How to Be Happy, According to St. Augustine

After a brief hiatus last week for Good Friday, we’re back to our series on Augustine’s Cassiciacum Dialogues. If you’d like to check out the first essay on the preceding dialogue, Against the Academics, you can do so below.

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Should We All Be Skeptics?

Perhaps no scene from Augustine’s life is as famous as his dramatic conversion in the late summer of 386. After wrestling with the claims of Christianity for years, Augustine’s search reaches a boiling point. In a moment of immense, tormenting inner conflict, he hears a voice saying, …

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5 months ago · 49 likes · 17 comments · Austin Suggs

I have a rather annoying habit of asking my wife, “so, do you want the good news or the bad news first?” Like a sensible person, she always starts with the bad news, and because I’m not a misanthrope, I never deliver genuinely bad news in this way.

So, it is with this essay. We start with the “bad” news: Augustine thinks we’re all miserable. Yes, I know, that’s a little bit of a dour note on which to start an essay about happiness. Perhaps, On the Happy Life, would’ve sold a few more copies if it was a bit more upbeat.

However, there is also good news. At a superficial level, I find some comfort in knowing that being “miserable” can look like chilling at an Italian villa with your friends on your birthday and chatting about philosophy. If Augustine and Co. are miserable, as he insists they are, they certainly don’t seem to be feeling miserable. There’s some solace in that.

But I’m guessing that’s not Augustine’s moral of the story. The good news from Augustine’s standpoint is that this dialogue at least reveals what happiness is and how we can get there. That’s what we’ll look at today.

You’re Either Happy or Miserable

To understand this dialogue, it’s important to look at one of its chief assumptions that many modern readers will not share. That is, Augustine insists that the relationship between happiness and misery is like that of life and death—there’s no middle ground.1 As Michael Foley notes in his commentary, Augustine is following in Plato’s footsteps here by associating a thing only with it’s fullest perfection. Translation: Happiness is only really happiness when it’s perfect happiness. There are not degrees of happiness and misery. It’s one or the other. Cicero also takes this approach, comparing it to drowning: Drowning an inch from the surface isn’t any less drowning than drowning a mile below the surface.

This strikes me as one of those things that may be philosophically true in one sense, but is not experientially true. Sure, a proper definition of the nature of happiness might require us to look at happiness in its fullness, but at the level of our day-to-day lives, happiness certainly seems to permit of degrees. Licentius, ever the contrarian in these dialogues, points this out in the previous dialogue, Against the Academics. There, as in this dialogue, they determine that happiness is tied to wisdom, and therefore, the one who is not wise is not happy. But Licentius points out that they’re having a great time at Cassiciacum despite not being wise themselves. This insight will be important later on, as the ending of the dialogue might crack open the door to problematizing this binary. For now, though, know that as the dialogue proceeds, the working assumption is that there is no middle ground.

Happiness is about Getting What You Want

So, with that background in mind, we must now look at what makes you happy. Augustine begins with a simple observation: We all want to be happy.2 With the group eagerly agreeing, he proceeds to argue, if that is so, then it must be the case that not having what you want is misery. After all, happiness so far is seen to be rooted in desire. Augustine then argues the inverse. If not having what you want is misery, then having what you want is happiness.

Right about now, alarm bells might be going off in your head. Didn’t a bunch of sermons, country songs, and fables tell you that happiness isn’t just about getting what you want? Whether it’s dragons hoarding gold or athletes achieving everything they wanted and still being miserable, we’re given myriad cautionary tales to illustrate that happiness is not as simple as getting what you want.

One of the things that makes the dialogue format so fun, is that it intentionally leads readers down the wrong path, and Augustine is always testing his students, getting them to commit to answers that will terminate in dead ends. He doesn’t give them the answers. He invites them to explore questions themselves and see what they make of their discoveries.

In this case, his saintly mother spots the problem. Monica interjects, “If he wants good things and has them, he is happy; but if we wants bad things, he is unhappy, even if he has them.”3

Augustine, always keen to praise his mother, rejoices that she has found the problem so quickly, and he pivots the discussion to the critical question: What should we want?

Learning to Want the Right Things

There’s a real happiness quagmire, and it’s this: most of us are really bad at predicting what will make us happy. We think a bigger kitchen, jet skis, or a promotion will make us happy. And they might. For a time, But generally speaking, the things we think bring happiness bring less of it than we anticipate, and the things we don’t often associate with happiness—like helping people move, serving at a food kitchen, or praying—do make us happier than we expect. The data bears this out, just ask .4

Augustine argues that true happiness must not consist in material things for the simple reason that material things can be lost. And if we tie our happiness to stuff we can lose, then anxiety about losing those things will plague us and keep us from being happy.

Though his companions agree with this, Augustine offers them a counterargument to make the dialogue more interesting. And it’s one you’ve probably considered yourself. You see, we’re often told, “stuff won’t make you happy.” And that’s usually coupled with the notion, “the more you have, the more you want.” But Augustine argues, “what if you’re rich but also content. Surely that would make you happy?”

It’s a tempting thought. All things being equal, it sounds nicer to have than to have not. And Augustine doesn’t reject this outright. However, once again, it’s Monica to the rescue. She responds to the example of the contented and happy rich man by saying, “He’s happy not by virtue of the things, but by virtue of the moderation of his mind.”5

And this moderation of mind is nothing other than wisdom. Augustine defines the wisdom as follows: “Wisdom is none of than the measure of the mind, that is, that by which the mind balances itself, the result being that it neither runs over into excess nor is it constricted by what is less than full.”6

Only the Wise Man is Happy

So, happiness requires wisdom. This is a pretty stock take in the ancient world. Aristotle, for instance, didn’t think philosophy was the abstract pursuit of a bunch of ideas for the sake of ideas alone. Philosophy was about the pursuit of wisdom, and wisdom was the foundation of the good life. Put differently, the self-help section and the philosophy section would’ve been stocked with the same books.

Augustine adds a noticeably Christian layer to this, though. Just as philosophy and self-help went together for Aristotle, philosophy, self-help, and theology went together for Augustine. It is the mark of the Augustinian wise man that he recognizes the greatest good to be desired is God Himself.

This leads to one of the primary points of the dialogue: “He who has God is happy.”7

God and Happiness

So far, so good. If you want to be happy, you’ve got to want the right things. Knowing what to want is wisdom, and that wisdom leads you to recognize that God is the greatest good to desire. That, in a nutshell, is the path to happiness.

However, a problem arises (sorry). If being happy requires having God, we must determine what it means to have God. This is the next task Augustine sets before his students, and they offer three options:

1. The one who lives well has God (Licentius)

2. The one who does what God wants done has God (Trygetius)

3. The one who doesn’t have an unclean Spirit has God (Adeodatus)

Eventually, Augustine gets them to agree that these three options essentially express the same thing. But then he springs a trap. He asks them if God wants people to seek Him.

They promptly agree. But there’s a problem here. The one who seeks does not have, otherwise He would not be seeking. But if having God is doing what God wants, and God wants us to seek Him, then we’re forced to decouple these ideas. That is, we must now say that even the one who does what God wants (seek Him) does not have God.

This mirrors the debates they had about wisdom in the previous dialogue. There, they determined that the wise man can’t simply be the one who seeks wisdom. He must have wisdom. Therefore, the skeptics were found to be inconsistent when they said the wise man assents to nothing. Wisdom was not about seeking but finding. And so too, it seems, is happiness.

The Joy is Not in the Journey

That means we must do away with one of our favorite clichés. The joy, it turns out, is not in the journey.

Well, that’s unfortunate.

It may be a cliché, but I’m still quite fond of it, and, being a touch stubborn, I don’t like being disabused of my favored opinions. However, it’s worth bearing in mind the distinction we started with: For Augustine, happiness is all or nothing. If that’s the case, it seems fairly logical to say that the seeker, by nature of seeking, lacks, and the one that lacks happiness cannot be said to be perfectly happy. And, since perfect happiness is the only happiness deserving the name, then the seeker is miserable. Bah humbug.

This development in the conversation is one that Augustine recognizes is uncomfortable. They all view themselves as those trying to do what God wants, and this primarily involves seeking Him. That’s what this philosophical retreat is all about. However, the very fact that they’re seekers forces them to say that they’re miserable.

Who “Has” God?

Once again, Monica attempts to find a way out for the group. She takes issue with their working idea of “having God.” She says, “It seems to me that everyone has God, but those who live well have God well-disposed to them, while those who live badly have God hostile to them.”8 What seems like a promising distinction is soon shown to not hold up.

Here’s why.

It goes back to the seeker. Since seeking God is good, they must say God is well-disposed toward the seeker. That should lead to happiness. However, that would mean that the seeker both has God and seeks God, and Augustine won’t allow that.

Or, at least, so it seems. At the explicit level, Augustine argues against this, maintaining a dichotomy between seeking and having, with only the latter attaining happiness. Once again, this is tied into wisdom. The wise man must have wisdom, not merely seek it.

Trinitarian Happiness

However, in a delightful theological move toward the end of the dialogue, Augustine reflects on the Trinitarian structure of knowledge which helps us see wisdom in a new way. For Augustine, “The Son of God is none other than the Wisdom of God.”9 The Son, who is wisdom and truth, proceeds from the Father, who is the measure of truth. We already knew wisdom and happiness were linked, but now we know it in a deeper way: To be wise is to be happy because to be wise is to know Wisdom, and Wisdom has a name, Jesus.

But it gets even better. This elusive Wisdom and Happiness we’ve been searching for aren’t hiding from us. The eternal third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, is reaching out to us. Augustine writes, “Moreover, a certain Admonition that pleads with us to remember God, to seek Him, and—after driving out all distaste—to thirst for Him flows out to us from the very font of Truth.”10 God, in His very being, is both the means and end of our happiness.

And it doesn’t stop there.

Eucharistic Happiness

In fact, I think there’s a way in which Augustine subtly hints at how seekers can be happy in this life. This last point forces us to read a bit into the text, but Augustine said in Against the Academics that philosophers don’t always put the deeper meaning of the text on the surface, so I think we’re justified to go out on a limb here.

To get to this deeper, slightly esoteric reading, we must look to the context of the dialogue. Throughout, the dialogue is compared to a feast, and this feast starts on Augustine’s birthday, which would’ve been on a Friday that year. The dialogue lasts three days, such that it is ending on Sunday. And as it’s wrapping up, we find Monica singing hymns as Augustine once more speaks of feasting. Foley, quite brilliantly from my perspective, suggests that Augustine is intentionally echoing eucharistic themes at the end of the dialogue. If that’s the case, we might have a secret key to how a seeker can be made happy.

Augustine and his friends grant that they aren’t wise. They cannot be said to fully “have” God, and thus they must concede they’re miserable. And yet, in his trinitarian argument, we’ve seen that God is actively reaching out to us to bring us to knowledge of Him. In an even more remarkable way, though, God gives us Himself in the Eucharist. That is, the imperfect seeker is truly able to “have God.” And thus, it would seem, the eucharist is the pledge of the full happiness that is to come in knowing and beholding God fully.

In a beautiful summary statement, Augustine says, “This, then, is the full satisfaction of souls, this is the happy life: to know piously and perfectly Him by whom you are led to the Truth, whereby you may thoroughly enjoy the Truth, through which you may be joined to the Supreme Measure.”11

Following Foley, I’d propose that it is in the Eucharist that we are able to taste this happiness, even as seekers. So, maybe, happiness isn’t as elusive as Augustine seems to imply. Maybe, happiness is to be found at every church altar where sinful seekers find that which they’re looking for and receive a taste of that which will one day be the fulfillment of their deepest desires.

A Resolution

While this resolution is, admittedly, speculative, I think it offers us a more satisfying read of this book. Up until the very end, Augustine’s argument feels a bit forced. Sure, on a technicality, the seeker doesn’t have and thus must not be happy, but why can’t there be degrees of having? Surely, Monica was onto something when she said that everyone has God. Part of being human is being made in the image of God, and insofar as we are, we are never absolutely separated from God. Our being is contingent upon His Being.

They tried to bypass this with the distinction about having God well-disposed toward you, but that seems misguided. Surely the God who is Love always has the same disposition (if we can speak of Divine dispositions). Our disposition toward God is what changes.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say all have God, and all have God well-disposed toward them, but that both of these permit of degrees experientially. As it relates to “having God,” we could take the traditional line of being made in God’s image but continually working to conform to His likeness, such that we have God but are growing to have Him in a greater way by our ever-increasing participation in His divine life by detaching ourselves from sin and clinging to Christ. As it relates to God’s disposition, though this is unchanging, our acceptance of this Divine Love is what changes such that this love is not painful to us but bliss.

If this is the case, we can have in part, but one day will have in full, just as now we see in part but will one day see clearly. The thing that bridges our incomplete present with the promised complete future is the Eucharist, that great bastion of our hope in which we taste and see that the Lord is good.

Odds and Ends

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