A nice short summary of Aquinas' idea of the "big picture." I find it helpful as a heuristic thought-pattern, and try to interpret more difficult dogmas within its boundaries. From the Timothy McDermott translation of the Angelic Doctor's Summa Theologiae.
"What the scriptures teach is that man failed the gardening task and ruined God’s creation, but that God graciously came, as a friend and cooperator, to help him salvage and recreate. In choosing that way to help man with his original goal God gave man’s life a new goal - that of fellowship with God himself as friend. The journey of this life is no longer simply a journey to the fulfilment of man’s nature, for that journey has been taken up into a journey into the presence of God Himself, into the good and happy state which God himself is."
McDermott: "This is Thomas’s preferred way of describing the relationship between what later commentators called man’s natural and supernatural ends. He does not talk, as they do, of man first knowing God as author of nature, and then as author of supernature. Rather he consistently talks of God, known to man’s learning as the author of nature, becoming through God’s teaching the object of his happiness. The word translated ‘happiness’ has more the sense of ‘happy state’ or ‘blessed state’, meaning a state which has blessedly happened or turned out well - a state of goodhap rather than mishap. It corresponds to the Aristotelian word ‘eudaimonia’, which some modern scholars translate as ‘flourishing’. When Thomas uses happiness as a name for God himself he is thinking of God as fulfilled life; and this explains why he talks of happiness as being accompanied by delight, rather than as consisting in it.
God has destined us for a goal beyond the grasp of reason."
I just love that.
amazon.com/Summa-Theologiae … +mcdermott
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