Aquinas on Degrees of Beatitude, Happiness in This Life, and Whether Beatitude Can Be Lost (I-II, Q.5 aa.2–4)

Orientation #

He refers back to Thomas’s “as has been said above” in the definition of beatitude (two things: the last end and its obtaining) and to the first part of the Summa on the vision of God not being had in this life; he also says he had quoted John 14 and Matthew 20 “in the Summa Contra Gentiles” when he “happened to be on that part”. He ends: “Just stop here so I can make my dinner.” The previous class treated q. 4 a. 8 and q. 5 a. 1, the next takes q. 5 aa. 5-6.

The class, in order #

1. q. 5 a. 2, objections: equal reward, highest good, perfect good (“one man is not able to be more blessed”) #

He reads the three objections against one man being more blessed than another.

1. Beatitude is the reward of virtue (Ethics I); but for works of virtue an equal reward is given — Matthew 20:10, every worker in the vineyard got a denarius, and Gregory: equal reward of eternal life. Aside: “in this age of democracy” equality is “kind of assumed without proof.”
2. Beatitude is the highest good; nothing can be greater than the highest. A student: beatitude is “subjective, not the object” — he agrees (“yeah, yeah”), anticipating the answer.
3. Beatitude is a perfect and sufficient good (Aristotle said this of happiness too), which puts desire to rest; desire is not at rest if some suppliable good is lacking; so either a man is not blessed, or no beatitude is greater than another. Sed contra: John 14, “in the house of my father there are many mansions”, which Augustine understands as diverse worth of merits in eternal life; the worth given for merit is beatitude itself; so there are diverse grades.

2. q. 5 a. 2, body and replies: same object, diverse enjoyment (“the unity of the denarius”) #

Point: on the side of the object no beatitude is greater; on the side of obtaining and enjoying, one can be more blessed.

• Two things in the definition of beatitude: the last end (highest good) and its adeption/enjoyment. There is only one highest good, God, the object of every man’s beatitude; but one can more perfectly enjoy God than another, being better disposed and ordered to it — “that’s by charity, I suppose.”
• Example: two people hear the same Mozart piece; one enjoys it more because better disposed (“got better ears”).
• The denarius signifies unity of beatitude on the side of the object; the diversity of mansions, diversity according to grade of enjoyment.
• Student: Thomas speaks of enjoyment rather than of seeing more clearly, yet beatitude consists more in the seeing. He: “I think, but the two are connected.”
• Ad 2: beatitude is the highest good as the perfect possession/enjoyment of the highest good. Ad 3: no blessed one lacks a good he desires, because he has the infinite good, “the good of every good” (Augustine) — he recalls the five chapters on the good in the Summa Contra Gentiles.
• Ad 1 (read after the citation dispute): one is more blessed than another by diverse partaking of the same good; the addition of other goods does not increase beatitude — Augustine, Confessions V: who knows God and other things is not more blessed on account of them, but blessed on account of God alone.
• Aside: a dispute among editions on where Augustine says “good of every good”: one footnote gives De Trinitate XIII 7, another the commentary on Psalm 134; he guesses Augustine “probably said it more than once” and that the Psalm commentary is the source; both volumes are Marietti.

3. q. 5 a. 3, objections: can beatitude be had in this life? (“it seems that beatitude is able to be had in this life”) #

“Save yourself a lot of trouble” — find out whether one can be blessed here.

1. Psalm 118, “blessed are the immaculate in the way” — this can happen in this life. His quick solution: Aristotle says we call a boy happy because we foresee what he will become, though a boy cannot be happy. Aside: democratic society thinks differently about boyhood.
2. Imperfect partaking of the highest good does not destroy the notion of beatitude (otherwise one could not be more blessed than another); in this life men partake by knowing and loving God imperfectly. “Just a question of more and less” — he compares “blessed are the poor in spirit,” which speaks of the end.
3. What is said by many cannot be wholly false, for nature does not entirely fail; many place beatitude in this life (Psalm 143, “blessed the people to whom these things are”). He: “I don’t trust that one” — Scripture also says the number of fools is infinite; but there is some truth in the many saying the end is pleasure. Sed contra: Job 14, man born of woman is filled with many miseries (“like Hamlet’s soliloquy”); beatitude excludes misery.

4. q. 5 a. 3, body: two reasons no true beatitude here (“some partaking of beatitude can be had”) #

Point: some partaking of beatitude in this life, but not perfect and true beatitude.

1. From the common definition: beatitude excludes every evil and fills every desire. But (a) evils here cannot be avoided — ignorance on the side of intellect (he recalls Summa Contra Gentiles: error est magna pars miseriae), disordered affection on the side of desire, penal things on the side of the body (Augustine’s toothache, which he recalls from the Confessions); Augustine pursues this in City of God XIX. (b) Desire cannot be satisfied: man naturally desires permanence of his goods, but they are transitory, and life itself passes though we wish it to remain forever; man naturally flees death. “You can’t have all you want, and you can’t avoid these evils.”
2. From that in which beatitude especially consists: the vision of the divine essence, which is not had in this life (shown in the first part).

• He links this to Aristotle’s “call them happy as men” and Solon’s “call no man happy till he be dead”: a man can fall from great happiness to misery — Oedipus, Othello when Desdemona arrives on the island (“who can control his fate”). He admits “call no man happy till he be dead” is his own paraphrase of Solon.
• Aside: Grandma Quigley, silent while other grandmothers bragged, asked about her children: “None of them’s dead yet.”

5. q. 5 a. 3, replies: hope, two kinds of imperfection (“the partaking of beatitude can be imperfect in two ways”) #

• Ad 1: some are called blessed in this life either by hope of future beatitude (Romans 8, “saved by hope” — Benedict’s encyclical Spe salvi) or by some partaking of it.
• Ad 2, the distinction: imperfection on the side of the object (God not seen in his essence) vs. imperfection on the side of the partaker (attains God, but imperfectly, compared to the way God enjoys himself). The first takes away the notion of true beatitude; the second does not, because beatitude is an operation and its true definition is taken from the object, which gives the species, not from the subject. Aside: God “enjoys himself infinitely” — said of a man, “what’s wrong with you?”
• Student: is the imperfect beatitude of this life seeing God as he is, imperfectly? He: no, it is not seeing God as he is; we know what he is not, that he is the cause of what we know, but not what he is in himself.
• Ad 3: men see some beatitude in this life on account of some likeness of true beatitude, so their estimation is not wholly wrong.

6. Digression: Heidegger’s question and the necessary through itself (“why is there something rather than nothing”) #

Point: the question “why is there something rather than nothing” assumes what is can be and not be, which is true only of contingent things.

1. The things we know best (you, me, the dog, the tree) can be and not be, so we ask why they are and must go outside them to something necessary.
2. Democritus: don’t ask the reason for what is necessary. But from logic, something can be necessary because of something else; so one comes eventually to what is necessary through itself — God.
3. There is no “why” without a distinction between this and that (why the sun is eclipsed); it is absurd to ask why a dog is a dog or why two is two. So of “I am who I am” one cannot ask why he is.
4. So Heidegger’s question, applied to God, involves a false thought (that God can be or not be); the real question is why there are things that can be and not be. Nothing other than God explains why God is.

• Asides: as a boy he imagined “what if there was nothing at all” — but then no one would know it; a student recalls a book (from Oliver Sacks, or someone like him) about a catatonic woman who, waking, said she had been thinking “nothing, nothing, nothing” — “don’t do that anymore.”

7. q. 5 a. 4, objections: can beatitude be lost? (“it seems that beatitude is able to be lost”) #

1. Every perfection is in the perfectible in its mode; man is changeable by nature, so beatitude is partaken of mutabiliter — he puzzles how to say the adverb in English (“changefully beatified”).
2. Beatitude consists in an act of understanding subject to the will, and the will is open to opposites; so a man could desist from the operation. Joke: after a beatification on Sunday “I don’t want to think about God anymore.”
3. To a beginning corresponds an end; beatitude has a beginning. He compares Melissus: being has no beginning, therefore no end — “they go together.” Sed contra: Matthew 25, the just go into eternal life, which is the beatitude of the saints; the eternal does not fail.

8. q. 5 a. 4, body: imperfect beatitude lost, perfect not (“Origen lays down, following the error of the Platonists”) #

“Thomas has got a long, long body here.”

• Imperfect beatitude of this life can be lost. Contemplative: science corrupted by sickness, or occupations withdrawing one from contemplation. Active: the will can degenerate from virtue to vice (Angelo in Measure for Measure, “quite a fall”). If virtue remains, exterior changes disturb happiness by impeding many operations but cannot remove it, since virtue still operates in sustaining adversity praiseworthily — “the good man uses the bad well, the bad man uses the good badly.” Hence Aristotle (Ethics I) calls men blessed “not simpliciter, but as men”: a diminution of the true notion, “just as I know the unknown” — the teacher knows more of what you don’t know than you do.
• Perfect beatitude: Origen, following the Platonists, held man could become miserable after it. False in two ways.
  1. From the common definition: beatitude quiets desire and excludes every evil; man naturally desires security of retaining his good, else afflicted by fear or sorrow of losing it; so true beatitude requires the thought that he will never lose it. If that opinion is true, he never loses it; if false, that itself is an evil, for the false is the evil of the understanding as the true is its good (Ethics VI). “That’s interesting, Thomas says.”
  2. From the special definition: seeing the divine substance, one cannot wish not to see it, since a good one wants to lose is either insufficient or has something unfitting annexed causing weariness; but the vision fills the soul with all goods (Psalm 16, “satisfied when your glory appears” — “your glory, not our glory”; Wisdom 7, all goods came with it) and has no bitterness or weariness annexed. So the blessed cannot desert beatitude by his own will.
  3. Nor by God subtracting it: that would be punishment, which the just Judge gives only for guilt, impossible in one seeing God’s essence, since rightness of will follows that vision.
  4. Nor by any other agent: the mind joined to God is raised above all else.
• So it is unfitting that man pass by alternations of time from beatitude to misery and back; such alternations belong only to what is subject to time and motion. In eternal life we partake of God’s eternity, which has no before and after — “no discourse, no movement there. One word.”

9. q. 5 a. 4, replies: eternity, natural necessity, beginning without end (“tota simul perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis”) #

• Ad 1: beatitude is consummated perfection excluding every defect, so it comes without changeableness, divine power raising man to partake of eternity that transcends change. He recalls Boethius’s definition, tota simul perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis: no beginning, no end, no before and after; understood by negation of what is in time. Boethius: the flowing now makes time, the standing now eternity; if we merely stopped the now of time we would not have perfect possession of life, but in the standing now there is. That is why it is called eternal life.
• Ad 2: the will is open to opposites regarding things ordered to the end, but ordered to the last end by natural necessity — another meaning of “necessary.” Man cannot not will to be blessed; even the damned want to be happy, “part of their frustration.”
• Asides: a man interviewed (Time magazine?) saying there is no hell — “whistling past the graveyard,” “wishful thinking,” contrary to God’s “niceness”; Pius XII on four truths hard to believe: Trinity, Incarnation, Eucharist, eternal damnation; Origen thought the demons could be reconciled; we understand the evil of the sinner as little as the goodness of God (“who understands sin?”, a Psalm); a monk: “come to the monastery, we preach about it” — “a hot topic”; the new Jane Eyre film’s cleric asking “do you know what hell is?”, and the family copy of Jane Eyre a parish priest gave his mother.
• Ad 3: beatitude has a beginning from the condition of the partaker, but lacks an end from the condition of the good partaken; so beginning and endlessness come from different things.

10. Digression: the soul with a beginning but no end (“the soul had a beginning, then must have an end”) #

Point: the objection is a good example of a dialectical argument — from experience, what comes into existence goes out of existence, so one must see that here the reason for the beginning differs from the reason there is no end.

• The same question arises for the human soul: it did not always exist, yet has no end. Aristotle, “in the eleventh book of wisdom” (his reference; [ed.: Metaphysics, inferred]), says forms in matter have a beginning but exempts the human soul from having an end — Greek scholars say he “couldn’t possibly have thought that”, must be a later addition.
• Personal: born 18 January 1936, in existence in 1935 but not in 1934, “and yet my soul go on forever, one place or the other” — amazing, at first sight doubtful.
• Three (or four) opinions: (1) the soul exists neither before nor after the body; (2) it exists both before and after (Plato); (3) Aristotle, with “a bit of truth in both,” not before but after — which seems at first the least probable, yet is the truth; (4) possibly, before the body but then wears out.
• In the dialogue on the immortality of the soul (Phaedo, inferred): Socrates argues the soul is more apt to survive death than the body, and bones and mummies survive, so the soul will; Cebes replies with the shoes: a man wears many pairs and finally buys one that outlasts him, so the survival of the shoe does not prove the man survives. “Very, very interesting dialogue.”

His words #

• adeption / obtaining / enjoyment — Thomas’s adeptio, the second element in the definition of beatitude
• “the good of every good” — Augustine’s phrase for God, quoted in ad 3
• error est magna pars miseriae — “to be mistaken is a great part of misery” (from the Summa Contra Gentiles, as he recalls it)
• “call them happy as men” — Aristotle’s qualified beatitude; “a diminution” of the true notion
• mutabiliter — “changefully”; man partakes beatitude in a changeable way (obj. 1)
• simpliciter — without qualification, opposed to “as men”
• “the false is the evil of the understanding” — as the true is its good (Ethics VI)
• tota simul perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis — Boethius’s definition of eternity
• “natural necessity” — the will’s ordering to the last end; another meaning of “necessary”
• “necessary through itself” — God, as against what is necessary because of something else
• “dialectical argument” — the objection from beginning to end, plausible from experience
• “whistling past the graveyard” — his name for denying hell

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 5, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 5, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 5, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Augustine, Confessions V (quoted in a. 2 ad 1)
• Psalm 16, Wisdom 7 (quoted in a. 4 body)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Ethics I (beatitude as reward of virtue; “as men”; the boy called happy; Solon), Ethics VI (true and false as good and evil of understanding)
• Matthew 20:10, John 14, Psalm 118, Psalm 143, Job 14, Romans 8, Matthew 25
• Gregory on the equal reward; Augustine, De Trinitate XIII 7 / on Psalm 134; City of God XIX; the toothache in the Confessions
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (chapters on the good; error est magna pars miseriae)
• Summa Theologiae I (vision of God not had in this life)
• Benedict XVI, Spe salvi
• Boethius on eternity and the standing now
• Origen and the Platonists on falling from beatitude
• Melissus (no beginning, no end); Democritus (no reason for the necessary); Heidegger’s question
• Aristotle, “eleventh book” of the Metaphysics on forms in matter and the soul (his reference)
• Plato, the dialogue on the immortality of the soul (Phaedo, inferred): Socrates, Cebes
• Shakespeare: Hamlet, Othello, Measure for Measure; Jane Eyre (novel and new film); Pius XII on truths hard to believe

His questions #

• Is the object of every man’s beatitude the same? Yes: the one highest good, God; difference is only in the grade of enjoyment.
• Does Thomas mean enjoyment rather than seeing more clearly? (student) Beatitude consists more in seeing, “but the two are connected.”
• Can one be blessed in this life? Only by some partaking, or by hope; not truly, since evils cannot be excluded, desire filled, nor God’s essence seen.
• Is the imperfect beatitude of this life seeing God as he is, imperfectly? (student) No; we know what he is not and that he is the cause, not what he is in himself.
• Why is Heidegger’s question badly put? It treats God as able to be and not be; the real question is why there are contingent things.
• How can one lose the imperfect beatitude of this life? Sickness corrupting science, occupations withdrawing from contemplation, the will falling from virtue to vice.
• Can the blessed become miserable, as Origen held? No: not by his own will, not by God’s subtraction (no guilt), not by any other agent.
• How can beatitude have a beginning and no end? Beginning from the condition of the partaker, endlessness from the condition of the good — as with the human soul.