In this paper, I seek to articulate a positive role for the body in our eschatological joy in God. I draw on Augustine's thought to argue that the body makes a positive contribution to our joy in God by being a pedagogy for our imaginations, training us to imagine the beautiful character of God in Christ through embodiment. While Augustine might seem like a surprising choice for this task, I argue that his concepts of ubique totus and the totus Christus provide fertile soil for the growth of an eschatological theology of the body.

Recent discussion regarding the beatific vision has concerned the object of the vision. Thomas Aquinas represents a robust account of the beatific vision according to which God will be seen in his essence by saints and angels in heaven. Others, however, have worried that such a view risks imperilling divine transcendence and incomprehensibility and favour instead an understanding of the beatific vision that is christologically oriented. This article offers a defence of the claim that we will see God's essence in heaven. First, it draws attention to various distinctions in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae concerning how we see the divine essence in heaven. Then, it demonstrates points of continuity between Thomas’ account and that of later Protestants, particularly Calvin and Turretin. Third, following Simon Gaine, it argues that Thomas’ account of the beatific vision is not christologically deficient. Finally, it argues that Thomas’ account has biblical support.

A constant in Augustine's long literary career is his understanding of God's presence as ubique totus, or ‘whole and everywhere’. I will first consider how Augustine came to perceive of the divine presence in this life (here I will look especially at the Confessions); second, how he theologically articulates the nature of the divine presence (here I will draw on Ep. 187), and, finally, how he understands the divine presence in the life to come (and here I will focus on the conclusion of the City of God). I suggest that a fundamental continuity obtains between how Augustine understands seeing God in this life and the next and that this continuity is predicated on his conception of the divine presence as ubique totus.

It has been shown that the thirteenth-century Dominican friar, St Thomas Aquinas, was an important theological influence on John Owen, the seventeenth-century English puritan theologian, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, especially in the areas of the divine being, grace and Chalcedonian Christology. Suzanne McDonald has argued that, while Aquinas is unmistakably a source for Owen's doctrine of the beatific vision, Owen surpassed Aquinas's doctrine in a manner she judges to be correct, theologically speaking, and which exposes the deficiency of Aquinas's account. Owen achieved this particular ‘Reforming’ or rather ‘re-forming’ of Aquinas's doctrine, she argues, by way of a ‘Christological re-orientation of the doctrine’ in terms of what is seen in the beatific vision and how it is seen, that is, its content and means. This article replies to McDonald from a Catholic and Thomist perspective, in response to her suggestion that Owen's account of the beatific vision opens up possibilities for ecumenical dialogue. The article attempts to achieve this first by reassessing the Christological contrasts McDonald draws between Owen and Aquinas in terms of content and means, and then by offering several suggestions as to why one might want to prefer Aquinas's account over Owen's.

This article explores the role of the body in Thomas Aquinas’ ethical thought, focusing on the Summa Theologiae. Drawing on Thomas’ account of human nature, teleology and ethics, it traces Thomas’ account of human embodiment through his discussion of the relationship between human and angelic nature, the beatific vision, law and virtue, and the active and contemplative lives. Against several recent accounts which have presented versions of Thomas as a thinker who is generally positive in his assessment of the human body, it argues that there is a basic tension in Thomas’ thought between the desire to locate human distinctiveness in the conjunction of body and soul and the sense that after a certain point, embodiment is precisely that which obstructs progress towards God. This tension is inextricably connected to Thomas’ understanding of human calling and discipleship and poses serious challenges to any attempts to draw on Thomas’ work as an ethical resource.

There appears to be no serious treatment of the positive role played by the body in Aquinas's account of human happiness. This would seem to be a significant gap in the literature given Aquinas's well known insistence on the human person as a body-soul unity. This paper aims at taking a first step in filling-in the gap by considering Aquinas's discussion of the body's part in human happiness in the Secunda Pars of the Summa theologiae. In particular it considers the place of the body in each of the three different forms of happiness that Aquinas talks about there. It is perhaps the role of the body in the third form of happiness – the perfect happiness of the beatific vision – that is most crucial to understand since this is human happiness simpliciter. Although the body has a part to play here too, Aquinas's understanding of it is not without problems.

The reason why all of our students should be Thomists is that excellence among the intellectual virtues is what should come to define our aspirations for them as emerging Christian scholars. Such aspirations are formed by the design and implementation of practices of study. Such aspirations denounce any distinction between subject and object or finite and infinite. However, such aspirations are also guided by the narrative of excellence as defined by the beatific vision of God. Thomas Aquinas reminds us that this narrative is not one the academy generates on its own but is the story of Christianity as embodied by the Church. Failure to recognize such a narrative and design practices of study accordingly not only leaves our students beyond the formative influence of the intellectual virtues but also leaves them susceptible to the influences wielded by other narratives such as the narrative of the market economy.