"If you are a regular reader of this column or have studied the science of happiness elsewhere, you'll know that getting happier requires three kinds of effort: using your intellect to understand your emotions and impulses, building conscious habits that create well-being, and sticking to these habits, notwithstanding your short-term urges. Another way of saying this is that you need to pay attention to your passions, intellect, and will."
"Aquinas wrote that "the final happiness of man does not consist in anything short of the contemplation of God"-a belief you might expect from a Catholic friar, that true and perfect contentment comes only when you die, go to heaven, and meet the creator. But Aquinas recognized that humans care about their life on Earth too, and he spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the "imperfect happiness" that we should strive for in the here and now."
"Aquinas was a monk of the Dominican Order and a polymath who spread the works of Aristotle to medieval audiences. Aquinas was so prolific in his scholarship that he is said to have dictated multiple books simultaneously to his fellow monks. Among his many subjects was human happiness."
Human happiness depends on three efforts: using intellect to understand emotions and impulses, forming conscious habits that create well-being, and exercising will to persist despite immediate urges. Medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas framed final happiness as contemplation of God while acknowledging an attainable imperfect happiness in earthly life through practical virtues. Aquinas combined Aristotelian thought with Christian theology and emphasized balancing passions, reason, and will. His Thomistic insights recommend cultivating habits and disciplined attention to inner life, and those insights align closely with contemporary psychological research on habit formation, self-control, and well-being.
Read at The Atlantic
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]