Perfect happiness is seeing God

Beatitude; the beatific vision

Thomas Aquinas 1225 · 1274Faith and reason cannot contradict each other.

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What it claims

Final and perfect happiness can be nothing other than the vision of the divine essence.

Why

No created good fully satisfies desire, and the mind only rests when it knows the very essence of God.

The same idea through history

Aristotle330 BCNicomachean Ethics, X, 7: perfect happiness is the activity of the highest thing in us, the mind, that is, contemplation. Thomas takes up this idea, but makes it the imperfect happiness of this life.

Augustine of Hippo397Augustine: the heart is restless until it rests in God. Thomas gives the most precise version: he says why, and what this rest consists of.

Thomas Aquinas1271Summa theologiae, Prima secundae, questions 2 and 3: Thomas goes through what people take for happiness (wealth, honours, fame, power, bodily goods, pleasure, any created good), sets them aside one by one, then shows that perfect happiness can only be the vision of God's essence.

Blaise Pascal1670Pascal: man looks for happiness everywhere and finds it nowhere, because the lack is infinite and only God can fill it.

In short

"Perfect happiness is seeing God" is an argument by Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae, I-II, q. 2 and 3, 1271) on the question "What is happiness?" (answer: in god). Its claim: Final and perfect happiness can be nothing other than the vision of the divine essence. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P5). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Summa theologiae, I-II, q. 2 and 3

Valid with an implicit premise

For Thomas Aquinas, everyone seeks happiness, but many seek it in the wrong place. He examines the candidates one by one: wealth is only a means, honours come from others, fame depends on opinion, power can serve evil, the body and pleasure are goods that are too low. Happiness is the perfect good: the one that fulfils the whole desire. Now our will desires the universal good, and it is in no creature, only in God. And our intellect does not rest until it knows what the first cause is. Hence the conclusion: perfect happiness is seeing God. Here below, we only have an imperfect happiness.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P5, the computer finds a world where perfect happiness simply does not exist: no created good fulfils the desire, God is not seen, and man remains unfinished. The other premises are true in that world, but the conclusion is not.

Valid with P5. Without it, the argument only shows that, if perfect happiness exists, it goes through the vision of God. That is a condition, not proof that this vision is possible. For Thomas, P5 comes from his view of nature: a natural desire of the intellect cannot be without an object. That is the most debated point, and the one naturalist objections target.

Analogy. A child wants the sky: he is given a balloon, then a hot-air balloon, then a plane. Each time he is pleased, then he looks higher. Thomas says: you want the sky itself, and nothing that stays on earth contains it. The sceptic replies: there may be no sky, only the urge to climb.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Aristotle 330 BC · attacks the conclusion

For Aristotle, perfect happiness is within man's reach: it is the activity of the highest thing in us, the mind, according to its proper virtue, contemplation. It is the most continuous activity and the most self-sufficient. He adds to this contemplation no future life and no vision of God: the contemplation of the wise is enough.

Thomas d'Aquin replies

Thomas Aquinas Thomas Aquinas (q. 3, art. 2, reply 4)

In this life, the activity that unites man to God can be neither continuous nor single: it is interrupted. Perfect happiness therefore cannot be possessed here. Aristotle himself, in placing man's happiness in this life, calls it imperfect and concludes: "We call men happy, but only as men." This happiness is nevertheless a participation in happiness, so much the greater as the activity is more continuous: the contemplative life has more of it than the active life. Perfect happiness is promised for later, when man's mind will be united to God by one, continual, everlasting activity.

Thomas Aquinas Thomas Aquinas (q. 3, art. 6, reply 1)

To another objection drawn from Aristotle, Thomas answers that the Philosopher treats, in the Ethics, of imperfect happiness, such as can be had in this life.

The debate goes on (our summary) Thomas reads Aristotle with respect: he keeps contemplation as the best part of happiness here below, but refuses that it is enough. An Aristotelian answers that, in book X, Aristotle does speak of "perfect happiness", and that Thomas leans mostly on book I (Ethics I, 10). The two agree on one point: the contemplative life is above the ordinary human condition (X, 7, 1177b) and one must raise oneself to it as far as one can. The disagreement is over what is still missing: for Thomas, death and interruption keep happiness from being complete; for Aristotle, a happiness "such as a man's" is already the highest one can aim at.

Epicurus 300 BC · attacks premise 2

For Epicurus, happiness is pleasure, understood as the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul. It is not a matter of the pleasures of the debauched: health of body and peace of mind are enough. They are found here below, without seeking an infinite good.

Thomas d'Aquin replies

Thomas Aquinas Thomas Aquinas (q. 2, art. 6)

Pleasure follows happiness without being its essence. All delight is like the proper accident that goes with possessing a fitting good; even the one that follows the perfect good is not the essence of happiness, but something that results from it. As for bodily pleasure, it cannot even result from the perfect good, since the good of the body is tiny beside that of the soul.

The debate goes on (our summary) Thomas answers the thesis that happiness is pleasure in general (the objection he discusses leans on Aristotle), not Epicurus in particular. An Epicurean can reply that the absence of trouble is not a bodily pleasure but a state, and that Thomas must show, not assume, that a more perfect good exists (P5). Thomas would answer that the desire to know does not die with peace of mind (P4). It is a real question of fact: does a tranquil soul still seek something?

Feuerbach 1841 · attacks premise 5

For Feuerbach, the promised vision of God is a wish of man that has been given a reality. God is only the human being freed from his limits, and the beyond is only this life freed from what seems evil in it. The content of the future life is the everlasting bliss of the person whom nature limits here: believing in that life is "the faith of man in himself". The natural desire to see God (P5) would then be only the desire to be happy without limits, projected outside us (see also the argument "Religion as man's projection").

no reply

No reply possible: objection raised in 1841, after the author's death (1274).

The debate goes on (our summary) Thomas's defenders answer that Feuerbach confuses the origin of a belief with its truth: that a desire exists does not mean its object does not (the genetic fallacy). Thomas, besides, does not claim to prove God from desire: the desire to know what the first cause is (q. 3, art. 8) only shows that happiness here below is incomplete. Feuerbach's defenders answer that, if all our content of God is human, nothing proves the desire has an object. P5 therefore remains the debated point.