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three. Human Capacities and the Image of God
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three Human Capacities and the Image of God Aquinas’s basic account of human nature, as we have seen, looks strongly Aristotelian. Like Aristotle, Aquinas holds that human beings are rational animals. He describes human beings as composites of form and matter, as intellective organic bodies. Also like Aristotle, he believes that the human function can properly be understood as “the life of activity expressing reason.” The primary goal of human life is happiness, and the way to attain happiness is to perform the human function well. A good human being—a happy human being—is one who lives a flourishing life, using reason to guide her decisions and to act well. For Aquinas, however, we are more than just composites of matter and form; we are children of God, created in his image. This fact is central to our nature, on his account, in our status as rational animals. It is impossible to appreciate Aquinas’s account of human nature fully without understanding the relation of human beings to God, and it is impossible fully to understand that relation without seeing that it works on both a metaphysical and a personal level. So far in this book we have focused on the metaphysical relation of God to human beings. In chapter 1, for instance, we saw how human beings fit into the general hierarchy of being, poised between immaterial and material creatures; in chapter 2 we saw how our intellective and 46 physical aspects are parts of a radically unified composite. In both chapters we concentrated on Aquinas’s conception of God as pure actuality, since this conception proves key to understanding both our place in the hierarchy of being and the concepts of matter and form. In this chapter, we focus on the necessary conditions for our personal relation to God. The fact that God is the paradigm person and that we are created in God’s image has important ramifications for understanding both our nature and the sort of life human beings are meant to lead. We are not ready yet to delve into Aquinas’s detailed account of the actual loving relationships that human beings can have with God; that falls in the realm of the ethical and will be discussed in the chapters in part 3. Rather, here we will focus on the aspects of human nature that make an intimate relationship with God possible in the first place—the basic components of human psychology, which Aquinas develops in his discussion of the soul’s capacities. As we mentioned in the introduction, Aquinas reinterprets Aristotle ’s description of the human function in light of his belief that we are made in God’s image. Aristotle speaks of our final goal, happiness, as “the life of activity expressing reason well,” leaving open the question of what, exactly, constitutes reasoning well. Happiness is, in general Aristotelian terms, the flourishing human life. It is a life that exemplifies excellent practical and theoretical reasoning; it is also a life that ends at death.1 Aquinas agrees that the goal of human life involves expressing reason well, but he claims that the fullest expression of human reason involves both knowing and loving God. It is not enough to contemplate God with our intellects, although that activity certainly requires reasoning . The fully rational person does not simply thirst for that kind of contact with God; she responds to it with love and joy. In this life, however, obstacles from the trivial to the serious constantly interfere both with our attaining true knowledge of God and with our responding appropriately to that knowledge. We get confused (and maybe even bored) reading Scripture, the phone rings while we are praying, and we are as likely to respond to a deepened knowledge of God and his plans for our lives with fear or resentment as with love. Although searching for happiness is our deepest life’s goal, we cannot attain lasting, complete, and perfect human happiness until we have firsthand knowledge of God—that is, until the Human Capacities and the Image of God 47 [54.152.216.170] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:45 GMT) afterlife. Only then will all our desires be satisfied, all our questions answered . Only then can we rest content in union with our Creator. Thus, Aquinas’s reinterpretation of Aristotle’s definition of happiness is grounded in a developed discussion of our capacities for knowing and loving. These abilities are not just...