, though one can enjoy a theorem.
• If I understand what a triangle is, am I understanding it in the body? No; the continuous is understood in a non-continuous way.
• Now, what about the fact that pleasure is desired for its own sake? It is, as the good is, since pleasure is the rest of desire in the good; but by reason of the good.