Why We Are Restless

Great interview by Hope Leman of Ben and Jenna Storey on their new book in my series at Princeton University Press--New Forum Books--"Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment."https://t.co/VDecqjAdu4

— Robert P. George (@McCormickProf) July 2, 2021

Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P. on the Human Good

Fr. White's recent lecture for the Thomistic Institute at UT Austin titled "Aquinas on the Final Purpose of Human Existence and Human Prudence" is now available on our podcast.

Spotify—https://t.co/Xk7AuDGPvM

— Thomistic Institute (@ThomisticInst) February 13, 2021

Philip Brickman and the Pursuit of Happiness

I have wanted to tell this story for 14 years. Today, I finally did. https://t.co/nAomzzXGY0

— Jennifer Senior (@JenSeniorNY) November 24, 2020

2020 St. Thomas Aquinas Lecture at Villanova University

Mary Hirschfeld, PhD, an associate professor of economics and theology at Villanova, presents the Office for Mission and Ministry's annual St. Thomas Aquinas Lecture, titled St. Thomas’s Views on the Economy and Human Happiness.

What Is the End of Political Life?

CWR: Thomism and Political Liberalism, Part 3 by Joseph G. Trabbic
St. Thomas says that “the whole of political life seems to be ordered to contemplative happiness.” What would a life ordered to divine contemplation look like? And how would politics support it?

A take on this comment.

Is Thomism too rationalist in its conception of eudaimonia? More and more I think that it is unsatisfying, as it is usually presented, and perhaps Pinckaers' modification may not be sufficient. A political life should have sufficient members and organized in such a way that it makes a local ecclesia possible, including the selection of men to become presbyters/episkopos to minister the Holy Mysteries. Through the Holy Mysteries and the Christian life is the ultimate end attained, the encounter of God and man in love, and this Christian life includes prayer and "contemplation." While the
he political community is ordered to human happiness, which according to Christianity is supernatural, a Divine gift of friendship with God, its immediate end is political friendship, and it is on this point primarily that liberalism, which serves the state and statism, differs from Aristotelianism and arguably Thomistic political theology. It is also a first principles that is obscured in Roman Catholic social teaching, written mostly or wholly by men who have no experience living in an authentic political community. It is because of this that RC social doctrine is easily exploited to serve the purposes of the state, and I expect more to be written about obedience to the secular authority in the future.

Prof. Candace Vogler, "Ultimate Fulfillment & Human Perfection"

Part 2 of Trabbic's Series

CWR: Thomism and Political Liberalism, Part 2

The Natural Law

So, the natures of things determine what’s good and bad for them, what they should pursue and avoid and, again, that is true for us too. Our nature, in this sense, is the “law” that we should live by. When Thomas talks about the “law of nature” (lex naturalis) or “natural law” this is partly what he has in mind. In part our nature is this law, but our reason, insofar as it grasps what is naturally good for us, and directs us to pursue it, belongs to natural law too.

Thomas’s account of natural law, however, does not stop there. For Thomas, our nature and our reason are created by God. Hence, he teaches that the natural law ultimately comes from God. By following the natural law – which is nothing more than living in conformity with our nature – we are following God’s will. When we act against it, we are acting against God. Thomas calls the “plan” for creation as it exists in God’s “mind” the “eternal law.” This plan not only includes our nature and purpose but the nature and purpose of everything else too. To say that the natural law comes from God is the same as saying that it is derived from the eternal law. What Thomas calls the “divine law” (lex divina) is likewise derived from the eternal law. I will come back to that in a moment.

And then something on happiness...

The “knowing” of God that we are talking about in both the natural and supernatural cases is an act of contemplatio or “contemplation.” For Thomists, Jordan Aumann explains, contemplation is “a type of knowledge accompanied by delight and a certain degree of reason’s wonder before the object contemplated.”⁴ Contemplation can be pretty pedestrian, as when I appreciate the dark gold color of the scotch in my glass, or more exalted, as when I marvel at the starry sky. But the beauty of creation can and should be a ladder we ascend to the divine.

Our lives as human persons and as Christians should have divine contemplation at their center. This is what we are ultimately ordered to by nature and by grace. That doesn’t mean that we should all pack up and move to a monastery. Most basically in means a way of life faithful Catholics already live: one of regular prayer and participation in the Church’s liturgy marked in general by an appreciative and celebratory attitude toward reality, including the reality of other people.⁵ As Thomas uses the term, vita contemplativa or “contemplative life” does not necessarily refer to the life of cloistered religious. As Aumann points out, it is something that we all practice – laypeople, religious, and priests – inasmuch as we engage in contemplative acts.⁶

The Meaning of Life

Happiness and Religion

John Haldane, "Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life"

Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life: A Collaboration

University of Chicago: June 2016 Summer Seminar "Virtue and Happiness"

Two from TAC

News

Dr. John Goyette: Aquinas on Law, Happiness & the Political Common Good
Address at the Seventh Annual Conference on the Social Doctrine of the Church, June 20, 2015

Dr. Gregory L. Froelich: Self-Love and Friendship
Talk from the 2015 West Coast Meeting of the Society for Aristotelian-Thomistic Studies

A short profile on Michael Augros and an interview with him.

Better than the Cartesian Cogito

Post by Orthodoxy and the World.

Dan Gilbert on Happiness

Post by TED.

Next Friday at the DSPT

DSPT Events

Dumb Ox Theology Forum: Fr. Thomas Joseph White, OP - Aquinas on Imperfect Happiness: Nature, Grace and the Final End of Man

Friday, April 11, 2014 DSPT Dumb Ox

Both Karl Barth and Henri De Lubac provided powerful, compelling visions of the relationship between the grace of God and human nature. However, their visions are in many respects opposed and incompatible. In his reading of Aristotle, Aquinas focuses on the imperfection of all natural human happiness, and on the natural desire for God. How does his vision provide a potential bridge between the diverse theologies of Barth and De Lubac?

Dumb Ox Theological Forum


Man, missed this - don't recall seeing it on my FB feed:

November 12, 2013 - Dr. Donald S. Prudlo jsu.edu , Associate Professor of Ancient and Medieval History, Jacksonville State University - Canonization and Infallibility: An Historical, Canonical, and Theological Investigation

Ever since the definition of Papal Infallibility at the First Vatican Council, there has been a lively debate in the Church about its meaning. This talk will address the roots of that doctrine in the middle ages, and in particular trace its development in the practice of the canonization of saints.
DSPT Dumb Ox Theology Forum - Canonization and Infallibility: An Historical, Canonical, and Theological Investigation Papal canonization did not really begin to take off until the 12th century. The challenge quickly became how to understand it apart from local and episcopal canonizations. At the same time various groups of heretics were beginning to challenge the doctrine of the Communion of saints, as well as the cultic practices of Christianity surrounding the tombs of its holy ones. In the 13th century the papacy and the new Mendicant orders established a symbiotic relationship that saw the elevation of Franciscan and Dominican saints. Some of these had been intimately involved in the suppression of heresy. Criticism of the cult of saints moved from the general to the particular, as individual saints came under attack. This forced the papacy and the Mendicant theologians to examine more closely the doctrine of papal canonization. By the end of
the thirteenth century, the difference had been established: papal canonizations enjoyed infallibility.
Canonization lies at the root of the personal infallibility dogma, and this will be the subject of the lecture.

OP East: A Guide to Happiness: Audio Recording

Thinking a question through to a tentative answer... who doesn't enjoy doing that? There are days when I miss "doing philosophy."

MoJ: "Pragmatic Eudaimonism"

Does God Want Us to Be Happy? by Protopresbyter Thomas Hopko

How does he define happiness or happy? A definition is not offered at the beginning of the interview, but we do find a hint later:

Helen: So, the main confusion is that people look at their problems from a secular attitude, saying to themselves, “My life should be happy here on earth” rather than looking toward the life after this one. Is that so? 

Fr. Thomas: Yes. I would also say that not only do people look at life secularly – which I guess would mean with no relationship whatsoever to God – but I think it’s also true to say, especially nowadays, that many people look at the world in a falsely religious way. Not necessarily just secularly. People think that God exists to make our earthly life “happy,” to take away all suffering and pain, to do whatever we want Him to do, that all we have to do is “name it and claim it” and God will give it to us, no matter what it is — health, a good job, a good sex life or, for example, how the human genome project is described. I read it recently on the front page of the New York Times. The director of the project said: “Our purpose is very clear: it is to live a longer, happier, more pain-free, healthier human life before we inevitably die.” Well, many people think that’s a good program. Many religious people think that’s what God is trying to do, too — to make us live a longer, happier, healthier, better, and easier life…

The accumulation of various goods, but not the eudaimonia of Aristotle or Aquinas.

The full interview.

Related:
Something on those happiness studies. [Subjective] satisfaction vs. fulfillment based on objective meaning?

Zenit: On the Law of God
"It leads man out of the slavery of egoism and brings him into the 'land' of true freedom and life"

In the Liturgy of the Word this Sunday the theme of God’s Law, of his commandment emerges. This is an essential element both in the Jewish and Christian religions. In the latter the Law of God finds its complete fulfillment in love (cf. Romans 13:10). God’s Law is his Word that guides man on his life’s journey, it leads him out of the slavery of egoism and brings him into the “land” of true freedom and life. For this reason in the Bible the Law is not seen as a burden, an oppressive limitation, but as a precious gift of the Lord, the witness of his paternal love, of his will to be near his people, of being their ally and writing a history of love with them.