What if St. Thomas Aquinas Wrote a Self-Help Book?

Six weeks ago, Fr. Gregory Pine asked if I would be interested in reviewing his new book, Prudence: Choose Confidently, Live Boldly. I expressed some interest, and asked for details, and then sort of let the trail go cold. I was just finishing up a writing project, and then launched into a second one (a book I’m working on about the Eucharist – more on that at a later date!). He was good about following up, and then following up again as needed. The truth was, a book on prudence sounded both (a) good and (b) perhaps too niche to be of much interest to people who weren’t me, and (c) after all, I was busy! So then I finally open the book, and find that it’s … got something to say to people who live like that

Instead of seeking to be truly happy and arranging our lives accordingly, many of us have chosen to be busy. It’s become the default response in any conversation: “How are you?” “Busy!” “So busy!” “Crazy busy!” But, upon hearing this response for the umpteenth time in a day, the question that naturally arises is “Why?” (p. 7)

While granting that there are “some legitimately and inescapably busy people in the world,” Pine suggests that for many of us, busyness is a choice, rooted in a deeper anxiety: that we “take on so much because we feel like we need to in order to justify our existence. Here we are, feeling a bit unfulfilled and lost. We had hoped that life would amount to more, but it hasn’t. With this recognition comes a sadness. It’s not so much depression as a kind of existential ache” (8).

The lie that we tell ourselves, Pine explains, is that “real life is elsewhere.”  We defer being happy and satisfied now, thinking of that as something that’ll come sometime in the indefinite future. Paradoxically, the busier we make ourselves, the less free were are (trapped in our own commitments, quietly hoping our plans will get cancelled) and become “mere observers” rather than “real protagonists in the drama of our existence” (9).This brings us to the heart of the problem: that too many of us are living lives without meaning. That’s not to say that our lives don’t have value. It’s that so often, it’s difficult to say why we’re spending our time doing the things we are, when they’re not enriching or satisfying. We know what we do, but not why, and so the what seems pointless. But God wants to speak into this meaninglessness and futility: “why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Hearken diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in fatness” (Isa. 55:2). In other words, the point of Christianity isn’t just one more happiness-delaying scheme, in which we need to be busy now for Lord in order to some day be happy in Heaven. To be sure, the harvest is rich and the laborers are few, and we’re promised eternal happiness after we die. But we’re also called to happiness in this life.

Many Christians are resistant to this claim: I think it sounds too much like secular self-help gurus, or the “prosperity gospel” in which we’re assured health and wealth if we just trust in Jesus (or Joel Osteen). But the fact is, God really wants our happiness, and this is a core theme of the Good News of the Gospel. Pine rightly distinguishes between two types of happiness:

Psychologists sometimes distinguish pleasure-happiness (hedonic happiness) and meaning-happiness (eudaimonic happiness). The former they associate with the positive emotion of meeting needs and desires: for example, the delight you get from a good meal or a good workout. The latter they associate with long-term goals and the embrace of difficulty, like the joy you get from fasting for a specific intention or serving the homeless at a soup kitchen. (p. 14).

Perhaps ironically, “long-lasting pleasure-happiness is inextricably bound up with meaning-happiness. A man who pursues mere pleasure, without taking account of meaning, ends up limiting the scope and enjoyment of his pleasure” (p. 15). The person who lives for pleasure doesn’t just have less happiness than the person whose life has deeper meaning…. the pleasure-seeker even has less pleasure. G.K. Chesterton once observed that the “poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.” It’s a jovial reminder that being rooted in heaven doesn’t mean disdaining the earth. The person whose life is grounded in meaning, and particularly in God, is more capable of enjoying the earthly joys of cheese, or a sunset, or the birth of a child.

If God wants our happiness, and lasting happiness is impossible without meaning, where do we find meaning? Of course in Him. But things aren’t quite as simple as “love God and you’ll be happy.”  Throughout every day of our lives, we are presented with choices, large and small. How do I know which of these will make me truly happy, here and hereafter? If both God and I want me to be happy, why is it so hard sometimes? What’s the role of grace in all of this (or, for that matter, the role of the Fall)? And what’s the role of suffering – when does meaning-happiness require forgoing pleasure-happiness, or even suffering pain? This is where the need for virtue, and particularly the virtue of prudence, arises.

Now, I’m only scratching the surface (both of the idea and of Pine’s book), but I want to focus on this part for a reason. When reading Aristotle (particularly the Ethics) one of the things that’s striking is that he’s obsessed with the question of how we can be happy. The same is no less true of St. Thomas Aquinas, who draws upon both Scripture and thinkers like Aristotle to answer that question. Yet our modern unhappy age is convinced that these thinkers are obscure and technical and have nothing to offer us. Some of that problem is stylistic – modern readers understandably struggle with reading ancient and medieval authors, even good ones. So Pine has taken this Aristotelian/Thomistic framework and presented it in a way that I suspect (and hope) will resonate with modern seekers.

If that sounds like something you or a loved one might benefit from, I’d encourage you to check the book out. But I get it: you’re pretty busy, right?