Abstract

I argue that, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, God--and not one's own happiness through union with God--is the ultimate end of the moral life strictly speaking. Although He is the source of happiness, God Himself, and not the happiness of knowing Him, is the center of the virtuous agent's life. Thus Aquinas, while incorporating all of the strengths of a virtue ethical framework, is not a eudaimonist in the normal sense, and is thus immune to any self-centeredness objections. I set the stage by contrasting two of Aquinas' explicit and repeated theses. First, he maintains that happiness, strictly speaking, consists in an act of knowledge (the knowledge of God) inhering in the human intellect, rather than in any act of the will. Secondly, he maintains that loving God, an act of the will, is better than knowing Him. This indicates that loving God is better than happiness. By analyzing Aquinas' distinction between the love of friendship and the love of concupiscence, and his distinction between end in the sense of object and end in the sense of attainment, I show that he holds that loving God is better than knowing Him not because the activity of loving God is the ultimate end of the moral life, but because God Himself is the ultimate end of the moral life. Thus man's ultimate end is neither himself nor any condition that He can enter into, but rather a being separate from himself.