Mt. Sophia Ideas

I’m teaching part of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica to my students here at the end of the semester.

We got to my favorite part on Wednesday.

In Question 62, Article 1, Aquinas is trying to describe happiness.  He says that there are actually two kinds.

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The first kind is “natural happiness,” and it comes from being generally awesome (or, as philosophers say, “virtuous”) at doing the normal activities of human life.  True happiness comes from being awesome at living, and therefore if you want to be happy, you have to work on being awesome.

But then there’s a second kind of happiness, Aquinas says.  This is “supernatural happiness.”  It comes not from being able to go about your normal activities awesomely, but from being able to relate to God awesomely.

That kind of happiness, Aquinas says, is a gift from God.  Only God can give you the ability to do it.

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Happiness is an activity for Aquinas (and everyone else who followed Aristotle), and therefore to be supernaturally happy is to perform a kind of activity.

What kind of activity, you ask? It’s “a kind of participation of the Godhead, about which it is written (2 Peter 1:4) that by Christ we are made ‘partakers of the Divine nature’” (source).

In other words, ultimate, supernatural happiness, is participating with God in whatever activities are natural to God.  Supernatural happiness is doing whatever it is that God does, along with God.

Side-by-side activity with the God of the universe; that’s supernatural happiness.

(And in case any philosophers are reading this: I know.  Aquinas’ theory of “participation” is a little more complicated than I’m making it out to be.  But, cut me some slack.  I don’t have time to go into the whole “form vs. matter,” “act vs. potency” thing here.)

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And that got me thinking about homeschoolers.  They’re a bunch of loners who sit in their basements alone all day, doing their  school work alone, and never going outside or seeing anyone.

Right?

Well, that’s what some people think homeschoolers are like, anyway.

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They’ve never heard of co-op, of course.  And the zillion other things that homeschoolers do outside the home.

Sometimes a homeschooler won’t actually see home for days on end, because she or he is out participating with her or his fellow homeschoolers in all the myriad things that homeschoolers do together as part of homeschooling.

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And, I know, co-op isn’t quite as lofty a thing as “participation with God.”  It’s just “participation with other homeschoolers.”  And homeschoolers aren’t God, any more than public and private schoolers are.

But still, co-op can be a kind of “type” or “image” of supernatural happiness.  After all, it’s in participating with other people that we first come to understand what it means to participate with anyone (God included).

Thus, maybe co-op not only can teach us about history and chemistry and art, but about the happiness of participation (and maybe even the supernatural happiness of participating with God).

Maybe?

-Micah Tillman

^{[Micah is a Mt. Sophia graduate who is working on his doctoral dissertation at The Catholic University of America. He also gets to teach philosophy (as a "graduate fellow"), which he loves.]}

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