Bound for Beatitude: A Thomistic Study in Eschatology and Ethics by Reinhard Hütter

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bound for Beatitude: A Thomistic Study in Eschatology and Ethics by Reinhard Hütter Gideon Barr Bound for Beatitude: A Thomistic Study in Eschatology and Ethics by Reinhard Hütter (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2019), 492 pp. In Bound for Beatitude: A Thomistic Study in Eschatology and Ethics, Reinhard Hütter undertakes to "recapitulate, from a Thomist perspective and in critical dialogue with the late-modern philosophical and theological context, the primordial human vocation to the beatific vision" (387). In this recapitulation, Hütter seeks to recover for contemporary theology both a "sound teleological orientation" and the "privileged instrumentality of metaphysics" by means of an explication and defense of Saint Thomas's theology of beatitude and the virtues (2). With insight and sensitivity into the sources and expressions of the contemporary intellectual and spiritual malaise that incapacitates the lasting achievement of both natural and supernatural happiness, Bound of Beatitude hits the mark as a contemporary ressourcement in Thomistic moral theology. The nine chapters of the book are collected together from articles and lectures previously presented and published but are bookended by a prologue and epilogue that are new and substantial and give the book its unity. For this reason, however, the organization makes for an unusual experience for the reader (the prologue and epilogue make up, save the first chapter, the lengthiest sections of the book). In some ways, the book is organized as a study in Thomistic ethics set between a study in Thomistic eschatology. The prologue and first chapter, which substantially treat the first five questions of Summa theologiae [ST] I-II and a metaphysical study of the finality of the created intellect, respectively, begin considerations that are not taken up again until the final chapter, on Marian exemplarity, and the epilogue, on the beatific vision. The extremities of the book thus take up the principle eschatological concerns, while the central chapters largely treat particular virtues under the formality of the distinction between the journey of the viator and the attainment of the comprehensor. Following Saint Thomas, who notes at the outset of the prima secundae that "the end is the rule of whatever is ordained to the end," Hütter uses the prologue to introduce elements of the formality of the end. It is Hütter's contention that a careful reading of Saint Thomas's Treatise on Happiness [End Page 979] (ST I-II, qq. 1–5) will do much to affect a ressourcement of the Thomistic theology of beatitude amidst contemporary anthropocentric views of human happiness. Hütter's treatment of these questions, which contain Saint Thomas's synthesis of Christian eschatology and Aristotelian ethics, is tremendously valuable and worth the reader's serious attention. This Thomistic synthesis resituates the viator's pursuit of happiness beyond an intra-mundane state of existential appreciation for the goods of this world, and rather upon a participation in divine happiness, in which resides the superabundant and surpassing plenitude of perfection sought in any object of earthly beatitude, accessible to our understanding only analogically. Crucially, by refocusing the attention in the pursuit of happiness upon a vision of the divine essence, the viator does not leave behind the promise of integral human happiness, insofar as "every genuine created good … is entailed in divine happiness, the possession of the perfect good" (13). This is a foundational judgment which allows Saint Thomas to likewise affirm the priority of the intellective vision for perfect happiness. In presenting this and other insights and attentively reading Saint Thomas, Hütter forcefully rearticulates the participatory, intellective, and theocentric character of human beatitude in response to modern objections. In the first chapter, the longest of the interior chapters, on the finality of the created intellect or the question of the right articulation of the natural desire for the vision of God, Hütter undertakes to re-explicate the instrumental and indispensable role of metaphysics in sacra doctrina in relation to final human beatitude. Along these lines, Hütter presents a lengthy defense of the principle of finality in order to properly undergird his discussion of the finality of the rational agent in nature and grace, safeguarding the real...