To persuade us that Lewis was a eudaemonist, Horner quotes the outset of Lewis’ essay “The Weight of Glory,” which reads as follows: According to Horner, “Aristotle, whose eudaimonistic views are perhaps the most influential of all, held that eudaimonia is synonymous with ‘doing well’ or ‘living well.’…” 6 And “Aristotle himself concludes that true eudaimonia actually consists in living a virtuous life.” 7

These thinkers … understood moral action to be grounded in the pursuit of eudaimonia….” 5 However, this intrinsic connection between ethics and eudaemonia ultimately ends up being something stronger than the former’s merely being grounded in the latter. How did classical thinkers construe this intrinsic connection between ethics and happiness? Horner says, “Moral action, in their view, is grounded rationally and normatively in the pursuit of happiness. But classical thinkers seldom, if ever, conceived of eudaimonia in that way 3… They viewed happiness as intrinsically connected to ethics. Our English word “happiness” usually refers to a feeling or subjective state of pleasure, satisfaction, contentment, or enjoyment-a largely subjective, superficial, and luck-dependent matter. Lewis’ Eudaimonistic Understanding of Ethics,” 2 David Horner intriguingly argues that Lewis was a eudaemonist (eudaemonia is a Greek word that is typically translated as “happiness”). In a recent online article entitled “The Pursuit of Happiness: C. Hence the unreasonable happiness which sometimes surprises a man at those very hours which ought, according to all objective rules, to have been the most miserable. Huge pleasures … sometimes (if we are careless) not even acknowledged or remembered, invade us from.

Cs lewis joy