Flourishing Together
Aristotle, Oord, and the Common Good
“To love is to act intentionally, in relational response to God and others, to promote overall well-being….I’ve chosen ‘well-being’ for my definition of love, because it encompasses various words and phrases pertaining to flourishing.”
— Thomas Jay Oord, A Systematic Theology of Love: Volume 1: God and Creation
Aristotle and the Classical Idea of Flourishing
It is noteworthy that Thomas Oord, when defining love, often uses the word “flourishing” to name what we humans rightly seek for ourselves and others—and even for God, when we love. He uses the word fifty-one times in A Systematic Theology of Love: God and Creation (Volume One).
The language of flourishing has deep roots in the Western ethical tradition, especially in the thought of Aristotle, the fourth-century BCE Greek philosopher whose reflections on the good life in works such as Nicomachean Ethics have shaped moral philosophy for more than two millennia. Aristotle used the word eudaimonia to describe the ultimate aim of human life. Sometimes translated as “happiness,” many contemporary interpreters prefer the word flourishing, because it captures Aristotle’s deeper meaning: a life in which human capacities are fully realized through the cultivation of virtues such as courage, justice, temperance, and practical wisdom within a community.
Flourishing as a Pattern of Life
In Aristotle’s view, flourishing is not merely a subjective feeling. It is an objective pattern of living well, one that unfolds over the course of a lifetime through the formation of character. The ethical life is not primarily about obeying rules or calculating consequences; it is about becoming the kind of person whose habits, relationships, and practices contribute to the flourishing of oneself and others. And this becoming does not occur in isolation. It takes place within a community. We learn what flourishing looks like by living among others whose lives, at their best, model courage, justice, wisdom, friendship, and generosity.
Flourishing and the Common Good
Aristotle’s vision of flourishing was never purely individual. It was inseparable from what later thinkers would call the common good. Human beings, Aristotle argued, are political animals who come into their fullest humanity within communities. The good life is therefore not merely a private achievement. It is realized within shared forms of life in which people pursue goods together—friendship, justice, learning, beauty, and civic responsibility. A flourishing person contributes to the flourishing of the community, and a flourishing community creates conditions in which individuals can grow into lives of virtue and purpose.
MacIntyre and the Renewal of Virtue Ethics
In the twentieth century, Alasdair MacIntyre helped renew interest in this Aristotelian vision. In works such as After Virtue, he argued that modern moral philosophy had become fragmented because it had lost the older framework of virtue and flourishing that once gave ethical language its coherence. Moral life, he suggested, cannot be sustained by rules alone or by individual choices detached from tradition. Virtue arises within practices and communities that shape character over time. For MacIntyre, as for Aristotle, flourishing depends on shared forms of life in which people learn, through example and practice, how to live well together.
Practices, Traditions, and Shared Goods
MacIntyre recovers and clarifies this dimension of Aristotle’s thought by emphasizing that virtues are cultivated within practices and traditions oriented toward shared goods. Practices such as education, craftsmanship, music-making, caregiving, farming, and civic participation embody goods that cannot be reduced to private benefit or individual success. They are goods that can only be realized together. From this perspective, the common good is not simply the sum of individual satisfactions. It is the quality of shared life that emerges when people participate in practices that nurture trust, cooperation, and mutual responsibility. Individuals flourish precisely by contributing to something larger than themselves.
Oord’s Theology of Love in Light of Virtue
Thomas Oord’s theology of love can be interpreted as participating—perhaps implicitly—in this broader virtue-oriented tradition. On this view love is not simply a matter of obeying rules (as in deontological ethics) or calculating consequences (as in utilitarian ethics); it is a matter of "acting intentionally, in relational response to God and others, to promote overall well-being." In this understanding of love, there are no isolate individuals; there are instead creative, relational selves. Love involves reducing harm, to be sure, but also helping oneself and others become the kinds of people who flourish through habits and virtues—people who learn, together, how to live well. And this, so Oord proposes, is what the universal Spirit of love, God, wants for us, as well. God wants us to "flourish" as individuals and communities, and as individuals-in-community with one another.
Whitehead and Cobb on Value
Here it can be helpful to dig a little more deeply into what "flourishing" really means. It means, of course, realizing what is truly valuable in life. Which itself raised the question: What is value? Here Whitehead can help.
In his essay “Whitehead’s Theory of Value,” Cobb argues that for Whitehead value is is by no means reducible to human value. It is a quality of life enjoyed by sentient beings as they embody and experience what Whitehead calls “strength of beauty” or “richness of experience” in their interactions with the world. Value involves the depth, intensity, harmony, and creativity of experience as life unfolds.
Expanding Aristotle: Whitehead on Beauty and Experience
As applied to human life, Whitehead’s perspective also subtly expands Aristotle’s vision of flourishing. For Aristotle, flourishing is largely interpreted in moral and rational terms: the cultivation of virtues that allow human beings to live well in community. Whitehead does not reject this moral dimension, but he places it within a broader understanding of value. For him, the ultimate aim of life is the realization of beauty, understood as the harmonious intensification of experience. Moral virtues remain essential, but they are part of a larger aesthetic vision of life that includes creativity, depth of feeling, relational harmony, and the richness of lived experience. From this perspective, flourishing is not only a matter of becoming good persons; it is also a matter of becoming a whole person in community with others, of enjoying well-being.
Practices of Flourishing
This well-being is not simply a state that one passively enjoys. It is a quality of life actively generated through agency—through acts of lovingkindness, generosity, forgiveness, community-building, and justice-making, to be sure, but also through acts of celebration, play, and artistic creation. Well-being includes music-making and photography (witness Thomas Oord's photography), an enjoyment of rich bonds with the more than human world, and enjoying moments of prayer, worship, and ecstasy. These activities do not arise in isolation or appear suddenly as if from nowhere. They emerge gradually within communities in which people learn from one another what flourishing can look like and where habits of care, responsibility, and compassion are cultivated over time.
Love and the Creative Advance of Life
In this way love participates in the ongoing creative advance of life itself. Aristotle reminds us that flourishing requires the formation of character within community, in service to a common good. MacIntyre reminds us that such formation depends on shared practices and traditions. Whitehead and Cobb remind us that the deepest value of life lies in the emergence of strength of beauty and richness of experience. And Thomas Oord reminds us that love—relational, intentional, and responsive—is the power that makes such flourishing possible.
Cobb, Daly, and the Common Good
Perhaps a final word is in order about the common good. Just as it is noteworthy that Oord uses the word flourishing to name what God seeks for the world, it is also noteworthy that John B. Cobb Jr. frequently speaks of the common good. His landmark book, co-authored with Herman Daly, is titled For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future. In that work they argue that economic and social life should be evaluated not primarily by the growth of consumption or profit but by the extent to which it contributes to the well-being of communities, the health of ecosystems, and the flourishing of life. And the process tradition which Cobb helped initiate has come to conceive the common good sorely and rightly sought in our time as an ecological civilization.
Ecological Civilization and Overall Well-Being
An ecological civilization is not about 'ecology' alone, at least narrowly understood. It is about living with respect and care for the entire community of life, our fellow humans much include, and with special care for the vulnerable. The fundamental units of such a civilization are local communities, in rural and urban settings, that are creative, compassionate, participatory, inclusive, humane to animals, good for the earth, and spiritually satisfying, with no one left behind. What God seeks, so process theologians believe, is this kind of 'overall' well-being, to use the language of Thomas Oord. And what God hopes for is that we become the kinds of people, with the characters and virtues, the habits of heart and mind, that help create and sustain such communities. To the degree that we become these kinds of people, each in our way, but in community with one another, we realize something of what Jesus called the basileai, a community of fellow travellers who live in solidarity with one another, in a spirit of love. And to the degree that we do these, even the universal Spirit of love, even God, is pleased and enriched. We taste something of what Thomas Oord means by overall well-being, in which even the well-being of the Holy One is enriched, enjoying the fruits of our flourishing.