FROM VIRTUE TO LOVE

Although this book's introduction emphasized the full translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as a key moment in the transformation of medieval definitions of enjoyment, these definitions evolved constantly from antiquity forward. This chapter provides an intellectual history of enjoyment, examining understandings of pleasure and love as “goods” from the classical period up to the beginnings of the age of scholasticism and the translation and reception of Aristotle's works in Latin. This history is in some part the narrative of how Platonic virtue and Aristotelian happiness became Christian love, though Christian theology never left pagan philosophy behind. Enjoyment is in some ways a difficult idea to track, as the classical period did not have a single dominant way of thinking about the achievement of the good, as would the medieval in the wake of Augustine's definitions of fruitio. I thus orient the following discussion of happiness, pleasure, love, and the summum bonum around the idea of enjoyment not because this was consistently the term that classical or medieval philosophers use to signify the highest good, but because it was Augustine's use of the term that would allow medieval philosophers to define, over time, the experience that is the goal of both the human life and the eternal soul: loving God for his own sake.