In his Confessions, St. Augustine makes the striking claim that happiness is most properly described as finding our “joy in the truth.”¹ This claim is difficult for contemporary readers to understand, because we tend to think of happiness in terms of pleasures or good moods, and it is challenging for us to imagine what distinctive pleasures, feelings, or moods we associate with searching for or possessing the truth. For instance, I currently hold in my mind many true propositions, such as: ‘It rained yesterday in Tulsa,’ ‘I am wearing jeans,’ and ‘Humans die.’ When I reflect on the first two, I feel nothing; contemplating the third, I feel an uneasy dread. And while we can acknowledge that there is a certain thrill of insight—the “aha” moment when we finally see the answer to a difficult problem or a great idea comes to us unbidden—we might be deeply skeptical that this is the best form of pleasure we can experience.

A further impediment to understanding Augustine’s meaning is the fact that the pursuit of truth can cause us great suffering. One of the most brilliant philosophers of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, was relentlessly devoted to the pursuit of philosophical wisdom—a goal worthy in itself—but no one who knows anything of Wittgenstein’s biography would say he was joyful in any sense readily available to contemporary discourse. Much of his life seemed to consist in the tortuous pursuit of the dissolution of philosophical puzzles—a deep wrestling with language and concepts that is admirable, but one that necessitated great sacrifices. Were the philosophical insights he experienced worth the price he paid for them? Wittgenstein himself insisted that “the joy of my thoughts is the joy of my own strange life.” On his deathbed, his final instruction to those present was to relate the following message to his friends: “Tell them I had a wonderful life.”²

Wittgenstein’s last words suggest that joy and suffering are not necessarily antithetical to each other, and that the deepest joys we can experience might even demand great suffering and sacrifice on our part. When we think of the sort of joy that Augustine had in mind in his famous formulation, we must move beyond our simple concepts of pleasure or good feelings. To make sense of the depth and complexity of his idea of happiness, we will need a richer moral psychology, one we find in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas’s discussion of joy allows us to understand it as a spiritual rest in a distinctively intellectual possession of the good.

Aquinas argues that love is manifest in all its forms as a tending out of ourselves towards the good, and joy is our experience of resting in the good according to the measure we have attained it. We enjoy a good because we are first drawn to it by love through desire, but the enjoyment is experienced in our resting in the good rather than in our yearning for it or our active pursuit of it. Furthermore, Aquinas recognizes different kinds of love that correspond to different forms of desire we experience. There is sense desire based on sensory experiences, as when I catch a whiff of bread baking and this immediately elicits a desire to consume the bread. The consumption is the enjoyment of the sensory good, and this is a recognizable form of bodily pleasure. But there is also rational desire or will—the sort of desire that is associated with choice and follows a judgment of reason that this good is to be pursued. When the will rests in its object, it is a deeper form of joy—a spiritual rather than material enjoyment, as the will is an essentially rational appetite, whereas sense desire can “listen to” reason (habituated over time so that it is aligned with reason) but is not itself rational.

Because an intellectual joy does not necessarily have a bodily manifestation or feeling, it can be experienced even in the absence of the material possession of the good. Aquinas mentions, for example, that a lover can rejoice in the goodness of the beloved even when she is absent from him materially—this joy is in the lover’s memory, imagination, and reflection, rather than in any kind of sensory experience. What one attends to in these cases is the good of the beloved, as this can be appreciated intellectually, or at a distant remove from the real presence of the person. In such a virtual or merely intellectual presence, we can savor and enjoy the good of the beloved in a way that grows our longing and affection for them. We can remember their beauty, we can contemplate their positive attributes, and we can appreciate their goodness in our lives. As the old adage says, “absence can make the heart grow fonder.” Sometimes this physical distance can help us better appreciate the good of the beloved than when they are readily available to us, and therefore readily taken for granted.

Aquinas claims that the deepest spiritual (most complete) joy is caused by charity, the virtue by which we love God above all things, and all things through our love of God.³ Joy, Aquinas argues, is the interior effect of charity, caused by the goodness of the presence of God in our lives. Charity is the cause of the deepest joy because God is the highest good. Therefore, the measure of the depth of joy is the measure of the good that causes it and the love that propels us towards it.

If we take this rich moral psychology in a somewhat more secular register, then we can make sense of the spiritual joy that Wittgenstein felt in his pursuit of philosophical wisdom, while also seeing that it is mixed with various pains and deprivations that he suffered for its sake. If philosophical wisdom was the highest good for Wittgenstein, the good around which he ordered his life as the place of his spiritual fulfillment, then it is rational that he sacrificed lower goods for its sake, and it makes intelligible the patterns of suffering that he endured and the sacrifices he made for the deeper joys that this wisdom brought him. Not all enjoyment is on a par, and we can willingly endure suffering for higher forms of enjoyment that we value the most, just as we can sacrifice lower goods for the sake of higher goods. We can accept that there is always an admixture of suffering and sorrow amidst our deepest and most meaningful joys. It is the goodness of the objects of our deepest longings that makes sense of the sufferings and sacrifices that we endure.

More generally, our life’s work typically involves suffering and sacrifice, but so do our friendships and the relationships that make our lives both deeply meaningful and joyful. A father must sacrifice and suffer for the sake of his children and his spouse, in ways big and small. He does this, presumably, because he understands his good as intimately bound up with the common good of his family, and he sees that these sacrifices are necessary for the full flowering of that good in which he participates. The sacrifices he makes for his family are perfectly intelligible in this larger practical context—he gives up certain goods that would benefit him as an individual for goods that he takes to be higher, as they contribute to the common good of the family in which he is an active participant. The higher joys of family, seem to him to be worth the price he pays for them. He too can rest in the knowledge that his family flourishes, knowing that it is his flourishing too.

I was recently speaking to a headmaster of a school who described his job as janitorial in nature. He said, “I clean up the messes here so our students can learn and thrive.” He describes his job as deeply rewarding, meaningful, and fulfilling, despite being “a daily slog that will probably put me in an early grave.” I was struck by his testimony, as this was a man who I knew had many other opportunities to make more money and take positions of greater prestige, but who didn’t want to be anywhere other than where he was, deep in the everyday muck of his school. It would be incorrect to say of this man that he endured his job so that he could find his joy elsewhere. He had found his joy in the school, and his daily suffering was for the sake of his knowledge that his students were thriving. This knowledge brought him deep joy.

I hope we are beginning to see our way to a sense of joy that can help us understand Augustine’s formulation of the happy life. In the midst of our daily struggles, which, if we are honest with ourselves, we know will never go away, we should remind ourselves where we find our deepest joy, and ask ourselves if we are struggling for it. Suffering and sacrifice are not good in themselves. The measure of their goodness comes from the object for which they are endured, and this good is where we find our joy. Joy, paradoxically, is a guide to our suffering. For just as the question of what is worth living for is the same as what is worth dying for, so the question of what is worth suffering for is the same as the question of what brings us joy and why.

Augustine believed that the deepest form of joy that humans could experience was “joy in the truth” understood as the possession of God in our mind and will. Regardless of whether we agree with this understanding, I hope these reflections help us take a fuller measure of his meaning. First, that joy follows upon love and desire, as its interior effect. Joy is experienced when we rest in the good we have been longing for—it describes our experience of fulfillment. Second, those spiritual joys that are more stable and enduring are the ones that should order our lives, rather than the fleeting pleasures of the body, or the unstable pleasures of power and fame. And finally, not only are suffering and sacrifice not incompatible with the joys of human flourishing, they are a natural and necessary part of such flourishing. A difficult life can be a wonderful life because the measure of the depth of our joys is the worth of the goods that we are living for; our choices are based in our knowledge that these goods are worth what we suffer and sacrifice for them. Augustine recognized that our spiritual capacities of intellect and will enable us to transcend our pain and suffering, not only to make sense of them rationally, but through the experience of the more spiritual joys that redeem them.