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Unless we believe that God sees our actions and knows our thoughts, and judges them, we will not restrain ourselves, and society will fall apart. But that fear is taken away if man is persuaded that God is Lactantius, Divine Institutes, trans.

Marcia Colish questions why Lactantius spends so much time refuting Epicurus rather than Porphyry, whose thought was at the time an opponent of Christianity. Marcia L. Brill, , Lactantius, Divine Institutes, 3.

Lactantius takes issue with the Epicurean view that the basic cause of unhappiness in life is fear and thus is to be eliminated. Fear has posi- tive work to do. Divine anger expresses love, and thus it is both comforting and motivating. Lactantius is already operating with a high doctrine of providence that was lacking in the philosophers.

This would not be lost on Augustine. The key is to avoid a transcendent framework in which one is morally scruti- nized by God and to remember that, for the most part, physical pain will be short-lived and in death there will be no distress or suffering.

Stoics and Christians found this position impious and dangerous because they were convinced that, without a deterrent to aggressive and unto- ward behavior, society would collapse.

Stoicism offers a clear response. Stoicism Stoicism, especially in the later Roman form that Lactantius and Augus- tine received it, differs considerably from Epicureanism. It is far more theological and is morally rigorous, and thus closer to Christianity. Roman Stoicism saw the universe as rational and good, designed and presided over by the divine, which they understood more person- ally than did the early Greek Stoics.

In this philosophy, life was oriented toward concord with the natural order. Stoicism and Happiness Stoicism has a prescription for happiness, but it is concerned only with spiritual or moral well-being and not with physical well-being.

The Stoic sage is an ideal person, so in control of her impulses and bodily needs that she can remain unperturbed whatever may befall her. If this is being happy, no external circumstance or condi- tion whatsoever can perturb the peace of mind that results. There is no way that happiness can be misconstrued in this system as transient ex- ternal pleasure.

Stoic happiness lies in a principled virtuous life, and the evidence of that is apatheia. If virtuous living produces pleasurable feelings of self-satisfaction, so be it.

However, these pleasurable feelings are not what humans seek, because happiness is the enjoyment of self that comes from the conviction that one is living a principled life of the highest integrity.

Stoicism is a rationalist cognitive therapy. Along with most of the Greek philosophical tradition, it holds that knowing the virtuous thing to do suffices for humans to be able to do it because reason is powerful enough to control the impulsive or irrational aspects of the soul.

There is no inner conflict between an irrational part of the soul For Stoics, bad decisions come from people being ignorant of or confused about what is best for them.

If we are thinking rightly, why would we act to our own detriment? One of ten ethical treatises that Seneca wrote c. We do not know whether Augustine read this treatise. For an excellent presentation of Stoic ethics, see Terence H. As we anticipate later developments, it is important to note that Seneca had a clear and direct influence on John Calvin.

Augustine, City of God, trans. Serious inquirers will need to put on their moral hiking boots, because happiness is a strenu- ous undertaking. The happy person is an ideal personality type who is not anxious about the future and thus is without ambition because, with virtue intact, there is noth- ing more to strive for.

Such a one can love others without thought for reciprocity, for no one has anything to give that the sage does not al- ready have. Thus indifferent to fortune, the morally competent are al- ways decorous and of sound mind and judgment. Just as there is no suggestion that happiness is a feeling, there is no possibility that it is adventitious, for it is a judgment.

There may be pleasure in this, but that is not the Stoic point. While some moderns may appeal at this point to congenital per- sonality types — some more sanguine, others more phlegmatic, and others more volatile or high-strung — the Stoics did not differentiate among the temperamental factors that one works within.

Wisdom is the art of indefatigable gracefulness, in season and out. One cannot later fall, lest it be discovered that one was not morally accomplished after all. The morally accomplished are highly regarded because they are generous and solicitous of others. They do not disrupt social or po- litical life. They know better than to offer advice to others or to depend on them. Yet the sage cultivates friendships that she carries off with gentle charm.

Augustine and Christians long after him drank deeply from this well of wisdom. Personal integrity is the standard of the Christian life.

Christian one-pointedness, whether it be to integrity or to humility, follows the precedent set by Stoicism. After presenting these Stoic commonplaces in the first half of his treatise, Seneca engages the Epicurean position and its criticisms of his own position with honesty. He acknowledges that, practically speaking, the difference between Epicurean and Stoic conceptions of happiness is smaller than is often assumed. Therefore, Epicurus insists on virtue, and Seneca acknowledges pleasure as a side effect of virtue, making room for genuine engagement with the issues.

Pos- turing and polemic give way to candid reflection. Helpful conversation begins when Seneca admits that he looks like a hypocrite to his Epicurean interlocutor. He talks about virtue alone but is a wealthy man enjoying an affluent lifestyle. Just now I am still fashioning myself to the height of a lofty ideal; when I shall have accomplished all that I have set before me, then require me to make my actions accord with my words!

At the same time, Seneca justifies his wealth from a Stoic perspec- Stoicism admits an appreciation of appropriate material things, such as health and wealth, but it does not think that they contribute to our flourishing because their definition of flourishing has excluded such things. Still, the position looks strange be- cause it renders an affluent lifestyle compatible with the belief that such things do not finally matter. Wealth is to be preferred to poverty because it makes life more comfortable, but it does not make people more virtuous and thus not happier.

This expresses the tenet of Stoic ethics that goods such as health, wealth, status, and a fine reputation are to be preferred to their opposites because they make life more pleasant. However, they do not constitute happiness, for that lies in virtue alone. Wealth requires the cultivation of virtue in a way that poverty does not.

Seneca does not ex- tol poverty as good for the soul or claim that it trains the soul in virtue, as some Christians would, though he does acknowledge that poverty requires endurance.

Rather, different material circumstances call for different forms of moral strength. The wealthy must show liberality, moderation, and kindness in distinguishing which requests from all sorts of charities to entertain, while they protect themselves from abuse and betrayal. The poor, on the other hand, require perseverance, patience, and fortitude simply to survive their situation. It is perhaps easy to hold, from a position of wealth and leisure, that the goods of fortune are morally neutral.

Yet, without them or in the event of their loss, temptation to meanness of spirit, envy, despair, depression, or ag- gression may well be strong.

Deprivation can be both morally and physically damaging, and Seneca does not sufficiently appreciate this. Christianity counsels endurance of suffering with the promise of bliss in the next life. Augustine will Augustine, City of God, Again, divine assistance is needed. Contemporaneous Criticism of Stoicism As a statesman devoted to the Roman republic, the urbane and well- educated Cicero was deeply interested in ethics.

He was more sympa- thetic to the Stoics than to the Epicureans, though not unreservedly so. He treats the Stoic concept of happiness in the last book of the Tusculan Disputations and again in the third book of On Moral Ends. While Cicero is sympathetic to this claim, his personal experience of the collapse of his public career in defending the republic and the death of his beloved daughter make it difficult for him to hold that happiness requires virtue alone.

Happiness is more complex than that. Fear and sorrow encourage people to blame events and circumstances for their misery rather than their moral failings. Cicero distinguishes the Stoic position from that of the Aristo- telians, who, like Epicurus, find happiness more complex a matter than virtue alone. The presentation here is more nuanced than that in the Tusculan Disputations. This is why Seneca appears to be a hypocrite to his Epicurean Yet Cicero is making a point not about how it works out in practice but about the formal principle on which the philosophy stands.

He takes issue with the Stoic definition of happiness: his criticism is that Stoicism has defined well-being too narrowly by limiting it to virtue; living well should surely also include material well-being.

Despite these criticisms, Stoicism has the advantage of liberating happiness from dependence on fortune and shrewdness. It defines peo- ple as morally able to the extent that they know where to seek and how to define flourishing.

The importance of knowing where to seek happiness was not lost on early Christian theologians. Stoics gave us the idea that living consis- tently with who one really is at the deepest level is happiness. That deeply impressed Christian theology, in which happiness is found only in being who one is called to be by God. In the meantime, another philosophical school also took this point most seriously. By the time Lactantius and Augustine were writing, Neo-Platonism was more important than the earlier philosophical schools we have exam- ined.

Plotinus ce writes about happiness, locating it in the context of three of his teachings that relate to the other philosophical schools we are considering. Plotinus wrote his most important work, The Enneads, during the last seven or eight years of his life. His clearest teaching on happiness is in tractates four and five of the first Ennead. The first two chapters of Ennead 1. Plotinus bows to Aristotle and Epicurus, but his goal is to fortify the Stoic teaching on happiness on one point: while the Stoics correctly re- alize that happiness resides in virtue, which reason alone provides, they could not or at least did not identify the source of that reason.

It could be reached immediately, by returning within one- self. See Augustine, Confessions, trans. Lloyd P. Gerson Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, , p. Plotinus, The Enneads, ed. Paul Henry and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer, trans. Tractate 5 is chronologically, though not canonically, prior to tractate 4. Plotinus, Enneads, 1. Our reason is universal reason that undergirds and orders reality. The ordering prin- ciple of the cosmos is incarnate in us.

We have all that we need to be happy, and if we do not actualize it, we are simply immature or igno- rant of this truth; we are deceived by appearances that we ought to penetrate. Spiritual maturity is the realization that the good life is not defined by health or freedom from pain. Rather, it is defined by pos- sessing the true and transcendent good that we not only understand but are. The transcendent is immanent.

The wise go inside themselves to find ultimate goodness and actualize it. Against the Aristotelians who insisted on the importance of the goods of fortune for happiness , the Epicureans who honored both bodily and mental pleasures , and even the Stoics who conceded that health and freedom from pain are preferable to their opposites, though morally neutral , Plotinus utterly discounts the body: the per- son is spiritually constituted.

In- stead, the Plotinian sage must take care of her body because it hap- pens to accompany the soul, not because it is valuable or helpful. While he will safe- guard his bodily health, he will not wish to be wholly untried in sick- ness, still less never to feel pain.

If he should meet with pain he will pit against it the powers he holds to meet it; but pleasure and health and ease of life will not mean any increase of happiness to him nor will Augustine appears to depart from this spiritualized anthropology when, in The Happy Life, he begins with the assumption that a person is both body and soul, and that the soul needs food just as the body does. Mary T. However, Augustine is not expressly refuting Plotinus in this early work; this balanced view is one that Augustine sustains throughout his career.

It has nothing at all to do with embodied life. Ennead 1. Can happiness increase or decrease? Plotinus is quite clear that happiness is an unchanging state of mind, not an emotion. It cannot increase by being remembered in the past or anticipated for the future. Even if some people grasp wisdom all at once while others grow into it, happi- ness itself is a stable all-or-nothing affair because it is about under- standing who and what one is sub specie aeternitatis.

The Stoics agreed, but they did not identify that nature with eternity. Indeed, it is eternal and neither increases nor de- creases but constitutes human being: the happy person participates in eternity.

Stable happiness derives from the stability of eternity itself. This proposition completes the Plotinian correction of the Stoics: they grasp that happiness is a function of virtue, but they fail to under- stand that to actualize our nature and truly flourish is to participate in eternity, not simply to be virtuous.

The Stoics have too local an out- look. The source that they are missing is the One. It is perhaps at this very point that Plotinus captivated Augustine, yet the latter adapted Plotinus to Christian purpose. Augustine, too, longed to rest in eternity, but he could not set aside the genuine suffer- ing of this life, as Plotinus and the Stoics did.

He sides with Epicurus, Aristotle, and Cicero in affirming that physical well-being does matter. Augustine will also disagree with Plotinus on this point. Denying that these are emotions simply because they are short-lived and not ra- tionally assented to seems to define away their reality. The Stoic sage is to be immune to fear and grief, but cannot necessarily prevent unreflec- tive reactions. The sage can at best be immune to fear at the level of con- scious reflection, not at the level of mere experience.

It is precisely the kind of endur- ing emotional response that the Stoics considered vicious. Permanent well-being will finally exist only after this life.

Again, we see that Plotinus, like the Stoics and even the Epicureans but for dif- ferent reasons , drive Augustine to eschatology. Here there is not pleasure in the self as we saw with the Stoics and is im- plied in Kant.

Pleasure is participation in eternity. This is quite a fresh direction in the ancient world. Happiness requires going inside oneself and discovering the divine there. It is a process of self-discovery, not the effect of transient events or hard work. This transcendental spirituality gives us a fresh angle on why Plotinus rejected the Stoic doctrine of pref- erences — preferring the condition of health and wealth, even if these do not define happiness.

Irwin argues that this is not an effec- tive argument against the Stoics because they accept nonrational emotional responses to events that arise before one has the opportunity to think about and adopt an appro- priate response, and they do not admit that these initial responses are passions. Even the sage may be caught off guard before regaining composure. Terence H. We have already met him, but here we consider him for his own contribution to the conversation on happiness, not merely as rep- resentative of another philosophical school.

Although Lactantius lived into the Constantinian age, his writings reflect the earlier period of Christian distress that stimulated his radi- cal plea for religious toleration and his eloquent and passionate attack on pagan philosophy and religion — especially pagan moral philoso- phy.

Here I explicate what Lactantius does with the various elements of Christian teaching as he carves out the first Christian position on happiness. Against the Epicureans, he held to a strong doctrine of divine anger and judgment: God is actively involved with human beings, adminis- tering justice and mercy personally.

Against the Stoics, he argued that virtue alone cannot make us happy; it is only a means to that end. Against the Epicureans — and with Plotinus — Lactantius claims that the soul is immortal.

Plato and Aristotle both recognized that we have nonrational desires that can direct behavior away from what we know to be the best course of action, and Saint Paul agrees. This recognizes the possibility of moral struggle that is foreign to Stoic or Plotinian psychology. The purpose of moral striving is to bring the sinful side of ourselves under the control of our nobler side. If our dark side is in control and we live this life in death and darkness, God will punish us forever in the next Lactantius, Divine Institutes, bks.

We fight against our sinful side by learning peaceable wisdom that will shape us and bring us on the course toward happiness, our su- preme good. Wisdom is knowledge that trains us in virtue, which is not our chief good but aims at it. God is our chief good. His teaching on happiness is correspondingly eschatological: bliss is the eternal reward for nourishing and exercising the soul well in this life. It is a teaching that, through Augustine, has sustained millions of Christians. The major difference between the Stoics and Lactantius is that, for the philosophers, happiness is virtue that resides in the soul while, for the Christian apologist, pain cannot be avoided in this life and even vir- tue is not enough to undermine its power.

We cannot bring about our own happiness, no matter how hard we try and no matter how skill- fully or admirably we act. Rather, happiness is finally the gift of eternal life with God. I have considered them in roughly chronological or- der, but that also turns out to be in order from the most worldly to the least worldly.

Here I wish to explore their influence on Augustine and through him on Western Christianity. The Epicurean view is that well-being is the enjoyment of embod- ied life and is impeded by the fear of physical suffering.

Epicurus lo- cated the source of much of that fear in theology — belief in the power and wrath of god s , the view that death is evil, that pain and suffering last, and so on — and he sought to undermine it by dismantling various theological tenets. Death is no more frightening than our state before birth, and temporal suffering passes quickly into eternal freedom from suffering at death. This was not lost on Augustine, who concluded that Christian beliefs in the afterlife and in the inability to overcome sin by effort alone were more pastorally useful than other beliefs offered by Stoicism, for example.

The Stoic suggestion is to locate happiness not in the simple plea- sures of daily life but in the satisfaction with self and the admiration of others that virtuous living brings. While the Stoic is of a higher mind than to be distressed by misfortune, some misfortunes — such as illness and pain — are undesirable even though it is not strictly necessary to avoid them in order to be happy.

Similarly, goods like health and wealth are preferred, though unnecessary for happiness. Happiness is a moral matter, not related to material circumstances. Stoic preferences have been criticized as a kind of legal fiction to get around the strict tenets of their basic doctrine, thus rendering the Stoics hypocrites, though they are quite consistent within the structure of Stoic ethics. Augustine absorbed some elements of Stoicism and rejected oth- ers.

His epistemol- ogy is essentially Stoic, and he used it early in his theological career in a treatise against the skeptics or academics , who held that true knowl- edge is not available to the mind.

Certain knowledge is possible, he argues, because the senses take in data experienced by them and the intellect processes it and ren- ders judgments on it. Moreover, against the Stoics, Augustine argues that although happiness requires virtue, virtue is not itself happiness. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. Colish, Stoicism, p.

For the Neo- Platonist, the goal of life is spiritual depth. Other philosophies are looking in the wrong place. Epicurus, the Stoics, and the skeptics all consider temporal life in either its material or spiritual dimension to be significant.

Plotinus thinks they are missing the point. He alone wants to transcend daily life in order to dwell with God. Plotinian mysticism gave Augustine a cosmic framework of univer- sal harmonious beauty within which to locate human striving. The Christian master wants to move people beyond self-preoccupation, not simply to the grandeur of the universe but to the grandeur of the God of Israel.

He argues that true blessedness requires the emotional stabil- ity that comes only with enjoying God, and he agrees with Plotinus that cultivating virtue is a strategy for sharing in that stability during this life.

Yet he Christianizes the Plotinian notion that happiness is the eternal vision of God by insisting on the immortality of the soul.

Its doctrine of the spiritual life centers on ecstatic experi- ence that yields true self-knowledge. Aristotle and the Stoics, for exam- ple, have a strongly social dimension to their philosophies that perhaps is not clear in Plotinus. Augustine, too, was criticized for being too inwardly di- rected and insufficiently social.

But that is a hasty judgment. Augus- tine knows that social harmony depends on morally healthy individu- als. He drank deeply from the Platonist well but finally could not be satisfied there because the incarnate Christ brought God down from heaven to earth. In conclusion, Augustine used the intellectual currents of the day selectively as he crafted a spiritually compelling Christian philosophy that was intelligible, grounded in the God of Israel, and concretized in Jesus Christ.

He deftly shaped postbiblical Western Christian thought, and we will now consider his writings on happiness. Late in life, he wrote a book annotating his major publications because he knew that they would shape Western civilization as Roman civilization faded.

We will follow his development of our theme in eight of his works spanning his en- tire career: The Happy Life De Beata Vita, ,3 Soliloquies Soliloquia, 1. Leroy S. It forms part of a group of dialogues from his time at Cassiciacum, a retreat outside Milan, where he spent the fall of while preparing for baptism the following Easter.

De Beata Vita is his only work specifically dedicated to happiness. The Happy Life records a discussion among eight people, including Augustine, that he undertook on his thirty-second birthday Novem- ber 13, and the two following days.

The participants are his mother, 4. Augustine, The Catholic Way of Life, trans. Donald Arthur Gallagher and Idella J. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Augustine, The Trinity, trans. It reads like a set of classes, with Augustine as the teacher who asks questions of the others and offers answers in the form of speeches or lectures; he also offers encouragement for the students, and they carry the discussion where he wants it to go.

Her comments regularly turn and refocus the class in important directions. His fecund mind worked tire- lessly over decades to render important questions more precise and clear. Issues raised obliquely here — election or predestination, grace, and eschatology — would dominate his thinking down the line.

But his main concern here is wisdom. More elabo- rate statements of these criticisms appear at the end of his life in City of God, but they do not change substantially.

Against Plotinus, he defines personhood as both spiritual and physical. Happiness comes with nour- ishing the soul through virtue that stabilizes the person who enjoys the consistency of self-use that comes by living righteously, not via passing sensual pleasures.

Significantly, Augustine does not begrudge humans physical well-being, though he holds the intellect to be spiritually supe- rior to the body. Bodily well-being is important because material and emotional sufferings impede happiness.

One does not trump the other; rather, they facilitate one another. Mate- Augustine, Retractations, p. Human life is purposeful. True happiness is stable and enduring, not evanescent. The eschatological focus here is not overt, though it lies just below the surface. It may be possible to enjoy God largely in this life, but that enjoyment is always limited by changing cir- cumstances and our own moral and intellectual instability.

It is simply impossible to avoid misery and suffering in this world. The first step toward enduring happiness lies in realizing that there is a difference between a valuable and a worthless life. Augustine works to- ward conceptualizing a virtuous life as abundant in good spiritual things: to be happy is to be spiritually filled with good things. This is the secret of wisdom that countermands a foolish life.

Wisdom is the key to a happy life. Heretofore, the theological themes that later would become central Augustinian concerns have been hypothetical.

The christological content of wisdom surfaces in the last three sections. Here Augustine formulates the classic Christian doctrine of hap- Augustine seems aware of this tradition but does not explicitly mention it. The idea of a mean that avoids extremes connects with the idea of stability: stable happiness is balanced between opposite extremes. Note that here sin does not consist of wrong acts, but of failing to live produc- tively — a far more dynamic category. Therefore, whoever possesses God is happy.

Possessing the triune God is happiness itself. To know and possess God is to enjoy oneself. Enjoyment of God is the light of life. Holding fast to it is the challenge. This he realizes even at the moment of his happiest discovery, and so he concludes on a cautious note that becomes the basso continuo of his mature works: eschatologi- cal hope.

Happiness is perfectly knowing and enjoying God, who leads us into truth and con- nects us with himself. We can hasten toward this culmination through faith, hope, and love, Monica wisely adds, but cannot finally arrive there in this life. On that ambiguous note, the interlocutors bid one another adieu with thanks and blessing. Happiness is knowing, loving, and enjoying God securely. For that, one must both seek and find God, and this seeking proceeds by cultivating wisdom.

It is the highest end of human life. Wisdom requires virtue but is not itself virtue, for wisdom resides in God revealed in Christ. Only those who know or have God and are filled with him experience spiritual joy.

All who lack knowledge and wisdom of God are foolish and unhappy by definition. Augustine will develop this teaching on happiness over time, and his fundamental convictions will not change.

What we will see is that the cautionary eschatological note at the end sounds louder and louder as Augustine moves through his career. Happiness is com- plete only in the eschaton. What happiness is never changes for the master, but it recedes further into the future as he ages. This very early work has accomplished the following: all people want to be happy, and God has made this possible; humans are defined as both body and soul, implying against the Stoics and Plotinus that the well-being of the body is important.

Further, human life is pur- poseful: to become wise and filled by enjoying God as much as possible in this life is to achieve our purpose, knowing that here we will never be completely safe from suffering and distress. Only those who know or have God to the fullest experience this spiritual joy. Yet, as well as we may know, love, and enjoy God in this life, happiness will never be com- plete until fulfilled in the eschaton. Faith and Hope in the Soliloquies Augustine wrote the Soliloquies during the same year and at the same lo- cation that he wrote The Happy Life.

Its two books portray a conversa- tion Augustine conducted with himself about his intellectual and moral quest to know God and the soul. We have already seen that knowing God is happiness, and this treatise follows the same inquiry. The Soliloquies add two notes to what we have seen — faith and Cornelius Mayer Makrolog GmbH, Happiness, Augustine tells us, is the spiritual vision of God. Until the eschaton, temporal life carries a lim- ited but genuine blessedness of its own that comes from knowing the good and choosing well.

The eschatological horizon relo- cates the hope for happiness to the next life, in appreciation of the real obstacles to happiness in this one. Love and the Four Cardinal Virtues in On the Catholic Way of Life ce This treatise is designed to cure the Manichees of their erroneous inter- pretation of the Older Testament by showing them that the two Testa- ments fundamentally agree.

At this stage, Christianity is more an exis- tential submission to a way of life mores than intellectual assent to a carefully worked out set of ideas, and Scripture is central to construing that way.

The practical import is great. Since Augustine himself had previously adopted the Manichaean way of life and belief that he now rejects, this work has autobiographical resonances. Again, the theme of the need for divine guidance appears, now with Augustine guiding peo- ple to the Catholic faith that can carry them from error into truth.

Love in this life and the hope for the next life would fi- Augustine wrote a full treatise on this topic in a letter to a woman named Paulina. This ba- sically establishes the doctrine of the vision of God as a major plank of standard Chris- tian eschatology until the sixteenth century. Augustine develops this theme in City of God, Happiness char- acterizes God-lovers, and loving well is the key to happiness.

It receives further refine- ment in book 1 of On Christian Teaching, which he wrote some six years later. Discussions of love and happiness often coincide. Here the obsta- cle to happiness is not that we do not know what brings true happi- ness; rather, we fail to attain what we rightly love. We flourish when we enjoy our chief good, the end for which we are made — enjoyment of God. According to Augustine, our chief good must both stretch and sat- isfy us. It stretches us if it is better than we are; it satisfies us if it is something we can be confident we will not lose involuntarily, lest our happiness be undermined by worrying about its loss.

Such a good is spiritually helpful by stretching us in ways that draw us closer to fulfill- ing our God-given end — actually improving and even perfecting us. To become better is to become wiser.

Wise teachers and models help us in this endeavor, but they will die or be lost some other way and we fear losing them. The only teacher — the only wisdom — that can perfect us and that we cannot lose involuntarily is God, whom we lose only by abandoning him.

Therefore, ultimate happiness is be- coming wiser and better by loving God. Lacking direct knowledge of God, we must rely on Scripture and the experience of its interpreter, the church — especially its depiction of Christ, who is the Christian way to fulfill the command of Deuteron- omy 6.

To love God is to follow others whom God has drawn near. Loving God means approaching him, seeking contact with him. Indeed, we want to be near those we love, for being there makes us happy. Spiritual strengthening enables us to let go of lesser visible goods as we become more attached to loving the highest and best good, which is invisible.

While we should use material things cautiously, we should be gen- erous in helping our neighbors meet their material needs, because a person is defined in terms of both soul and body.

Happiness requires cultivation of virtues beyond spiritual self-care because God enjoins love of neighbors, and we cannot be happy until we practice that love. Concern for bodily well-being was hinted at in The Happy Life, but it be- comes explicit here. Physical well-being is important, but Augustine does not equate it with spiritual well-being. He does not explicitly say that bad physical circumstances impede enjoyment of God by embittering the soul, for example, but neither does he espouse the position of the Stoics and Plotinus that material circumstances are irrelevant to happiness.

In Soliloquies, he introduces the love and vision of God as attaching us to a happiness completed only after death. In The Catholic Way of Life, he connects loving and happiness in a distinctive Augustine wrote book 1 of this work in ; he completed books 2 and 3 in , by which time he was deeply concerned about sin.

Hereafter, references to this work will appear in parentheses in the text. Happiness is high-quality loving by means of which one extracts the best that life has to offer. The question of happiness arises in a different context in On Free Will. And it gave rival leaders an opening to attack Trudeau's character, describing him as a selfish egoist who can't be trusted to put the interests of Canadians ahead of his personal ambition to secure a majority.

The day campaign also exacerbated divisions in the country over the approach to mandatory vaccinations and vaccine passports, sparking ugly protests by profanity spewing opponents of public health restrictions, including one incident in which gravel was thrown at Trudeau and his entourage. It also cost Trudeau several cabinet ministers on Monday — former fisheries minister Bernadette Jordan and former gender equality minister Maryam Monsef lost, while Deb Schulte, who served as seniors minister, was in a race still too close to call.

While the result was virtually identical to , the geographic landscape was slightly changed. After being shut out of Alberta and Saskatchewan last time, the Liberals were poised to pick up two seats in Alberta.

In his victory speech, Trudeau, who never explicitly called for a majority, suggested that the result was nevertheless a clear mandate for his government. O'Toole won his party's leadership last year by courting social conservatives but then ditched his "true blue" image in a bid to broaden his party's appeal outside its Western Canada base. He presented himself to voters as a moderate with pricey centrist policies, including a plan to put a price on carbon, which his party had previously pilloried as a job-killing tax on everything.

But the move did not produce the hoped-for breakthrough for the Conservatives in Ontario or Quebec, where the Liberals once again won the lion's share of the seats, and helped push some right-wing voters into the arms of the People's Party.

In a speech to supporters after the outcome O'Toole doubled down on his centrist approach and, in an apparent bid to head off any move to oust him as leader, signalled that he's not going anywhere. Predicting that Trudeau will plunge the country into another election in 18 months in yet another bid to secure a majority, O'Toole said he's "resolutely committed to continuing this journey for Canada.

He said he'd congratulated Trudeau on the election victory but also told him, "If he thinks he can threaten Canadians with another election in 18 months, the Conservative party will be ready and, whenever that day comes, I will be ready to lead Canada's Conservatives to victory.

The NDP, which had hoped to ride on Singh's status as the most popular federal leader, did not make the number of gains it had hoped for either.

It lost its lone Atlantic seat and was down one to just five in Ontario. It did pick up one seat in Quebec, where it now holds just two of 78 seats, and gained one in Alberta.

As before, Trudeau will need the support of at least one opposition party to pass any legislation and survive crucial confidence votes. Both Singh and Blanchet indicated that they will push their priorities in exchange for supporting the Liberal government. For Singh, that includes making the "super wealthy" pay their fair share of taxes.

For her part, Paul admitted she was disappointed to lose her bid for a seat but celebrated the re-election of former Green leader Elizabeth May and a gain by Green candidate Mike Morrice in Kitchener Centre, where the Liberal incumbent, Raj Saini, was dumped by his party mid-campaign over sexual harassment allegations that he denies. Politics Technology Video Weather News. Third international meeting with Russia over its potential invasion of Ukraine ended without clear breakthrough.

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