On Ultimate Ends: Aquinas’s Thesis that Loving God is Better than Knowing Him

581 The Thomist 78 (2014): 581-607 ON ULTIMATE ENDS: AQUINAS’S THESIS THAT LOVING GOD IS BETTER THAN KNOWING HIM DANIEL SHIELDS Pontifical College Josephinum Columbus, Ohio QUINAS IS GENERALLY regarded as a eudaimonist, holding that happiness, understood as human flourishing, is the ultimate end and thus the first principle of the moral life, which is accordingly conceived as the pursuit of one’s own, true happiness and perfection.1 It is well known that Aquinas holds that happiness consists in the vision of God’s essence in heaven, an act of knowing. In this life, the human person’s greatest participation in happiness comes from contemplating God, the highest object of the highest act of the highest power in man, his intellect.2 Aquinas argues that the 1 See, for instance, Stephen J. Pope, “Overview of the Ethics of Thomas Aquinas,” in The Ethics of Aquinas, ed. Stephen J. Pope (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002), 49; Ralph McInerny, Aquinas on Human Action: A Theory of Practice (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 31-32: “That one does whatever he does for the sake of happiness is, verbal quibbling apart, the final word in motivation.” Anthony J. Lisska also interprets Aquinas in straightforward eudaimonist fashion: Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law: An Analytic Reconstruction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 107-9, 204. John Finnis also holds that for Aquinas happiness is the ultimate end of the moral life, but according to him happiness—or “integral human fulfillment”—is a common good in the sense of an aggregate, including both a multitude of incommensurable basic goods and every person’s attainment of those goods, not just the agent’s. See Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 104-17. 2 STh I-II, q. 3, a. 8; q. 3, a. 5; q. 3, a. 2, ad 4. For secondary literature, see, for example, Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Colleen McCluskey, and Christina Van Dyke, Aquinas’s Ethics: Metaphysical Foundations, Moral Theory, and Theological Context (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 74-78; Ralph McInerny, Ethica Thomistica: The Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, 2d ed. (Washington, D.C.: The A 582 DANIEL SHIELDS essence of human happiness cannot consist in an act of the will, but must consist in an act of the intellect.3 It is far less commonly noted, however, that Aquinas states explicitly that it is a “higher” and “better” thing to love God than to know him. The only scholar who has noticed this in recent years, so far as I am aware, is Russell Hittinger, but he has not discussed the relationship of this thesis with the better known one.4 It is important to do so, for they appear to be at odds. In this article I intend to present and explain Aquinas’s thesis on the superiority of loving God, and to reconcile it with his position that happiness essentially consists in the knowledge and not in the love of God. In doing so, a clearer picture of Aquinas’s understanding of the end and nature of the moral life emerges.5 As I will show, Aquinas is not strictly speaking a euCatholic University of America Press, 1997), 30-34; idem, Aquinas on Human Action, 48-50; Lisska, Aquinas’s Theory of Natural Law, 131-36. Cf. John Finnis, who holds that the beatific vision is merely the primary component of perfect happiness (and downplays the role of contemplation in imperfect happiness): Aquinas, 315-19, and 109-10. As I will make clear, for Aquinas it is better to be a preacher than a pure contemplative, not because that kind of life is happier, as Finnis claims, but because it exhibits a higher degree of love for God. See below, n. 49. 3 STh I-II, q. 3, a. 4. 4 F. Russell Hittinger, “When It Is More Excellent to Love Than to Know: The Other Side of Thomistic Realism,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 57 (1983): 171-79. The closest he comes to touching on the question of this paper is the following: “Even when, by a supernatural gift, God allows His...