The Christian Novelty: What are fulfillment and happiness?
- Guest Contributor
- 1 hour ago
- 4 min read
By Father José Noriega, D.C.J.M.
St. John Vianney Seminary, Denver
The Christian novelty was like a spark that kindled a new fire, with a radiance and a warmth never before seen. To the great question of the human heart — what is the happy life, and how is it attained? — Christianity offered an answer that astonished both the Jewish and Greek worlds. The Jews saw a happy life as one in covenant with God, and that the path was the commandments. The Stoics answered that the happy life was life according to reason, and that the path was the mastery which reason must exercise over every dimension of life, including the passions. The Aristotelians proposed that the happy life was the contemplation of truth, and that the path to it was the virtuous life.
Great ideals, but how is this to be lived, if our strength is merely human, and therefore limited and fragile?
Christianity re-centered the perspective. The first words with which the Lord began his public life resounded like thunder beneath a clear sky: “Blessed, happy, are… for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Those called blessed and happy were not the loyal of Judaism, nor the heroes of Stoicism, nor the virtuous of the Academy — supermen of law and virtues — but the poor, the meek, those who mourn and those who hunger. The contrast was unmistakable. A happy life is not the fruit of our effort, but a gift of God. Blessed is the one who receives, in wonder, the love of God. The covenant now takes concrete form in friendship with Christ. And the commandments will always be a response to his love. To live according to reason now becomes to living according to love received. Mastery of the passions is transformed into living the love of neighbor within them. Contemplation of the truth becomes contemplation of the Truth of God’s love. And the virtuous life becomes the unfolding of the love that has been given.
Christianity gave precedence to love before the commandments, reason and the virtuous life. It did not deny their role; rather, it restored them to their proper place as responses to a love first received. Love thus cast a new light on what the happy life is and how it is to be lived. It meant allowing oneself to be loved by God and allowing his love to bear fruit within us. St. Paul experienced this with profound astonishment: “He loved me and gave himself up for me” (Galatians 2:20). Here lay the source of his new life and his overflowing activity: from his journey to Damascus onward, he could conceive his life only as a response to this love.
Centuries later, St. Augustine experienced something similar to St. Paul. He was surprised by grace. And in grace, he found the strength to live the Beatitudes. A contemporary of his, a monk of stern temperament named Pelagius, saw the source not in grace but in the very powers God gave us in creating us. Augustine confronted him: “Why do you show me the ideal and not that which enables me to live it?” Without the love of God, no ideal is possible. Thus, he affirmed the primacy of grace and love for the centuries to come. Even the virtues would be nothing other than the strategies of love, its concrete expressions in the various dimensions of life.
St. Thomas Aquinas expressed this with wisdom when he placed charity (love of God) as the mother in whom the virtues are conceived, and as the form by which its greatness is impressed upon our affections. For, in receiving the love of God through the Holy Spirit, that divine love regenerates our hearts and grants us a new light upon the greatness of our life, and new strength to live it. The happy life is now to live in friendship with God, to become like him, to be transformed in Christ. The love of God precedes and generates our reason and our virtues; it illumines them from within and shapes them as true human excellences. And this is not given as an ideal to be attained, but as an initial gift from God that conforms our freedom and our reason, making them capable of flourishing.
Today, we face new challenges. What is a happy life now? A life of professional success? A life guided by feelings? A life of sheer determination? Only this?
In this landscape, the novelty of Christianity continues to shine with new light. The happy life lies in bringing to fulfillment what God has begun in us, in allowing the love we have received to blossom, making our freedom, our affections and our reason capable of an excellent and unified love. Then we shall be able to create actions that enable us to flourish as children of God and as brothers and sisters among ourselves, building a human society in which God is present.
