From Ellen T. Charry, God and the Art of Happiness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010)
“Happiness is knowing, loving, and enjoying God
securely. For that, one must seek and find God, and this seeking proceeds by
cultivating wisdom. It is the highest end of human life. Wisdom requires virtue
but is not itself virtue, for wisdom resides in God revealed in Christ.”
“This very early work [De Beata Vita] has
accomplished the following: all people want to be happy, and God has made this
possible; humans are defined as both body and soul, implying (against the
Stoics and Plotinus) that the well-being of the body is important. Further,
human life is purposeful: to become wise and filled by enjoying God as much as
possible in this life is to achieve our purpose, knowing that here we will
never be completely safe from suffering and distress. Only those who know or
have God to the fullest experience this spiritual joy. Yet, as well as we may
know, love, and enjoy God in this life, happiness will never be complete until fulfilled
in the eschaton. While being filled
with the wisdom of God surfaces here early on as central to Augustine’s
teaching on happiness, it will eventually be eclipsed by love.”
“Happiness characterizes God-lovers, and loving
well is the key to happiness…We flourish when we enjoy our chief good, the end
for which we are made – enjoyment of God.”
“Happiness is high-quality loving by means of
which one extracts the best that life has to offer…To be good is to love in a
manner consistent with one’s God-given nature. Living wisely is living
virtuously – that is, in obedience to the self God created us to be.”
From a summary of Sermon 368 (“Whoever loves
his soul will lose it”): “What does this mean? Some loves are harmful while
others are helpful; when we pursue helpful ones and let them push out harmful
ones, better self-love will prevail. Therefore, one way to grasp the healing of
the soul is to see it as learning to love oneself well. This is not in any way individualistic,
antisocial, or prideful, because, for Augustine, self-love exists always in the
context of comprehensive Christian identity – in relationship with God and
others.”
“[The] instability of love is the greatest
impediment to the training of love unto salvation. Vanity and greed are distorted
forms of love that create psychological and spiritual dysfunction. Augustine
realizes that the specific form this dysfunction takes depends on individual
differences, but the conflicted self is a universal human experience essential
to Augustine’s theological psychology. Finally, he argues, divine grace is the
only way that the divided soul can truly be healed. However, our ultimate
reliance on God for this healing does not absolve us of the responsibility to
be guided and to guide others in loving as best we can here and now.”
“People say they want to be happy; they say
that they want the truth and do not want to be deceived by falsehood. But they
are unwilling to be convicted by the truth when it criticizes their distorted
love…people love truth only when it confirms and supports them.” Augustine “understands
the power of defense mechanisms that entrench us in patterns of thought and behavior
and that resist insight and change.”
“The journey into God is a healing journey into
one’s soul, for each step deeper into God heals and strengthens love. In this
journey, love of material goods loses its power as the soul is perfected in the
love of God which is perfect self-love.” (Cf. O’Donovan on self-love in
Augustine)
“Augustine concludes that only those who have
everything they want – and want nothing wrongly – can be happy…The best thing
to want in this life is a will to love well and desire good things in proportion
to their goodness, the getting of which will make the seeker happy as possible
for as long as possible. A good will that aspires to God can bring a person
near to complete happiness, but Augustine holds tenaciously to the view that
life is so challenging that true happiness eludes us. Temporal happiness, then,
is wanting and having what is good – righteous love of self, neighbor, material
things, and al these in God – in proportion to their goodness. This requires spiritual
training.”
“The implicit teaching on happiness in The Trinity is soteriological. Salvation
is the healing of the soul through the slow and painful recovery of the
shattered and lost image of God that we are intrinsically by the grace of
creation.” “Augustine’s therapeutic soteriology is the primary
handhold for the current effort to reclaim a Christian doctrine of happiness.”
Augustine’s “doctrine of happiness remains
hopeful that we can have and enjoy what we seek and be healed by that
enjoyment. It is cautious in that it discourages high expectations of
persistent flourishing as life proceeds. Perhaps the most distinctive feature
of Augustine’s doctrine of happiness is that it heals the soul. It is a
christologically grounded eschatological theory of happiness that is salvific.
To be healed is to be happy. If we cannot be happy in this life, it is because
we cannot be fully healed here – not that
we cannot be healed here at all. The soul’s rest in God is its healing…happiness
is not just that we enjoy seeking God but that his goodness, wisdom, and beauty
actually do heal us to the extent that we know, love, and enjoy him.”
