What Is The Good Life?
Reflection #006
Every person, whether they articulate it or not, is searching for what we might call the good life. We pursue it in career success, in family satisfaction, in moral achievement, in the admiration of others. Yet the very fact that our definitions differ so widely tells us something important: we are not entirely sure what good really means, nor what kind of lives would actually lead to it.
The ancient thinkers understood this dilemma. Aristotle, reflecting on the restlessness of human longing, wrote in Nicomachean Ethics that “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”1 But Aristotle did not define happiness as a passing emotional warmth or a momentary pleasure. He used the word eudaimonia, a flourishing of the whole person—a life lived in accordance with virtue, ordered toward what is truly good. The good life, for him, was not something we felt, but something we became.
Yet Aristotle left us with a tension: if flourishing depends on virtue, and virtue is a habitual excellence of the soul, then what happens to people like us—whose souls are conflicted, whose habits are inconsistent, and whose efforts are always mixed with selfishness? The philosophers gave us a diagnosis, but not a cure.
In his Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas presses this point even further by helping us see that the issue is not simply that we pursue joy, but that we can’t help pursuing it. We are built to seek delight; we never operate from a neutral place. The heart is always reaching out for something to rest in. So the real question is not whether we will seek joy, but where we will seek it.
Aquinas draws from the well of Augustine when he says that when we lose our joy in God—when He is no longer our deepest source of gladness—we don’t stop desiring joy. We simply look for it elsewhere. And the substitutes we choose, even good things, can’t bear the weight we put on them. They can temporarily numb us or excite us, but they can’t actually satisfy us. So our desires become restless, anxious, even compulsive. The good life, then, is found not in suppressing desire, but in directing it rightly—so that our joy rests in the One who can actually sustain it.
Jonathan Edwards deepens this insight by examining the nature of the heart itself. For Edwards, we are always chasing what we love most. Thus, sin is not simply doing bad things—it is loving lesser things as though they were ultimate. This is why Edwards said, “God is the highest good of the reasonable creature. The enjoyment of him is our proper happiness, and is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied.”2 We were designed for joy in God, and until our loves are ordered around Him, our lives remain unstable and unsatisfied.
“The good life is not found in what we acquire, but in the One to whom we belong.”
This is why the good life is not ultimately found in achievement, nor in self-improvement, nor even in moral striving. It is found in reordering our loves so that God is first. Not simply believed in, but loved. Not simply acknowledged, but trusted. Not simply worshiped, but delighted in. The good life is not found in what we acquire, but in the One to whom we belong.
To borrow the language of Scripture, the good life is life in Christ. It is a life where our worth is not earned, but received. Where our identity is secure, not fragile. Where our failures no longer define us, and our achievements no longer enslave us. A life where suffering does not mean despair, and success does not mean self-exaltation. A life where love is no longer a transaction, but a gift.
And so the good life, paradoxically, is not finally about the life we build—it is about the life we receive. Jesus does not simply offer guidance; He offers Himself. He is, as He says, the way, the truth, and the life. (John 14:6)
We find our flourishing when we find our rest in Him.
This sentence is a paraphrase summarizing Aristotle’s teaching that eudaimonia (flourishing) is the highest human good and ultimate end. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I.7, 1097b–1098a, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1999).
Jonathan Edwards, “The Christian Pilgrim, or The True Christian’s Life a Journey Toward Heaven,” in Sermons and Discourses, 1730–1733, ed. Mark Valeri, vol. 17 of The Works of Jonathan Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 437.