8.6 God’s Blessedness (SCG 1,100–102)
8.6 God’s Blessedness (SCG 1,100–102)
In the light of what I noted above concerning Aquinas on happiness as beatitudo, Aquinas obviously has to say that God enjoys beatitude, and this is what he does in SCG 1,100. God, maintains Aquinas, knows and wills the perfect goodness that God is. So God enjoys blessedness or perfect happiness. Given divine simplicity, Aquinas adds in SCG 1,101, God’s blessedness has to be God himself. Then, in SCG 1,102, Aquinas concludes SCG 1 by claiming that God’s blessedness or happiness is perfect and unique and, therefore, greater than that of any creature.
The nearest thing to blessedness is blessedness itself, says Aquinas. So, he reasons, since God is blessedness itself, “God is in a unique way perfectly blessed.”40 Human beings may look forward to beatitudo and may, indeed, achieve it. But they do not eternally possess blessedness as actual and as constituting what they are by nature. Again, says Aquinas: (1) God delights in himself immeasurably since he is perfectly at one with himself and wills himself as the highest good; (2) blessedness is a perfection enjoyed by what has intellect, “but no other intellectual operation can compare with God’s operation … because by one operation God knows himself as perfectly as he is perfect”; (3) God’s blessedness, unlike that of creatures, is eternal; (4) God’s happiness lacks the weariness and various cares that accompany what happiness we might ever achieve in this life; it is also happiness deriving from what is much greater than what tends to make us happy (such as physical pleasure, riches, temporal power, honor, and fame); (5) God’s happiness is that of one who perfectly enjoys what God is; so it is joy in what is divine and in all that is made to exist by what is divine.
At this point, Aquinas concludes SCG 1 with the words “To him, then, who is singularly blessed, be honor and glory unto the ages of ages. Amen.”41