In our day, most studies of happiness rely on surveys: If most people say happiness is X, then the researchers conclude that happiness must be X. Apparently a great many people are convinced that X is pleasure. As a song by the rock band Jane’s Addiction proclaims, “Ain’t no wrong now, ain’t no right / Only pleasure and pain.” But the sentiment is not held only by rockers. With lancing sarcasm, one legal scholar has called these lines “the central lyric of twentieth-century American jurisprudence.” No doubt, even today most ordinary people would not go so far as to say that there “ain’t no right.” But is there anything more to good than pleasure, and is there anything more to right than trying to obtain it?

The term translated as “power,” potestate, can refer to all sorts of powers. However, the kind of power discussed in the present Article is not the power to build a house, to prove a theorem, to be aroused to anger, or to write a book, but the power to rule or direct others. Curiously, although people in our society readily admit to the desire to be “administrators,” join “management,” learn “leadership,” or enter “public service,” they rarely admit to a desire to rule or attain power.

In the previous Article, St. Thomas argued that the body is required for happiness, not in the sense that happiness originates in the body as its very essence, but in the sense that the body contributes to the well-being of the whole human person. The happiness of the redeemed soul does not increase in intensity after its reunion with the body; just by seeing God, it was already as happy as it is possible to be. However, its happiness increases in extent because now the body participates in it too, by “a kind of overflow.”

In Question 1, we established that man does have an ultimate purpose, and this is happiness. In Question 2, we found that it does not lie in any created thing, and in Question 3, we found that it lies in union with the Creator. Both Question 4 and Question 5 pursue what this union involves, but they pursue it in different senses. Here, in Question 4, we are looking into the conditions it requires – “If you do not have Q, you cannot possess that union with Him.” Later, in Question 5, we will look into other matters connected with its attainment.

The actual enjoyment of external and of bodily goods takes place in the soul. However, there are also goods intrinsic to the soul, such as virtue. Could supreme happiness or beatitude lie in one of those?

As the terms are used here, the sensitive powers – loosely, the senses – include not just the abilities to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, but all those capacities by which animals surpass plants. So to ask whether happiness is an activity of the sensitive powers is to ask whether it is an activity of those capacities, connected with the body, which we rational animals share with subrational animals, rather than of the intellectual powers that are ours alone.

Although St. Thomas always tries to meet his opponents at their highest point, it may at first seem that the Objections in this Article seem rather silly. I don’t think he would deny that. Thinking that a single person can have more than one independent ultimate goal is like thinking that one can have one’s cake and eat it: To make it appear plausible, one must descent to even sillier suppositions. Yet there is much more to St. Thomas’s analysis than saying “Don’t be silly,” for questions from people who “don’t get it” are often the most difficult and challenging to answer. One may have to go right down to the foundations of thought in order to identify the mistake.

Earlier we considered the fact that some people are offended by the Christian suggestion that God does not need us. But if He is complete in Himself, how could He? This does not mean that He has no love for us; it means that His love is greater still, because it is perfectly gratuitous. As from eternity, He does not love to get something; He only loves.

Up to this point in Question 2, we have been considering not only particular goods, such as wealth, honors, glory, power, and pleasure, but also entire categories of goods, such as external goods, goods of the body, and goods of the soul. Since these exhaust all possible created human goods, it would seem that no other candidates for happiness are left. Even though we have not considered each separate human good that is conceivable – for example, we have not considered friendship, beauty, meaningful work, knowledge of the created universe, or the overcoming of challenges – it seems that every human good we might propose falls into one of the three categories.

It is a curious thing: If one asks whether supreme happiness is possible, some people insist that it is not; yet if one asks whether supreme happiness is possible in the present life, some of the same people insist that it is. The only thing these two answers have in common is a resolution to deny that supreme happiness is possible in the next life: “Here, or nowhere!”

In Question 3, Article 8, St. Thomas argued that we need not comprehend God to be happy, and that, being finite, we cannot do so anyway. Yet the tradition seems, at least, to say that in some sense, happiness does require comprehending Him. What then is the truth of the matter? Plainly it needs to be unraveled.

The query is not whether man can do anything by his own power to make himself supremely happy, for we have already seen that he cannot. Nor are we asking whether man can do anything by his own power to deserve supreme happiness, as though he had a claim upon God as an equal, for only God can forgive His sins and infuse into him the divine charity that makes his little deeds meritorious. Only one point is at issue: Does God require man to conduct himself in a certain way to receive happiness at the Divine hands?

The philosopher David Benatar holds that life is so full of suffering that it is “better never to have been.” Probably not many agree, but a far greater number uphold a milder counsel of despair (if a counsel of despair can be said to be mild): That since supreme happiness is unattainable, the wise person takes what he can get and “settles.” In the present Article, St. Thomas challenges these views.

The suggestion that happiness is some kind of operation, or activity, may seem formidably abstract until we have considered just what kind of activity it may be – and this must wait until we read through the remaining six Articles of Question 3. For now, it may suffice to keep in mind Aristotle’s remark that both ordinary and educated people identify happiness with the activity of living well and doing well. At present St. Thomas simply wants to vindicate that claim; later on he will specify its meaning more fully.

Could it be that even though every person does love something to the furthest limit, he pursues not all things but only certain things for its sake?

Everything the Creator creates is created; the Creator Himself, however, is not created. He is not a contingent being, so that something else caused Him to exist; He is a necessarily existing being, the cause of all else that exists. So to ask whether our beatitude or supreme happiness is “something uncreated” amounts to asking whether our beatitude is something concerning God Himself.

After all that has been said already, it may seem obvious that the answer is “Yes.” In fact, it may at first seem that St. Thomas is merely repeating the question he asked in Question 2, Article 1! However, the question can be taken in two different ways. What St. Thomas demonstrates is that though in one sense the answer is “Yes,” in another sense it is “No.”

Wouldn’t all created things have the same ultimate aim? One might at first say “Yes,” just because they were all made by the same God. On the other hand, one might at first say “No,” on grounds that creatures without intellects have no aims. But as we saw previously, things do not have to know their purposes in order to have purposes; their purposes are built into their natures. Yet shouldn’t it make some difference that certain things have intellects and others do not? What is the solution?