Philosophy, ideally, brings our rational inquiry to a proper level of cultivation that allows us to accept the revelation in the Gospels. Praeparatio evangelica is a doctrine of the early Church, which maintains that God, prior to the fullness of revelation in His Son, already cultivated the soil, as it were, for the Incarnation, by developing a philosophical culture that would be open to the revelation of Jesus Christ.[1]
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45 years before the birth of Christ, Cicero, a Roman orator, statesman, and philosopher, wrote a book called De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Good and Evil). The central question of this book is an exploration of the nature of the summum bonum, i.e. the highest good. The highest good is an ultimate value in life, a final telos beyond which there is no further aspiration, which organizes all standards of right conduct. What is right is what conduces to this ultimate end, and what is wrong undermines it. We do not use the highest good as a means to another end, but value it in itself.[2]
The idea of the highest good arises from the recognition that there must be something intrinsically valuable in life, and so not every good we seek is instrumentally valuable. If everything were only instrumentally valuable (as an instrument for the obtaining of another thing), there would be no motivation for our actions. An instrumental value derives its value only from what it can obtain, and so instrumental value without the existence of an intrinsic value is no value at all.
Our lives, moreover, do not consist in a patchwork of discrete goals, isolated from one another. It is not as though we move from good to good, with no higher unity connecting our various experiences. Eating lunch, reading a book, driving a car, and talking with a friend are all individual goods, but they also tend in a common direction. Underlying all these activities is an aspiration towards a state of complete flourishing and beatitude, i.e. happiness. We do not eat lunch just to eat lunch, or talk to a friend just to talk to a friend. If talking to a friend ceases to make us happy, we choose not to talk to a friend, just as we skip lunch if we don’t think it will conduce to our final perfection.
Aquinas would affirm these truths later. He rejected the idea that we can have several last ends, or ultimate values, in life. The ultimate value we seek is our crowning perfection, and it cannot be perfect if it is competing or subsidiary to something else. The beginning of a process is always oriented to its completion. Our actions may proximally orient themselves towards a particular good, but they ultimately aspire to a final perfection.[3]
Modern people in liberal societies like to think of their lives as an eclectic patchwork. They adopt different ends throughout life according to their individual whim. Life consists in a mix of different styles and choices. But Romans like Cicero recognized the structure of human motivation. No matter how much apparent diversity there is in our choices, we always are tending towards a final state of perfection—at least, what we perceive as our final perfection.
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Philosophical disagreement arises with respect to the precise nature of this final state. Cicero dealt with several philosophical schools current at his time who defended a particular account of happiness. The Epicureans, followers of Epicurus, believed that pleasure is the highest good. Epicurus thought he did not have to prove that pleasure is the highest good using argument. Pleasure is an immediate incentive, available even to infants, who gravitate to it naturally. Pleasure and pain are natural detection systems of what is good for us, and what is bad for us, respectively.[4]
The Stoics, on the contrary, maintained that moral worth is the highest good. Moral worth, grounded in a virtuous character, is sufficient for happiness, even if one lacks pleasure. The virtuous Stoic lives in harmony with Nature, which embodies a kind of rational structure of the cosmos, a Logos. The Stoic accepts the natural course of events with resignation, and rejects desires that are contrary to Logos.[5] The Stoics thought that this virtuous conformity to the rational structure of the cosmos is sufficient for happiness. We do not need any external good fortune to achieve happiness, so long as we have virtue. The Stoic, in fact, views pleasure as a dangerous illusion, disturbing the soul from its commitment to virtue by the false appearance of goodness.
