Eudaimonia, Beatific Vision, and Happiness

I may introduce this unit in my classroom as focusing on “the Other” and I may even mention how we will discuss service and mission, topics that students get more and more excited about the longer I teach, but I take a step back to reiterate the concepts of telos, eudaimonia, and Beatific Vision.

The Cathedral of Our Lady Assumed into Heaven and St. Nicholas (photo P. Smith). To many people, a church is just a building. In Catholic belief the Church is much more than just the physical space or even the people of the Church; the Church is a Sacrament, bot material and transcendent in nature.

            After the groans from students that seem inevitable when I repeat what I think are important concepts, I reiterate what I have said before: telos is a target that we cannot reach, but the more we try, the closer we get to the target, and the closer we get to the target, the better we become as human individuals and as a human society. “Ugh! We already know this!” I know they already know this, but most education on our country is so compartmentalized that students do not always synthesize the details. Kids in this country know more about everything than ever in the history of the world, and if they do not remember all the details, they have more immediate access to virtually any information that they want. But what they do not have is the critical capacity to integrate and synthesize all of this raw information so they can begin to understand deeper and more fundamental Truths about their existence. Without the ability to synthesize all the information we have access to, we cannot develop or create new ideas, theories, philosophies, or theologies that stretch the human mind and heart to higher levels of knowledge and understanding. If we allow ourselves to simply consume information and to think of facts as being sufficient in and of themselves, then we are destined for an intellectual “Pit” out of which there is no escape. I repeat concepts of telos, eudaimonia, and Beatific Vision for my students so they can practice using vocabulary and difficult concepts in a way that builds on itself. By the end of the year, it is amazing how creative many students have become in their articulation of some of the deepest theological concepts in the history of humanity.