Natural Desire for God

NATURAL DESIRE FOR GOD. - An age-old problem, both philosophical and theological, which has had various and conflicting solutions through the centuries and is still today the object of lively discussions.

Nor is this surprising, if one considers that it implies the whole question of the relationship of the finite to the infinite, of the contingent to the absolute, and the other, properly theological, question of the point of insertion of the supernatural into human nature.

I. GREEK PHILOSOPHY

Setting aside Stoicism, which, in its most genuine form, amounts to a pantheistic monism and therefore has no reason to pose a problem founded on the relationship between man and divinity, the question of a more or less conscious tendency of the human spirit toward God can be discerned at least in the three great philosophers: Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus.

It is well known that the Platonic God does not present true personal characteristics, but is confounded with the noetic world of ideas, more probably with the idea of the good. In any case, the theory of the pre-existence of the soul, from before it informed the body, leads Plato to establish a relationship between it and the divine sphere of ideas, its place of origin. This relationship begins on the gnoseological line as reminiscence of the ideas already contemplated and now reflected in the sensible world by way of participation (μέθιξις) or of imitation (μίμησις); then it develops on the psychological line as nostalgia or loving tendency (ἔρως) of the soul to return to its ideal world. This nostalgia, which in the Symposium is personified in Ἔρως (ὁ "love") and in the Phaedrus becomes frenzy (μανία), is the psychological expression of a metaphysical principle, that is, of the subordination of man and of the sensible world to the Absolute, in which alone is the supreme reason of the one and the other. A fervent natural desire of the spirit, which tends to escape from matter toward the ideal world: in that desire the aesthetic moment and the religious moment coincide.

For Aristotle God is the first unmoved mover, a form transcending all matter and therefore pure thought in act, pure act, fullness of being subsisting in itself and for itself. The Aristotelian God is metaphysically firmer and more personal than the Platonic one. But the relationship between God and the world, accentuated by the master with the participation of the ideas and with the concept of the good, is diminished by the disciple, who reduces the divine influence to final causality, sufficient to found an ethics rather than a religion. The first mover moves everything, including man, as the supreme end, by way of attraction, and man's tendency toward God is resolved into movement, which is passage from potency to act. Man goes naturally toward the divine (pure act) the more he strives to actualize his noblest faculties, the intellect and the will, and the latter more than the former. The perfection and happiness of man are placed in the progressive conquest of truth: to the attraction of thinking thought, which is God, man responds with the thirst for knowledge, which brings him near to God.

But the desire of the divine reaches the heights of mysticism in Plotinus. Although he distinguishes the One, the Intellect and the Soul informing the cosmos (Ἕν, Νοῦς, Ψυχή), he overcomes pluralism with the concept of emanation, which is a descent (πρόοδος) of the One into lower degrees and therefore its immanence in the intelligible world and in the cosmic one. The profound unity, despite the apparent multiplicity, is the motive of the return (ἐπιστροφή) of all reality to the initial One. This return is accomplished principally in man by way of the will and by way of the intellect, in such a way that an ethics and a gnoseology of salvation are constituted. The soul, through sensation, dialectic and intuition, ascends to the

Νοῦς, in which life participates in the contemplation of the One, the supreme end of man, as Aristotle had already taught. But Plotinus goes further, when he grants to the soul, impatient of the imperfection of the visible world, the faculty of rising as far as ecstasy (Enneads, VI, 9), which is «flight of the alone to the Alone», no longer merely intellectual vision, but possession, identification of the soul with its origin, which is God, first intuited, now experienced.

Thus Greek metaphysics touches the summit of religiosity, in awaiting the incarnate Λόγος.

II. THE THOUGHT OF THE FATHERS

Investigation of the thought of the Fathers of the Church concerning the present question is very difficult, both because of the scarcity of material and because of the fluctuation of terminology. The theme of the beatific vision, with which that of the natural desire for God is particularly connected, is little developed in patristic literature prior to St. Augustine, as indeed is the whole anthropological problem, owing to the prevalence of Trinitarian and Christological heresies. On the other hand, the thought of the Fathers moves entirely within a supernatural climate, and therefore in their language reason and faith, nature and Grace are fused into a structure so compact that it is difficult to discriminate the attributions of one element from those of another.

Nevertheless, some doctrinal motif can be gleaned from the field, reasonably cultivated, of the knowability of God. Already the apologists against pagan polytheism, drawing inspiration from Sacred Scripture (Wis. 13 and Rom. 1), affirmed not only the possibility but also the facility of knowing the true God through creation (Aristides, Apol., 1; Tatian, Adv. Graecos, 4; Irenaeus, Adv. haer., 11, 9, 1; Tertullian, Apolog., 17; and others). By this path one arrives at asserting that the knowledge of God is innate, congenital in man (in the sense of being spontaneous). But this natural knowledge is imperfect and cannot be compared with that held out by Christian Revelation (I Cor. 13; I Io. 3) in the blessed life. The beatific vision of God is soberly commented upon by the early Fathers as the term and reward of the life lived in faith, hope and charity in Christ. "For us," writes St. Basil, echoing tradition (In Ps. 48), "the end for which we perform all our actions and to which we aspire is the blessed life that awaits us in the other world." It is the itinerary of Christian asceticism, onto which mystical contemplation is grafted as an anticipation of the beatific vision. Pseudo-Dionysius, between the end of the 5th century and the beginning of the 6th, develops a copious doctrine concerning this itinerary, harmonizing with the data of Revelation the fruitful motifs of Neoplatonic speculation.

Indeed Neoplatonism, especially that of Plotinus, exercised no small influence on the Eastern Fathers, especially on the Alexandrians. The Neoplatonic climate matured between the 1st and 3rd centuries (from Philo to Plotinus) is so saturated with religiosity and mysticism that the Fathers readily found in it instances and language akin to the Christian conception. The soul's nostalgia for the world of the divine, which is accentuated from Plato to Plotinus, as was said above, and takes concrete form in the concept and practice of an elevation to God through ascetic purification, finds easy acceptance among the Fathers, who meditate on the words of the Lord: "Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God." They willingly adopt the well-known Platonic principles of the soul's tendency to see God, of the kinship or affinity of the one with the other, which makes that vision possible the more the inner eye is purified by detachment from the sensible world (ecstasy). But at the same time they moderate and correct those principles in the light of faith. The soul is like God, but distinct from Him as His created image (Irenaeus), and therefore it has the capacity to see God and desires Him, but in order for its eye (νοῦς) to reach such a height it must be not only purified, as Plotinus would have it, but elevated and illuminated by a supernatural light, which is a gift of God (Justin, Clement of Alexandria, more decisively Augustine, Epist., 205, 19 and elsewhere). Moreover, in place of the physical and ontological desire of the Neoplatonists, the Fathers substitute the yearning of the will invested with the ardor of the infused virtue of charity (cf. St. Augustine, De div. quaest., 83, q. 46). The vision of God in this life, furthermore, is never perfect, not even in ecstasy; St. Gregory of Nyssa reduces it to the reflection of God in the purified soul (De beatitudinibus, hom. 6), indeed to the desire itself, ever strained because unsatisfied (De vita Moysis).

The claim of Eunomius (4th century), who admitted an adequate, almost intuitive cognition of God in this life through the concept of ἀγέννητος ("unbegotten"), forces the Fathers to greater caution, as is evident in this significant passage of St. Gregory of Nazianzus (Or. theol., 2, 17): "What God finally is in His nature and in His essence, no man has ever found nor can find... For my part I hold that he will finally find it when this deformed and indeed divine element, which is our mind and our reason (νοῦς, λόγος), shall have been reunited with its kindred Being, and when the image shall have ascended to its exemplar, for which it now feels the desire. And this for me is the whole of philosophy, namely that we shall then know insofar as we are known (cf. I Cor. 13). But in this mortal life all that reaches us is nothing but a rivulet, a faint ray of the great light."

The Platonic influence, thus moderated, will flow into St. Augustine, while it will regain the upper hand in Pseudo-Dionysius, whose theology, wholly pervaded by mysticism drawn from Plotinus through Proclus, touches the extreme limits of orthodoxy, if indeed it does not overstep them.

Starting from the principle that man naturally seeks happiness and that there is no perfect happiness outside of God, St. Augustine posits at the root of the human being a tendency toward God. This tendency calls to mind the "return" of which Plotinus speaks, but the holy Doctor departs from him and corrects him by substituting the Christian concept of creation for the Plotinian one of emanation and by inserting into the ascending dialectic of the spirit the light of faith and the flame of supernatural charity. God is the supreme principle and end of all creatures, but in a particular way of man, made in His image and therefore capable of knowing and loving Him. The intellect and the will have as their object unconditioned truth and good; and since all creatures are limited beings, pale reflections of the Supreme Being, with whom absolute truth and good are identified, the spirit is continually agitated by a thirst that is not quenched except in the possession of God: "Lord, you have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You" (Conf., 1, 1). A dynamism and an innate, natural impulse, which unfolds along the intellectual line of the search for truth, but is animated by an impulse of love. It is the metaphysical indigence of the finite being that becomes psychological indigence and tension of the spirit, described by Augustine with dramatic accents in the De vita beata, in the De Civitate Dei, but above all in the Confessiones. The stimulus of the intellect and of the will are creatures, is man himself, who scrutinizes and knows himself; more than any other thing it is God who dwells within man and settles him in Himself with some glimmer of His light: "For my hunger was within me and came from the interior food that You Yourself are, O my God" (Conf., 3, 1). The term of the ascent will be God possessed with the intellectual vision as truth and with love as good; beatitude will be gaudium de veritate, that is, possession and fruition of God (Deo frui). Consequently the d. of happiness is the attainment (consecutio) of God, which is had not by absorption in Him, but by a contact of cognition and love (De moribus Ecclesiae, 11, 18). This contact matures in the exercise of the virtues, which is a progressive assimilation to God. It is worth observing that in the Augustinian exposition the consideration of man in his historical concreteness dominates, not in metaphysical abstraction, and therefore, although he often warns that perfect beatitude and the means to attain it are a gift of God not owed to man, nevertheless the two orders, natural and supernatural, do not appear clearly distinguished in the sense later understood by the Scholastics. The d. of God, according to Augustine, is a constitutive impulse of the human being itself, which in the present order unfolds and reaches its term under the influence of Grace; which does not exclude the possibility of another order of things, in which that d. rooted in human nature could follow a different development, with aids different from Grace. In short, Augustine does not exclude the hypothesis of a pure nature, not elevated to the supernatural order, such as is now in fact the case.

III. THE SCHOLASTICS

Heirs to the thought of the Fathers, they are all agreed in reaffirming a desire for God in the human soul, but when they seek to examine more deeply and to determine the nature of that desire they divide into so many opinions that it is not easy to follow and understand them. In truth the difficulty arises from the complexity of the elements that come into play and partly also from the terminology then in the process of evolution. It is enough to think of the terms "natural" and "supernatural," whose history De Lubac recently attempted to trace. The unclear distinction between nature and the supernatural, which adumbrates the Augustinian conception, persists at least until St. Thomas and aggravates the difficulty of the question of the ultimate end, intimately connected with the one treated here. Finally, the interference of the psychological line with the metaphysical one, already emphasized in St. Augustine, gives rise to equivocation among the Scholastics and their readers. Under the influence of St. Augustine (De Trinitate, 1, 13) the ancient Scholastics generally do not see the ultimate end of man, and therefore perfect beatitude, outside the beatific vision, even while recognizing an imperfect happiness, such as that established by the philosophers as the term of human life. St. Anselm (De casu diaboli, 12) calls the first beatitudo iustitiae, the second beatitudo commodi. This concept is more or less undisputed until the 17th century, when Silvestro Mauro distinguishes for the first time clearly two equally perfect beatitudes, one natural (proper to pure nature), the other supernatural (proper to the regime of Grace). Thus one reads in his Opus theologicum, VI, 7: De possibilitate naturae purae.

But even while insisting on the beatific vision as the only true happiness, the ancients did not deduce from it a conclusion contrary to the gratuitousness of the supernatural order (Grace-vision) or to the possibility of another order of things. William of Auvergne, for example, maintains the dilemma: either beatific vision or eternal pain; but he attenuates its scope when (contrary to the opinion of St. Augustine) he exempts children who die without Baptism from every punishment, granting them a natural happiness (De universo, II, 82); consequently he excludes from the divine predestining action every necessity, affirming only its fittingness (loc. cit., 21).

More arduous and delicate is the question of man's tendency toward perfect beatitude. With St. Augustine the Scholastics recognize in man a natural desire for full happiness, whose object can only be God. But how is one to explain the sin by which so many men turn away from God? This objection forces them gradually to make distinctions: all intuit and desire happiness, but they do not know where it truly lies (Peter Lombard); what is desired is not life (=vision of God), but that the life lived in whatever way be blessed (Prepositinus); there is a natural will, which tends toward true beatitude, and a derived will, which throws itself upon temporal goods in which it erroneously places happiness (William of Auxerre); there is a natural desire to know and enjoy God, which reveals a receptive capacity of the spirit with regard to the beatific vision ("anima humana est beatificabilis"), but such a desire is not realizable except by way of faith and Grace (William of Auvergne). In Hugh of St. Cher too one finds the distinction of two desires, one natural, the other elicited, free, in the face of beatitude.

The Franciscan school, which begins with Alexander of Hales, will arrive at the concept of an innate desire of beatitude, per modum ponderis (cf. Scotus, In IV Sent., dist. 49), by which the will inclines toward God, without prior cognition. St. Bonaventure insists on the natural, spontaneous desire of true beatitude (In IV Sent., dist. 49 and elsewhere), but does not exclude an innate intuition of the Supreme Good, which precisely excites that desire (De mysterio SS. Trinitatis, q. I, 1).

All the elements of the question, more or less elaborated, converge in the thought of St. Thomas, which merits particular consideration.

IV. ST. THOMAS AND HIS INTERPRETATION

The Angelic Doctor speaks repeatedly of beatitude as the ultimate end of man, which consists in the vision and enjoyment of God, and which surpasses human powers (Sum. Theol., I, q. 12, a. 4 and q. 62, a. 1; I-II, q. 2, a. 8, q. 3 and q. 114, a. 2; II-II, q. 2, a. 3; De veritate, q. 8, a. 3 and elsewhere). But there is no lack of texts in which mention is made of two beatitudes and therefore of two ends, one natural and imperfect, the other perfect and supernatural (Sum. Theol., I, q. 23, a. 1; De veritate, q. 14, a. 2 and q. 27, a. 2, etc.). Despite, however, the transcendence of the beatific vision, the holy Doctor affirms several times the desire for it: "Cum enim ultima hominis beatitudo in altissima eius operatione consistat, quae est operatio intellectus, si nunquam essentiam Dei videre potest intellectus creatus, vel nunquam beatitudinem obtinebit, vel in alio eius beatitudo consistit quam in Deo: quod est alienum a fide... Inest homini naturale desiderium cognoscendi causam, cum intutur effectum... Si igitur intellectus rationalis creaturae pertingere non possit ad primam causam rerum, remanebit inane desiderium naturae" (Sum. Theol., I, q. 12, a. 1; cf. also I-II, q. 3, a. 8; C. Gent. 3, 50; Comp. theol., 104 and elsewhere).

The immense literature that has flourished around this doctrine of St. Thomas demonstrates at once its importance and its difficulty. The most controversial point lies in the apparent contradiction which the affirmation of a natural desire toward a supernatural term, such as the beatific vision, seems to imply. The first disciples of the Angelic Doctor, even though they do not share Scotus's opinion, nonetheless do not feel the uneasiness of that apparent contradiction and continue to defend the natural desire of the beatific vision (Giles of Rome, Hervaeus Natalis, Paludanus). But in the 16th century, when Lutheranism was promiscuously mixing nature and the supernatural, the Thomists became more cautious and rigid in their language. Cajetan then proposed an interpretation of St. Thomas that eliminated every difficulty: it is not a question of an innate desire, as the Scotists hold, but of an elicited desire, that is, one that presupposes knowledge of the beatific vision through divine Revelation; such a desire, without the help of Grace, remains ineffective and is called natural only in the sense that it does not conflict with nature, which has the obediential potency for the supernatural order. This summary explanation, shared also by Bañez, found easy acceptance among many theologians, especially after the condemnation of Baius, who placed in human nature a true and proper exigency of Grace and of the beatific vision, thereby compromising God's freedom and the gratuitousness of the supernatural order. Thus there matures that opinion which would become common among Thomists from the 17th century onward and which would be attributed without further ado to St. Thomas: man, knowing of the beatific vision, desires it naturally with an elicited desire, but one that is conditional and ineffective if one prescinds from Grace. Evidently it is no longer a question of a natural desire, but of a supernatural desire, and this interpretation is reinforced by Silvester Maurus's opinion on the distinction of the two ends, one of which is the adequate term of the natural desire, the other of the supernatural desire. But Silvester of Ferrara had already criticized Cajetan's Thomistic exegesis, maintaining his own, which was more faithful to the texts and to the spirit of the Angelic Doctor. In his commentary on the Summa contra Gentiles (III, 50 ff.), he notes critically that the desire of which St. Thomas speaks is truly natural, that is, deriving from the constitutive principles of human nature, whose intellect, at the sight of any effect of God, tends spontaneously to know also the Cause in its essence, which implies the beatific vision, the only way of knowing the divine essence. From such a natural tendency St. Thomas wishes to prove not the existence or the attainability of the beatific vision, but only its possibility, which presupposes a capacity or receptive potency of the faculties of the soul. The intellect and the will tend of themselves to the possession of God, the supreme true and the supreme good, without knowing that this possession can be had only through the beatific vision, which transcends the powers of nature and is therefore unattainable without supernatural help. By this path, opened by Capreolus and by Silvester of Ferrara, it is easier to grasp the thought of St. Thomas, which can be summarized in these terms:

1) God, as He is the first principle, so is He the ultimate end of all creatures, especially of man, who is naturally ordered to God, in whom alone he can find his full happiness, the quiescence of every intellective and volitive appetite: "Impossibile est beatitudinem hominis esse in aliquo bono creato; beatitudo enim est bonum perfectum, quod totaliter quietat appetitum... obiectum autem voluntatis, quae est appetitus humanus, est universale bonum, sicut obiectum intellectus est universale verum; ex quo patet quod nihil potest quietare voluntatem hominis nisi bonum universale, quod non invenitur in aliquo creato, sed solum in Deo" (Sum. Theol., I-II, q. 2, a. 8; cf. I, q. 23, a. 1, II-II, q. 2, a. 3).

2) This supreme finality can be considered metaphysically and psychologically: in the first sense it is the ontological subordination of man to God (the transcendental relation of contingent being to the Absolute); in the second sense it is the tendency of the intellect and of the will toward God as the supreme true and the supreme good. This tendency constitutes the natural desire to know and to possess God in Himself and therefore the desire of the intellect, urged to seek and to see the cause from the vision of effects; and the consequent desire of the will, born to tend toward the object apprehended by the intellect. The term of both is God, who, although transcendent, is nonetheless not foreign to the adequate object of the intellect and of the will, which is being, with which the true and the good are identified: "Nihil finitum desiderium intellectus quietare potest. Quod exinde ostenditur quod intellectus, quolibet finito dato, aliquid ultra molitur apprehendere... Non igitur intellectus substantiae separatae quiescit per hoc quod cognoscit substantias creatas quantumcumque eminentes, sed adhuc naturali desiderio tendit ad intelligendum substantiam quae est altitudinis infinitae" (C. Gent., 50, see also 54; cf. Sum. Theol., I, q. 12, a. 1; I-II, q. 3, a. 8; Comp. theol., 104).

3) The natural desire of the human intellect tends toward the vision of the divine essence, whose possibility is proved precisely from that desire: "Non igitur naturale desiderium sciendi potest quietari in nobis, quousque primam causam cognoscamus non quocumque modo, sed per eius essentiam" (Comp. theol., 104; C. Gent., III, 3, 51). Nevertheless the beatific vision always remains a reality that surpasses the powers of human nature and its exigencies: it "ex sola divina liberalitate repromittitur" (De veritate, q. 14, a. 2). But the supernaturalness of the vision must be understood rather in relation to its attainment, for which nature is unequal, and it does not prevent us from considering it in a certain way connatural to man, who is capable of it and aspires to it (Sum. Theol., III, q. 9, a. 2, ad 3).

4) More clearly, the natural desire has its formal object, which is beatitude, in which the thirst of the intellect and of the will is slaked (= God, Truth-Good); but it also has a material object, which is beatitude itself concretized in this or that good. Formally, then, the soul tends with the intellect and with the will to the possession of the supreme true and the supreme good (= God); but since such possession cannot be realized except through the immediate vision of the divine essence, the soul tends to this vision materially or implicitly: "Quamvis divina visio sit ipsa beatitudo, non tamen sequitur quod quicumque appetit beatitudinem, appetat (explicite) divinam visionem: quia beatitudo inquantum huiusmodi importat per se actum voluntatis, non autem divina visio, sicut aliquis appetit dulce, qui non appetit mel" (In IV Sent., d. 1, q. 1, a. 3, q. 1, ad 2: the whole question should be read).

5) The root of such a desire is obediential potency, a receptive capacity of a metaphysical order, which psychologically resolves itself into a desire that tends toward the possession of God, but cannot reach it fully (through the beatific vision) without Grace: « Quamvis intellectus noster sit factus ad hoc quod videat Deum, non tamen ut naturali sua virtute Deum videre possit, sed per lumen gloriae sibi infusum » (De veritate, q. 10, a. 11, ad 7;

In Boet. De Trinitate, q. 6, a. 4, ad 5 and elsewhere). This is a privilege of the rational creature, which tends not only toward the good that it can attain by its own powers, but also toward the good that it can receive from the supreme Agent.

In conclusion, the desire of which St. Thomas speaks can be called innate because it is rooted in the very nature of man as a potency or capacity, but it is properly elicited, that is, accompanied by the cognition that arises from the vision of any effect of God, and it unfolds on the psychological level as a real tendency toward God, a formal term insofar as He is the supreme true and the supreme good, a material term insofar as He is the object of the beatific vision. In the order of intention that desire is absolute and efficacious, but in the order of execution it remains inefficacious and conditioned upon supernatural aid.

V. MODERN THEOLOGY

Today the question of the natural desire for God is more alive than ever. There is the negative attitude of conservative theologians, which, as has been said, was determined by the errors of Baius and is linked to Cajetan. But the psychological tendency of modern philosophy, largely immanentist, has infiltrated even among Catholics, throwing fully back into discussion the problem of the supernatural in relation to human nature. Setting aside the modernist deviation, which moves on the heterodox track of immanentism and pragmatism, one must note an insistent return to the concept of a more intimate connection between the natural order and the supernatural order, with the danger of eliminating that line of demarcation already drawn by St. Thomas and accentuated with the condemnation of Baianism in the 16th century, under Pius V. There is a tendency to exclude the hypothesis of a pure nature (without Grace), which sound theology considers necessary to defend the gratuitous character of the supernatural, and preference is given to the position of the Augustinians (Noris, Berti, Bellelli), who regard as a necessity of fittingness, by virtue of divine wisdom and goodness, man's destination to the beatific vision, which would be the only end established by God. In this climate the opinion of Scotus regarding the innate desire for God and its full possession through the vision is accommodated, and there is even talk (Blondel) of a need, indeed of an indigence, of the supernatural lost with original sin. Pius X in the encyclical Pascendi recalled the now traditional doctrine on the clear distinction of the two orders, condemning the opinion of a true and proper indigence of the supernatural.

Keeping in view this grave document of the Church's magisterium, one can separate the wheat from the tares in these modern theological currents. The thought of St. Thomas, as interpreted above, is once again useful for reconciling, without compromises, ancient and modern demands. It certainly moves more along the metaphysical line than the psychological one, and not wrongly, if one does not wish to build on sand. But the possibility and the fittingness of integrating it with the (Augustinian) historical and psychological consideration is not denied, which sees man in his concrete reality, who carries in his heart wounded by original sin the nostalgia for lost riches. This psychological unease is more than the innate desire or the transcendental relation to God. It is the restless heart of Augustine, which echoes all the religious motives of pagan philosophy, all the fervor of Christian asceticism and also the Kierkegaardian anguish of so much modern philosophy.

For the thought of the Fathers: R. Arnou, Platonisme des Pères, in DThC, XII, coll. 2375-87; E. Portalié, Augustin (Saint), in DThC, I, coll. 2432-43; E. Gilson, Introduction à l'étude de St Augustin, Paris 1929; C. Boyer, Essais sur la doctrine de St Augustin, ibid. 1932; id., L'idée de la vérité dans la philosophie de St Augustin, 2nd ed., ibid. 1941.

For the Scholastics: H. Ligard, La théologie scolastique et la transcendance du surnaturel, Paris 1908; M. De Wulf, Histoire de la philosophie médiévale, 5th ed., Louvain 1924; E. Eher, De naturali hominis beatitudine ad mentem Scholae antiquioris, in Gregorianum, 9 (1927), p. 269 ff.; V. Doucet, De naturali seu innato supernaturalis beatitudinii desiderio iuxta Theologiae a saec. XIII usque ad saec. XX, in Antonianum, 5 (1929), pp. 167-208; E. Gilson, La philosophie au moyen âge, 2nd ed., Paris 1947; V. De Broglie, De fine ultimo humanae vitae, ibid. 1948.

For St. Thomas: J. Sestili, De naturali intelligenti animae capacitate atque appetitu intunendi divinam essentiam theologica d'Aquitiis, Naples-Rome 1896 (see on this pamphlet A. Holder, Le désir naturel de la vision béatifique, in Revue Augustinienne, 16-17 (1910), pp. 5-26); G. Broglie, De la place du surnaturel dans la philosophie de St Thomas, in Recherches de sciences religieuses, 15 (1924), pp. 193-245, 481-97; J. Maréchal, Le point de départ de la métaphysique, V, Paris 1926; E. Briabois, Désir naturel et vision de Dieu, in Nouvelle revue théologique, 59 (1927), pp. 81-97; R. Garrigou-Lagrange, L'appétit naturel et la puissance obédientielle, in Revue thomiste, 35 (1928), pp. 474-78; M. Cuervo, El deseo natural de ver a Dios y los fundamentos de la apologética immanentista, in Ciencia tomista, 20 (1928), pp. 332-48; J. E. O' Mahony, The desire of God in the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, Dublin Cork 1929 (Scotistic interpretation); M. D. Roland Gosselin, Béatitude et désir naturel d'après St Thomas d'Aquin, in Revue de sciences philosophiques et théologiques, 18 (1929), pp. 193-222 (in a Thomistic sense); A. Fernandez, Naturale desiderium videndi divinam essentiam apud Divum Thomam eiusque scholam, in Divus Thomis, 33 (Piacenza 1930), pp. 5-28, 503-37 (along the lines of S. Ferrarese); S. Vallaro, De naturali desiderio videndi essentiam Dei et de eius valore ad demonstrandam possibilitatem eiusdem visionis Dei quidditative, in Angelicum, 11 (1934), pp. 133-70; id., De natura capacitatis intellectus creati ad videndam divinam essentiam, in Angelicum, 12 (1935), pp. 192-216 (along the lines of Fernandez and with greater clarity); B. M. Lemer, De desiderio naturali ad visionem beatificam, Rome 1948 (a work of a speculative nature, of broad views, which brings to light the intellective character of the desire of which St. Thomas speaks).

For modern thought: J. V. Bairvel, Nature et surnaturel, 5th ed., Paris 1931 (between the old and the new currents); A. Verriele, Le surnaturel en nous et le péché originel, ibid. 1932 (very open to modern demands, though conceding with caution); H. De Lubac, Surnaturel, ibid. 1946: a work of copious historical erudition but bold in its interpretations to the point of endangering some traditional doctrine; it has been criticized by De Broglie, op. cit., and by C. Boyer, Nature pure et surnaturel, dans le surnaturel « du père De Lubac, in Gregorianum, 28 (1947), pp. 379-95.

Pietro Parente

DE SIMILITUDINE CARNIS PECCATI:
v. PACIANO.