Foreword: Happiness

Read pages 13-16 of Our Goal and Our Guides. This is an introduction to the Quest for Happiness series which was written in the 1950's for Catholic high schoolers. The foreword tells a little about the plan of the series. It asks you to study the chart that lays out the plan for the series, but we can do that part later. It also discusses a bit what is meant by "happiness". Here's the outline of that part:

1. Man's Desire for Happiness
2. Only God Can Make Us Happy
3. Perfect Happiness Must Wait for Heaven
4. The Secret of Happiness
5. Lawful Enjoyment of Created Things

Man's Desire for Happiness

In the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas says that everyone desires happiness whether it looks like it or not. You see people making themselves unhappy all the time, but that's not because they want to be unhappy, but because they're choosing the wrong paths to true happiness.

Happiness, Aquinas says,

consists in the perfect good

Aristotle says the good is

...what all things aim at.

Aquinas says that therefore we can arrive at a specific idea of what happiness is, even if some humans don't happen to know what it is.

And thus all do not know Happiness; because they know not in what thing the general notion of happiness is found. And consequently, in this respect, not all desire it.

The book asks what you would answer to someone who asked "What do you want most in life?" People through history have answered this in different ways. In some ways, CS Lewis says, this is what history is -- the story of people trying to achieve happiness through different ways:

"All that we call human history--money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery--[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."

St Augustine, who is quoted in the foreword, spent his younger days as a sinner trying to find happiness in things other than God. He returned to God in his adult life. In his Confessions he wrote:

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

A 19th century poem that seems to illustrate the point about the way humans need more than material things to be happy:

Richard Corey

WHENEVER Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king,
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

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