13.3 The Value of SCG 3,16–63
How shall we evaluate the positions adopted by Aquinas in SCG 3,16–63? We shall obviously take them to be worthless if we cannot follow Aquinas in holding that God exists and if we cannot follow him so as to think that people are more than what is purely material. We might, perhaps, readily concede that, as Aquinas holds, ultimate human happiness cannot consist just in the enjoyment of bodily pleasures and the like. After all, Aristotle, who did not share Aquinas’s notion of God, and who had no belief in life after death, was at one with Aquinas when it comes to the idea that human beings are most happy when engaging in contemplation or understanding.66 Yet why should we assume that anyone will be ultimately happy in the sense of “ultimately happy” that Aquinas has in mind in SCG 3,25–48?
You might say that, as a Christian theologian, Aquinas is entitled to suppose that we shall live having died and that God will ensure that we do so. In SCG 3, however, Aquinas seems not to be presuming Christian doctrine. He appears to reason philosophically, albeit that he frequently peppers his discussions with quotations from the Bible. SCG 3 seems to be following up on Aquinas’s promise in SCG 1,9 to consider, while following “the way of reason” (per viam rationis), what can be known of God, the coming forth of creatures from God, and the ordering of creatures to God as their end. But does it do so successfully?
It does not if we take it to rest on demonstrations to the effect that our souls will survive the death of our bodies. Nor does it do so if we take it to rest on demonstrative arguments concluding that any human soul enjoys the beatific vision. But Aquinas does not attempt to demonstrate either that our souls will survive our bodily death or that anyone is guaranteed to enjoy the beatific vision. As I have shown (see SCG 2,55), he argues that our souls are not perishable as are physical objects. He does not, however, take this conclusion to be equivalent to “Our souls have to survive the death of our bodies.” Whether they do or not is, for Aquinas, a matter of faith, as is the belief that some souls enjoy the beatific vision. When it comes to SCG 3,16–63, therefore, the question “Has Aquinas proved that our souls survive our death or that any human soul enjoys the beatific vision?” is irrelevant. More to the point would be the questions “Has Aquinas shown that we have a natural desire for the vision of God?” and “Has he shown that nothing short of the beatific vision can give us ultimate happiness?”
That people have a natural desire for what Aquinas calls “ultimate happiness” has been denied since to say that they do seems to imply that, by nature, people can arrive at a knowledge of what God is. The idea here is that we can provide no account of human nature that would make it seem capable of what Aquinas means by “ultimate happiness.” Why not? Because, so it has been argued, human beings cannot lift themselves up to the vision of God by themselves, because only God can tell us what our destiny is, and because this destiny cannot be deduced from what we know of ourselves by human reasoning. Yet Aquinas does not seem to be denying any of these points in SCG 3,16–63. In these chapters he never claims that people have an ability to secure the beatific vision by means of their natural capacities. Nor does he deny that our future is in the inscrutable hands of God, or that our going forward to enjoy the beatific vision is something we can deduce to take place from what we might know of ourselves as reflecting on human nature without benefit of divine revelation. In SCG 3,16–63 what Aquinas claims is that we have an unlimited desire to know, and that this desire would be frustrated if we could never know what God is.67 He does not assert that we are as guaranteed to enjoy the beatific vision just by desiring it as, all things being equal, we might take ourselves to be guaranteed to nourish ourselves should we choose to drink milk. He thinks that if we come to enjoy the beatific vision, that has to be because of God raising us to it by what he calls “the light of glory” (see SCG 3,53). In SCG 3,16–63 Aquinas is not offering an account of human beings that depicts them as inevitably gaining beatitude. He is noting that people, given what we know of them, can only be ultimately happy if beatified. He is also noting how goods less than the beatific vision cannot ultimately satisfy them. In doing so, he proceeds philosophically and in a way that he thinks ought to be appreciated even by non-Christians.
Along with some famous theologians such as Karl Barth, you might say that philosophical reflection can do us no good before the Christian God since that God is beyond reason and can only be approached as one addressing us in revelation (see chapter 2, section 3.1 here). Yet, like Barth, Aquinas believes in divine revelation. For him, that truly declares what is and what is not the case when it comes to our future. On the other hand, however, he does not think that divine revelation can conflict with what we know to be true independently of it. For Aquinas, truth cannot contradict truth. And, he thinks, it is not hard to see, apart from divine revelation, that we are naturally inclined to knowledge of the kind that he has in mind when he speaks about the beatific vision. And, when defending this conclusion, he surely makes some good points. For it makes sense to say that if we are to be ultimately happy, that has to be because certain natural desires that we have will be satisfied. More precisely, it makes sense to say that if we are to be ultimately happy, that cannot be because of our possession of what we can obtain by our efforts in this life, that it cannot be because of what Aquinas discounts as amounting to ultimate human happiness in SCG 3,26–44. Even an atheist can agree that physical pleasures and so on can leave one unsatisfied. Aquinas, of course, is no atheist. But he does think that what atheists can truly perceive deserves to be granted a hearing when it comes to understanding what we might be before God in the long run. And perhaps he is not wrong to do so if truth cannot contradict truth.
Is he, however, right to home in on knowledge as our final end, as that which will make us truly happy? Aquinas’s account of ultimate human happiness seems to be austerely intellectual. Yet might one not argue that ultimate human happiness cannot come about without there being other kinds of satisfaction? For why should intellectual joy (the vision of God as Aquinas thinks of it) be the only thing that might make us happy in the long run? Why not intellectual joy accompanied by physical joy? After all, we are not just things able to know. We are things able to be happy at a sensory level. So how can it be said that sensory enjoyment cannot be part of our ultimate happiness? Why focus only on understanding? Why not say that we cannot be ultimately happy unless we are also satisfied at the sensory level?
As I will show, in SCG 4 Aquinas holds that the dead shall be raised in bodily form. In SCG 3,16–63, however, he focuses only on happiness considered as a matter of knowledge, which he takes to be wholly incorporeal. But should he have done this? Should he not, instead, have argued that our ultimate happiness must consist both in our knowing God and in us enjoying bodily satisfactions?
You will see why he does not do this while noting his arguments to the effect that ultimate human happiness cannot consist in X, Y, or Z (see in particular SCG 3,27–32). According to Aquinas, bodily pleasure cannot be our final end, cannot amount to perfect happiness, since it is something we share with other animals and since intellectual joy is superior to physical joy. But in SCG 3,16–63 Aquinas does not seem to note how much a desire for physical pleasure makes us be what we are. If we were to become creatures without interest in physical pleasure, then we would, presumably, have turned into things that we are not. So how can our ultimate happiness consist only in something intellectual—the vision of God?
Aquinas seems to think that there has to be but one final end for people when it comes to their happiness. Yet, without denying that the vision of God will satisfy us to a high degree, might one not suggest that if we enjoy the beatific vision without physical satisfaction, then it is not really we who enjoy that vision? Aquinas, of course, thinks that it is only the souls of the blessed who enjoy the beatific vision. So one can see why he concentrates on the idea of the vision of God being that which gives ultimate happiness to what is left of us when we have died. Be that as it may, his confidence in SCG, 3,16–63 in it being only a matter of knowledge in which ultimate human happiness consists might be regarded as suspect since it seems to disregard much that we physically enjoy and hope to enjoy in the future.
I remember offering some presents to a child and saying “You can have only one of them.” The child replied “I want all of them.” In SCG, 3,16–63 Aquinas seems to think that, when it comes to ultimate happiness, there is only one present on offer. Yet perhaps he might have thought better when it comes to this conclusion while reasoning philosophically, as he clearly is in SCG 3,16–63. Later in the SCG, and relying on what he takes to be divine revelation, Aquinas declares that our bodies shall be raised from the dead as incorruptible and immortal. While making this point, Aquinas says that “only the occupation of the contemplative life will persist in the resurrection” (SCG 4,83).68 Yet he also argues that, come our resurrection, we shall “have bodies one can handle, composed of flesh and bones.”69 And, he adds, our bodies will be “immune from every evil.”70 In other words, in SCG 4 Aquinas takes our final end to include physical happiness or well-being. This, I think, ought to make us wonder why in SCG 3 he so resolutely homes in on intellectual happiness as constituting our ultimate well-being.
You might suggest that he does so because in SCG 3 he is not relying on divine revelation so as to establish the theses that he defends. Yet if it is philosophically plausible to say that physical well-being cannot be lacking if people are to be ultimately happy, to claim that people will have to enjoy physical well-being in order to be ultimately happy is not to rely on revelation. It is to rely on what might be thought to be necessary for ultimate human happiness should people be granted it.
In response to this point Aquinas might observe that, in SCG 3,25–48, he is merely concerned with what can make us ultimately happy with respect to our status as having intellect. Yet in these chapters he frequently refers to ultimate happiness as what can be achieved by human beings, not just pure intellects. He speaks of felicitas humana (human happiness). If, however, it is this that he is concerned with in SCG 3,25–48, then he surely ought not only to conceive of it as something intellectual since human beings are not just intellectual substances. In short, though one might well see the force of SCG 3’s denial that ultimate human happiness can lie in honors, glory, riches, and so on, one might reasonably feel that an account of ultimate human happiness that presents it as only a matter of seeing God intellectually, only a matter of understanding, cannot really be taking full account of the word “human” in the phrase “ultimate human happiness.”
In SCG 3,63 Aquinas declares that “our every desire is fulfilled” in the beatific vision. As I have shown, he defends this conclusion while noting that sensory delight, which even nonhuman animals enjoy, is inferior to intellectual enjoyment. What he does not seem to consider, though, is that human beings are not just intellects and that, if sensory pleasure is lacking to them, one might wonder whether they remain as human beings. As I noted in chapter 11, Aquinas does not think that a human soul is a human being. So why, in SCG 3, does he resolutely proceed to report on what he takes ultimate human happiness to be only by confining it to understanding? Might one not suppose that something important has dropped out of the picture in his claim that ultimate human happiness is only to be found in knowing? Might one not think that, even if Aquinas is right to say that, among creatures in the spatiotemporal world, only human beings stand out as able to know, it does not follow that human beings will be ultimately happy only by knowing?
Be that as it may, though, by the end of SCG 3,63 Aquinas takes himself to have shown that God is the end of all things, including people. But he still takes himself to need to explain how God governs creatures, what divine providence amounts to both in general and with respect to people. Aquinas starts on this task in SCG 3,64. So let us now follow him as develops his arguments.