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Perfect Happiness and the Resurrection of the Body

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

John Morreall
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University, Evanston

Extract

Although not a great deal has been said about heaven in the Christian tradition, it is part of the traditional notion of heaven that the blessed are in a condition of perfect happiness. In this life we can be happy to a certain degree, but mixed with earthly happiness is disappointment, frustration, and even sorrow. In heaven, by contrast, there is no sadness, nothing is lacking, happiness is complete. The usual way of explaining this perfect happiness is in terms of the ‘beatific vision’ – the face to face relationship of knowing and loving God which the blessed enjoy. On earth we experience only finite objects; nothing that we come to know ever completely satisfies our desire to know, and nothing that we love ever completely satisfies our will. But in the beatific vision we shall be in a direct relationship with the infinite God, who in his boundless perfection will completely ‘fill up’ our capacities to know and love. As the completely adequate object of these capacities, God will make us perfectly happy. As Aquinas puts it, ‘…But if God alone were seen, who is the fount and source of all being and of all truth, he would so fill the natural desire for knowledge that nothing else would be desired, and the seer would be completely happy.’

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

page 29 note 1 Aquinas, Thomas, Summa TheologiaeGoogle Scholar Ia, q. 12, a. 8, ad 4.

page 31 note 1 Flew, Antony, ‘Is There a Case for Disembodied Survival?’, The journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, LXVI, 2 (April 1972), 133.Google Scholar

page 31 note 2 Luke, 23: 43.Google Scholar

page 32 note 1 Hick, John, ‘Theology and Verification’, Theology Today, XVII, I (April 1960Google Scholar); reprinted in Hick, John, ed., The Existence of God (New York: Macmillan, 1964), pp. 263–7.Google Scholar

page 31 note 2 For a defence of the intelligibility of resurrection with spatio-temporal gaps, see Morreall, John, ‘Penelhum's Replica Objection’, Philosophical Studies (Ireland), xxv (1977), 86102.Google Scholar