12. “Seeing” God in Heaven
12. “SEEING” GOD IN HEAVEN
How can our ultimate end be “the Beatific Vision” of God Himself? Isn’t that too high and holy and distant for us to hope for? We are like worms and God is like Mount Everest. Doesn’t it make more sense to say, in the words of the famous Vermont farmer joke, that “you can’t get there from here”?
Whether any created intellect can see the essence of God?
It is written: We shall see Him as He is (1 Jn 2:2).
God is in Himself supremely knowable. But what is in itself supremely knowable may not be knowable to a particular intellect on account of the excess of the intelligible object above the intellect, as, for example, the sun, which is supremely visible, cannot be seen by the bat by reason of its excess of light. Therefore some who considered this held that no created intellect can see the essence of God.
This opinion, however, is not tenable. For as the ultimate beatitude of man consists in the use of his highest function, which is the operation of the intellect (mind, understanding), if we suppose the created intellect could never see God, it would either never attain to beatitude, or its beatitude would consist in something else besides God; which is opposed to faith. . . . Further, the same opinion is also against reason. For there resides in every man a natural desire to know the cause (reason, explanation) of any effect which he sees, and thence arises wonder in men. But if the intellect of the rational creature could not reach so far as to the first cause of things, the natural desire would remain void.
Hence it must be absolutely granted that the blessed see the essence of God (I,12,1).
How can we see God? How can we get there from here? The question is legitimate, and stems from a profoundly true understanding of the ininity of the gap between us and God. Only someone who vastly overestimates humanity, or vastly underestimates divinity, or both, can be insensitive to this question, or unworried about it.
(“Seeing” Him, of course, means not just “perceiving” Him with the eyes, or even with the abstract reason, but above all with the heart; “knowing” Him personally, not just impersonally; as Father, not just Explanation. The I AM is not just AM (being) but also I (person).)
But the question is answerable, for God has planted the desire to see Him in our very nature, which remains in all of us, even the most sinful. We find in our very nature the desire to know the ultimate explanation for everything, which is in the Mind that designed everything, the Author of the story we are all in. For we desire to know all that can be known about all that is. (We also desire to attain and enjoy all the good that is and all the beauty that is, but we first have to know it in order to appreciate and enjoy it.) This is not a religious dogma that requires faith to believe; it is a fact anyone can find simply by introspection. Whether or not there is a God, our hearts are in fact restless until they rest in God. It takes only honesty, not faith, to discover that.
So whether God exists or not, we have a natural desire for God. But “nature makes nothing in vain.” All natural desires correspond to real beings that can satisfy them: hunger, thirst, eros, tiredness, loneliness, boredom, ugliness, injustice, and pain point to food, drink, sex, rest, friends, interest, beauty, justice, and pleasure. Unless this one desire—the greatest one of all—is the one and only exception.
But if that is the case, if this is the one exception to the law that runs through everything else, then the correspondence between desires and satisfactions in everything else is not caused by a good God, nor by random chance (it is far too coincidental for that) but by a bad God, or the Devil, who lures us with a thousand appetizers and then starves us of the main course.
Perhaps that cannot be proved to be false, as St. Thomas thinks it can; but why would anyone choose to believe that rather than believe, hope and trust the alternative explanation, that God (and therefore the nature He gave us) is good and trustable? Why bet on what you can’t win even if you win?