Many theologians, preachers, and artists have imagined the happiness of the saints in heaven. Relatively little attention, by contrast, has focused on the happiness of the saints on earth. In fact some have questioned whether true happiness in this life is an attainable or even a desirable goal.
Many Catholics, though ever fewer, can still recite from memory the opening lines of the Baltimore Catechism:
Who made you? God made me.If the traditional catechism ignored the possibility of being happy in this world, that was no casual oversight. It reflected a longstanding tendency to regard the present life as merely instrumental, a means to attain a greater goal. That goal, "eternal happiness," was by definition beyond the reach of mortal beings.
Why did God make you? To know, love, and serve Him in this world so as to be happy with Him forever in the next.
In the Summa Theologica St. Thomas Aquinas devoted considerable attention to this question, largely to show why happiness, in its ultimate sense, can refer to "nothing else than the vision of the Divine essence." After reviewing in turn such ephemeral goods as wealth, honor, fame, power, health, and pleasure, he showed how vain it was to suppose that any of these could provide perfect happiness. Indeed, in setting forth his proofs, Aquinas kept his eye so resolutely trained on "perfect" happiness as to imply that anything short of that goal was hardly worth the name.
But in thus focusing on our future goal, Aquinas was heir to a long tradition. Our life on earth, according to this perspective, is conceived as a state of "lonely exile" from our true country. In the words of the "Salve Regina," a medieval hymn in honor of the Virgin, we are "poor, banished children of Eve, weeping and mourning in this vale of tears." The effort to be happy in this life is not only vain but positively harmful to the extent that it causes us to forget who we are and where we are headed.
