God alone is our good

Another example drawn from morality, which shows that our senses offer us only false goods

We have presented proofs which, it seems to me, sufficiently show that this prejudice — that our sensations are in objects — is a principle highly fertile in errors in physics. We must now bring forward others drawn from morality, in which this same prejudice, joined with that other — that the objects of our senses are the true causes of our sensations — is also very dangerous.

There is nothing so common in the world as to see persons who become attached to sensible goods: some love music, others good food, and still others are passionate about other things. Now, here is roughly the manner in which they must have reasoned in order to persuade themselves that all these objects are goods. All these agreeable flavors that please us in feasts, these sounds that flatter the ear, and these other pleasures that we feel on other occasions, are without doubt contained in sensible objects, or at the very least these objects cause us to feel them, and we can enjoy them only through their means. Now, it is not possible to doubt that pleasure is good, that pain is evil: we are inwardly convinced of this; and consequently the objects of our passions are very real goods, to which we must attach ourselves in order to be happy.

This is the reasoning we ordinarily carry out almost without thinking about it. Thus, it is because we believe that our sensations are in objects, or that objects have in themselves the power to make us feel them, that we regard as our goods things above which we are infinitely elevated, things that can at most act only upon our bodies and produce some movements in their fibers; but which can never act upon our souls, nor make us feel pleasure or pain.

God alone is our good

if it is not our soul that acts upon itself on the occasion of what happens in the body, there is only God alone who has this power; and if it is not the soul that causes itself pleasure or pain according to the diversity of the vibrations of the fibers of its body — as there is every appearance, since it feels pleasure and pain without consenting to it — I know of no other hand powerful enough to make it feel them than that of the author of nature.

God alone is our true good. He alone can fill us with all the pleasures of which we are capable. It is only in the knowledge and love of Him that He has resolved to make us feel them; and those pleasures that He has attached to the movements that occur in our bodies, so that we might take care of their preservation, are very small, very weak, and of very short duration, although, in the state to which sin has reduced us, we are like slaves to them. But those that He will make His elect feel in heaven will be infinitely greater, since He has made us to know Him and to love Him. For in the end, order demands that one feel greater pleasures when one possesses greater goods; since God is infinitely above all things, the pleasure of those who will possess Him will certainly surpass all pleasures.

Origin of the errors of the Epicureans and the Stoics.

What we have just said about the cause of our errors with regard to the good makes sufficiently clear the falsity of the opinions that the Stoics and the Epicureans held concerning the sovereign good. The Epicureans placed it in pleasure; and because pleasure is felt as much in vice as in virtue, and even more ordinarily in the former than in the latter, it was commonly believed that they gave themselves over to every sort of voluptuousness. Now, the first cause of their error is that, judging falsely that there was something agreeable in the objects of their senses, or that they were the true causes of the pleasures they felt; being besides convinced, by the inner sentiment they had of themselves, that pleasure was a good for them, at least for the time they enjoyed it, they gave themselves over to all passions, from which they did not fear suffering any inconvenience afterward. Whereas they ought to have considered that the pleasure felt in sensible things cannot be in those things as in their true causes, nor in any other manner, and consequently that sensible goods cannot be goods with respect to our soul, and the rest that we have explained.

The Stoics, persuaded on the contrary that sensible pleasures were only in the body and for the body, and that the soul must have its particular good, placed happiness in virtue. Now, here is the source of their errors.

It is that they believed that sensible pleasure and pain were not in the soul, but only in the body; and this false judgment then served them as a principle for other false conclusions, such as: that pain is not an evil, nor pleasure a good; that the pleasures of the senses are not good in themselves; that they are common to men and beasts, etc. However, it is easy to see that, although the Epicureans and the Stoics were wrong in many things, they were right in some. For the happiness of the blessed consists only in a perfect virtue, that is to say, in the knowledge and love of God, and in a very sweet pleasure that accompanies it unceasingly.

Let us therefore remember well that external objects contain nothing agreeable or disagreeable, that they are not the causes of our pleasures, that we have no reason to fear them or to love them; but that God alone is to be feared and to be loved, as He alone is powerful enough to punish us and to reward us, to make us feel pleasure and pain; in short, that it is only in God and from God that we must hope for the pleasures for which we have so strong, so natural, and so just an inclination.