From Eden to Eternity by Alastair Minnis;

Author:Alastair Minnis;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)
Published: 2016-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

Resurrecting the Senses

Granted that the divine essence can be seen with the eyes of the mind, can it be seen with the eyes of the body?237 No, answers Aquinas. But corporeal sight will see it “as an object of indirect vision,” since the divine glory will be perceived through glorified bodies, particularly the body of Christ. Augustine is quoted as saying that in “the bodily forms of the new heaven and the new earth” we will “perceive God with total clarity and distinctness, everywhere present and governing all things, both material and spiritual.”238 While on the old earth we “see the invisible things of God as understood by the things that are made” (Romans 1:20 again), there it will be like seeing men and not having to believe that they live but seeing that they live.239 Here is quite a dramatic foreshortening of the process of the via positiva. Whereas in the fallen world man needs creatures, and nature in general, to enable him to proceed from “the things that are made” to “the invisible things of God,” in heaven man will not need animal and plant life to perform that service240—and here is a major reason for their exclusion from the paradise of the blessed, as already explained. Through the intellect God will be seen immediately in His essence. And “the carnal eye . . . will be unable to attain to this vision.” But corporeal sight will receive an appropriate solace (solatium congruens), because in the patria it will perceive God in the “bodily effects” of divinity (in suis effectibus corporalibus)—that is, “especially in Christ’s flesh, and secondarily in the bodies of the blessed, and afterwards in all other bodies.”241 Aquinas probably has in mind the chapter in Augustine’s De civitate Dei that he had explicitly drawn on in the quaestio with which I began this paragraph.242 Offering alternative ways of understanding the role that bodily perception may play in the future paradise, there the saint speculated that perhaps “we shall see Him in every body to which the keen vision of the eye of the spiritual body shall extend.”243 But Aquinas’s firm specification of the glorified bodies of Christ and the saints, together with any other corporeal form (presumably the heavenly bodies) which will exist in the homeland, as “bodily effects” by which the divine may be perceived, is an important affirmation of the presence, and the value, of the material.

Glorification will not damage or render inoperable the “carnal eye,” render it incapable of sensation, Aquinas insists. Gloria non tollit naturam: glory does not destroy nature.244 Hence the human eye will retain its diaphanous character (diaphaneitas), with the intensification of clarity in its pupil rendering its sight keen rather than defective. Here sight, the noblest, strongest, and most subtle of the senses, is enthusiastically celebrated; its preeminence in the sensory experiences to be enjoyed by the glorified body affirmed. To go into more detail than Aquinas does at this point, it was believed that the human eyeball

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