Aquinas....

So in Aquinas the other day, we got into a friendly debate over the things necessary for happiness. One of the questions in his Treatise on Happiness is, " Are friends necessary for hapiness?". I sharply disagreed with Aquinas in class. He says that there are two types of happiness: perfect and imperfect. For imperfect happines it seems as though friends are required, but he concludes that the combination of God and one person creates all that is needed.

Of course, several of us tried to take down Saint Thomas. We argued that if an was in a vacuum this would be fine, but man is relational. We cannot fathom only God. God said it was "not good" for man to be alone in Genesis. We talked about how even hermits interact with people occasionally and that isolation is not good for people. Some students brought up the monastic orders and pointed out how men separate themselves from the world, but we instantly rebuted them saying that they at least lived in a community of like minded monks.

I have been thinking for a while today, a week later, about my resonse on this question. I was confusing the ideal with the actual. I was trasnfering my frustration for God not being sufficient for me as an excuse to shoot down Aquinas. Like I wrote a while back, we are beings that live a life of reaction. I reacted to my prof's high view of Aquinas and my own spiritual frustration.

I see friends as a necessity because of my overdependance on them. I do not like being alone. What is alone? Humorous, is it not? William Wadsworth wrote, "The World is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste to our powers". If we were to remove our dependance on the friends that fail, and then to place it in the one who created them, how would we live? We are such needy people. Such helpless children. And this is where friends help to balance us out. I believe that friends are necessary, but should not be our aim. I think that the ideal would be great, but due to our fallen nature we are unable to completely attain the ideal. Most of the practical things that I have learned about God i have learned through my friends.

"He asks too much to whom God is not sufficient."

“He is an exceedingly covetous fellow to whom God is not sufficient; and he is an exceeding fool to whom the world is sufficient. For God is all inexhaustible treasury of all riches, sufficing innumerable men; while the world has mere trifles and fascinations to offer, and leads the soul into deep and sorrowful poverty.”