On the Beatific Vision and the Unitive State A Bit

Last year, a friend of mine had a remarkable experience of his particular judgement. The man, who is young middle age, told me he cried for days and days over his sins. Being that he spent his life as a good Catholic, was in the seminary for awhile, and was celibate by choice as a single person, the fact that he was faced with sin, even his smallest venial sins were seen as these really were in the presence of Truth, Beauty, Love and all the Attributes which we know are of God struck me as significant. Most of us do not see the horror of even one sin before He Who Is-the I Am Who Am.

In England and in America, there are too many priests who still preach and teach that everyone goes to heaven when they die. These priests forget about two things: punishment due to sin and the need for purification. Almost weekly, I hear Catholics state that their recently deceased relatives are in heaven and these same Catholics do not have Masses said for their dead family members.

The Church Suffering remains a teaching of the Catholic Church. And, only the perfect are with God. We shall be judged by real love, not sloppy, sentimental love, but tough love, sacrificial love.

Here is Garrigou-Lagrange:

We shall sum up here what St. Thomas teaches on this point in the Summa. (2)

If God had created us in a purely natural state with a mortal body and an immortal soul, but without the supernatural life of grace, even then our last end, our beatitude, would have consisted in knowing God and loving Him above all else, for our intellect is made to know the truth, and especially the supreme Truth, and our will is made to love and will good, and especially the sovereign Good.

If we had been created without the supernatural life of grace, the final reward of the just would have been to know God and to love Him, but they would have known Him only from without, so to speak, by the reflection of His perfections in creatures, as the greatest philosophers of antiquity knew Him. 

With reason, we can know God. But reason is inspired by grace and knowledge through the sacraments.

Without a doubt, we would have known Him in a more certain manner without admixture of errors, but by abstract knowledge, through the intermediary of things and of limited concepts in the mirror of creatures. We would have known God as the first cause of spirits and bodies, and we would have enumerated His infinite perfections known analogically by their reflection in the created order. Our ideas of the divine attributes would have remained, we have said, like squares of mosaic incapable of reproducing perfectly the spiritual physiognomy of God without hardening it. This abstract and mediate knowledge would have let many obscurities subsist, in particular in regard to the intimate harmonizing of the divine perfections. We would always have asked ourselves how infinite goodness and the divine permission of evil are able to harmonize, how infinite justice and infinite mercy can accord intimately. The human intellect would not have been able to forbear saying: If I could only see this God, who is the source of all truth and goodness, of the life of creatures, and of intellects and wills! This desire would have remained conditional and inefficacious if we had been created in a purely natural state.

Just as we love someone and want to know all about them, and if in marriage, desire union with that person we love, so too, we desire complete union in God.  I am grateful to Father Marcus for this art and poem he translated found here :

The Canticle of Saint Francis

Love put me
in a furnace.
Love put me
in the furnace.
He put me
in the furnace of Love.

I

In a furnace of Love He put me
my new Spouse, my very own
when He slipped the ring onto my finger,
this loving little Lamb.
And then, He cast me into prison
and struck me with a blade,
splitting my heart wide open;
Love put me in a furnace.

II

He split my heart in two,
and my body fell to the ground.
The bolt of Love
ripping from its crossbow,
struck me, as it embraced me.
Out of peace He has made war;
I am dying of the sweetness.
Love put me in a furnace.

III

I am dying of the sweetness,
be not astonished.
Such a blow was dealt me
by love's lance.
Its point of iron is long and wide
as a hundred arms' lengths. Know this:
it went right through me .
Love put me in a furnace.

IV

And then, the arrows rained down tightly
and the crossbows thrust me down.
So, did I take up a shield,
and the blows came fast and heavy,
until nothing more could defend me.
They broke me into pieces,
so strong was the arm delivering them.
Love put me in a furnace.

V

He shot them with such force;
I despaired of fending them off.
And to escape death,
I cried out with all my strength:
"You are breaking the laws of combat."
But then, He raises an instrument of warfare
that overwhelms me with fresh blows.
Love put me in a furnace.

VI

The arrows that He aimed at me
were of stone set in lead;
each of them weighed at least a thousand pounds.
He launched them in a hailstorm so thick
that I could not count them.
Not one of them missed me.
Love put me in a furnace.

VII

He could not have missed me, never,
so perfect was His aim.
I was lying on the earth,
unable to move; my members failed me.
My whole being was utterly smashed.
Like a man already dead
I no longer felt anything.
Love put me in a furnace.

VIII

Dead, not by mortal death,
but by intoxication with the Beloved.
Then, I awoke so strong,
again taking possession of my heart,
and I was able to follow the guides
who led me on
even to the gate of heaven.
Love put me in a furnace.

IX

After I regained consciousness,
I waged war against Christ.
Straightaway, I took up arms,
and rode my steed into His terrain.
And having come face to face with Him,
without delay, I came to blows,
and avenged myself on Him.
Love put me in a furnace.

X

When I had sated my vengeance,
I made my peace with Him;
For, from the very beginning
this Love had been true love.
Now, of Christ, the Lover,
I have become capable.
Ever and always does my heart carry Him.
Love put me in a furnace.

Love put me
in a furnace.
Love put me
in the furnace.
He put me
in the furnace of Love.

But, in reality, the infinite mercy of God has raised us to supernatural life, whose full flowering is called not only the future life, but eternal life, because it is measured by the single instant of immobile eternity. Preaching the beatitudes at the very beginning of His ministry, our Lord tells us: "Be glad and rejoice, for your reward is very great in heaven." (3) To the Samaritan woman He says: "He that shall drink of the water that I will give him, shall not thirst forever; but the water that I will give him, shall become in him a fountain of water springing up into life everlasting." (4) In His sacerdotal prayer, Christ says: "Now this is eternal life: that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent." (5) St. Paul explains this statement to us by saying: "We see now through a glass in a dark manner; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known." (6)And St. John adds: "We shall be like to Him, because we shall see Him as He is." (7)

Have you EVER heard a sermon on this from the pulpit? I never have. Do priests understand themselves the loving union with the Trinity? Do they reveal in their lives that they are seeking perfection? I can count three whom I know personally, and all are under 65 years of age. They are secular priests as well.

The Church has defined that this revealed doctrine means an immediate vision of the divine essence without the intermediary of any creature previously known.(8) In other words, by the gaze of our intellect supernaturally strengthened by the light of glory, we shall see God better than we see with our eyes of flesh the persons with whom we speak, for we shall see Him clearly as an object closer to us than we are to ourselves. Here on earth we know especially what God is not: we know that He is not material, changing, limited; we shall then see Him as He is in His Deity, in His infinite essence, in His intimate life common to the three Persons. Grace is a participation of this essence and life since it will give us to see Him thus immediately as He sees Himself, to love Him as He loves Himself, to live eternally by Him.

I do not understand people wanting to know God through seers and visionaries when we each are capable of finding God in prayer, through the Church and the sacraments. We do not need intermediaries and can be wasting a lot of time running around to this group and that instead of praying. In the end, meeting God is completely personal and not a group experience. 

St. Thomas explains this revealed doctrine by stating (9) that between God and us there will not be even the intermediary of an idea, for no created idea can represent such as it is in itself, the pure, intellectual, eternally subsistent being that is God and His infinite truth, or His limitless love. We shall not be able to express our contemplation by any word, even by any interior word, just as a man is rendered incapable of speech when absorbed by the sight of a sublime and indescribable spectacle.

This immediate vision of the divine essence immensely surpasses all the created concepts of the divine perfections that we can have here on earth. We are called to see all the divine perfections intimately harmonized, identified in the eminence of the Deity, or the inner life of God; to see how the tenderest mercy and the most inflexible justice proceed from one and the same infinitely generous and infinitely holy love, from an eternal love of the supreme Good, which is, to be sure, intimately diffusive of self (the principle of mercy), but which also has a right to be loved above all (the principle of justice). We shall see how mercy and justice are united in all the works of God, how eternal love is identical with the sovereign good always loved, how divine wisdom is identical with the first truth always known, and how all these perfections harmonize and are but one in the very essence of Him who is.

Dear readers, do you desire this union with God above all else? Are you spiritually lazy? Are you distracted? Are you not orthodox?

We shall also see the infinite fecundity of the divine nature in the three divine Persons; the eternal generation of the Word, "splendor of the Father and figure of His substance." We shall gaze upon the ineffable procession of the Holy Ghost, term of the common love of the Father and of the Son, the bond uniting Them eternally in the most absolute diffusion of Themselves. The supreme Being is essentially diffusive of Itself in the intimate life of God, and freely bestows Its riches by means of creation and by our gratuitous elevation to the life of grace. Thus will be verified St. Paul's words: "Whom He foreknew, He also predestinated to be made conformable to the image of His Son; that He might be the first-born amongst many brothers." (10) From all eternity God has an only Son to whom He communicates all His divine nature; He gives Him to be "God of God, light of light." He has willed to have other sons, adopted sons, to whom He communicates a participation in His nature, sanctifying grace in the essence of their souls, and from this grace proceed in their higher faculties the light of glory and in amissible charity. Thus, St. Thomas says, "by the incarnation of the Son we receive adoptive sonship in the likeness of His natural sonship." (11)

This is not poetry, this is reality, our ultimate reality, to be united with God.

We shall also contemplate immediately the intimate and indissoluble union of the person of the Word and of the humanity of the Savior. We shall see thereby all the splendor of the divine maternity of Mary, of her mediation, the price of the salvation of souls, and the unlimited riches of these words so quickly uttered: "The eternal life of the elect."

Very few saints have written about this union, as such a union is beyond words. We can look at those who have given us glimpses of the unitive state, most clearly, St. John of the Cross.

I have met people in the Illuminative State, but not in the Unitive State. 

Personal holiness is hard to find. Concentrate on yourself and God.

No one can tell the joy that will be born in us of this absolutely immediate vision, which will be like a spiritual fusion of our soul, of our intellect, and of the divine essence, an uninterrupted transforming union, an intimate and perfect communion that nothing will ever be able to lessen. The love which will result from this vision will be so pure and strong a love of God that nothing will ever be able to diminish it. 

Again, do you desire this above all else?

This love will be sovereignly spontaneous, but no longer free; it will be superior to liberty, ravished by the sovereign Good. By this love we shall rejoice especially that God is God, infinitely holy, just, and merciful; we shall adore all the decrees of His providence in view of the manifestation of His goodness, and we shall subordinate ourselves completely to Him. We shall enter into His beatitude, according to the words of our Savior in the parable of the talents: "Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord." (12)

We attain this state, but not without suffering, not without the pain of the self-will being uprooted.

We can form some idea of the activity of the saints in heaven by the radiation of their lives on earth, such as it appears, for example, in our day in the numerous graces obtained through the intercession of Mary in the sanctuary at Lourdes, or through the prayer of a St. Teresa of Lisieux.

To be continued..