Aquinas on Ethics & Happiness

Overview

In our eighth and final lecture, we reflect on Thomas Aquinas’s ethics as the means by which human beings, created in God’s image, return to God through a teleological framework centered on beatitudo (happiness) as humanity’s ultimate goal. We examine Aquinas’s analysis of wealth, honor, power, and bodily pleasure, showing how each fails to satisfy our deepest longing for God, the true source of beatitudo. The lecture concludes by outlining how the virtues of justice, temperance, courage, and prudence, together with natural and eternal law, order human life toward God and lasting fulfillment. Bishop Barron emphasizes the importance for us to live at the unchanging center of life's "wheel of fortune" rather than on its constantly turning rim.