Aristotle, Aquinas, and Seligman on happiness.

Kaczor, Christopher

What exactly is happiness? Ancient philosophers like Aristotle, medieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas, and contemporary psychologists like Martin Seligman have wrestled with this perennial question. In seeking happiness myself, I've learned a great deal from all three. I found instructive the ways they accord as well as ways that they differ.

It might seem at first silly to try to define happiness. "I know it when I feel it," you might say with some justification. In a similar way, we know about our bones, but the systematic study of our bones can nevertheless be useful, especially if something is going wrong with our bones.

A Positive Psychology Framework for Happiness

In his book Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well Being (2011), Martin Seligman that happiness, which he also calls flourishing and well-being, involves five different elements: Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement (PERMA) (Seligman 2011). Each of these five elements contributes to human flourishing, and each is chosen by people as an end desired in itself, rather than simply as a means to some further end.

The first element of flourishing is positive emotions such as joy, delight, warmth, euphoria, and gladness. One element of positive emotion, subjective well being, is how people respond to questions such as, "How happy are you right now?" or "How satisfied are you with your life?" (Diener & Biswas-Diener, 2008, p. 4). We can distinguish feelings, our own subjective and conscious awareness of emotions, from the emotions themselves. We can be having an emotion manifesting itself in our bodies and yet not really feel or consciously realize we have the emotion, as when people say, "I didn't realize how happy I was until he walked into the room." Likewise, our bodily reactions may be expressive of positive emotion, but we might not be (fully) aware of what our emotions are and so not (fully) feel our emotions. Positive emotions are the first element in Seligman's conception of flourishing, but other elements also contribute to well-being.

The second element is engagement with life. Engagement is also known as flow, making use of signature strengths in an activity requiring energized focus on the moment, an activity that is neither too difficult nor too easy. Csikszentmihalyi (1991) understands engagement or flow as involving challenging activity requiring concentration on the present which results in a sense of 'time stopping' and a 'loss of self.' Flow can take place in work, hobbies, or sports, such as when the athlete is 'in the zone' making use of a signature strength. In Anna Karennina, Tolstoy describes flow in one character's work,

The longer Levin went on mowing, the oftener he experienced those moments of oblivion when his arms no longer seemed to swing the scythe, but the scythe itself his whole body, so conscious and full of life; and as if by magic, regularly and definitely without a thought being given to it, the work accomplished itself of its own accord. These were blessed moments. (Tolstoy, 2004, pp. 252-253)

We can have flow in many different kinds of activities, and flow is part of a happy life. Taking note of human diversity, positive psychologists hold that each person has signature strengths that fall under the general categories of wisdom, courage, justice, temperance, transcendence, and humanity (charity). Within each general category, there are sub-categories that define more precisely the strength in question, such as creativity, leadership, loving and being loved, open mindedness, teamwork, and kindness. When a person makes use of a signature strength in a challenging activity with energized focus of attention to optimum performance, the person experiences flow or full engagement.

The third element of PERMA, relationships, constitutes another aspect of human flourishing, indeed perhaps the central element. Seligman (2011) explains:

   When asked what, in two words or
   fewer, positive psychology is about,
   Christopher Peterson, one of its
   founders, replied, " Other people"
   Very little that is positive is solitary.
   When was the last time you laughed
   uproariously? The last time you felt
   indescribable joy? The last time you
   sensed profound meaning and purpose?
   The last time you felt enormously
   proud of an accomplishment?
   Even without knowing the particulars
   of these high points of your life, I
   know their form: all of them took
   place around other people. Other
   people are the best antidote to the
   downs of life and the single most
   reliable up. (p. 20)

Positive, loving relationships are an essential part of happiness. Without close, loving, positive relationships, human persons face the likelihood of physical and mental health problems, and undergo a loss in human flourishing (Baumeister & Leary, 1995).

On Seligman's view, meaning is another part of flourishing. Meaning is understood as "belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self" (Seligman 2011, p. 17). Although a person cannot be mistaken about a purely subjective feeling, it is possible, Seligman holds, to be mistaken about meaning. Pot smoking adolescents may think their midnight philosophizing was quite meaningful, but when they sober up and grow up, they may come to realize if they listen to a recording of their conversation that nothing meaningful was really said. Likewise, depressive persons like Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill may feel as if their lives are meaningless, but we can rightly judge that they lead meaningful lives. Meaning involves a connection and a contribution with something that is larger than the self: family, school, vocation, political party, country, or God.

The final element of flourishing on Seligman's (2011) view is achievement. He says, "Accomplishment or achievement is often pursued for its own sake, even when it brings no positive emotion, no meaning, and nothing in the way of positive relationships" (p. 21). Accomplishment can be sought via mastering certain skills such as playing a complicated song on the piano, running a marathon in under three hours, or learning German. Achievement may also be understood comparatively, such as winning a race, becoming the valedictorian, or making more money than your peers.

For Seligman, all five elements are needed for full flourishing, all can be desired as ends in themselves, and all can be quantifiably measured. Positive emotions are important for happiness, but a person's happiness is augmented if they not only are experiencing positive emotions but are also engaged in meaningful work and achievement. Not just subjective experience but objective reality is relevant for flourishing in Seligman's (2011) understanding:

   Engagement, meaning, relationships,
   and accomplishment have both subjective
   and objective components,
   since you can believe you have
   engagement, meaning, good relations,
   and high accomplishment and
   be wrong, even deluded. The
   upshot of this is that well-being cannot
   exist just in your own head:
   well-being is a combination of feeling
   good as well as actually having
   meaning, good relationships, and
   accomplishment. (p. 25)

Flow-making use of signature strengths is relevant because part of what people want out of life is not just feeling a certain way, but also engagement with life. An illusion could generate feelings, but an illusion does not involve engagement with (real) life. Similarly, actually having good relationships and accomplishing something (real) is not merely a subjective feeling. It is hard to imagine a flourishing human life without some element of each aspect of PERMA: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement. How does the PERMA conception of flourishing compare with the ideas put forward by two of the preeminent philosophers of happiness, Aristotle and Aquinas?

PERMA in the Context of Aristotle and Aquinas

Positive Emotions

The importance of emotions is a shared emphasis for positive psychologists and the philosophers of virtue. For Aristotle, eudemonia involves experiencing enjoyment, and the emotional life of virtuous persons--what they take pleasure in and what they find painful--contributes to their happiness. Likewise, Aquinas devotes a huge section of the moral part of the Summa theologiae to exploring what he calls "the passions" such as love, hatred, delight, sorrow, and fear. Why?

Some might be tempted to think that all that really matters, at least morally speaking, are your exterior actions, especially doing your duty, not whether or not you are experiencing certain emotions. Indeed, it might seem that concern for one's own emotions is a selfish preoccupation in tension with the demands of duty understood as an altruistic regard for others. Zagano and Gillespie (2006) express this concern, "Positive Psychology can appear as a self-seeking and self-serving process aimed simply at obtaining individual and interpersonal happiness" (p.50).

I used to think that, ethically speaking at least, all that really matters is doing your duty and that emotions were insignificant and irrelevant. While it is true that what we do is vitally important for our own happiness as well as the happiness of others, I now think that it is a mistake to belittle the importance of emotions and feelings for the moral life. When we feel upset, depressed, sad, and angry, it is still possible to do the right thing, but doing the right thing while experiencing such emotions becomes immensely more difficult. When we feel bad, we desire to alleviate our bad feelings, and this can lead us to act against what we know is right (McGonigal, 2012). We have a moral responsibility to avoid, insofar as reasonably possible, putting ourselves in occasions of wrongdoing. Since negative emotions are often occasions of doing wrong, our moral responsibilities include a concern for our emotional life.

As negative emotions can draw us to doing wrong, positive emotions can draw us outwards towards connecting and contributing to others. As Gretchen Rubin points out, "studies show that happier people are more likely to help other people. They are more interested in social problems. They do more volunteer work and contribute more to charity" (Rubin, 2009, p. 215). It is, therefore, a mistake to suppose that our own happiness is necessarily set in opposition to the well-being of others, for often our positive emotions help us to be our best selves for others.

In addition, the duty to love our neighbor as ourselves leads to a concern about our own emotions. We would all prefer to experience positive emotions rather than negative emotions. When we experience negative emotions, it affects all those with whom we have contact. Just as we can transmit a contagious disease to other people, so too through emotional contagion, we influence (positively or negatively) all those around us (Hatfield, Cacioppo, Rapson, 1993).

Emotions also matter morally because we have a moral duty to take care of our own health which is damaged by chronic negative emotions. Since our emotions greatly influence the emotions of others, we are also negatively or positively influencing the health of others in our life.

Finally, our emotions also matter because our emotions can distort or enhance our thinking. When we are upset, for example, when we are in a "fight or flight" mode, we cannot think as clearly as when we are in a "calm and connect" mode. Since practical wisdom is needed in order to act well, we have good reason to cultivate positive emotion. As Fredrickson (2013) points out:

   The tightly controlled laboratory
   experiments ... convincingly reveal
   that the scope of your awareness
   changes dramatically over time,
   depending on your current emotional
   state. Your awareness narrows with
   negative emotions and broadens with
   positive ones. It is when feeling
   good, then, that you're best equipped
   to see holistically and come up with
   creative and practical solutions to the
   problems you and others are facing.
   Your wisdom, then, ebbs and flows
   just as your emotions do. Let's face
   it, you're just not able to access and
   integrate all the knowledge and experience
   you've gained over the years.
   Think back to when you've made
   your most unwise choices, and odds
   are you'll uncover images of yourself
   during particularly strained
   times--stressed beyond your limits,
   overwhelmed, in pain, wholly alone,
   or otherwise adrift from the moorings
   of your most-cherished values. By
   opening the doors of perception, positive
   emotions provide you with the
   much-needed space to recognize disparate
   points of view and weigh your
   various options for action. (p. 82)

St. Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits and the author of the Spiritual Excercises, made similar recommendations to those whom he gave spiritual direction. He advised them to make decisions and changes out of a spirit of consolation, rather than desolation. Consolation is an uplifted, joyful, and happy spirit. Desolation is a feeling of downheartedness, fear, and anxiety. When enveloped in a spirit of desolation, Ignatius recommended not making any significant life-decision or major change (Ignatius, 1964). By contrast, we make wiser decisions out of a spirit of consolation. So, the emphasis on emotion and feelings found in contemporary positive psychology (as well as Aristotle and Aquinas) makes sense even from an ethical point of view that emphasizes duty.

Aquinas and Aristotle differ from Seligman in their view that the pleasure of positive emotions is not, without qualification, in every case good. The pleasure of positive emotions is good, on their view, if and only if it arises from a good cause, but pleasure can be evil if it arises from an evil activity. Pruss (2013, pp. 115-127) imagines the case of someone who delights in the painful death of children in a cancer ward. Surely, having pleasant emotions because of these deaths is not a pleasure that is good. Similarly, he imagines a person living in a delusion that he is the greatest scientist of all time. His wealthy parents have hired a team of actors who serve to guide him into "discoveries" that have really been made centuries before. He feels exhilaration, but again his good feelings are derived from delusions of grandeur. Such a person's situation is not choiceworthy. Both the virtuous person and the vicious person experience pleasant emotions, but the virtuous person derives pleasure from virtuous activity while the vicious person derives pleasure from vicious activity. Delight over evil moves a person farther away from true happiness by serving as an incentive for further wrongdoing.

Positive psychology adds dimensions to the discussion of emotion that were unknown to Aristotle and Aquinas. For example, researchers found that exercise is a reliable way to increase positive emotion. Positive psychology has investigated practices that characteristically generate positive emotion such as practicing gratitude. Positive psychology has also recommended practices that mitigate negative emotions, such as forgiveness.

Engagement

Aristotle and Aquinas would recognize, I think, the idea of flow as what they called, 'activity in accordance with virtue.' Like flow, this activity must be challenging (neither too difficult nor too easy). But unlike flow, activity in accordance with virtue is not 'morally' neutral on their view. You can have flow in doing evil activities, like scientists using their signature strengths to build weapons of mass destruction for a terrorist group. By contrast, for Aristotle and Aquinas, there is no activity in accordance with virtue for someone engaging in evil activities.

Relationships

Aristotle, Aquinas, and Seligman find common ground in an emphasis on the importance of good relationships and friendship for flourishing. Aristotle thought that a person could not be truly happy without friends. For Aquinas, as mentioned, true happiness requires love, love of God and love of neighbor. Seligman (2011) holds that, "the pursuit of relationships is a rock-bottom fundamental of human well-being" (p. 21). But even though they all recognize the importance of good relationships for happiness, there are important differences in how each approaches the subject.

Aristotle and Aquinas emphasized that the moral character of these friends matters for happiness. Mere friendships of utility or pleasure tend to be transitory, and therefore do not characteristically contribute to long term flourishing as do friends of virtue. In positive psychology, by contrast, I've discovered no emphasis on the moral character of friends.

Aquinas, unlike Aristotle but like Positive Psychology, places a special emphasis on marital friendship as a source of happiness.

The greater a friendship is, the more solid and long lasting will it be. Now there seems to be the greatestbetween husband and wife, for they are united not only in the act of fleshly union, which produces a certain gentle association even among beasts, but also in the partnership of the whole range of domestic activity. (Aquinas, 1975, p. 148)

Aquinas also, here departing from both Aristotle and positive psychologists such as Seligman, places the highest emphasis on the friendship that can exist between God and a human being. Ultimately, nothing is more important than this friendship, both because our eternal happiness is determined by it and because friendship with God influences how we view and treat other people. On his view, love for God cannot exist without love also for the image of God that is found in every single human being (Aquinas, 1975, pp. 127-128).

But what exactly is love? Fredrickson (2013) emphasizes the biological and emotional aspects of love. She defines love as "the momentary upwelling of three tightly interwoven events: first, a sharing of one or more positive emotions between you and another; second, a synchrony between your and the other person's biochemistry and behaviors; and third, a reflected motive to invest in each other's well being that brings mutual care" (p. 17). On this understanding of love, love between God and human beings is impossible at least if God is understood as an absolutely perfect, unchanging, spiritual being. At least on Aquinas' understanding of God, God does not have emotions, biochemistry, or well-being that can be aided by human care. On the Thomistic account, God is absolutely unchanging and perfect, and so cannot be made worse off or better off in any respect. God does not have a body and therefore does not have biochemical bodily reactions. Finally, since emotions are certain changes involving the body, since God does not change and does not have a body, God does not have emotions. So, on Aquinas's understanding, Scripture is speaking metaphorically in saying that God becomes angry (1 Kings 11:9). Such passages point to the reality that what can change is not God but the relationship of human beings (who do change) to God. Much as the sun is consistently hot, but feels wonderful or searing depending on the condition of the human being in question, so too God is consistently who God is but is experienced by just and unjust human beings in different ways. Fredrickson's view of love may work well for describing the love that exists between human beings. But this understanding of love will not properly capture the love between human beings and God.

On the other hand, if love is defined as involving good will, appreciation, and desire for unity (Pruss, 2013), (1) a human being can share love with God. A human being can be united in good will with God, a human being can appreciate God, and a human being can desire unity with God. God's unchanging perfection does not exclude any of these three elements. Indeed, for Aquinas, the most important of all loves is the love of God. Without love for God, a person is missing out on the most important relationship of all. Every human relationship has its weaknesses because every human being has his or her weaknesses. As human beings, we desire perfect goodness, perfect truth, perfect beauty, and perfect love which is why even the best of human relationships do not perfectly satisfy our restless hearts.

Finally, positive psychology adds many dimensions to a discussion of friendship and relationships that are unseen in Aristotle or Aquinas, in providing evidence about what practices help and hinder relationships. For example, psychologists found friendships are deepened through what is called active positive responding (see Stanley, Blumberg, & Markman, 2001). When a friend tells you good news, how do you react? Positive active responding involves acknowledging the good news, helping your friend relive the fun of finding out the good news, and celebrating the good news. By contrast, friendship is dulled when good news is received indifferently or worse still when someone seeks to find the down side of the good news, "Have you thought about how much tax you'll have to pay, now that you've got your big raise?"

Meaning

For Seligman, meaning, which he understands as participating in and making a contribution to something bigger than oneself, is part of human flourishing. Some people might understand meaning in a purely subjective manner. What is meaningful to you, may not be meaningful to me. And, in a sense, this is true. I care passionately about Notre Dame football, and you may care passionately about who is appointed head of your local PTA. But in the sense in which Seligman uses the term, it is not true that what is meaningful or significant is purely subjective. He appealed to Lincoln and Churchill who in their depressive episode may have felt their lives were meaningless, but whose lives we rightly judge as immensely meaningful. Indeed, one difference between a mature and sane person and an immature or insane person is what they take to matter. Whether a person has an odd or even number of eyelashes does not matter, and so is not meaningful (Pruss, 2013). (1) Someone who made it the primary goal in life to find out whether other people have an odd or even number of eyelashes is insane.

Although many people attempt to find meaning through a materialistic lifestyle, both the philosophers of virtue and the positive psychologists agree that this meaning is not to be found in the accumulation of wealth and possessions. On the view of Aristotle and Aquinas, wealth is not the ultimate end constituting happiness because we want wealth as a means to purchase other things. Positive psychologist Emmons (2007) weighs in with contemporary research that supports ancient wisdom.

   A materialistic life style is one based
   on accumulation and acquisition of
   consumer goods beyond that which
   is necessary to meet basic needs.
   ... research demonstrates that aspiring
   toward greater wealth and more
   material possessions undermines the
   ability to be content. ... A number
   of recent studies have found that
   materialism can put people in an
   emotional debt in that the greater
   they place a value on materialistic
   pursuits, the more at risk they are
   for depression and other distressing
   emotional states including envy and
   hostility. (p. 88)

Accumulation of cash and material possessions does not satisfy the desires of the human heart for meaning.

What makes something truly meaningful? Meaning, for Seligman, involves participating in and making a contribution to something bigger than oneself. Craig (2008) sees the question of ultimate meaning as tied to the question of God's existence. A person can live as a great hero, saving many people from pain, ignorance, and death. But ultimately he will cease to exist and all those whom he helped will cease to exist. What he did makes no lasting difference. On the other hand, a person might be tyrannical, killing people, harming people, making the world much worse off. But in the end, this person too will die and all those who were made worse off end up in non-existence. Ultimately, all human beings, indeed all life, on earth will be dead. Without God and immorality, there is no lasting meaning possible.

In keeping with its empirical orientation, positive psychology is neutral with respect to theistic belief. Laboratory tests cannot prove or disprove God's existence. But, if Craig is right, the emphasis in positive psychology on meaning objectively understood seems to implicitly point to the question of God's existence as an essential for ultimate meaning, and hence to human happiness.

Accomplishment/Achievement

Accomplishment comes into two varieties: non-comparative accomplishment and comparative accomplishment. Non-comparative accomplishment is about achieving some goal, the achievement of which is independent of social comparison with others. Examples include, running as fast as you can for three miles, learning to speak German, and writing an excellent short story. Comparative accomplishments, by contrast, are always embedded in some kind of social ranking with others. These include winning a three-mile race, speaking German better than anyone else in German class, and being awarded the short story prize in the magazine competition.

Non-comparative accomplishment is a necessary part of flourishing, imparting a sense of agency and control to the person who is able to bring about the accomplishment. Comparative accomplishment can also bring about a similar sense of agency and control.

However, positive psychology and the virtue tradition coincide in a view that cautions about comparative accomplishment. Positive psychology provides powerful evidence that the pursuit of happiness via upward social comparison with others is likely to end in disappointment. Many people believe that happiness will be found in being better than others in some competition. If only they had more money, more popularity, more fame, or more power than whomever they are comparing themselves with, then they would be happy.

However, success, understood in terms of social comparison with others, tends not last long. Once we achieve a particular goal, and become a "winner" at any particular level, we quickly adjust and come to believe new goals will bring deliver happiness. For example, Lyumbomirsky (2013, p. 166) cites an experience provided by Ben-Shahar (2007) who reported that his sense of accomplishment and happiness lasted about three hours becoming his country's youngest national squash tournament champion. Even those who succeed in being the very best in terms of social comparison do not find lasting happiness in their success, for they may end up in a negative comparison with themselves. "[After Thriller the best-selling album of all time, Michael Jackson declared that he would not be satisfied unless his next album sold twice as many copies. In fact, it sold 70 percent fewer. Most musicians would be thrilled with sales of thirty million, but for Jackson the contrast with his earlier success was stinging" (Lyumbomirsky, 2013, p. 120). The arrival fallacy describes the phenomena that once people achieve their goals, the happiness that they thought would arrive and last proves surprisingly fleeting (Ben-Shahar, 2007, p. 25). Like the horizon that always eludes our grasp, the achievement of one goal reveals another yet goal.

Many scholars have investigated the relationship between money and happiness. They found that increases in money do significantly increase happiness, but only if one does not have sufficient material goods for basic living. The person who does not eat three meals a day, or sleep in a bed, or wear warm clothes is made significantly more happy by the acquisition of these necessities. However, once basic needs are met, researchers found no increase in reported happiness. Myers (1993) points out that although the average American has become much more wealthy, living in bigger houses, owning more cars and televisions, and having greater disposable income than ever before, the average American is no more happy than 50 years ago. After the initial shock wears off, lottery winners report no greater levels of happiness than they had before winning. Fortune 500 CEOs are no more happy, and often are less happy, than average people. Almost everyone says that they need ten to fifteen percent more money to be "comfortable." Once, after getting a 40% raise, I felt quite wealthy for the first few months, but then it was business as usual--feeling like more money was needed. As people become more wealthy, they adjust to the new level of affluence, and believe they need even more money to be comfortable. For those whose ears are deaf to the Gospel's warnings against greed, the findings of positive psychology point to a natural moral theology.

Although Aristotle does not use the term social comparison, his account of the magnanimity of the "great souled man" concerned with great honors suggests, arguably, someone who is quite concerned about his role in the pecking order and whose happiness consists, at least in part, in being exalted above others. An excessive concern with one's own greatness can be described as pride.

For Aquinas, by contrast, the virtue of humility--unknown to Aristotle--plays an important role in happiness. Although Aquinas does not view magnanimity and humility, both properly understood, as opposed (Kaczor & Sherman 2009, pp. 403-407), Aquinas' greater emphasis is on humility. Humility recognizes God as the author of whatever excellence we have which tempers exaggerated self-exaltation with gratitude and helps us recall the reality of our weakness and imperfections. A humble person is a grounded person, in reality, rather than excessively concerned with social comparison.

The concern expressed by positive psychologists about social comparison finds an echo in the last of the Ten Commandments, "Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's goods." I never really understood this commandment until I studied positive psychology. I thought, "What does it matter if I wish to have what my neighbor has? Who does that harm?" It turns out that it harms the one engaged in the social comparison. For to covet our neighbors goods, we must first compare ourselves to our neighbor's material goods and find we do not measure up.

The materialistic orientation of our culture insists that happiness is just a purchase away. Emmons (2007) notes:

   As any advertiser knows, material
   strivings are fueled by upward social
   comparisons that promote feelings of
   deprivation and discontentment. By
   focusing on blessings one is grateful
   for, attention can be directed away
   from making comparisons with others
   who have more. A number of studies
   have shown that upward social
   comparisons lead to less positive
   affect and more unpleasant feelings
   such as depression and resentment.
   When an individual is grateful for
   how green her own lawn is, she is
   not likely to be looking at the greener
   grass on the other side of the fence.
   I should note that the converse likely
   holds as well: if a person's attention
   is consistently devoted to things they
   do not have, they will be unlikely to
   focus on appreciating the blessings
   they do have. (p. 42)

In this too, the positive psychologists and teachings of Jesus find a resonance. Jesus urged his followers cast aside excessive concern about their material well-being, "I tell you, do not worry about your life and what you will eat, or about your body and what you will wear" (Luke 12:22).

Does Science Alone Provide the Truth About Human Happiness?

Perhaps the biggest divergence between positive psychology and the virtue philosophers is the limitation of positive psychology to what can be empirically verified. Each aspect of Seligman's PERMA is capable of measurement and quantification. By contrast, Aristotle and Thomas include aspects that either are not, or even cannot, be empirically verified. For Aristotle, the best kind of friendship is a friendship of virtue, understood as an excellence with ethical dimensions. But empirical studies can in principle only determine what is the case, not what ought to be the case. Since what we ought to do cannot be empirically determined, it cannot be empirically measured. Ethical judgment can and should be empirically informed, but ethical judgment is never simply a matter of scientifically proven facts. For Aquinas also, his account of a fully flourishing human life includes elements that are not subject to scientific verification. For example, the workings of grace are a necessary part of his understanding of a flourishing human life. But, of course, grace cannot be measured, weighed, or empirically verified (even though perceptions of grace can be measured). Should such non-empirical characteristics discredit the views of Aristotle and Aquinas?

It is said that a sign hung in Albert Einstein's office at Princeton University which read, "Not everything that can be counted counts; not everything that counts can be counted." Although some people wish to limit authentic insight to what can be verified empirically, this view is self-defeating. We cannot empirically verify the claim that we should only believe what can be empirically verified. Science does not establish that we should only accept science. The philosophy that whatever cannot be established through laboratory testing is self-defeating because it is a philosophy that itself cannot be established through laboratory testing. Someone may find good grounds for rejecting Aristotle's or Thomas's account, but the non-empirical nature of their accounts is not such a ground.

There is, of course, no opposition between making use of modern medicine and practicing the Christian faith. Likewise, although there are elements of tension, I've found that positive psychology, like modern medicine, can be used to greatly enhance human well being, without jeopardizing faith. Yet, as Vitz (1995) points out, some people would take a step further and conceive of psychology as a replacement for faith. If positive psychology is so wonderful, should I simply give up Christianity and embrace positive psychology as its modern replacement?

Psychology, including positive psychology, cannot replace Christian belief and practice for several reasons. First, psychology cannot adequately satisfy the human desire for truth. Positive psychology makes use of the empirical method which cannot--in principle--answer questions of ethics, the meaning of life, and ultimate truth. The human drive to ask and answer the ultimate questions is a sign of the human disposition for a relationship with the ultimate Truth, God. Something more than positive psychology is needed to satisfy this desire to know that which goes beyond the empirically verifiable. Positive psychology will never be able to ultimately satisfy the distinctly spiritual cravings of human beings. Due to its empirical orientation, positive psychology cannot supplant the role of religion, and yet can be a support of Christian belief about how to live and aid in Christian practice.

Second, while psychological practices can help relieve a distorted guilt, it cannot relieve reasonable guilt. The objective guilt of sin requires not just a calming of subjective feelings of guilt but a removal of the objective offense. No psychologist can forgive sins; this requires the work of Jesus Christ. This is essential if our happiness is to be found in love of God. Sin creates disunion between the sinner and God. If God is the source of happiness, so long as this disunion remains, happiness is impeded.

Finally, our happiness is primarily to be found in love--love of God and love of neighbor. But love requires knowledge; and without deep knowledge, our love will be shallow. We need God's revelation to enhance our love, for a purely human approach to understanding God will lead to partial and fragmentary understandings at best. Although powerful as an aid to living faith, positive psychology is not a substitute for faith.

Practical Implications

The division of flourishing into positive emotion, engagement, relationship, meaning, and achievement can facilitate being more precise about what could be augmented in a person's life. Spiritual directors and therapists can help those they are directing or counseling to consider how each element might be improved. The vision of happiness provided by Seligman also provides some material for Christian apologetics and for pastors. It is not just a matter of revelation but also something that is empirical proven in positive psychology that financial well-being (once we are past the poverty level) does not necessarily bring about happiness. Such insights show the reasonability of Christian beliefs about money (as merely a means and not the ultimate end of life). These insights also can help pastors to motivate others to place their highest concern on love of God and neighbor rather than on the acquisition of material goods.

Christopher Kaczor

Princeton University/Loyola Marymount University

Notes

(1) On the difference between something mattering and something not mattering, see Pruss (2013), chapter 4.

References

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Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Christopher Kaczor, Department of Philosophy, Loyola Marymount University, 1 LMU Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90045; ckaczor@lmu.edu

Christopher Kaczor (Ph.D. in medieval philosophy, University of Notre Dame) is William E. Simon Visiting Fellow in Religion and Public Life at the James Madison Program at Princeton University and Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University. He has authored several books including, The Gospel of Happiness: Rediscover Your Faith Through Spiritual Practice and Positive Psychology. Dr. Kaczor's interests include bioethics, positive psychology, Thomas Aquinas, and natural law ethics.