Comparing Happiness In Jermone's Letters 'And Beowulf'

To be godly means to be happy with one’s identity. Many of us spend so much time trying to underline what the ultimate good and happiness that the general public are trying to achieve, we tend to forget that the point of going on that journey to find ultimate happiness is for ourselves. We also forget that we have different level of contentments and that there are different ways to be content. Jermone’s Letters, Augustine’s Confession, Petarach’s Secretum, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and the Anglo-Saxon’s Beowulf all share essentially the search for happiness; what differs is how each of these philosophers think is the best way to approach true happiness, all according to how one identify one’s self and one’s beliefs.

In Jerome’s letters, being godly is following God’s guideline. To be happy is to submit the self under the authority of a higher being and the being’s rules such as being chaste and acting chaste. There is no such thing as happiness on Earth because it is just material and temporal happiness. The only way to true happiness is to transcend away from the body that entraps the soul. What is so disturbing about Jermone’s idea of what true happiness is that there is not much human experiences around what he calls happiness and I want to know what it takes to feel ultimate happiness and to know how it differs from

So we have to find happiness within our self in order to transcend. We have to find happiness and God by finding ourselves first. Augustine’s idea of what is happiness exactly is different from Jerome’s idea. Rather than aiming for type of happiness that we do not even know how to describe, we should aim for temporal happiness and/or material happiness because material happiness is a small factor of temporal happiness. His philosophy is to be happy by doing what one wants and desire to do that is morally and ethically correct. Only through this way will we achieve the highest form of happiness that we know