What Is Our Summum Bonum?

The great Christian theologian and philosopher, Augustine of Hippo, once quipped, “It is the decided opinion of everyone who uses their brain, that all people desire to be happy.” It seems a rather dull observation when you think about it. Who doesn’t want to be happy? Why would anyone desire a sad, miserable life? But Augustine points this out not to be Captain Obvious, but to direct us to the all important question we too often fail to ask: “What is it that we ought to desire that will bring us the happiness we all wish we could have?”

The classical name given as the answer to this question is the summum bonum, which is Latin for the “highest” or “ultimate good.” Simply put, the summum bonum is that which we ought to desire in order to be happy.

Of course, this begs the question, what is our summum bonum? What is this highest good that we ought to be desiring?

If you feel the overwhelming weight of this question then you’ll rightly recognize this isn’t a question we can just answer on our own based on our limited experience and knowledge. It seems like a question we could use some help with (to say the least) and in fact what we find throughout human history is that there has been a robust, ongoing conversation dedicated to this very question. It may not be readily evident to us today, but philosophy was originally designed as a discipline dedicated to providing resources around the question of our summum bonum as human beings. The entire philosophical project was about helping us wrap our minds around the massive question of how we can live towards that which will bring us true happiness.

What also may be lost to us today is that this is the question Jesus was most concerned with, as well. Contrary to popular belief, Jesus did not come to tell us how to get to heaven after we die. Rather, Jesus came to reveal to us what he believed was the answer to the question philosophers had been grappling with for centuries before his arrival. To put it succinctly, Jesus came to reveal to us what the good life is by showing us who God is.

This is the rich soil out of which the Christian life grows. To know who God is is the beginning of the good life because God is none other than our summon bonum. That is, God is our highest good, the ultimate end toward which our lives must be directed in order to find true happiness. In this way, the question of who we believe God to be is intimately and inextricably bound up with what we imagine the good life to be. To answer the question of who God is is to answer the question of what (or who) we ought to desire in order to be happy.

In the Christian faith there is God as God is revealed in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus and then there are all the pretenders. These pretenders are legion and go by many names. Idols and lowercase “g” gods in the Hebrew Scriptures. Caesar and Mammon in the Gospels. The Apostle Paul in his epistles prefers to name them as the “powers and principalities” which he sees as conduits of the greatest threat to our happiness – the devilish duo of Sin and Death.

The human condition as it is illuminated by the biblical narrative is that we are forever finding ourselves settling for the pretenders rather than the summon bonum. This condition is given the name idolatry in both the Old and New Testaments. The problem with idolatry is precisely a kind of settling that leaves us continually restless. And so our problem is not so much that we assent to a set of wrong beliefs, but that we entrust ourselves to things that, in the long run, will leave us empty and disappointed.

If we simply believe God to be a better option to Death or, in the worst forms of Christianity, just a better alternative to eternal conscious torment in hell, we are selling short the goodness of God revealed to us in the wisdom of the cross. The “trick” of Christianity, if we can call it that, is that faith comes to us because we find the person of God revealed in Jesus Christ to be so beautiful and so true that we cannot but help but believe in this God as our summum bonum, the greatest and ultimate good.

This is why so much of the Christian life comes down to worship. We worship what we have come to understand as our greatest good. This happens whether we are religious or not. As many have pointed out, the question is not whether you will worship, but who or what you will worship. And we can end up worshiping any number of “goods” that are constantly on display around us. The constant barrage of sound bites, images and video clips that bombard us on the daily, all promoting some good we should entertain. The work of Christian worship is to say that over and above all these competing goods our summum bonum is the God we find revealed in Jesus Christ and him crucified.

The life of faith is that life shaped and formed by the worship of this God who comes to us in the person of Christ through the work of the Spirit. Simply put, the good we worship is the good we become. This is the logic at work for us Christians as we pursue the life that is drawn ever more fully into the life of God, where true happiness is found in the one who is our summum bonum.