59. Why power can’t make you happy
59. WHY POWER CAN’T MAKE YOU HAPPY
Power obviously makes you more like “Almighty God.” So why doesn’t it make us happy?
It would seem that happiness consists in power. For all things desire to become like to God . . . (and) men who are in power seem . . . to be most like to God. . . .
(But) God’s power is (identical with, one with, inseparable from) His goodness; hence He cannot use His power otherwise than well. But it is not so with men. Consequently it is not enough for man’s happiness that he become like God in power, unless he become like Him in goodness also.
It is impossible for happiness to consist in power, and this for two reasons. First because power has the nature of principle (beginning) . . . while happiness has the nature of last end. Secondly because power has relation to (is open to both) good and evil, whereas happiness is man’s proper and perfect good (I-II,2,4).
Power, St. Thomas reminds us, is a means, not an end. It is something we begin with, something we use, something that is potential to its good use (e.g., nuclear power, or a sharp mind). But happiness is our end, our goal, our attainment, our actuality, not just our potentiality. That is his first argument against power as what happiness consists in.
And his second argument is that happiness is our supreme good, and therefore it excludes all evil. But power does not exclude all evil: it can exist in evil men, and often does.
We think too highly of power. “Almighty God”—it’s almost His middle name for us. It’s the first thing we think of when we say “God”. We use “Good God” not as His middle name but as a swear word!
But nowhere in His revelation does it say “God is power.” It does, however, say that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8).
Love is not power. Power struggles ruin love, or show that love is already ruined. Love does not seek power, nor does it seek the freedom that consists in power. (There is also another, higher freedom than that.) Lovers don’t want to be free; they want to be bound to their beloved. They never talk about freedom. Why? Because they are already free, in a much higher sense. They are free because love is the truth of our being, love is our true destiny, and “the truth will set you free” (Jn 8:32).
Truth became incarnate. Right after saying “the truth will set you free”, Christ says, “So if the Son makes you free, you are free indeed” (Jn 8:36). The Son of God is truth (Jn 14:6), for He is the Logos (Jn 9, 14), the very Mind of God. If you have Him—if He has you—you are free indeed.
That is why the martyrs laugh and sing and joke and forgive as they die. They have found the higher freedom, they are free—not from their bodies or from pain or from death, but from sin, from selfishness, from lovelessness, which is the ultimate slave-driver. They are not happy because they are suffering the loss of their lower freedom, their natural human powers, but despite that. They are not masochists, they are lovers. They are happy because they have attained their higher freedom and are free even from their need for the lower freedom now.
Most of us would not be so stupid as to say that happiness consists in power. But many of us would say that it consists in freedom, and what most of us mean by “freedom” is usually only power. You might think that you’re not free if you are in jail, or chained, or paralyzed, or enslaved. But you would be wrong if you think that, for “stone walls do not a prison make / Nor iron bars a cage.”
If freedom is only power, and if “all power tends to corrupt”, then so does freedom. There’s something wrong with that, something missing there, some other kind of freedom that’s being forgotten when freedom is confused with power. For Christ came to set us free, and He did not say that power will make you free, but that truth will. Obviously, He has a different concept of freedom.
Ghandi understood that concept of freedom. He wrote: “God is not in strength but in truth.”