62. Why even moral virtue alone can’t make you happy
62. WHY EVEN MORAL VIRTUE ALONE CAN’T MAKE YOU HAPPY
The typically modern mind identifies religion with morality. Isn’t that the heart of it, and the most important thing of all? Isn’t that the ultimate end and point of life: to be morally good? So happiness would then consist in the good of the soul, which would be intellectual and moral virtue.
If . . . we speak of man’s last end as to the thing itself which we desire as last end, it is impossible for man’s last end to be the soul itself or something belonging to it. Because the soul, considered in itself, is as something existing in potentiality, for it becomes knowing actually from being potentially knowing, and actually virtuous from being potentially virtuous. Now since potentiality is for the sake of act as for its fulfillment, that which in itself is in potentiality cannot be the last end. Therefore the soul itself cannot be its own last end (I-II,2,7).
Could you be happy without God if you were good enough? If so, there is no God. God is not God if He is not your ultimate meaning and end and happiness. You are not that—your own end—not even a morally perfect you. God did not design you to be perfect alone. Even God is not alone; He is together, He is a family, a society, a Trinity. That is why “it is not good for man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18): because he is created in the image of the Trinitarian God.
Your own virtue, even genuine and perfect virtue, is not your happiness. God is your happiness. In fact, perfect virtue consists ultimately in this: forgetting yourself and your virtue and caring only about God, knowing and loving God.
In fact, when virtue makes itself its own end, it becomes the worst of vices, Pharisaical pride. The alternative, humility, is not a low self-image, it is no self-image, it is blissful self-forgetfulness. Even earthly pleasures teach us that lesson: as soon as we turn from the thing we are pleased with, the sunset or symphony or sex or scotch, to think of ourselves, the pleasure is gone. The deepest pleasures are always self-forgetful. That is why the word “ecstasy” has two related meanings: “standing-outside-yourself”, which is the literal meaning, and “highest joy”. “Oh what a good boy am I!” makes you a bad boy, a proud one. “I am now having a religious experience; how interesting!” makes any religious experience you had disappear like a bubble being pricked by the knife of self-conscious analysis.
St. Thomas gives us the metaphysical principle behind this experiential fact: the soul is not complete, not finished; it is in potentiality, in process. It is not the golden castle, it is the golden chariot journeying to the golden castle along the golden road. God is the castle, and the road is the world.
To put the point in more abstract and literal terms, although the soul is not in space and matter, as the body is, it is in time. In fact, it is in two kinds of time: the time that is relative to material bodies passing through space, which is kronos, and the time of mind and will and spirit, the time of meaning and purpose, which is kairos. But both are time. Souls grow, minds mature, humanity lives through a history of consciousness as well as a history of material civilization, both collectively and individually. The soul is not its own end, as the flying arrow is not its own target. The arrow of our souls flies to God as the target—unless the arrow is so badly bent that it flies backwards, in which case it pierces the eye of the archer and makes him blind as a Pharisee.