The Consummation of the World: St. Thomas Aquinas on the Risen Saints’ Beatitude and the Corporeal Universe

Abstract

In the Catholic tradition, the object of human hope is o;ered as bodily resurrection from death, and “the life of the world to come.” Implicit in that short phrase from the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is that this “life” is understood to be life in communion with God, knowing and loving him without end, for “this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” ( John 17:3). Pope Benedict XII’s encyclical Benedictus Deus (1336) states dogmatically that the souls of the saints enter immediately into beatitude—perfect beatitude—constituted essentially by the vision of God “face to face.”1 God, as the Source of all being, all truth, all goodness, all beauty, perfectly, more than satis@es every human longing.2 Such a conception of the object of our hope may leave one wondering: since God is, indeed, all that one could ever want—which we have no inten-