<p>In this essay I explore the need for a conception of beatitude within secular ethical theory. In the gospels and Aquinas’s <i>Summa Theologica</i>, beatitude is claimed to consist in closeness to God or heaven, in participating – to the extent humans are thought capable of this – in the divine. This notion may appear to be among the most dispensable when theorizing ethics apart from theology. But I think a complete secular ethics will include a conception of beatitude, and in this essay I attempt to explain why. This ambition may be less surprising if it is viewed also as an entry into the increasingly popular topic of meaningfulness. The phenomenon of secular beatitude theorized here is a type of meaningfulness; the term “beatitude”, however, enjoys benefits over already-secular terms like “meaningful”. These include (i) more clearly denoting a state of being, as contrasted with merely denoting a property of a life or a project; (ii) more clearly denoting an ideal to be approximated, rather than a quantity to be produced; and (iii) more clearly denoting a state or property that consists in relating fittingly to something that is both objectively valuable and external to oneself. As I explain in this essay, theorizing meaningfulness as secular beatitude opens a middle path between a speculative cosmic and a deflated subjectivist conception of the meaning to be found in human life.</p>