98. Love and pleasure
98. LOVE AND PLEASURE
Does the loving itself bring pleasure? Is the desire itself its own satisfaction? Or does the pleasure come only when the desire is attained or the love is reciprocated?
. . . the greater the desire for the thing loved, the greater the pleasure when it is attained; indeed, the very increase of desire brings with it an increase of pleasure, according as it gives rise to the hope of obtaining that which is loved, since . . . desire resulting from hope is a cause of pleasure. Now wonder is a kind of desire for knowledge, a desire which comes to a man when he sees an effect of which the cause either is unknown to him or surpasses his knowledge or faculty of understanding. Consequently wonder is a cause of pleasure, in so far as it includes a hope of getting the knowledge which one desires to have. For this reason whatever is wonderful is pleasing (I-II,32,8).
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst (i.e., those who desire, hope, and wonder) after righteousness, for they shall be filled” (Mt. 5:6)—with pleasure as well as with righteousness. The more we thirst for God and the righteousness that God is, the more pleasure we will be able to experience in Heaven when we attain this righteousness. The degree of Heavenly joy that you will be able to contain will be determined by the intensity and idealism, the aspiration and ambition, of your earthly desire for God, your love for God, and for that which God is (righteousness, holiness, love, peace, truth).
This includes your intellect’s desire, your wonder, your holy curiosity, your desire to know Who God is. This is an intellectual desire, but it is not merely a desire for correct concepts but for living presence; not merely a knowledge about God but a knowledge of God, as you know your friend or your spouse. It is a desire for kennen, not wissen, for connaitre, not savoir, for a “knowledge” that is more like sex than like scholarship. Indeed, sex is a pale image of it. The Biblical word for sex is “knowledge” (Gen 4:1). That is not a euphemism or a metaphor.
All who seek, find. Those who seek more, find more. Those who seek less, find less. God satisfies all our desires in Heaven, but if the desire is not there, He cannot fulfill it.
He fills to the brim with His joy, with Himself, whatever receptive places we make in our hearts and lives. That is the ultimate reason why the relationship between virtue and pleasure is an intrinsic necessity. Aristotle knew the proximate, human, psychological reason for that, but not the ultimate, theological reason. But he knew a lot. He knew that the relation between virtue and pleasure was like the relationship between how hungry you are and how much you enjoy your dinner; that happiness is not an extrinsic reward, like a promised payment for a service. It is a necessary causal relationship: the amount of water that can fit into a canyon depends on how deep the canyon is. Rewards are not given by God, in Heaven or on earth, as compensation for lack of pleasure earlier. The reward of happiness is in the very act of virtue, like the joy of surfing (not having surfed) a good wave. The reward is the very state itself of the soul (joy) that is caused by zeal in loving God and neighbor.
When you sculpt out a deep God-shaped canyon in your soul by your intense desire (love) to know Him, God will fill it to the brim with what you sought—Himself—and this will bring brimful joy. If you sculpt out only a shallow canyon, He will be able to fill only that—not because of any lack of active power in Him but because of a lack of receptive “weakness” or emptiness in you.
And therefore the purpose of life on earth is to sculpt and dig deeper canyons of desire in our souls for Him to fill. Augustine prays: “Narrow is my heart; enlarge it, that You may fill it.” Our hearts are not restless enough; we are too easily contented. That is why the saints counsel us against loving the world too much: not because worldly pleasures are evil but because they are so small, and Heavenly pleasures are so great. The saints are the true hedonists. If you doubt this, visit Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity: they are the happiest people you will ever meet on this earth.