Aquinas is surely right in saying that on the only reasonable assessment of human agency, intentional acts are performed sub specie boni. Human beings, in acting intentionally, necessarily apprehend some apparent good in what they are doing. There is, of course, a great deal of variety in the goods that we pursue. Many of us, like Madame Bovary, pursue sensual pleasure; others wealth; others still, knowledge. And while many objects of our desire are only apparently, but not objectively, good, it remains an obvious general truth that the good is the universal object of human desire and that our intention in pursuing it is to achieve satisfaction and happiness. The all-important question of human life, therefore, is this: What good conduces to our ultimate satisfaction and happiness? Aquinas would say that to answer this question we must first look to the telos, or essence, of a human being—to his or her “final cause.” Suppose, by analogy, that I ask you whether a certain watch is good or bad. Being told that the watch is waterproof, indestructible, and made of precious metals will not assist you in answering this question. You will first need to know if the watch keeps accurate time. This is because keeping accurate time is the purpose, and so a necessary condition, of good watches. Human beings, as intentional agents, are naturally ordered towards objects in which they apprehend some apparent good—as already noted. But this is not their only innate and essential faculty: As rational animals, we are also naturally ordered towards the truth. Needless to say, Aquinas is not suggesting that every human being is rational and good. That would be manifestly false. Rather, he suggests that a human being who acts with irrationality and vice frustrates, or perverts, his natural faculty. And, clearly, a human being who perverts his natural faculties cannot be said to have achieved his ultimate wellbeing—any more than a watch that keeps inaccurate time can be said to be “a perfect watch.” It would seem, then, that our ultimate wellbeing must lie in the pursuit of objects that are not merely apprehended to be good but are good in fact. But which objects are those? Rational reflection can aid us here, says Aquinas: It cannot be sensual pleasure because that satisfies only a part of the human being—the body. It cannot be power because power can be used to do evil and it is absurd to suppose that the Supreme Good can be used to do evil. Even knowledge is not the answer. Copleston explains that because, “knowledge develops only one of our faculties, it cannot achieve the objective perfecting of the whole personality.” [1] To answer the question of what goods produce our maximum possible wellbeing we must ask a different question: To what degree of intensity must any good be possessed in order to fully satisfy the human faculty that is naturally ordered towards it? Take the two faculties under consideration: Rationality and intention. We can know by reflection on our desire for truth that it is not and cannot be satisfied by the attainment of truths which are local and incomplete. Our mind is naturally ordered towards the final truth about Ultimate Reality and only the attainment of this could completely satisfy us and mark the end and the fulfilment of our desire for truth. Our desire for the good, likewise, is not satisfied by lesser goods that we possess temporarily. It is naturally ordered towards the attainment of a Summum Bonum—a Supreme Good—and only the attainment of this, and the eternal possession of it, could completely satisfy us and mark the end and the fulfilment of our desire for the good. And what has been said of the objects of intention and rationality can be said of all the other objects of our desire: beauty, love, virtue, and so forth. We have therefore arrived at this conclusion: For human desire to obtain a final and complete satisfaction it must pursue and obtain an object that is the consummation of every good and itself the Ultimate Truth. In other words, it is the pursuit and attainment of God that defines what it is for us to flourish given the kinds of things we are. In Augustine’s lapidary phrase: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” If Aquinas and Augustine are right about all this, then it follows that any human life that is wholly dedicated to the pursuit of some lesser object of desire—any life in which the natural desire for the Creator misdirected to a desire for the objects in creation that merely reflect His glory—will culminate in the profoundest dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Consider, in this connection, Madame Bovary. It is instructive in view of what has been said above that her road to perdition begins with quixotic religiosity. As a child, Emma Bovary is sent to a convent by her father where she attempts to mortify herself with fasts and, “puzzled her head to find some vow to fulfil.” The problem is that Emma is more interested in the iconography and material accoutrements of the Catholic faith than the spiritual realities they signify. Indeed, of these she shows little cognisance. She does not go to mass. Instead, she enthuses over the flowers and music. She gazes at the vignettes of lambs and sacred hearts and of, “Jesus sinking beneath the cross he carries.” And she loves the religious literature only for its “passional stimulus”—only to the extent that it excites her imagination. Emma (and this should surprise no one) does not mature spiritually; in fact, her nature at last, “rebelled against the mysteries of the faith as it grew irritated by discipline—a thing antipathetic to her constitution.” And the nuns, sensing that something is amiss, are not sad to see her go. Applying to Flaubert’s novel the results of the foregoing analysis, the fundamental error that will bring about Emma’s horrible downfall is already in place. Everything that follows is simply an intensification of the consequences of the same underlying misdirection of human desire. Thus, after rejecting religion, she begins to devour romantic novels in search of the glamours and exotic. The palm trees, Turkish sabres, tigers, Greek hats and minarets seem to her to intimate the future fulfilment of the restlessness in her heart. “She was waiting for something to happen,” writes Flaubert. “Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon.” But in this, Aquinas has shown us, she is gravely mistaken. Later, she thinks the answer is her marriage to Charles but after becoming disillusioned by the trivialities of domestic life she concludes that she was never in love with him. And so she is left wondering, “what one meant exactly in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, that had seemed to her so beautiful in books.” The higher she raises the stakes, the more she is doomed to suffer, the more she is doomed to lose. Her reckless affairs with Rodolphe and Leon; her profligate consumption of luxuries; the debt she accumulates to Lheureux in order to purchase those luxuries; her narcissistic mortification she experiences when she begs Rodolphe and Leon for a loan to save her from ruin and is refused—until, at the end of the novel, she eats arsenic and writhes to death on a bed in a room whose other furnishings the bailiffs have distrained. And all throughout her seemingly inexorable descent into misery and deprivation, everything she sought was close at hand: all that is dazzling, poignant, intelligent, sumptuous, interesting, beautiful and true and which has no reality without Him who is its author and ultimate source; everything that might have ravished her and marked the end and fulfilment of her every desire—all of this was, to paraphrase Augustine, “mysteriously more interior to her than she was to herself.” Here is the analogy that keeps coming to kind. Picture a man who, in his first moment of consciousness, finds himself walking across a desert in the late afternoon. His heart’s desire is to find, “luminous things.” Behind him, the sun is lowering; before him, objects sparkle in the sand. Here is a shard of glass, there a hand mirror—a coin, a metal key, an empty bottle. Suddenly, a voice, softer than silence, invites him to turn his back on these objects. But the man is so dazzled and preoccupied by what he sees before him that he ignores the voice. It calls to him again—with more urgency—and he angrily repudiates it. The tragedy is that if he heeded the voice—if he turned his back on these lesser goods—he would find himself face to face with the source of their luminosity—the evening sun in full blaze. But the universe cannot wait forever. The light slowly begins to fade. The sun sets. Falling onto his knees, the man snatches up one of the objects and, horrified, watches as the last glint of reflected light vanishes in his very hands. And there, in the outer darkness, he must remain forever.
[1] The quote is from Aquinas: An Introduction to the Life and Work of the Great Medieval Thinker by Fredrick Copleston whose explanation of Aquinas is the source of the above analysis.