Dist. 49, Part 2
by St. Bonaventure
Source text: Public Domain Mark 1.0. English translation/apparatus/encoding: CC BY-NC 4.0, Wroot Press.
https://bonaventure.wrootpress.com/browse/4/d/49/q/bon-sent-IV-d49-p2-littera
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### Part II.

### Chapter IV. *Whether the beatitude of the Saints be greater after the judgment.*

After these things it is customarily asked whether the beatitude of the Saints will be greater after the judgment than in the meantime. — It is to be believed without any scruple that they will have a greater glory after the judgment than before, because their joy also will be greater, as Augustine testified above, and their knowledge will be more ample. Hence Jerome: «When the judgment has been completed, God will show to the elect a more ample glory of his own brightness». «If it moves anyone [to ask] what need there is for the spirits of the dead to receive back their own bodies in the resurrection, if the highest beatitude can be furnished to them without bodies; it is a difficult question and cannot be perfectly determined by us. But nevertheless there is no doubt that the mind of man, snatched away from the senses of the flesh — and also after death, once the flesh itself has been laid aside — cannot see the unchangeable substance, that is, God, in the way in which the holy Angels see him: whether for some other more hidden cause, or for this reason, that there is in it a certain natural appetite for administering a body, by which it is in some manner held back, lest it should press on with its whole intention into that highest heaven, until that appetite comes to rest. Moreover, if the body be such that its administration is difficult and burdensome, as is this flesh, which is corrupted, much more is the mind turned away from that vision of the highest heaven. Accordingly, when it has received this body no longer *animal* but *spiritual*, made equal to the Angels it will have the perfect mode of its own nature, obeying and commanding, made alive and making alive, with so ineffable an ease that what was a burden to it will be a glory».

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