The Theological Case for Christ's Beatific Vision

The Theological Arguments

Though the beatific vision is not a metaphysically necessary effect of the gratia unionis, Christ’s soul has so strong a moral claim to it that the burden of proof lies entirely with those who deny it. It is unthinkable that Christ’s soul should not, from the very start of its existence, have known the Logos with whom it was united by the most intimate bond conceivable — the Hypostatic Union. And if Christ’s sacred humanity was endowed with the sublimest gift in the order of grace — personal communion with the Godhead itself — it could hardly have been denied the lesser gift of the beatific vision in the light of glory. Christ’s soul, already established in the fullness of created sanctity and the perfection of grace,¹ was thereby elevated to the highest summit accidental grace can reach: the beatific vision of the Divine Essence. As the theological axiom has it, “Glory is grace consummated.”

Kleutgen puts the underlying logic well: “The man Jesus is true God by virtue of the Hypostatic Union, because by this union His humanity is elevated, not to a higher degree of likeness to God, but to the very personal being of the Son of God. The Hypostatic Union, therefore, unlike the beatific vision of God, is not a consummation of sanctifying grace — it is something far superior to both. Grace, then, cannot be the cause of the Hypostatic Union, but must be its effect… This is the only correct way to conceive the relation between grace and the Hypostatic Union, and it naturally leads us to think of grace in Christ as already in its state of consummation. For grace was not given to Christ, as man, to help Him attain some future predestined dignity — He already possessed, from the start, the highest dignity conceivable. Grace in its consummated state simply is the light of glory that elevates the soul to the vision of God. If, on the other hand, the Hypostatic Union is wrongly imagined as merely a vital communion achieved through intellectual activity, we lose the distinction between it and the ordinary union with God that grace permits any soul to enter — and we would be tempted to imagine a gradual advance in both, having then, to be consistent, to locate the consummation of the Hypostatic Union itself in the beatific vision. This is exactly why Günther’s school, without quite drawing the inference explicitly, so bitterly attacks the thesis we are defending here.”²

St. Thomas argues, second, that Christ “would not be Head of all creatures if some creature ever surpassed Him in mental perfection.”³ As Mediator between God and man, tasked with leading men to the beatific vision of the Divine Essence, His human nature — the instrumentum coniunctum of the Godhead — had to possess, from the start, the fullest measure of the very eternal life He was to communicate to others. Kleutgen: “Let it not be said that He does not dispense eternal life until after His glorification — for it was not in His glorification that He became the author of our salvation, but in the hardships and sufferings He bore from the manger to the Cross.”⁴ One might object that if a still-passible Savior could merit the glory of the Resurrection for us, there is no reason the beatific vision could not likewise come to us through a Redeemer who Himself lacked it. But the two cases are not parallel: Christ’s mediatorial office made a glorified, transfigured bodily life incompatible with His earthly mission, forcing Him to postpone that transfiguration until after the Resurrection — but the beatific vision did not conflict at all with His capacity to suffer and die, and, given His dignity as Head of grace, had to be His from the very moment of conception. As St. Thomas argues: “Man is in potency to the knowledge of the blessed, which consists in the vision of God and is ordered to it as its end… Men are led to this end of beatitude through Christ’s humanity, according to Hebrews 2:10: ‘It became him… in bringing many children into glory, to perfect the author of their salvation by his passion.’ And therefore it was fitting that the beatific knowledge consisting in the vision of God should belong to Christ the man in the most excellent way — since the cause must always be more excellent than its effect.”⁵

The Joy-and-Sorrow Difficulty

But how do we reconcile Christ’s earthly life and suffering — above all the agony of His Passion — with the essential blessedness the immediate vision of God brings? Some theologians propose that Christ’s soul experienced beatific joy in its “upper” region while sadness and pain afflicted its “lower” region.⁶ This hardly deserves serious consideration. Joy and sadness can coexist in a human soul when they spring from different motives and different formal objects — the martyrs exulted amid cruel torture — but a sharp line must be drawn between spiritual joy alongside bodily pain (unproblematic) and spiritual joy alongside spiritual affliction (a genuinely hard problem). That theologians have generally filed this among the inscrutable mysteries, rather than abandon the doctrine altogether, shows how firmly they hold to it.

The best-known proposed solution is Melchior Canus’s: distinguishing the intellect’s act (vision) from the will’s act (joy) within the beatific vision, he holds that Christ on the Cross continued to see God, but without the joy that vision ordinarily brings.⁷ This was anticipated by St. Ambrose⁸ and later adopted by Gregory of Valentia, Salmerón, and Maldonatus, but it hardly satisfies: so far as we know, the intuitive vision of God and beatitude are simply inseparable.

A better way through: the will of the blessed responds differently to the uncreated Good than to created goods. Beyond the essential happiness flowing from the beatific vision itself, the blessed in Heaven also enjoy a distinct, accidental happiness from contemplating created goodness — numerically and formally distinct operations, corresponding to their distinct objects, though ordinarily both together exclude sorrow entirely. But the incompatibility between joy and sorrow here is a natural, not an essential, incompatibility. There is no strict ontological reason Christ’s soul, even in full possession of the beatific vision, could not have been plunged into sorrow at contemplating the sins of mankind and His approaching Passion — a miracle of divine power may simply have suspended, temporarily, the natural (though not essential) link between essential and accidental beatitude.⁹

The Argument from Messianic Consciousness

A third argument concerns the origin of Christ’s Messianic and divine self-consciousness. Our Savior must have been fully conscious of His own Divinity and Messianic mission from the very beginning — otherwise we would have reason to doubt the infallibility of His testimony to the truths of salvation, including His own Divine Sonship, and the meritoriousness of the atonement itself.

Deny that Christ possessed the beatific vision from the first moment of His existence, and it becomes hard to say how or when His soul came to an infallible awareness of its own Messiahship and personal union with the Godhead. We face a dilemma: either Christ’s human consciousness was, from the start, inseparably bound to His Messianic and divine consciousness, or there was a time when His self-aware soul did not yet know of its own Messianic dignity and Hypostatic Union with the Logos. On the first alternative, no way of attaining that divine consciousness is safer or more direct than the beatific vision, which would include contemplation of the Logos and the union itself; anything less would have left Christ’s soul walking in the mere obscurity of faith about its own Divinity for thirty-three years — hardly compatible with His repeated claim, setting Him apart from every prophet, that He testifies only to what He Himself has seen.¹⁰ Nor can we say He testified as man to what He saw only as God — for it is the man Jesus, not the unincarnate Logos, who speaks in passages like John 3:11 and 8:38, and He speaks as one who fully understands what He has seen. Even Schell, probably the ablest defender of the newer theory, concedes that “there was no room for faith in Christ; its place was taken by a most penetrating knowledge.”¹¹ But such “penetrating knowledge,” freed from the limits of faith, can only be intuitive vision — since intuitive vision alone truly annuls faith.

To hold that Christ’s human consciousness awoke before His divine consciousness — or with the Modernists, that “Christ did not always possess consciousness of His own Messianic dignity”¹² — amounts to saying His soul had to learn its own Messiahship from some outside source, since on this view it never possessed the beatific vision at all. But from where? Not from studying the prophets, since Scripture tells us Jesus, without any schooling, already knew “His Father” at age twelve and had full command of Scripture. Not from some inward illumination distinct from the beatific vision either — for what could such illumination be, besides enlightened faith? And faith, however enlightened, does not see or know — it gropes in the dark, amid doubt and temptation. The divine consciousness in Christ’s human soul, then, can have come from nowhere but the beatific vision — and since that consciousness is bound up inseparably with His human consciousness, reaching back to childhood and indeed to the very instant of conception, His divine consciousness and His beatific vision must both have begun at exactly the same moment.¹³

The Extent of the Beatific Vision

Less important than the questions above, but still worth settling, are the Scholastic disputes over exactly how much Christ’s beatific vision let Him know of God and creation.

It is of faith that God remains absolutely incomprehensible to any created intellect, even in the state of glory.¹⁴ Christ’s soul was a finite creature, and so the beatific knowledge it possessed, however exalted, cannot have amounted to adequate comprehension of the Divine Essence. St. Thomas defended this firmly against Fulgentius,¹⁵ Alcuin,¹⁶ and Hugh of St. Victor:¹⁷ “It is impossible,” says the Angelic Doctor, “for any creature to comprehend the divine essence, since the infinite cannot be comprehended by the finite. And so it must be said that Christ’s soul in no way comprehends the divine essence.”¹⁸ The Council of Basel rightly rejected the proposition of Augustine of Nazareth, that “Christ’s soul sees God as clearly and intensely as God sees Himself.”¹⁹

This same principle settles whether Christ’s soul possessed the scientia simplicis intelligentiae — knowledge of everything possible to God’s omnipotence, whether or not ever realized. To affirm this would be to attribute adequate comprehension of the Divine Essence to Christ’s human soul,²⁰ and so this view is generally rejected. Theologians agree, however, that Christ possessed the scientia visionis — knowledge of everything that actually exists, past, present, and future, down to the most hidden thoughts of the human heart.²¹ This eminent yet still finite mode of knowledge preserves the creaturely character of Christ’s soul, and matches His twofold role as Head of the present order and Judge of the living and the dead.²²

Notes