Absolute Recoil by Slavoj Zizek

Author:Slavoj Zizek
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Verso Books

Aquinas, of course, takes care to avoid the obscene implication that the good souls in Heaven might take some pleasure in observing the terrible suffering of other souls. He proceeds along two lines. First, he proposes the thesis that, in Heaven, the blessed will enjoy the full illumination of their minds, since knowledge is also a blessing and a perfection that should not be denied to the saints. If the saints in Heaven were to be ignorant of the damned, this would be a denial of the blessing of knowledge. Consequently, the saints will possess greater knowledge, including a greater knowledge of Hell, including being allowed to see it in action. Next problem: good Christians should feel pity when they see suffering—so will the blessed in Heaven also feel pity for the torments of the damned? Aquinas’ “no” is grounded in a rather flimsy hair-splitting argument: “Seeing the punishment of the wicked, the righteous have no pity: Whoever pities another shares somewhat in his unhappiness. But the blessed cannot share in any unhappiness. Therefore they do not pity the afflictions of the damned.”13

Aquinas’ second line of argumentation tries to refute the notion that the blessed in Heaven will derive joy from witnessing the punishment of the damned in an explicitly obscene way. He does so by introducing a distinction between two modes of enjoying a thing:

A thing may be a matter of rejoicing in two ways. First directly, when one rejoices in a thing as such: and thus the saints will not rejoice in the punishment of the wicked. Secondly, indirectly, by reason namely of something annexed to it: and in this way the saints will rejoice in the punishment of the wicked, by considering therein the order of Divine justice and their own deliverance, which will fill them with joy. And thus the Divine justice and their own deliverance will be the direct cause of the joy of the blessed: while the punishment of the damned will cause it indirectly.14

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.