Lecture: “The Divinely Abundant End: Aquinas on the Beatific Vision of the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit”
Fr. Bryan Kromholtz, O.P. (Visiting Scholar, PIMS)
Some theologians have recently addressed the question as to whether St. Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on the beatific vision of the saints is sufficiently Christological – does it suffer from a “Christological deficit”? If such may be asked, one may also ask similar questions about that teaching: Is it sufficiently Trinitarian? And, if so, does it simultaneously represent a sound Christian soteriology, anthropology, ecclesiology, cosmology, …? Without claiming to answer all these questions definitively, I intend to demonstrate that there is a significant Trinitarian character in Aquinas’s understanding of the saints’ visio Dei. In doing so, I will also point toward how such an understanding also upholds Catholic soteriological, anthropological, ecclesiological, and cosmological commitments, suggesting that such wide-ranging “checks” are one way to measure what, in theology, might count as a “deficit” vs. a balanced approach.
Image: Last Judgment (~1940), Chapel of the Priory of St. Albert the Great, Oakland, California; photo: B. Hutcherson, OP