67. God alone suffices
67. GOD ALONE SUFFICES
God designed us to need and love each other. He will surely perfect that design in Heaven. Life without friendship is not a human life. How then can God alone suffice for our eternal happiness? Isn’t that selfish and lonely? Won’t we need human friends as well as God in Heaven to be happy? But if we need something besides God, wouldn’t that make God only part of our true good, and thus something less than God?
(In the following answer, please keep clearly in mind that St. Thomas is not saying that we will not have friends in Heaven, only that we will not need them, for indeed if God alone is not enough to make us perfectly happy, then God is not God.)
Charity is perfected in happiness. But charity includes the love of God and of our neighbor. Therefore it seems that fellowship of friends is necessary for happiness.
If we speak of the happiness of this life, the happy man needs friends . . . that he may do good to them; that he may delight in seeing them do good; and also that he may be helped by them in his good work. . . .
But if we speak of perfect happiness which will be in our heavenly Fatherland . . . man has the entire fullness of his perfection in God. . . . the fellowship of friends conduces to the well-being of happiness. . . (yet) if there were but one soul enjoying God, it would be happy, though having no neighbor to love.
But supposing one neighbor to be there, love of him results from perfect love of God. Consequently, friendship is, as it were, concomitant with perfect happiness (I-II,4,8).
Just as our spirit’s happiness will “flow over” into our glorified body, from its essential place in our soul to its additional place in our body, as a glorious “extra”, so our love of God will “flow over” into our love of neighbor in Heaven, as it does on earth.
But not out of need. Our “horizontal” loves of each other in Heaven will be based on pure charity, not on need. We will love each other as God loves us: out of pure “overflow”.
And even though it is right and good and necessary for us to need each other here, and to express that need-love, we also need to learn more of the pure gift-love, the pure charity, that is the nature of God, because that is the love we will give and receive in Heaven. That’s the relevance of Heaven to our daily lives: life in this world is dress rehearsal for opening night on the stage of eternity. To say the same thing in another analogy, God gave us time, and space, and matter, and the universe to be our spiritual gymnasium, and we need to work out every day. To use still another image, this world is our elementary school, and we need to learn its lessons so that we can graduate to high school and university when we die. Purgatory is high school, and Heaven is the university where we keep learning to love more and more forever.