13.2 Ultimate Felicity for Humans (SCG 3,26–63)
13.2 Ultimate Felicity for Humans (SCG 3,26–63)
In SCG 3,37 Aquinas bluntly says: “Our ultimate felicity consists only in the contemplation of God.”8 He means that perfect human happiness amounts to a “vision of the divine substance,” as he puts it in SCG 3,57.9 Before he discusses this vision of God, however, Aquinas spends time ruling out possible candidates for the title “That in which human felicity ultimately consists.”
13.2.1 What Ultimate Human Felicity Is Not: 1 (SCG 3,26–36)
According to Aquinas, ultimate human felicity does not consist in an act of will (in actu voluntatis) (SCG 3,26). Nor does it consist in bodily pleasures (in delectationibus carnalibus) (SCG 3,27), in honors (in honoribus) (SCG 3,28), in glory (in gloria) (SCG 3,29), in riches (in divitiis) (SCG 3,30), in worldly power (in potentia mundana) (SCG 3,31), in goods of the body (in bonis corporis) (SCG 3,32), in sensory experience (in sensu) (SCG 3,33), in acts of the moral virtues (in actibus virtutum moralium) (SCG 3,34), in being prudential (in actu prudentiae) (SCG 3,35), or in acting creatively as an artist (in operatione artis) (SCG 3,36).
In denying that ultimate human felicity consists in an act of will, Aquinas is concerned to stress that it lies in knowing, not in being attracted or desiring. He is convinced that we become united to God by willing in certain ways. Yet, he argues, as beings capable of knowing, it is in knowing God that our ultimate happiness must lie.10 So, he says:
Since happiness is the proper good of an intellectual nature, happiness must pertain to an intellectual nature by reason of what is proper to that nature. Now appetite is not peculiar to intellectual nature; instead it is present in all things, though it is in different things in different ways. And this diversity arises from the fact that things are differently related to knowledge. For things lacking knowledge entirely have natural appetite only. And things endowed with sensory knowledge have, in addition, sense appetite. … But things possessed of intellectual knowledge also have an appetite proportionate to this knowledge, that is will. So, the will is not peculiar to intellectual nature by virtue of being an appetite, but only in so far as it depends on intellect. However, the intellect, in itself, is peculiar to an intellectual nature. Therefore, happiness, or felicity, consists substantially and principally in an act of the intellect rather than in an act of the will.11
And to this argument Aquinas adds some others, the main ones being these:
1. What we will is prior to our willing it; we move to what we perceive as desirable. So the object of our willing is something known, something that leads us to want it. Therefore, “no act of will can be the first thing that is willed.”12 Yet happiness, as the ultimate end, is the first thing that is willed; so an act of will cannot be happiness or felicity. In other words: by will or appetite we are drawn to something; yet it is not an act of will that we are drawn to; it is something we desire.
2. Willing can be misconceived insofar as we can will what is not truly good. So ultimate human happiness has to amount to understanding rather than willing.
3. By willing we tend to what we desire but might lack. So our ultimate happiness cannot just lie in willing or desiring or loving. It must consist in obtaining what we will or desire or love, on condition that this is something supremely good, something than which nothing greater can be willed, desired, or loved.
When it comes to what else Aquinas thinks ultimate human happiness cannot be, a major notion governing his discussion is that if X is to be ultimate human happiness, then it has to be an end beyond which no other can be thought desirable. It cannot be a good that is a means to an end. It must be ultimately desirable, first among what is desirable for people, something desirable for its own sake. With this idea in mind, therefore, Aquinas argues as follows.
1. Human felicity cannot consist in bodily pleasures, such as food and sex, since these are ordered to ends not identical with them—such as bodily preservation or the generation of offspring. In SCG 3,27 Aquinas also argues: (1) since ultimate happiness is not an act of will, it cannot lie in bodily pleasures which belong to sensory desire; (2) bodily pleasures are enjoyed by nonhuman animals, so distinctively human happiness cannot lie in them; (3) the final end for people must involve what is ultimately best for them, which cannot be enjoying certain physical sensations but rather lies in understanding of some kind; (4) ultimate human happiness cannot lie in union with something inferior to what is human; yet sensory pleasures derive from union with what is inferior to human beings; (5) something that is not good unless it is moderated is not good of itself; yet the enjoyment by human beings of bodily pleasure has to be in moderation so that people are not damaged; so bodily pleasure is not the ultimate good for people; (6) if bodily pleasures were goods in and of themselves, then enjoying them as much as possible would be good for people; yet excessive enjoyment can be positively and physically harmful; (7) if ultimate human happiness consisted in bodily pleasures, it would be wrong ever to display temperance concerning them; but it is sometimes virtuous to do so, and temperance is a virtue; (8) if the ultimate end of everything is God (see SCG 3,17), the ultimate end for people must be that by which they are brought closest to God; yet sensory pleasures can impede union with God since they can drag people down to wallowing among bodily things.13
2. “That which is good and desirable on account of something else is not the ultimate end. But honor is of this sort. A person is not rightly honored unless it be because of some other good that is present in that person. And this is why people seek to be honored, desiring, as it were, to have a witness to some good feature present in them.”14 In SCG 3,28 Aquinas also argues: (1) honors are conferred on one by others; they do not amount to a perfect way of functioning, the possession of perfect happiness; (2) people attain perfect happiness as a result of being virtuous; but having an honor conferred on one is not something one can bring about by choosing to act well; (3) even evil people have honors conferred on them; so ultimate human happiness, in which there can be no evil, cannot lie in honors.
3. By “glory,” Aquinas means “a widely recognized reputation” accompanied by praise.15 With this understanding in mind, he denies that ultimate human happiness lies in glory since people seek glory so as to be honored. He adds: “If honor is not the highest good, much less is glory.”16 In SCG 3,29 he also argues: (1) we praise those who are on the way to arriving at a good end, not those who have achieved ultimate human happiness; so ultimate human happiness cannot chiefly consist in praise; (2) it is better to know than to be known; so ultimate human happiness cannot amount to being well known; (3) it is good to be known for good things one has done; yet these good things are better than being well known, from which it follows that it is not the case that the highest good is being widely known; (4) our highest good should be perfect, but the knowledge that comes about as one is well known comes with uncertainty and error; (5) our ultimate good should be something abiding; yet glory comes and passes away, and “nothing is more variable than opinion and human praise.”17
4. Our highest good or happiness cannot lie in riches or wealth since these “are only desired for the sake of something else; they provide no good of themselves but only when we use them.”18 In SCG 3,30 Aquinas also argues: (1) one can hardly take our highest good to lie in having things from which we chiefly benefit only when we get rid of them; (2) that which gives human beings ultimate happiness must be better than them; but people are better than riches or wealth since these “are but things subordinated to our use”;19 (3) whether or not we obtain wealth or fortune does not always depend on what we choose to do; there is an element of chance involved in the acquisition or losing of wealth or fortune; yet our highest good cannot consist in what can be acquired or lost by chance.
5. Nor can it lie in worldly power since chance frequently plays a big role in our acquiring or losing this. Also, great worldly power can be had by people who are bad. Yet “people are deemed good chiefly in terms of the highest good” and “are not called good, or bad, simply because they have power.”20 In any case, power is relative, while perfect human happiness must be intrinsic to those who enjoy it; and power can be used for good or ill, while this cannot be true of ultimate human happiness. In addition, of course, human power is fragile; it comes and goes and depends on various things; yet nothing like this can be that in which ultimate human happiness consists.
6. Our highest good cannot consist in goods of the body since such goods can be had by both bad and good people. They are also unstable and largely beyond our control. By “goods of the body,” Aquinas is not thinking of the sensory delights to which he refers in SCG 3,27. As he says himself, he is thinking of goods such as health, beauty, and strength, and he denies that ultimate human happiness can lie in these, not only because they can be had by both good and bad people but also because they can be had by nonhuman animals, some of which possess them to a greater degree than we do.
7. Ultimate human happiness cannot lie in goods to be attributed to people because their senses are working well. The sense powers of nonhuman animals often work well, yet nonhuman animals cannot attain the ultimate happiness that is proper to human beings. In any case, “Intellect is better than sense. So, the good of the intellect is better than the good of the senses. Therefore, our highest good does not lie in sense.”21
8. Ultimate human happiness cannot lie in actions performed by people with moral virtues since these are just means to acquiring happiness. Aquinas writes: “Human felicity is incapable of being ordered to a further end, if it is ultimate. But all moral operations can be ordered to something else. … Therefore, our ultimate felicity does not lie in moral operations.”22 Aquinas means that, for example, we act with bravery so as to obtain victory, and we act with justice so as to preserve peace. Yet, he suggests, our ultimate happiness or end cannot consist in a virtuous striving for something other than it. In general, Aquinas argues in SCG 3,34, ultimate human happiness does not consist in striving to be virtuous. Rather, it amounts to having arrived at some final perfect state. Since he thinks this, in SCG 3,35 he takes it to be obvious that ultimate human happiness cannot consist in the acting on the basis of the virtue of prudence. “The act of prudence,” he says, “is only concerned with things that pertain to the moral virtues.” He continues: “Now our ultimate felicity does not lie in the acts of the moral virtues [see SCG 3,34], nor, then, in the act of prudence.”23
9. Ultimate human happiness does not lie in acting creatively as an artist since “the knowledge that pertains to art” is “practical knowledge.”24 Aquinas means that the knowledge that pertains to art is knowledge that helps one to bring about a result, like a wonderful building or a beautiful painting. So, he thinks, it is knowledge ordered to an end and cannot be the ultimate end for people. In any case, he adds, art only results in artifacts, “which cannot be the ultimate end of human life.”25
So, in SCG 3,37 Aquinas concludes:
If the ultimate felicity of people does not consist in external things which are called the goods of fortune, nor in the goods of the body, nor in the goods of the soul according to its sensitive part, nor as regards the intellective part according to the activity of the moral virtues, nor according to the intellectual virtues that are concerned with action, that is, art and prudence—we are left with the conclusion that the ultimate felicity of people lies in the contemplation of truth.26
The contemplation of truth, says Aquinas, is an operation unique to human beings; other animals do not engage in it. Furthermore, he adds, the contemplation of truth “is ordered to nothing else as an end, for the contemplation of truth is sought for its own sake.”27 And what truth does Aquinas have in mind as that the contemplation of which provides human beings with ultimate happiness? He thinks that it is God. “Our ultimate felicity,” he says, “consists in the contemplation of wisdom, based on the considering of divine matters … [and] … our ultimate felicity consists only in the contemplation of God.”28
13.2.2 What Ultimate Human Felicity Is Not: 2 (SCG 3,38–48)
Having arrived at this verdict, Aquinas embarks on another set of arguments designed to show what ultimate human happiness cannot be. More precisely, he moves on to argue that ultimate human happiness cannot be something achieved by people prior to their death.
As I have shown, Aquinas thinks that people do enjoy some knowledge of God in the present life (1) since there is some vague awareness of God present in people by nature (see SCG 1,11), (2) since “God exists” is demonstrable (see SCG 1,13), and (3) since we can demonstrate that certain perfections should be attributed to God and that certain ways of being should not (see SCG 1,14–102). Aquinas also holds that Christians are able to assent to truths about God by faith even if they are not able to demonstrate them (see SCG 1,5–8). In SCG 3,38–40, however, Aquinas denies that ultimate human happiness amounts to knowledge of God in any of these senses.
To start with, he takes what he calls the “common and confused knowledge of God which is found in practically all people” to be imperfect and to admit of error.29 Yet, says Aquinas, human happiness cannot be defective.
Again, he argues, while certain propositions concerning God are demonstrable, not everyone is able to arrive at demonstrative knowledge of God (see SCG 1,4), and even those who can still lack a knowledge of what God is (see SCG 1,14). Such “proper knowledge as we have of God through demonstration,” says Aquinas, “is not sufficient for our ultimate felicity.”30 Why not? Because it “still remains in potency to something further to be learned about God, or to the same knowledge possessed in a higher way.”31 Even when we have managed to achieve some knowledge of God by demonstration, Aquinas laments, “we still remain ignorant of many things” and lack ultimate happiness.32
As for what he calls “the knowledge of God which is through faith” (cognitio Dei quae est per fidem), Aquinas takes this to be imperfect since it does not amount to knowledge even if what the believer holds to by faith is true. Yes, Aquinas agrees, by faith we lay hold of what is true. But, he adds, we remain with a lack of understanding. He writes:
In the knowledge of faith, there is found a most imperfect operation of the intellect, having regard to what is on the side of the intellect, though the greatest perfection is discovered on the side of the object. For the intellect does not grasp the object to which it gives assent in the act of believing. Therefore, neither does our ultimate felicity lie in this kind of knowledge of God.33
We often say that seeing is believing. Yet Aquinas takes mere believing to be needed precisely when there is a lack of sight or understanding. So he regards faith as intrinsically inferior to knowledge and thinks that our ultimate happiness cannot lie only in having faith. Ultimate happiness, he says, puts an end to natural desire. Yet, he goes on to observe, “The knowledge of faith does not bring rest to desire but rather sets it aflame, since all people desire to see what they believe.”34
13.2.3 Ultimate Human Happiness and Separate Substances (SCG 3,41–46)
Aquinas therefore thinks that ultimate human happiness consists in a knowledge of God that goes beyond any knowledge of God that we can have in this life. He is, however, aware of lines of argument that might be thought to suggest otherwise—lines of argument that claim that, in this life, we can know or understand separate substances (i.e., purely intellectual beings as considered in SCG 2,96–101) and thereby enjoy a fulfilling knowledge of God.
Why would someone say that a knowledge or understanding in this life of separate substances would provide us with some fulfilling knowledge of God? Because such a person might think that understanding separate substances would involve an understanding of God that is superior to the ways of knowing God that Aquinas refers to in SCG 3,38–40. And it is thinking along these lines that Aquinas is concerned with in SCG 3,41.
In SCG 3,41 Aquinas refers back to the SCG’s previous discussion of separate substances. Then he says this:
A separate substance, in knowing its own essence, knows both what is above and what is below itself, in a manner proper to its substance. This is especially necessary if what is above it is its cause, since the likeness of the cause must be found in the effects. And so, since God is the cause of all created intellectual substances … then separate intellectual substances, in knowing their essence, must know God himself by way of a vision of some kind. For a thing whose likeness exists in the intellect is known through the intellect by way of vision, just as the likeness of a thing which is seen corporeally is present in the sense of the viewer.35
If this line of thinking is correct, then understanding a separate substance would seem to involve a grasp of what that substance knows. And if separate substances know God as Aquinas takes them to do (if they enjoy some kind of vision of God), then it would seem that if we can understand separate substances, we thereby gain some vision of God ourselves. But can we understand separate substances in this life?
Aquinas raises this question in SCG 3,41, and he then goes on to note and discuss arguments coming from three thinkers, two of them Arabic:36 Avempace (1095–1138), Alexander of Aphrodisias, and Averroes. Aquinas presumes that each of these authors asserts that we can in this life understand separate substances. Since his discussion of them running through SCG 3,41 to SCG 3,44 is detailed and, I suspect, only of interest to specialists in the history of philosophy, I am not going to try to talk you through it. Instead, I shall note where it leads Aquinas.
His conclusion is that the arguments he has been discussing are flawed, that we cannot understand separate substances, and, therefore, that we do not in this life have a knowledge of separate substances that gives us a knowledge of God that is superior to the general knowledge of God had by most people, to the knowledge of God derived from demonstration, and to the knowledge of faith. “A thing is futile,” says Aquinas, “which exists for an end which it cannot attain.”37 Then he argues:
Since the end of people is felicity, to which their natural desire tends, it is not possible for our felicity to be placed in something that we cannot achieve. Otherwise it would follow that we are futile beings, and our natural desire would be incapable of fulfilment, which is impossible. Now, it is clear from what has been said that we cannot understand separate substances on the basis of the foregoing opinions. So, our felicity is not located in such knowledge of separate substances.38
In SCG 3,45–46 Aquinas asks whether there is any way in which people can understand separate substances in this life. In SCG 3,46, for example, while citing texts from St. Augustine, and while assuming that the human soul is not material, he wonders whether human beings, just by being what they are, might directly or immediately understand what is incorporeal. Yet, he argues, though we can know that we exist just because we are thinking things, we do not know what we are, and what a human soul is, just by existing as things going through various intellectual operations. Knowing what we are, he says, depends on thinking hard concerning how we function and what we aim at. It is not to be gained simply by being human, and “the soul does not understand itself through itself in this life.”39 Here Aquinas means that we do not understand nonmaterial things just by having a human soul.
So, in SCG 3,47, Aquinas ends up saying that, in this life, we cannot “see God through his essence” (quod non possumus in hac vita videre Deum per essentiam).40 We do not know God’s essence and, therefore, do not know what God is (see SCG 1,14–27). According to Aquinas, the essence of God is not something we can know or understand in this life as we might be able to understand what the essence of something in the spatiotemporal world might be. So, he argues, ultimate human happiness is not to be found in any knowledge of God that we have in this life, given the fact that, in this life, our knowledge of what things are is crucially dependent on sensory experience. In SCG 3,47 Aquinas notes passages in the writings of St. Augustine that might be thought to present a different view; but, rightly or wrongly, and while citing some other texts of Augustine, he argues that they should not be thought to do so. When it comes to our understanding of God in this life, Aquinas takes Augustine to be on his side. He reads Augustine as saying that our present understanding of God latches onto what God is rather as our reflection in a mirror matches what we are. A mirror image does not capture the full reality of the one looking into it; it is only a reflection. By the same token, says Aquinas, the knowledge of God that we have in this life fails to capture what God is. Continuing to pursue the mirror analogy, and with Augustine still in mind, he claims that God cannot be seen by us in his essence but can only be seen “through a glass in a dark manner,” as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:12. Consistently with what he has been arguing earlier in the SCG, Aquinas goes on to say:
Although this mirror, which is the human mind, reflects the likeness of God in a closer way than lower creatures do, the knowledge of God which can be taken in by the human mind does not go beyond the type of knowledge that is derived from sensible things, since even the soul itself knows what it is as a result of understanding the natures of sensible things. … Hence, throughout this life God can be known in no higher way than that whereby a cause is known through its effect.41
So, says Aquinas in SCG 3,48, “Our ultimate felicity does not come in this life.” Given what he has just been arguing, you might think that Aquinas has already given reason enough for making this assertion. Be that as it may, however, SCG 3,48 spells out a number of other reasons as to why we cannot be ultimately happy in this life. I summarize them as follows.
1. Our ultimate human end satisfies us so that we seek nothing more. In this life, however, there is always something more to seek; in this life we do not understand everything.
2. Perfect happiness is stable and enduring. When people attain felicity they “attain stability and rest, and that is why this is the notion of all people concerning felicity, that it requires stability as part of its essential character.”42 In this life, though, there is no certain stability, however happy we are. We are continually dogged by illness and misfortune.
3. Death overcomes us before we have reached ultimate happiness.
4. True and ultimate happiness cannot be mixed up with evil. In the present life, however, we can never be entirely free from evil, both physical and psychological.
5. We naturally shrink from death and have sorrow because of it. But we cannot achieve freedom from it in this life, so we cannot be ultimately happy in this life.
6. Ultimate happiness is a doing, not a tendency to act in certain ways. “But it is impossible to perform any action continuously in this life.”43
7. All human happiness in this life comes with sorrow attached. We cannot have perfect happiness in this life since we can always lose what happiness we have because of death or sickness. The best we can have is an imperfect happiness of some kind.
8. If we are to arrive at ultimate or perfect human happiness, and if we cannot arrive at it in this life, we must arrive at it after death.
9. Everyone coming to grasp truth is tending to perfection, but nobody ever arrives at full knowledge. In this life, we are always in the process of learning and are never in the state of having reached an ultimate end. “Thus, since our ultimate felicity in this life seems mainly to consist in speculation, whereby the knowledge of the truth is sought … it is impossible to say that people achieve their ultimate end in this life.”44
10. We do not in this life actually understand all things. So in this life we are not ultimately happy as we would be if enjoying a knowledge of God that is clearer and more perfect than we have in this life.
13.2.4 Beatitude (SCG 3,49–63)
Aquinas, therefore, thinks that people can only be ultimately happy, can only reach their highest end, by knowing God after death more clearly than they are able to in this life. To be happy in this way, he says, is to enjoy beatitude or ultimate happiness. But what is involved in beatitude? Can something more precise be said about human beatitude than anything that Aquinas has already maintained in the SCG? Aquinas clearly thinks that there is more to be said about ultimate human happiness. Hence, SCG 3,49–63.45
In SCG 3,49–63 Aquinas is concerned to maintain that the souls of human beings are, after death, able to achieve what we might call a direct or noninferential knowledge of what God is (i.e., God’s essence, which, as I have shown, Aquinas says we cannot at all know in this life).46 He does not claim that souls enjoying beatitude are able fully to comprehend what God is; he holds that only God can do this. Yet he does claim that God’s essence is known by what enjoys beatitude, even though he thinks that some of the blessed might understand what God is better than others. He speaks of this beatific knowledge as a seeing (visio) of some kind, though not one that people can achieve by reflecting on themselves in this life, and not one that they can arrive at without God’s help. He thinks of beatitude for human souls as a miracle, as brought about only by God.
Is it certain that any human soul will enjoy beatitude? You may think that it is not, since even if we concede that God exists, we are not thereby committed to the view that God will leave anything that is part of a human person in existence after the person has died. In the SCG, however, Aquinas is evidently supposing that no natural desire can exist in something unless the thing were able, in principle, to have it satisfied.47 So he finds it evident that if God has made us such that it is a knowledge of God that makes for our happiness, then God will certainly give our souls a beatific knowledge of God, unless we do something to leave ourselves unworthy of it. And he thinks that God can do this by enlightening our intellects and bringing it about that God’s form is received in them directly and without intermediaries. According to Aquinas, the very form of God can be received by the soul of a human being in a way that allows it to know the essence of God.
In working toward this conclusion, Aquinas makes these points:
1. The souls of the dead cannot understand what God is just by understanding what they are. One might understand what the cause of an effect is by understanding the effect. But in understanding what they are as effects of God, human souls cannot understand what God’s essence is, if only because, as effects of God, creatures of God do not fully show forth what God is as their creator. It is “not possible for the divine substance to be understood through a created likeness.”48 The ultimate happiness of human souls “does not lie in the knowledge of God in which they know him through their substances, for their desire still leads them on toward God’s substance.”49
2. God knows himself by being himself, and God’s knowledge is God. Human souls can come to see God by sharing in God’s knowledge. God’s essence is both the object and that by which one who sees God actually does see God. Human souls see God as the pure form that God is brings about knowledge of it in them. They see God as the very form of God, which brings about understanding in them. “Thus, then, shall we see God face to face, in the sense that we shall see him without a medium, as is true when we see a person’s face.”50
3. “No created substance can, by its own natural power, attain to the vision of God in his essence.”51 “No intellectual substance can see God through his divine essence unless God is the agent of this operation.”52
4. The beatified human soul benefits from “an influx of divine goodness,” which may be compared to a light that illumines something in darkness. “This disposition whereby the created intellect is raised to the intellectual vision of divine substance is fittingly called the light of glory, not because it makes some object actually intelligible, as does the light of the agent intellect, but because it makes the intellect actually powerful enough to understand.”53
5. The light of glory “falls far short of the clarity of the divine intellect. So, it is impossible for the divine substance to be seen as perfectly by means of this kind of light, as it is seen by the divine intellect itself. … It is impossible for any created intellect’s vision to be equal to the seeing of the divine substance.”54
6. “There is no created intellect so low in its nature that it cannot be elevated to this vision [sc. the vision of God].”55 That is because the light of glory is not something that any creature naturally possesses; it comes about only by God’s action, and “what is done by supernatural power is not hindered by diversity of nature, since divine power is infinite.”56
7. “It is possible that one of those who see God may see him more perfectly than another, even though both see his substance.”57
8. The vision of God is the final end of intellectual beings. Yet such beings naturally desire to understand what things are in the world and how they relate to each other. So human souls who see the divine substance will have such desire satisfied. This, however, does not mean that any created intellect can see all that God knows in knowing the divine essence.58
9. To see God by the light of glory is not to see in successive stages. That is because God is one single and simple thing rather than a book whose pages can be turned over as we seek to learn more. Therefore, the soul as seeing God shares to some extent in God’s eternal life, in which there is no successiveness (see SCG 1,15). “So, this vision is perfected in a sort of participation in eternity. Moreover, this vision is a kind of life, for the action of the intellect is a kind of life. Therefore, the created intellect becomes a partaker in eternal life through this vision.”59 “This vision consists in a participation in eternity, as completely transcending time.”60 It follows from this that those who see God will never cease to see God. The vision of God,since it lacks successiveness, is not in time. “So, it is impossible for people to lose it, once they have become partakers of it.”61
10. When the soul of a human being arrives at the vision of God, all the desires of that person are fulfilled. Since God is Truth, our desire for truth is satisfied in the vision of God. Our desire to live in accord with reason will also be satisfied by this vision since reason, “having been enlightened by the divine light,” will have arrived at what it ought “so that it cannot swerve away from what is right.”62 We crave honor and renown, yet souls enjoying the vision of God “are raised through this vision to the highest peak of honor, because they are in a sense united with God”; and such souls enjoy renown insofar as they are recognized for what they are by God and all who are united with God by seeing him.63 People also desire wealth, pleasure, and continued existence. However, souls seeing God enjoy “a plenitude of all goods” by enjoying God, “who contains the perfection of all good things.”64 And the vision of God gives great pleasure and is more pleasurable than “the delight of the sense” and comes with no fear of loss.65 As for being preserved in existence, that is built into the soul’s vision of God since this exists as lacking successiveness.