The Study of Theology as a Foretaste of Heaven: The Influence of Albert the Great on Aquinas’s Understanding of Beatitudo Imperfecta

Abstract

The Study of Theology as a Foretaste of Heaven:The Influence of Albert the Great on Aquinas’s Understanding of Beatitudo Imperfecta Jacob W. Wood In the course of the Treatise on Beatitude in the Summa theologiae [ST], Thomas Aquinas distinguishes between beatitudo perfecta and beatitudo imperfecta.1 Perfect beatitude consists in the vision of God in heaven.2 Imperfect beatitude, however, is more difficult to define. If we consider the term apart from related terms such as beatitudo supernaturalis and beatitudo naturalis,3 then, while scholars agree that Aquinas’s use [End Page 1103] of beatitudo imperfecta has something to do with Aristotle’s discussion of happiness in book 10 of the Nicomachean ethics, they diverge widely on whether or how Aquinas made use of the Stagirite’s thought. Germain Grisez, for example, asserts that Aquinas improperly appropriated Aristotelian beatitude and thereby distorted the biblical understanding of beatitude, making the vision of God a monolithic beatitude that excludes other aspects of integral human fulfillment.4 Denis Bradley agrees with Grisez’s observation that Aquinas places the end of man solely in the vision of God to the exclusion of other ends;5 ironically, he explains this claim with the opposite view that Aquinas rejected Aristotelian concepts of beatitude as fundamentally irreconcilable with Christian revelation.6 Still others have approached the question from the side of Aristotle. Thus, R. A. Gauthier argues that Aquinas so thoroughly transformed Aristotle’s Nicomachean ethics through his own reading of Albert the Great that Aquinas can hardly be said to be Aristotelian at all.7 Anthony Celano, by contrast, [End Page 1104] defends Aquinas from the charge of misreading Aristotle. For Celano, Aquinas completes Aristotle’s aspiration to the happiness of the gods with the Christian revelation that such happiness both is possible and has been offered by God to humanity.8 More recently, Adriano Oliva has proposed that Aquinas used Aristotelian contemplation as a paradigm for Christian contemplation and that Aquinas consistently harmonized Aristotelian and Christian contemplation from the beginning to the end of his career as two ways of seeking the vision of God in loving friendship with him.9 The purpose of the present article is twofold. First, I would like to propose a way of reading Aquinas historically that can account for the radical divergence among scholars on his understanding of beatitudo imperfecta. Generally speaking, the aforementioned readings of Aquinas align with three stages of development in Aquinas’s explanation of imperfect beatitude, but without always taking into account the developments from one text to the next. Bradley and Grisez have a view of Aquinas that most closely aligns with the Commentary on the Sentences, where Aquinas says that imperfect beatitude is the summit of natural contemplation in this life, juxtaposed with the contemplation of God by grace in the next life. Celano has a view of Aquinas that most closely aligns with the Summa contra gentiles [SCG], where Aquinas says that imperfect beatitude is the summit of natural contemplation in this life but there is also a sense in which our contemplation of God by faith prepares us by desire for the end of man proposed by Christian revelation for the next life. Gauthier and Oliva have views of Aquinas that most closely align with ST, where Aquinas refers to the second act envisioned by SCG as another form of imperfect beatitude through which we not only grow in the knowledge and love of God but also order our actions toward the vision of him by charity. Reading Aquinas in this way leads to the view that, rather than juxtaposing Aristotle with Christian revelation, as Bradley suggests, or of compromising Christian revelation, as Grisez suggests, we should see Aquinas as ultimately [End Page 1105] using the idea of beatitudo imperfecta as a way to harmonize what reason and faith say about the perfection of man and, therefore, to affirm the legitimacy of multiple secondary beatitudes in relationship to beatitudo perfecta. This harmonization does not preclude a place in Aquinas’s thought for a beatitudo imperfecta inspired by Aristotle that is formally distinct from a beatitudo imperfecta inspired by faith and charity, as Gauthier and Oliva could be read...