Dying With the Most Toys Does Not Mean You’ve Won

In Book 1 of On the Free Choice of the Will, Augustine examines the relationship between doing good and being happy. Happiness is when someone takes delight in their own will, as opposed to depending on temporal things for your happiness, something with which modern psychology agrees. Evil people will to be happy as well, but they refuse to will to live rightly. This leads to evil people depending on temporal things for their happiness, which leads them to be unhappy.

Augustine’s first point about happiness is that while everyone wants to be happy, a person is truly happy only “when he takes delight in his own good will” (Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will, page 24). This person concerns his life with eternal things, and “the joy occasioned by acquiring this good [will] elevates the mind calmly, peacefully, and steadfastly,” which Augustine says is “called the happy life” (25).

While the happy person takes delight in his good will, he appropriately assigns “little worth to anything else that is called good but can be lost even when the will to retain it remains” (24). In other words, the happy person does not become attached to the temporal things in life. This is because temporal things are, well, temporary (hence the similarity in the two …show more content…
Augustine says that these temporal things, these things that serve as mere distractions, include the following: “Riches, honors, pleasures, physical beauty, and all the other things that [someone] can fail to acquire despite willing to, and can lose against their will” (27). These are the things that it seems that most cultures uphold as valuable and that most people strive to attain. The problem with wealth, reputation, physical attractiveness, status, and so on, is that these things are easily lost. Not only are they easily lost, but they will necessarily be lost – when you die. Therefore, happiness should on depend on temporal