64. What role our bodily senses play in our happiness
64. WHAT ROLE OUR BODILY SENSES PLAY IN OUR HAPPINESS
Since neither external goods, nor goods of the body, nor goods of the soul, constitute happiness, but only God, does that mean that our body and our senses play no part in our true happiness except to distract us and tempt us? Why did God give them to us? What is their role in our attaining happiness?
A thing may belong to happiness in three ways: (1) essentially, (2) antecedently (before, as cause), (3) consequently (after, as effect). Now the operation of sense cannot belong to man’s happiness essentially. For happiness consists essentially in his being united to the Uncreated Good, Which is his last end, as shown above, to which man cannot be united by an operation of his senses. . . (and also) because, as shown above, man’s happiness does not consist in goods of the body, which goods alone we attain through the operation of the senses. Nevertheless the operations of the senses can belong to happiness both (2) antecedently and (3) consequently.
(2) Antecedently, in respect of imperfect happiness such as can be had in this life, since the operation of the intellect demands a previous operation of the sense. (Your senses feed your mind and heart; if you sense nothing at all, you can know nothing and can desire nothing.)
(3) Consequently, in that perfect happiness which we await in heaven, because at the resurrection, from the very happiness of the soul, as Augustine says, the body and the bodily sense will receive a certain overflow, so as to be perfected in their operations. . . .
In perfect happiness the entire man is perfected in the lower part of his nature by an overflow from the higher (point (3)). But in the imperfect happiness of this life, it is otherwise: we advance from the perfection of the lower part to the perfection of the higher part (point (2)) (I-II,3,3).
But speaking of perfect happiness, some (heretics) have maintained that . . . it is necessary for the soul to be entirely separated from the body. . . . But this is unreasonable. For since it is natural for the soul to be united to the body, it is not possible for the perfection of the soul to exclude its (the body’s) natural perfection.
Consequently, we must say that perfect disposition of the body is necessary, both (2) antecedently and (3) consequently, for that happiness which is in all ways perfect.
Antecendently, (a perfect body is necessary) because, as Augustine says, if the body be such that the governance thereof is difficult and burdensome . . . the mind is turned away from that vision of the highest heaven. Whence he concludes that when this body will no longer be ‘natural’ but ‘spiritual,’ then will be its glory which erstwhile was its burden.
Consequently, because from the happiness of the soul there will be an overflow on to the body so that this too will obtain its perfection (I-II,4,6).
Heaven is not bodiless, a place for angels only. It includes a resurrected body, without which we are not complete human beings. God did not make a mistake in making us embodied creatures, and He will not undo His perfect plan. We alone are both spirit and matter; we alone hold all creation together.
And the pilgrim road to Heaven is not bodiless either, a road fit for angels. It includes bodily joys and sufferings, both of which we can and should offer to God in trust. It includes learning to ride these beautiful but unruly horses. C. S. Lewis says, in Miracles, “The old field of space, time, matter, and the senses is to be weeded, dug and sown for a new crop. We may be tired of that old field; God is not. . . . These small and perishable bodies we now have were given to us as ponies are given to schoolboys. We must learn to manage: not that we may some day be free of horses altogether, but that some day we may ride bare-back, confident and rejoicing, those greater mounts, those winged, shining and world-shaking horses which perhaps even now expect us with impatience, pawing and snorting in the King’s stables.”