In Search of The Good Life

Introducing Essays on the Nature of Goodness and Its Implications for Human Flourishing

This essay appears as the Introduction in Volume 3, Issue 1 of The Consortium: A Journal of Classical Christian Education. It drops on July 1, 2024. Watch for it at https://theconsortiumjournal.com/.

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The concept of “the good life” has been a central theme in history and philosophy, a prominent motif in art and literature, and in classical education, it is the teleological objective for learning. Indeed, in classical thought, the pursuit of the good life was the very purpose for civilization itself.

Yet, several questions immediately strike the observant thinker: if the good life is the chief objective of education and the very purpose of civilization, what exactly is the good life? Who is it for? Indubitably, it could not possibly be for all classes of people who have lived during various times in history, such as slaves, the impoverished, or women. So, by what standard can we judge its realization? And, what is the method for achieving or discovering this good life? These have been, and continue to be, preeminent human questions. 

The modifying attribute, “the good,” has likewise shaped ethical, metaphysical, and theological discourse for nearly three millennia. In both classical and medieval thought, the good constituted one of the three common and primary notions that made up the doctrine of the Transcendentals: the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.¹ These Transcendentals “constituted together a synthetic vision of divine life in which all things rest and have their existence.” Thus, few ideas in the history of thought have been treated without some consideration of the good. 

Caravaggio, The Card Sharps, ca. 1596

Subsequently, questions about the good’s perceived opposite, evil, have naturally followed. What is evil? Does it have an ontological existence? If so, who is responsible for evil and how can it be eradicated? Are there gradations of evil, or is evil purely so, regardless of its various degrees of intensities and outcomes? As we can see, questions about the good and its opposite, evil, also touch every facet of human inquiry, every kind of scientific pursuit, and nearly all academic study. Mortimer J. Adler observes that 

the theory of good and evil crosses the boundaries of many sciences or subject matters. It occupies a place in metaphysics. It is of fundamental importance in all the moral sciences—ethics, economics, politics, jurisprudence. It appears in all the descriptive sciences of human behavior, such as psychology and sociology, though there it is of less importance and is differently treated.

It seems, in any case, that some perception of the good, and its perceived opposite, evil, is paramount to achieving any cogent understanding of man and his ability to flourish.  

Generally speaking, the good can be understood, in both its moral and nonmoral senses, as