CatholicTheology.info

Choose a topic from Part 3 Suppl:

• Penance (Continued)
• Extreme Unction
• Order (Holy Orders)
• Matrimony
• The General Resurrection
• The Last Things
  • 87. Knowledge in Risen Man
  • 88. Time and Place of the General Judgment
  • 89. Persons to be Present at the Last Judgment
  • 90. Christ, the Judge
  • 92. Heaven: The Beatific Vision
  • 93. The Happiness of Heaven: Mansions
  • 94. The Saved and the Damned
  • 95. The Endowments of the Blessed
  • 96. Special Heavenly Rewards
  • 97. The Punishment of the Damned
  • 98. The Will and the Intellect of the Damned
  • 99. God's Mercy and Justice Towards the Damned
• Appendix I (The Innocents in Limbo)
• Appendix II (Two Notes on Purgatory)

92. Heaven: The Beatific Vision

1. In heaven the blessed will directly see the veryessence of God. "We shall see him as he is" (I John 3:2).God is supremely intelligible or understandable, and is himself thedetermining of the creatural intellect to know him in hisessence. To know God thus is to behold the beatific vision.

2. After the general resurrection when bodies and soulswill be reunited, the blessed will not behold God's essencewith their bodily eyes. For bodily eyes, even when theyare glorified, behold bodily things, and God's essence is notbodily. Those that see God in heaven (before or after theresurrection of the body) see him with the mind, theintellect-strengthened, elevated, and illumined by the Light ofGlory.

3. No creature can know God exhaustively, so as to knowall thatGod knows. This would mean the encompassing of theinfinite by a finite understanding; this is utterly impossible.Therefore, the blessed see God in his essence, but they do not seeall that God sees. Even the angels "who know all things inGod," do not know all that God knows. The term "allthings" means "all that they know."

"Those who love God are always happy, because their whole happiness is to fulfill, even in adversity, the will of God."
St Alphonsus de Liguori

* * *

"This is the greatest wisdom -- to seek the kingdom of heaven through contempt of the world. "
Thomas á Kempis

* * *

"The supreme perfection of man in this life is to be so united to God that all his soul with all its faculties and powers are so gathered into the Lord God that he becomes one spirit with him, and remembers nothing except God, is aware of and recognises nothing but God, but with all his desires unified by the joy of love, he rests contentedly in the enjoyment of his Maker alone."
St Albert the Great

* * *

Copyright