Cicero’s Summum Bonum and the Greatest Commandment

Even the pagans, like Marcus Tullius Cicero in his On the Ends of Good and Evil, prepared the soil for planting the seeds of the Gospel.

From One Peter Five

By Daniel Dal Monte, PhD

Philosophy, ideally, brings our rational inquiry to a proper level of cultivation that allows us to accept the revelation in the Gospels. Praeparatio evangelica is a doctrine of the early Church, which maintains that God, prior to the fullness of revelation in His Son, already cultivated the soil, as it were, for the Incarnation, by developing a philosophical culture that would be open to the revelation of Jesus Christ.[1]

45 years before the birth of Christ, Cicero, a Roman orator, statesman, and philosopher, wrote a book called De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum (On the Ends of Good and Evil). The central question of this book is an exploration of the nature of the summum bonum, i.e. the highest good. The highest good is an ultimate value in life, a final telos beyond which there is no further aspiration, which organizes all standards of right conduct. What is right is what conduces to this ultimate end, and what is wrong undermines it. We do not use the highest good as a means to another end, but value it in itself.[2]

The idea of the highest good arises from the recognition that there must be something intrinsically valuable in life, and so not every good we seek is instrumentally valuable. If everything were only instrumentally valuable (as an instrument for the obtaining of another thing), there would be no motivation for our actions. An instrumental value derives its value only from what it can obtain, and so instrumental value without the existence of an intrinsic value is no value at all.

Our lives, moreover, do not consist in a patchwork of discrete goals, isolated from one another. It is not as though we move from good to good, with no higher unity connecting our various experiences. Eating lunch, reading a book, driving a car, and talking with a friend are all individual goods, but they also tend in a common direction. Underlying all these activities is an aspiration towards a state of complete flourishing and beatitude, i.e. happiness. We do not eat lunch just to eat lunch, or talk to a friend just to talk to a friend. If talking to a friend ceases to make us happy, we choose not to talk to a friend, just as we skip lunch if we don’t think it will conduce to our final perfection.

Aquinas would affirm these truths later. He rejected the idea that we can have several last ends, or ultimate values, in life. The ultimate value we seek is our crowning perfection, and it cannot be perfect if it is competing or subsidiary to something else. The beginning of a process is always oriented to its completion. Our actions may proximally orient themselves towards a particular good, but they ultimately aspire to a final perfection.[3]

Modern people in liberal societies like to think of their lives as an eclectic patchwork. They adopt different ends throughout life according to their individual whim. Life consists in a mix of different styles and choices. But Romans like Cicero recognized the structure of human motivation. No matter how much apparent diversity there is in our choices, we always are tending towards a final state of perfection—at least, what we perceive as our final perfection.    

Philosophical disagreement arises with respect to the precise nature of this final state. Cicero dealt with several philosophical schools current at his time who defended a particular account of happiness. The Epicureans, followers of Epicurus, believed that pleasure is the highest good. Epicurus thought he did not have to prove that pleasure is the highest good using argument. Pleasure is an immediate incentive, available even to infants, who gravitate to it naturally. Pleasure and pain are natural detection systems of what is good for us, and what is bad for us, respectively.[4]

The Stoics, on the contrary, maintained that moral worth is the highest good. Moral worth, grounded in a virtuous character, is sufficient for happiness, even if one lacks pleasure. The virtuous Stoic lives in harmony with Nature, which embodies a kind of rational structure of the cosmos, a Logos. The Stoic accepts the natural course of events with resignation, and rejects desires that are contrary to Logos.[5] The Stoics thought that this virtuous conformity to the rational structure of the cosmos is sufficient for happiness. We do not need any external good fortune to achieve happiness, so long as we have virtue. The Stoic, in fact, views pleasure as a dangerous illusion, disturbing the soul from its commitment to virtue by the false appearance of goodness.

These reflections are interesting in their own right, but their ultimate value, for Catholics, lies in calibrating our relationship with Jesus Christ. The idea of the highest good, first, gives us the idea of a central value around which our entire life revolves. Each choice on the micro-level is not a discrete and isolated choice, but forms a unity with other choices in their convergence on an ultimate value. This structure of motivation, i.e. the fact that any evaluation we make presupposes a larger structure of evaluation leading to a highest evaluation, helps to make sense of the absolute claims of Jesus on our devotion. Jesus insists that one must love God with “thy whole heart, and thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind, and with thy whole strength.”[6] Jesus has to occupy the space for the highest good, as the central value which organizes all our standards of conduct and norms on the micro-level. Having assimilated the notion of a highest good in our motivational structure, we can see the error in thinking that our lives consist in many discontinuous goods. Instead, there is a central value on which our lives converge, and Jesus is directing this convergence towards Himself. We cannot follow Jesus in one context, and follow a political party in another, for instance, and just be an avid gamer in another, et. All activities tends towards a final end, and this end must be Jesus. We must make a choice, and we cannot compartmentalize goods, as if they had no common point of convergence. We will worship something, and Jesus rightfully demands this worship. We must eat lunch, talk to a friend, write, and sing, for God, and not for some other end.

The Stoics and the Epicureans were grasping only partial truths of the true nature of the highest good. The Stoics were correct that the highest good involves conforming one’s will to a higher wisdom, but they neglected the special sort of pleasure that comes from this conformity. Jesus does not demand that we strive for a pleasure-less conformity to rules, but instead seeks to impart abundant life. “I am come that they may have life, and have it more abundantly.”[7] The Epicureans are correct in valuing pleasure, but incorrect in making pleasure higher than holiness. Jesus desires us to have pleasure, but only in a way that is concomitant with our sanctification. We might think of some fruits of the Spirit as those higher, spiritual pleasures that we receive from knowing Christ: love, joy, peace.[8] Nevertheless we do not seek these things in themselves, but receive them as gifts from knowing Christ, Whom we seek as our final end.

Both the Stoics and the Epicureans, moreover, erred in thinking that the highest good is some process or state internal to our souls, as pleasure and virtue are, respectively. Our actions converge on an ultimate end that is a Person. All our actions are ultimately aspirations towards a dialogical relationship with a personal God.

Finally, the idea of the highest good helps us to recognize that we cannot have two masters. There is a highest value to our lives, not multiple values. There cannot be two highest goods, because a good cannot be the highest if it has an equal. We do not value friendship, food, sports, and reading as independent goods, but for a highest good on which all these activities converge, i.e. happiness. We cannot identify our happiness as both God, and a creature. Devotion to a creature will necessarily distract us from the Creator, since we can have only one highest good. In demanding all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, Jesus is recognizing that any holding back from Him is a betrayal. “No man can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one, and love the other; or he will sustain the one, and despise the other.”[9]    

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[1] Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2002): 122.

[2] Marcus Tullius Cicero, “De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum,” in Loeb Classical Library, Vol. XVII, trans. by H. Harris Rackham, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931): 13.

[3] Summa Theologiae, I-II.Q1.A6.

[4] De Finibus, 17.

[5] De Finibus, 35.

[6] Mk 12:30-31.

[7] Jn 10:10.

[8] Gal 5:22

[9] Mt 6:24.

Pictured: First-century AD bust of Cicero at the Capitoline Museums, Rome. Photograph by José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia.org