Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

Likewise, our conception of life’s ultimate end makes a difference to the goodness of our actions. If we just seek worldly virtue, that’s less perfect than if we seek God. Albert still admits that worldly virtue is a kind of happiness, even if it is a lesser one. Where Augustine said that only “false virtue” was available to the pagans of Rome, Albert thinks that even a pagan can become genuinely, if imperfectly virtuous. For pagans too can acquire the so-called “political” virtues through the process of habituation described by Aristotle. Furthermore, the happiness of contemplation can be achieved in this life. Such earthly contemplative happiness trumps the happiness of acquired political virtue, though it falls short of the perfect beatitude of the blessed in heaven. The upshot is that Albert’s ethics envisions three possible degrees of human happiness, lying respectively in the life of practical virtue, the life of philosophical contemplation, and ultimately the beatific vision. The first two were already described by Aristotle in his Ethics, but the third is known only in Christian theology. Ideally, the lesser kinds of virtue and happiness are stages on the way to ultimate beatitude: acting virtuously towards our neighbors is a kind of preparation and stepping