Love and happiness

Could perfect happiness consist of perfect love?

Here’s a line of argument that it couldn’t. Constitutively central to love are the desire for the beloved’s good and for union with the beloved. A love is no less perfect when its constitutive desires are unfulfilled. But perfect happiness surely cannot be even partly constituted by unfulfilled desires. If perfect happiness consistent of perfect love, then one could have a perfect happiness constituted at least partly by unfulfilled desires.

When this argument first occurred to me a couple of hours ago, I thought it settled the question. But it doesn’t quite. For there is a special case where a perfect love’s constitutive desires are always fulfilled, namely when the object of the love is necessarily in a perfectly good state, so that the desire for the beloved’s good is necessarily fulfilled, and when the union proper to the love is of such a sort that it exists whenever the love does. Both of these conditions might be thought to be satisfied when the object of love is God. Certainly, a desire for God’s good is always fulfilled. Moreover, although perfect love is compatible with imperfect union in the case of finite objects of love, perfect love of God may itself be a perfect union with God. If so, then our happiness could consist in perfect love for God.

I am not sure the response to the argument works but I am also not sure it doesn’t work. But at least, I think, my initial argument does establish this thesis:

• If perfect happiness consists of perfect love, it consists of perfect love for God.

Of course none of the above poses any difficulty for someone who thinks that perfect happiness consists of fulfilled perfect love.

Aliens in the heavenly Jerusalem?

If Christianity is correct, there is at least a moderate probability that there are embodied intelligent persons other than humans. If so, will some of them be in the heavenly Jerusalem, too, available for us to interact with? I think that the value of unity between creatures gives a plausible affirmative argument. Over a finite amount of time, it might make sense that different intelligent species be sequestered, as inter-species communication has many difficulties. But given an infinite amount of time, it seems plausible that such contact would be appropriate. The heavenly choir, thus, may well include an intelligent gas cloud (not literally a gas cloud: a being of body and soul, whose body is composed of a gas cloud) slowly changing colors in a meaningful way, and chatting with St Thomas about divine simplicity.

Of course all such possibilities for wonder pale beside the simple wonder of union with God.

Happiness, friendship and eternity

When one is not tired of a friend, the expected approaching loss of union with the friend makes one miserable. To be tired of a friend would not be compatible with full human happiness, and neither would it be compatible with full human happiness to have no friends. Full human happiness is grounded in truth—it is not full happiness when one's delight depends on ignorance. Therefore, when one is not tired of a friend, an approaching loss of union with the friend one is not tired of is not compatible with full human happiness, whether the loss is expected or not. But neither is it compatible with full human happiness to be tired of friends or lack them. Thus, in full human happiness, one never approaches the loss of union with a friend. But if one were to cease existing, one would thereby lose all union with one's friends.

It follows that full human happiness requires unending life with at least one friend. Moreover, it requires a well-grounded security in this unending life (this point I learned from Todd Buras).

We can conclude from this that naturalism is false if we add the premises:

1. People have a natural desire for full human happiness.
2. What people have a natural desire for is possible.
3. If naturalism is true, then it is not possible to have well-grounded security in unending life.

One might think this argument can be simplified by arguing that if naturalism is true, unending life is impossible. But if the universe goes on expanding forever and quantum indeterminism holds, unending life is not impossible, just highly improbable (it gets less and less probable as the universe gets colder and colder). But such an unending life is insecure because of the improbability of its continuation.

It is not good for a man to be alone

Christ is in heaven, with a glorified body. Glorification does not destroy what is essentially human. A glorified body, thus, has a mouth, eyes, ears, and all that. There is more to it than that. But what normal human beings have, Christ has in heaven. But there would be something unnatural, something lacking in the glorification, if Christ had a mouth and ears, but there was no fellow human being there for him to talk to. Our bodies exist in large part for interaction with others (that our bodies are signs of our being-for-others is a central insight of John Paul II's theology of the body). A single embodied human being just does not make all that much sense.

But if there is a fellow human being in heaven for Christ to be in human communion with, then who is this fellow human being? It is right and proper to confer honor upon our parents. Thus, his mother is a very plausible candidate. There would be something unfitting about his conferring that honor on someone other than his mother, and not on his mother, given the commandment of filial devotion, unless his mother were not a disciple of his—which, the Christian tradition insists, she was. (Indeed, I think it is right to read the New Testament as presenting her as the paradigmatic disciple.)

Objection 1: This argument proves too much. For a glorified body also includes reproductive organs, and so a parallel argument would show that to live a full, glorified human life requires reproduction.

Response: Probably, reproduction is only a natural function of a human being for a limited portion of the human being's life. Moreover, there is a way in which we can transcend the physically reproductive life through spiritual reproduction—through devoting our lives in celibacy to spreading the Gospel. But some form of bodily interaction with other human beings—whether through talking or hugging or just looking in another's eyes—seems essential to a naturally fulfilling human life at just about all its mature (and maybe even immature) stages.

Objection 2: The need for bodily communion is satisfied through Christ's giving of himself to us bodily in the Eucharist.

Response: Christ's giving of himself to us in the Eucharist does not seem to make use of any of the natural faculties of his glorified body. There is a kind of natural bodily communion with others that is called for.

Objection 3: Mary survived at least some time past Christ's ascension into heaven. So if Mary is the only one assumed into heaven, for a while Christ was bodily alone in heaven, only surrounded spiritually by the souls of those he brought out of Sheol.

Response: Maybe then we have to say that more people were assumed bodily into heaven. Moses and Elijah are good candidates on Scriptural grounds. But the argument that it would unfitting for Mary not to be assumed as well if anybody is, given the special honor to be paid to parents, still remains. Or, maybe, we should say that there is nothing deeply unnatural in a human being's being alone for a while, even for a couple of years. But to be alone for a significantly greater amount of time would be unnatural.

Objection 4: Maybe time runs at a different rate in heaven, and it'll only be five minutes of heavenly time between Christ's ascension into heaven and the Last Judgment.

Response: Could be. I think such a difference in the rate of time, though, weakens the way in which Christ is in human communion with us. But I acknowledge that the different-rate hypothesis is a viable one, and hence weakens the argument.

Fittingness arguments, like the one I offer, are not meant to be conclusive. But they do increase the probability of the claim. Or, at least, the argument could help explain why it is that the doctrine of Mary's assumption is not something weird, unexpected and ad hoc, if the doctrine actually can be seen as helping to solve a genuine problem, the problem of Christ's bodily aloneness.

Eternal happiness and finitude

Let us think what full happiness would be like. This isn't just partial happiness, but it is a happy state involving nothing unfortunate for one, nothing unhappy. Full happiness need not be maximal happiness. It is prima facie coherent that one might be fully happy at t₁, but happier yet at t₂, though the lesser amount of happiness at t₁ would not have to involve any kind of unhappiness at the fact that it is not yet t₂.

Full happiness has both mental and extra-mental components. To be fully happy requires a certain level of awareness of the events that make one be happy. No one in a coma is fully happy. But purely subjective states are insufficient. Being loved by others is surely a part of full happiness, but thinking and feeling that one is loved by others is not enough. The falsehood in thinking and feeling one is loved by others when in fact they despise one is clearly something unfortunate for one. Both the subjective component and the objective are essential to full happiness.

Next, for the sake of the argument, let me assume that there is a finite number N such that there are at most N subjectively different conscious states that are possible to one of us. At this point, I want this assumption to be ambiguous between different senses of "possible" (practical, nomic, physical, causal, metaphysical, logical, etc.) For instance, it seems plausible that there is such a number if mental states supervene on brain states and there is a limit on the possible size of the brain of one of us (maybe brains just couldn't function—or at least couldn't function as our brains—if they were more than a light year across), since although an analog system like the brain possibly is can have an infinite number of states, states that are too close together would not be subjectively distinguishable.

Now, it seems to me that a part of the concept of being fully happy is that the state of being fully happy forever is desirable. Let us take that assumption.

I will individuate mental state types in terms of subjective difference (feeling hot and smelling wintergreen are subjectively different, but smelling synthetic wintergreen and smelling natural wintergreen need not be subjectively different).[note 1]

The following seems plausible: Every qualitatively normal human state—i.e., every state of the same qualitative type as our normal, everyday human states—is such that to be in that state forever would be somewhat unfortunate. When we find ourselves feeling really happy, we wish that the moment could go on forever. But in fact, in the case of normal human states, this would be unfortunate. The wish of the lovers to sit on the bench watching the autumn foliage forever might be romantic, but if a fairy froze the lovers in that subjective state for eternity, we would see the spectacle as deeply sad. We might see it as preferable to many other states, but it would not be a fully happy state.

Neither would it be a fully happy state for a person to oscillate, with or without a repeating pattern, between a finite number of normal mental states. Granted, if the person in the state may be unaware that she has already experienced the blissful state 10¹00 times, she may not feel any ennui in having the state for the (10¹00+1)st time. But remember that happiness involves not just a subjective state, but an objective one. It may or may not be good to unaware of the infinite repetition of states, but such repetition is itself unfortunate.

But if there is only a finite number of normal mental states (distinguished subjectively) possible to us, then anybody who experiences only normal mental states will either cease having mental states (due to death or coma) or will eternally oscillate (with or without a repeating pattern) between a finite number of states. Since it is unfortunate if happiness is not to last forever, the person who would cease to have mental states was not fully happy (whether or not she was aware of the impending end of consciousness). And the person eternally oscillating between a finite number of states is also undergoing something unfortunate.

Consequently, assuming what has been assumed above, such as that there is a finite upper bound on the number of mental states possible to us, it follows that full happiness is impossible to us if we are limited to normal human states. The sense of "impossible" here matches the sense of "impossible" in the claim that it is impossible for us to have more than N subjectively different mental states.

From the above, an argument could be constructed that our full happiness would require either a supernatural mental state (such as the vision of God) or our going through an infinite number of different mental states (e.g., due to unbounded growth in knowledge).

In either case, the following seems interestingly true: Full happiness is impossible as long as naturalism is true. This might yield a desire-based argument against naturalism if we add the theses that any rational desire is possible to fulfill, that the desire for full happiness is rational, and that if naturalism is true, then it is impossible for naturalism to cease to be true. This requires some kind of a physical causal or nomic sense of "possible".

The above is just a sketch. Working it out would require carefully examining the different modalities and trying to find one in respect of which all of the premises of the argument are plausible. Something like nomic modality might do the trick. But this is all left as an exercise to the reader.