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Education
June 24, 2026
Aristotle, Paul, and the American Pursuit of Happiness
Upon visiting America, French aristocrat, historian, and philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville remarked that “in America I saw the freest and the most enlightened men placed in the happiest condition that exists in the world.” Motivated by a desire to be alive, then free, then happy, the American project was at its conception unique in the national recognition that government’s job is to “secure these rights” of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.1 Although our nation was established to enable and protect this quest for happiness, the pursuit has proved difficult. In the same breath in which he praised America for its happy conditions, de Tocqueville observed of the American people that “it seemed to me that a sort of cloud habitually covered their features; they appeared to me grave and almost sad even in their pleasures.”2
De Tocqueville’s comment is as true today as it was when he visited America in the 1830s. Unlike any other nation before it, the United States, as outlined in the Declaration of Independence, exists nearly entirely so that its citizens may pursue happiness, and yet American citizens are among the most unhappy in the world. In its 2025 edition, the annually published World Happiness Report ranked the U.S. 23rd in the world, even below statist countries like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Remarkably, America doesn’t even place in the top 60 countries if the only demographic surveyed is citizens below the age of 30. Even if this survey and the others like it are biased or using unfairly weighted criteria, all we must do is simply look around a local grocery store; stressed-out single hordes of discontent and unfulfilled “Disney adults,” unmarried and childless in the prime of their life.3 How did we get here? Why are we so sad? What might be the solution?
As a whole, the average American is depressed because he is discontent, and discontent because he does not know what true contentment or happiness really is. Once again, de Tocqueville presciently predicted the root problem with the American pursuit of happiness: “The taste for material enjoyments must be considered as the first source of this secret restlessness revealed in the actions of Americans.” Because man will never be contented by material possessions alone (Prov. 30:15), materialism throws him into a vicious cycle: the more we have, the more we realize we could have.4 The hedonist can never say “enough,” and therefore hedonism cannot be the path to contentment or true happiness. Not only have we sought to find lasting happiness in pure hedonism and material pleasures, however, we as a people have also abandoned friendships of virtue, instead choosing to rely on methods like yoga, meditation, and therapy that are simply utilitarian at best and ephemerally individualistic at worst. We have, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, imprisoned ourselves by being contented to remain only ourself at the expense of pursuing meaningful friendships. How can he who is imprisoned by his own solitude be happy?5 In short, the happiness that Americans have pursued is empty and unfulfilling because it is materialistic and individualistic, defined by what is pleasurable rather than what is true, good, or beautiful. Happiness has been reduced to mere pleasure, and thus has become empty and unfulfilling.
Against this individualistic hedonism, Aristotle and the Apostle Paul offer an alternative that, while mindful of human material needs, may point us towards a more lasting happiness. According to tradition, the most happy man will be he who is least in need; lasting happiness, eudaimonia, is marked by self-sufficiency, that which “merely standing by itself alone renders life desirable and lacking in nothing,” what we today call contentment. In the classical Western tradition, the same tradition our Founding Fathers were following when they penned the Declaration of Independence, to be happy is to be self-sufficient—lacking in nothing—and thus to pursue happiness is to pursue self-sufficiency.6 Such an absolute lack of need might seem impossible to achieve: after all, we’re only human. And yet, in his epistle to the Philippian church, Paul writes—using the exact same word as Aristotle—that he learned how, “in whatever situation I am, to be self-sufficient,” or, as it is more commonly translated, “to be content.” While self-sufficiency and contentment is, as Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs famously noted, certainly a rare and difficult jewel, it is at certainly possible for the man who is willing to pursue it properly.7 For Paul and Aristotle, this pursuit of self-sufficiency is simultaneously social and solitary, personal and political. True happiness, in other words, requires a healthy inward spiritual life along with active friendships with virtuous peers.
The necessity of an inward spiritual health for self-sufficiency is perhaps easiest for us modern Christians to understand; after all, “self-sufficiency” is by definition concerned with the self. “The activity of contemplation,” Aristotle writes, “will be found to possess in the highest degree the quality that is termed self-sufficiency.” Contemplation, the ordering of the soul towards the divine, is the chief prerequisite to contentment, and it is clearly that which allowed Paul to be content no matter where he is or who is around him.8 Virtuous contemplation is the most divine part of the human soul as it is both what makes us as humans unique and how we order our souls after God, Himself the highest good.
While self-sufficiency clearly requires inward contemplation, if it’s possible to achieve it must also allow for friends and external goods, which we as humans simply need for life. In the Christian tradition, this isn’t a problem—self-sufficiency isn’t entirely individualistic and solitary. While some have taken him to be a Stoic, the Apostle Paul constantly stresses the importance of his friends to his self-sufficiency; as just one example, Romans 16 is a long list of the friends in Rome Paul had completely relied on. Even in his final trials, Paul clearly relied on his virtuous friends: “Luke alone is with me,” the apostle wrote, “get Mark and bring him with you.” If Paul’s contentment was Stoic and entirely solitary, why would he need Luke and Mark?9
In desiring to defend the necessity of external goods to self-sufficiency, however, Aristotle runs into a problem. He recognizes the mortal need of friends and other external goods for contentment, but his god, the prime mover, is entirely solitary and alone, “for it is clear that as he [the prime mover] needs nothing more [than himself] he will not need a friend, and that inasmuch as he has no need of one he will not have one.” For Aristotle, true happiness is found in imitating the divine, but if the divine is entirely solitary, how can we reconcile that with our need of friends?10
The Apostle Paul finds his answer in the Trinity. Accepting the Aristotelian claim that the highest good is imitation of the divine (Rom. 8:29), Paul grounds the human need for friends in the trinitarian nature of the Christian God. To borrow a phrase from Augustine, the persons of the Trinity are in a relationship of eternal mutual love—friendship in its highest sense. Thus, for the Christian, to imitate the divine is both to have virtuous friends and a rich life of inner contemplation. While this simultaneity is impossible in Aristotle’s framework, Paul was able to achieve true self-sufficiency— happiness—because he could account for both his inner surety and external reliance on friends in his imitation of God.
A fundamental doctrine of the Enlightenment, largely inherited by our postmodern culture, is that happiness and pleasure are substantively one and the same: to pursue happiness is to pursue pleasure. As Alexis de Tocqueville presciently observed, this materialistic conception of happiness has been pervading the American people for centuries; although it would have been foreign to our Founding Fathers, the exaltation of pleasure as the highest good has permeated the glorious American dogma of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. As a result, our country, despite its wealth and freedoms, is among the unhappiest nations of the Western world. The virtue of happiness has been exchanged for the vice of materialism, and we have consequentially grown increasingly sad and depressed. By abandoning the classical conception of self-sufficiency being the key to happiness, the postmodern world has ignorantly abandoned any hope of achieving lasting joy. The answer to our unhappiness is not more material possessions or stoic reliance on oneself, but rather is returning to the ways of our forefathers. Grateful to Aristotle for his emphasis on self-sufficiency, we must, like Paul, redeem his system, seeking to imitate God by both pursuing a rich life of contemplation while at the same time building true friendships with virtuous peers. In this harmonious and complementary balance of solitary and social, we have by God’s grace a clear way of pursuing and achieving true contentment and happiness.
1 Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 511.
2 Ibid., 536.
3 https://data.worldhappiness.report/table.
4 de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 512.
5 C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2013), 57.
6 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, translated by H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 73 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 1097b.
7 Philippians 4:11.
8 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1177a27.
9 2 Timothy 4:11.
10 Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, 1244b2. 10