Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A New Approach to the Natural Desire to See GodFrancis Bethel O.S.B.We read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: "The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God. … Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for" (§27). We seek the true and the good, and God is absolute Truth and Goodness. Does this mean that the desire for truth and happiness is a direct ordering to God? How to understand this desire in relation to the supernatural desire for God?I propose in the following pages to explore the intellectual side of our aptitude for God around St. Thomas's theme of the natural desire to see him. We can situate the various views on this subject according to two main lines, both of which have their difficulties. One group holds that, since our faculties are innately ordered to their proportionate and therefore limited objects, they cannot also be ordered to the Beatific Vision of the infinite God. The other position affirms that, since creatures do not satisfy us, our spiritual faculties must somehow be innately directed to that Vision. In the first case one needs to counterbalance by showing how grace builds on nature, how the Vision fulfills our nature. In the second, one has to make clear how one can still preserve the distinction between the natural and the supernatural orders.1 [End Page 753]I will call the "elicited-desire position" the opinion that a direct order to the Vision arises only after one becomes aware of God's existence, and "natural-appetite position" the stand that intrinsic principles of our spiritual faculties are ordered to the Vision.2 St. Thomas did not use these terms [End Page 754] here and did not turn his attention especially toward that distinction; some therefore prefer not to resort to them for fear of obscuring St. Thomas's perspective. Nevertheless, I adopt them because that is where the question lies in the current debate.St. Thomas in fact would seem to have a foot on each side of the debate. In some texts, especially when arguing in favor of the Vision, he presents a deep, natural élan in that direction. In others, when he is manifesting that we need grace to enter the supernatural order, he explains that we can have no natural movement toward that order. So, as everyone remarks, we have a second problem: what exactly is the thought of the master, of the guide through whom we need to reflect on the natural desire?Why take up again this so embattled issue? For the good reason that any better glimpse of the beautiful mystery of man in his relation to God is fruitful for our spiritual life and contemplation, for philosophy and theology. To make headway, I think that we need to embrace the question more largely, take it up from its foundations by re-immersing it in St. Thomas's metaphysics. I differ from most others partly because I study the dynamism of the intellect, not the will. I disagree with the elicited-desire position, for I judge that the intellect innately surpasses its object toward God. I differ also from many who hold the natural-appetite position in that I do not conceive the intellectual appetite as oriented toward something supernatural; I do not consider God to be included in our natural intellect's object.In the first part, to manifest the need of a fresh approach, I will examine how well the two fundamental positions measure up to the Church's and St. Thomas's teachings on the relationship between nature and grace. We will see that St. Thomas teaches and the Church indicates that God is not the direct, formal object or term of a natural faculty and yet our intellect innately tends beyond its natural object toward God.In the second part, I will introduce new texts of St. Thomas that study in metaphysical terms the relation of our intellect to God. We will find that the fact that the intellect's object is being (ens)—in the sense of...