The second group under this division is made up of persons revealing a subtler kind of defect. These are filled with a thirst for genuine and noble gifts of fortune. They long for success in their work, for health and wealth, for freedom and the enjoyment of all beautiful things, for the bliss of loving and being loved, for conjugal happiness: in short, for whatever blessings life may offer. They are not dull and inert, not smug and sated; they know hunger and thirst; nor do they chase illegitimate joys or crave for specious goods.

Still, what they hunger and thirst for is not justice; what keeps them in tension is not value as such; not that aspect of creaturely goods by which they glorify God. Persons of this kind interpret happiness in terms of true and valid goods; yet in their exclusive longing for happiness—the mark of their basic egocentrism—they are ultimately incapable of fully understanding the high goods of life or, in turn, of bringing true happiness to others.

This is easiest to see with reference to the good constituted by a community of love. He alone who does not primarily seek for his happiness, as such, but forgets himself in his value-response to the beloved person—in other words, he alone who is able to give himself—can love in the full and genuine sense of that term. He alone, therefore, can experience the integral happiness of loving and of being loved—the unique mutual vision implied in a deep love-relationship. Yet, in fact the same thing is true, though less strikingly obvious, perhaps, of all high goods of life: our possession of truth, our penetration of the world of beauty (in nature and in art), and of the world of value in general.

He who is dominated by his thirst for happiness bars himself from access to true and deep happiness. In his possession and enjoyment of any good, he fails to reach the level of depth where that good reflects the light of God and reveals its ties with eternity. He always remains stuck on the plane of the perishable. The possession of no gift of fortune can ever bring him genuine satisfaction. It is as though every good he has secured spoke to him in the end only words of disappointment: “I am not what thou seekest”; and his hunger and thirst drives him, as it did Faust, further and further across the limitless plains of breadth rather than down the deep paths that converge in the Center, where alone peace and consummate happiness can be found.

Respect for justice without hunger for it

To these two classes of men—the souls that hunger and thirst either not at all, or not after justice—the standard antithesis, intelligible even on a purely natural level, is embodied by the type of man filled with hunger and thirst for that which is important in itself, objectively valuable, and pleasing to God.