60. Why a perfect body in perfect health can’t make you happy
60. WHY A PERFECT BODY IN PERFECT HEALTH CAN’T MAKE YOU HAPPY
“If you have your health, you have everything.” Isn’t that true? What else do we need?
Bodily health is internal, unlike money, things, honor, fame, glory, or power. So it’s closer to true happiness than any of those things. What’s still missing?
Man surpasses all other animals in regard to happiness. But in bodily goods he is surpassed by many animals: for instance, by the elephant in longevity, by the lion in strength, by the stag in fleetness. Therefore man’s happiness does not consist in goods of the body.
. . . all goods of the body are ordained to the goods of the soul as to their end. . . . Just as the body is ordained to the soul as its end, so are external goods ordained to the body itself. And therefore it is with reason that the good of the body is preferred to external goods. . . (I-II,2,5).
Who is it who typically says “If you have your health you have everything?” Only old people, not young people. Only those who have lost their health, not those who have it. Those who have it know by experience that it is not “everything”, for even if they have perfect health, they do not have perfect happiness.
Why? For an embarrassingly obvious reason: because we are not mere animals. A trip to the zoo refutes this candidate for happiness. Look at the logic of St. Thomas’ simple syllogism in his first paragraph.
No animal can be as happy (or unhappy) as man. But animals can excel men in any bodily good. Therefore man’s happiness cannot consist in bodily goods.
Then look at the reason for it in his second paragraph. The body is indeed important—because it is the matter for the soul, the means for the soul. You do not “have” a soul in the same sense as you “have” a body; you are a soul. And even though you are a body too (it is not just something you have as you have clothing), yet you “are” not a body in the same sense as you “are” a soul. Your soul is like your meaning and your body is like your words. Your soul is like the music and your body is like the notes. Your body is your outside and your soul is your inside. And that is why health cannot be the whole of happiness. In fact, health is an inadequate answer for the very same reason why it is a more adequate answer than any of the external goods, or “goods of fortune”: it is not internal enough. Soul-health is a better answer than body-health because it is more internal.
We reverse the order of reality when we use our mind only to serve our body and when we use our body only to get external things. We harmonize with the order of reality only when we use our body to serve our soul and when we use the things of the world to serve our body. Things are to be used as means, and people (including ourselves) are to be loved as ends, not vice versa. Our bodies are halfway in between: bodies are parts of our personhood and also parts of the material world. They are both subjects and objects.
Thus there are three degrees of interiority, or internality, or I-ness: (1) my stuff, (2) my body, and (3) my soul; (1) mine, (2) me, and (3) I; (1) the objects of the self, (2) the objectifiable self, and (3) the non-objectifiable self.
But there is something even more internal than the goods of the soul, as we will find out a few pages later. It is God, Who, as St. Augustine profoundly says, “is more intimate to me than I am to myself”.