Would you say that you’re happy? Your answer will depend on whether you think about happiness as the pop singer Pharrell does or like the early church theologian Augustine.
“It is a certainty that all people want to be happy,” Augustine wrote 1,600 years ago in The City of God. It’s less certain, however, when “they ask who is happy or what makes them happy” (X.1). Men and women through the centuries have wrestled with understanding the essence of happiness. Is it pleasure, a positive state of being, wisdom, or even a goddess like the Roman deity Felicity? Or is happiness simply one of those things that you know when you see it—or when you feel it?
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