The meaning of life is happiness, and true happiness - "Beautitude" or εὐδαιμονία (Blessedness) - is found only in unity with the Communion of Saints gazing upon the Beatific vision of God and rejoicing in their union with Him. This happiness is found as a foretaste on earth in the Eucharist, and our pathway to it is in the "Beatitudes" preached on the sermon on the mount - blessed are they who followed Christ to the end, and blessed are we who have Communion with them in Christ!
Five centuries before Christ, the pagan philosopher Aristotle grappled with a serious question: what is the meaning of life? In what would become his Nicomachean Ethics, he pointed out that human beings never do anything needless – whatever we do it always has an end or a purpose. He also noticed that, very often, those ends or purposes served some higher purpose. And that those higher purposes served a purpose even higher still. In his classic example; the purpose of leatherworking was saddle-making, the purpose of saddle-making was horsemanship, the purpose of horsemanship was warfare, and the purpose of warfare was statecraft. This being the case, he posited that above them all there must be a highest end, the architectonic or final end of all human activity – the meaning of life. Once you know what the end of something is, it’s ultimate purpose, it’s meaning, you can tell whether it’s good at it or not. It’s excellence; the purpose of the knife is to cut, therefore its excellence is in its sharpness and durability. Find the purpose of human life, and you can find its excellence as well.
What is our purpose? Aristotle says if you asked the hoi polloi, the man on the street, what the purpose of his life was you would get one of four answers; pleasure, wealth, power, and honour. One by one he rubbished them.
Man is an intelligent creature, but pure pleasure is what the brute beasts want. Physical pleasure alone is beneath our powers of intellect and would render them obsolete.
Wealth and power we only ever want so that we can use them for other purposes; wealth to buy things and power to do things, but neither of them can be the end in themselves.
Honour can only be given to us by someone else, and can just as easily be taken away by them. Socrates was honoured by many, until he wasn’t, and then he was put to death. Something given to us by another can’t be our final purpose, otherwise it would be too precarious.
What then, if the hoi polloi are wrong, is the meaning of life? It has to be something we want only for it’s own sake and not for the sake of something else, something which engages our powers of intellect, and something which we can obtain without being given it by another. Aristotle found only one thing that met all of these criteria; happiness. In fact the word he uses is eudaimonia, blessedness, a perfect kind of happiness. Happiness is the one thing we want for its own sake, everybody wants to be happy, and for no other reason than that happiness is good. Where Aristotle comes unstuck is his attempts to figure out what makes us happy.
Happiness, or blessedness, is elusive. Aristotle thought one could be happy simply by being virtuous – that is by cultivating virtues and becoming a “Good Man” – but here again he comes unstuck, virtue is doing what a good man does, and being a good man means being virtuous. The reasoning is circular, and he never quite gets across the finish line. He never quite gets humanity to its desired happiness.
Aristotle is one of the pre-Christian philosophers who, by the light of reason, gets to the edge of the Gospel: five hundred years before Christ he stood on the brink of understanding the true meaning of life.
This first day of November, this Solemnity of All Saints, begins a season where Christians too begin to ponder the meaning of our lives. Unlike Aristotle, though, we begin with the end already answered for us. St John writes;
When it is revealed we shall be like him because we shall see him as he really is.
The end, the happiness we are looking for is not found in this life and on this earth, but in the beatific vision, looking on God face to face and being like Him. Standing with that great multitude of the saints washed clean in the blood of the Lamb, singing our praises to Him.
We are reminded in this month of the four last things; death, judgement, heaven, and hell. We remind ourselves of the inevitability of our own deaths, and we remind ourselves of our purpose; our purpose is to be Saints, not just to look up to them as unapproachably good, or signs of an impossibly high calling, but to look up at them and want to be like them. To look up to those saints, drawn from every class, and sex, and nation, and find those saints who speak to our lives the most, and ask for their prayers and their help.
In the Gospel, Jesus gets us over the finish line, and tells us how to be saints; poverty in spirit, gentleness, hungering and thirsting for justice, mercy, purity of heart, making peace, being persecuted for the cause of right and for the name of Jesus. This is the roadmap to true and lasting happiness, and he says Happy, Blessed, are they who live and embody these virtues.
Today we look upwards, to the great pantheon of the saints arrayed in glory before the throne of God, and we see in them those who have run the race to the finish. We see in them our highest calling. And we celebrate with them, across time and space, this sacrifice of the Mass – which is the foretaste of heavenly joy, and the preparation for the blessedness of the Kingdom. As we celebrate on earth, they celebrate in Heaven – and we are united in the one body of Christ in which we all share.
Saints of God in glory, be with us, rejoices with us, sing praise with us, and pray for us now!
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