You are invited to attend our next monthly meeting to be held on Friday, July 10th from 4:00pm to 5:30pm. We will be discussing “On the Thomistic Problem of the Beatific Vision” by Étienne Gilson from the Winter 2025 issue entitled “800 Years of Thomas Aquinas” (Volume 52.4). The article can be downloaded from here.
Here is an excerpt from the Introduction to the issue:
… in “Retrieving the Tradition,” the English-language edition of Communio is pleased to present for the first time the work of Étienne Gilson, with a 1964 essay entitled “On the Thomistic Problem of the Beatific Vision.” In this study the great historian of philosophy seeks to recover the question of the “natural desire” to see God as Aquinas himself poses this question, prior to the later theological disputes that have so often shaped its interpretation. Returning to the Thomistic context in which the problem first arises, Gilson recalls that for Thomas the whole order of creation is directed toward the divine likeness and that intellectual creatures attain this end most properly through the knowledge of God. The beatific vision thus appears not as an extrinsic addition to the creature’s destiny but as the fulfillment, by grace, of the intellect’s deepest orientation toward the first cause of all being. It is precisely this point that has again become the focus of intense debate in contemporary theology, especially in disputes concerning the relation between nature and grace and the question of whether man possesses a natural desire for the supernatural. Without attempting to resolve these controversies directly, Gilson offers something more fundamental: a recovery of the Thomistic problematic itself prior to many of the conceptual oppositions that later came to dominate the discussion.
We will meet in the Kateri Room located at St. Michael’s Church, 240 Hemlock Street, Waterloo, Ontario. Use the east side parking lot and enter by the rear doors. Walk up the stairs. The Kateri Room is on your right before you enter the church proper.
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.