Just Thomism

Cynthia Nielsen at Per Caritatem has a lovely and well argued post about Aquinas’ teaching on the relation of the intellect to the will. I only have difficulty with one of the inferences drawn toward the end:

Aquinas says that the beatific vision, which is the soul’s relation to God, is essentially an intellectual act, and at the same time he says that the soul’s most excellent act in relation to God is an act of the will. It will not do to resolve this tension by affirming that this superiority of the will holds for the will’s relation to God in via, but not in fine. Such a qualification would succeed in dissolving the problem only if the soul were capable, finally, of appropriating the whole of God without remainder into itself in the sense of a total comprehension, so that there would in fact be no ‘beyond’ left to require the soul’s volitional movement above itself

My objection is only to the second sentence. To respond:

1.) In the same way that we do not comprehend God in beatitude, neither do we love him comprehensively; because just as comprehension means to know God as fully as he knows himself, neither can we love God as fully as he loves himself. A failure in comprehension, therefore, does not require that the will still reach out to something more.

2.) If beatitude consists in an act of the will going beyond what is in some way known by the intellect, then the mind must relate to this thing beyond itself by an act of faith. But in beatitude faith passes away to knowledge: “then I shall know him even as I am known” and “this is eternal life, that they might know you the only true God”.

3.) I argue that Aquinas’ holds a different and simpler doctrine concerning the relation of intellect and will. Let me summarize his doctrine as I see it, then cite the sources later.

To attain to something in itself is better than attaining to it through another.

In this life, we attain to knowledge of God through another (creatures) but we love God in himself. But beatitude consists in our “see[ing] God as he is” and in “knowing him even as we are known”.

So the proper cause of the relative superiority of the will over the intellect is its greater mode of attainment in this life. After this life, the cause disappears, and so the effect disappears as well.