Everybody knows (for the relevant value of ‘everybody’) that, for Thomas Aquinas, perfect happiness consists in intellectual contemplation of the divine essence, with the will’s delight or enjoyment being a necessary concomitant of that beatific vision but not, strictly speaking, part of the essence of happiness. Beyond this boilerplate statement, however, most of us would be hard-pressed to say much more about contemplation in Aquinas. What sort of act is it, and how does it relate to other acts of intellect? What acts of contemplation are available in this present life, and how do those acts fit into a life of faith or a life devoted to philosophical or theological study? What contribution, if any, does contemplation make to this-worldly happiness? In Thomas Aquinas and Contemplation, Rik Van Nieuwenhove takes up these and related questions and develops Aquinas’s account of contemplation in a systematic way, elaborating even what “everybody...

You do not currently have access to this content.