Aquinas on Happiness

175 Pages·2017·0.96 MB·English

University of Colorado, Boulder
CU Scholar
Philosophy Graduate Theses & Dissertations Philosophy
Spring 1-1-2016
Aquinas on Happiness
Joseph Stenberg
University of Colorado at Boulder, [email protected]
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AQUINAS ON HAPPINESS
by
JOSEPH STENBERG
B.A., Colorado Christian University, 2006, 2007
M.A., University of Colorado Boulder, 2011

A dissertation submitted to the
Faculty of the Graduate School of the
University of Colorado in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy
2016
This thesis entitled:
Aquinas on Happiness
written by Joseph Lee Stenberg
has been approved for the Department of Philosophy

Robert Pasnau

Mitzi Lee

Dan Kaufman

Chris Heathwood

Christina Van Dyke

Date

The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we
find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards
of scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline.

ii
ABSTRACT

Stenberg, Joseph Lee (Ph.D., Department of Philosophy)
Aquinas on Happiness
Thesis directed by Professor Robert Pasnau.

This dissertation is a philosophical study of Thomas Aquinas’s theory of human happiness. I
aim to give a careful, charitable, analytical, systematic exposition of his theory of happiness. The
project is motivated both by the belief that Aquinas is a worthy interlocutor in thinking about
happiness and by the conviction that happiness plays a foundational role in Aquinas’s broader
ethical thought. The study takes as its point of departure a detailed summary of Aquinas’s Treatise
on Happiness in the Summa Theologiae. In addition to providing a comprehensive sketch of Aquinas’s
basic account of human happiness, that summary reveals a series of difficult interpretive questions,
the answers to which determine how we think about the most fundamental elements of Aquinas’s
theory. The questions it raises are: What is Aquinas’s method? According to Aquinas, what is perfect
or heavenly happiness fundamentally? What is imperfect or earthly happiness really? And what
fundamentally explains degrees of perfect and imperfect happiness? Only when we have answers to
all of those questions can we claim to have a systematic understanding of Aquinas’s views in this
domain. Answering each of these questions occupies a chapter of the dissertation. The first and last
of these questions have received little sustained attention from commentators, and so I break new
ground simply by attempting systematic, detailed answers to them. In the case of determining
Aquinas’s account of the deep natures of perfect and imperfect happiness, I argue for novel
interpretations of Aquinas’s views that, in my view, better capture the texts and are more interesting
philosophically. In doing so, I also offer reasons for rejecting dominant and long-standing
interpretations of Aquinas’s views on these matters. Taken together, my dissertation constitutes a
systematic rethinking of Aquinas’s theory of human happiness.

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DEDICATION

To the two men who have overseen my philosophical education:
Bob Pasnau and St. Thomas Aquinas.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My debts are many and great. I thank Bob Pasnau for his tireless work on my behalf, for his critical
feedback, and for his ongoing support. The present study would be far worse without his efforts
and, more fundamentally, I would not be the philosopher that I am without his guidance these last
seven years.
I also want to thank Mitzi Lee, Dan Kaufman, Christina Van Dyke, and Chris Heathwood
for serving on the dissertation committee. They have all played an important role in shaping me and
my views.
At a variety of conferences and meetings, I have benefitted from the feedback of excellent
scholars – too many to name them all. But I extend my thanks to those who attended my talks on
this and related material at The Fifth International Congress on the Virtuous Life at Tilburg
University; the Medieval Philosophy in the United Kingdom Meeting; the Toronto Colloquium in
Medieval Philosophy (especially, Peter King and Martin Pickavé); the St. Thomas Summer Seminar
in Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology; The Dutch Seminar in Medieval Philosophy
at the University of Groningen; the University of Wyoming; the Université Paris-Sorbonne
(especially, Pasquale Porro); and the University of Uppsala (especially, Alexander Stöpfgeshoff).
This work was also made possible by generous financial support. I would like to thank the
Embassy of France in the United States for awarding me the Chateaubriand Fellowship in the
Humanities, which allowed me to conduct research in Paris. I would also like to thank the University
of Colorado at Boulder for granting me three semesters of dissertation fellowship, and especially for
the Thomas Edwin Devaney Dissertation Fellowship, which allowed me to spend the year focusing
entirely on my dissertation.
I thank my parents, Don and Sue Stenberg and Frank and Beth Keller, for all that they have
done. Some debts can’t be repaid.
There are two final individuals that I would like to thank. First, I would like to thank Dan
Lowe. Your friendship was the greatest gift that graduate school afforded. Second, and most
importantly, I would like to thank Katie Keller. You have made my life incalculably richer. Though
true, this work wouldn’t be possible without you is too faint of praise. The world would be immeasurably
poorer without you, amadita.

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ABBREVIATIONS FOR AQUINAS’S WORKS

Latin title Abbreviation
Scriptum Super Libros Sententiarum Super Sent.
Summa Contra Gentiles SCG
Summa Theologiae. ST

Prima Pars ST Ia
Prima Secundae ST IaIIae
Secunda Secundae ST IIaIIae
Tertia Pars ST IIIa
Responsio ad Magistrum Ioannem de Vercellis de 108 Articulis. De 108 articulis
Expositio libri Posteriorum. In Post. Anal.
Sententia Libri Ethicorum SLE
In Symbolum Apostolorum ISA
Quaestiones Disputatae De Veritate QDV
Quaestiones Disputatae De Malo QDM
De Regno ad Regem Cypri De Regno

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER

INTRODUCTION: AQUINAS ON HAPPINESS ...................................... 1

I. CONFRONTING AQUINAS ON HAPPINESS ...................................... 18

II. HAPPINESS IDEALIZED: ON AQUINAS’S METHOD ...................... 43

III. AQUINAS ON THE ESSENCE OF PERFECT HAPPINESS .............. 63

IV. AQUINAS ON IMPERFECT HAPPINESS ............................................... 97

V. FROM HAPPY TO HAPPIER: AQUINAS ON WHO IS HAPPIER
THAN WHOM AND WHY ......................................................................... 130

CONCLUSION ................................................................................................ 152

BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................. 157

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INTRODUCTION
Aquinas on Happiness

§1: The aim of the study
This dissertation is a philosophical study of Thomas Aquinas’s theory of human happiness. I
aim to give a careful, charitable, analytical, systematic exposition of his theory of happiness. As I
show over the course of the study, I think that this sort of exposition will lead us to rethink
Aquinas’s theory of happiness in a number of fundamental respects. Furthermore, it seems to me
that, once properly understood, Aquinas’s theory provides an interesting and, in many ways,
distinctive alternative theory of happiness to those on offer today.

§2: The pursuit of happiness
As a general matter, examining the nature of happiness certainly seems worthwhile. After all,
we want to be happy. We want those we care about to be happy. The desire for and pursuit of
happiness is entirely unsurprising. We want good lives and lives that are good for us. We want our
lives to go well and we want to make the lives of our family members, friends, and others for whom
we care better. Happiness matters to us.
The practical pursuit of happiness for ourselves and others leads many of us to a related
theoretical pursuit: we want to know about happiness and how to get it. We want to know the target
at which we should aim, if we are to live happy lives. Interest in these matters is so great that we
have started conducting studies to try to figure out who is happy and, hopefully, why. We are told
that the Pennsylvania Amish tend to be as happy as those on Forbes’s list of wealthiest Americans,
and that the Maasai (a tribe of East African herders) tend to be happier than college students from a
1
collection of 47 nations.1 We are told that Denmark is the happiest nation, Costa Rica the 6th
happiest, and the United States the 14th happiest.2 And we’re left to debate and try to tease out why
these things are so.
So what is happiness? One might think that, if we can measure it well enough to make these
judgments, then of course we know what it is. That thought, however, is mistaken. The question
what is happiness is far from settled. The surveys used to collect most “happiness” data either try to
measure life satisfaction or various elements of felt experience, such as pleasure. Much of the appeal
of life satisfaction and felt experience as measures of happiness is clear. First, both seem connected
to our ordinary conception of happiness, since it seems obvious that a thoroughly dissatisfied person
or a person whose life is enveloped by debilitating pain isn’t happy. And, second, it seems plausible
that we can measure both through questionnaires. However, even the choice to think of happiness
as having to do with satisfaction rather than felt experiences, or vice versa, is an important one. Not
only does this choice affect one’s theory about what happiness ultimately is, but it also affects one’s
results on the ground. For example, although the United States is ranked as the 14th happiest nation
on a satisfaction metric, it falls to 57th when assessed on a felt experience metric.3 So the debate over
what happiness is remains a pursuit with both theoretical and practical import.
And, make no mistake: this debate about theories of happiness has very real implications for
the practical pursuit of happiness in our own lives and in the lives of those for whom we are
concerned. At the political level, the level at which our concern is for all citizens, the wide gap
between how the United States performs on one metric as opposed to the other suggests that, if we
take the happiness of the citizenry as an important goal in decision-making, we have a vital choice to

1 W. Tov and E. Diener, “Culture and Subjective Well-being,” in S. Kitayama and D. Cohen (eds.), Handbook of Cultural
Psychology (Guilford Press, 2007), pp. 691-713.
2 Gallup Global Well-being: The Behavioral Economics of GDP Growth (2010). <http://www.gallup.com/poll/126965/gallup-
global-well-being.aspx>.
3 W. Tov and E. Diener, “Culture and Subjective Well-being.”
2