The art of happiness download pdf

Sheila Oakley, who has a doctorate in French 18th century history, has translated this Discourse on Happiness from French into English. She has also written the preface to this translation, and has added a short chronology of the author's life, and supplementary notes to explain certain contemporary allusions and references.

She would be delighted to hear from readers who wish to give their impressions of the book, after reading it. She can be contacted at: [email protected] or readers may prefer to write a review of the book by clicking on the appropriate rubric at the top of this web page. The stoics lived a long time ago, but they had some startling insights into the human condition-insights which endure to this day.

The philosophical tradition, founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in BC, endured as an active movement for almost years, and contributions from dazzling minds such as Cicero, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius helped create a body of thought with an extraordinary goal-to provide a rational, healthy way of living in harmony with the nature of the universe and in respect of our relationships with each other. In many ways a precursor to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy CBT , Stoicism provides an armamentarium of strategies and techniques for developing psychological resilience, while celebrating all in life which is beautiful and important.

By learning what stoicism is, you can revolutionize your life and learn how to seize the day, live happily and be a better person. This simple, empowering book shows how to use this ancient wisdom to make practical, positive changes in your life. The occasion was a big birthday. And it inspired two close friends to get together for a talk about something very important to them. The subject was joy. Both winners of the Nobel Prize, both great spiritual masters and moral leaders of our time, they are also known for being among the most infectiously happy people on the planet, despite having experienced great personal and national suffering.

From the beginning the book was envisioned as a three-layer birthday cake, the first being their personal stories and teachings about joy.

Both the Dalai Lama and Tutu have been tested by extraordinary adversity, oppression, and conflict. The second layer consists of the exciting research into joy as well as the other qualities essential for any enduring happiness, like gratitude, humility, humour, compassion, generosity, and forgiveness. And the third encompasses practical exercises and guidance based on the Dalai Lama's and Tutu's own daily practices, which anchor their emotional and spiritual lives.

Most of all, during that landmark week in Dharamsala, they demonstrated by their own exuberance, compassion, and even wise-cracking humour, how joy can be transformed from a fleeting emotion into an enduring way of being. Enlivened by personal anecdotes and intimate accounts, His Holiness provides step-by-step exercises to help readers shatter their false assumptions and ideas of the self and see the world as it actually exists, which is a prelude to right action. Western Christian theology is skittish about happiness.

We hope for future, eternal happiness, but we avoid considering happiness in this life as if we suspect such a thing is not allowed. That You May Have Life offers a refreshing interpretation of happiness as a way of life grounded in scripture and the incarnate Christ. Ellen Charry here reveals how the Bible encourages the happiness and joy that accompany obedience to the Creator, enhancing both our own life and the lives of those around us.

This advances the well being of creation, which, in turn, causes God to delight with, in, and for us. With this original theory of the Christian life, this book will encourage intelligent readers to take part in truly abundant life. An in-depth study of the philosophy, science and art of true self-knowledge taught by Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi, giving detailed guidance on the practice of self-investigation atma-vichara , 'Who am I?

Uses techniques of Buddhist mind training to describe a way of life that will lead to happiness. 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. As with The Catholic Way of Life, Augustine wrote it against the Manichaean view that radically separates good from evil as two com- peting cosmic principles. Augustine addresses happiness while discuss- ing evil and gives us a rather different picture of the connection be- tween love and happiness than we saw previously.

He agrees with Aristotle that everyone wants to be happy, though clearly not everyone is happy. The Happy Life argues that the wise locate themselves in eternal truth and thus are happy, while the foolish dis- tance themselves from eternal truth and thus are unhappy.

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