Chapter 106 — How natural desire comes to rest in the vision of God in his essence, in which beatitude consists

Once this end is reached, natural desire must come to rest. For the divine essence, thus united to the intellect of the one who sees God, is the adequate principle for knowing everything and is the wellspring of all goodness, so that nothing can remain to be desired. This, too, is the most perfect way of attaining likeness with God: to know God in the way he knows himself, by his own essence. Of course, we shall never comprehend him as he comprehends himself. This does not mean that we shall be unaware of some part of him, for he has no parts. Rather, it means that we shall not know him as perfectly as he can be known, since the capacity of our intellect for knowing cannot be brought to a level with the knowability of his truth: God’s clarity or truth is infinite, whereas our intellect is finite. But his intellect is infinite, just as his truth is; and so he alone knows himself to the full extent that he is knowable; just as a person comprehends a demonstrable conclusion if he knows it through demonstration, but not if he knows it only in an imperfect way, by a probable proof.

And since we call man’s ultimate end ‘beatitude,’ man’s happiness or beatitude consists in the fact that he sees God in his essence; although man is far below God in the perfection of his beatitude, since God has this beatitude by his very nature, whereas man attains beatitude by participation in the divine light, as was said above.