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The Beatific Vision and Freedom of Choice. Excerpt from Chapter 13 of Frank J. Sheed's book "Theology & Sanity" (1947) For angels and men the only purpose could be the most perfect possible relation …More
The Beatific Vision and Freedom of Choice.

Excerpt from Chapter 13 of Frank J. Sheed's book "Theology & Sanity" (1947)

For angels and men the only purpose could be the most perfect possible relation with God.
Had we no revelation from God Himself as to the purpose for which He made them, we might at least hazard a guess;
that as the highest powers of their nature are knowledge and love,
it must be their destiny to come to know God and love God to the very limit of their power,
using no element of energy upon anything that would distract them from this knowing and loving.
Again considering their nature, we might hazard the further guess that this knowing of God would be by way of a richer and richer concept of Him, and that their love of God would bear a proportion to their growing knowledge.
Such a natural destiny would be a thing of unrealizable splendour;
yet that is not their destiny, but something more splendid still.
No examination of the nature of angels and men would tell us what this more splendid destiny is, we can know it only from the word of God.
God has told us that the destiny alike of men and angels is to see Himself, the Uncreated Splendour, face to face,
not by means of any concept however rich,
but direct—God Himself taking the place in the intellect of the idea of Himself,
so that between the spirit of angel or of man and God
nothing whatever shall intervene,
not the purest concept,
not anything at all.
This is the Beatific Vision,
the seeing that is our bliss.
This is the end for which God has destined spiritual beings:
it is an end for which their natural powers are totally inadequate,
which is why we could not discover it for ourselves by examining those natural powers.
Angels and men alike need to have ingrafted into them by God powers enabling them to achieve this end which their natural powers could not achieve.
Life, we have seen, is a principle of operation.
Natural life is the principle by which we carry out the kind of operations that go with the kind of beings we are.
The principle which is to enable us to operate above our nature is called supernatural life.
The object of this supernatural life is the Beatific Vision, the direct gaze upon God. Without it we cannot have the Beatific Vision.
We lack the power.
But in God's design neither angels nor men were to have the Beatific Vision without a previous testing.
Consider the angels first.
God created them in the perfection of their nature as pure spirits.
Further, He endowed them with the supernatural life of which we have just spoken.
But they were not as yet admitted to the Beatific Vision.
They must first be tested.
What the testing was, we do not know;
but we know that some of them failed in the test,
and we know, too, that they failed through some form of self-assertion,
assertion of self against God.
In the Book of Job we read:
In His angels He found wickedness (Job iv.18).
Further, we know that one of these rebellious angels was the leader of the rest.
We find such phrases as the "Devil and his angels" (e.g., Mt.xxv.41) and "the Dragon and his angels" (Apoc..7).
This chief of rebellious angels is most commonly called Satan, a Hebrew word meaning adversary or accuser, which is roughly the meaning also of the Greek word Diabolos, from which our word Devil comes.
He is worth closer study.

Strictly speaking there is one Devil:
the rest are demons:
It is usually held that the rebellion was his affair primarily:
he seduced the rest.
The words Satan, Diabolos, Devil, express his nature:
he is the enemy.
What is his name?
We say that he was Lucifer, the light-bearer, before his fall, though he is not called by that name in Scripture.

Our Lord describes him (John viii.44):

He, from the first, was a murderer;
and as for truth, he has never taken his stand upon that;
there is no truth in him.
When he utters falsehood, he is only uttering what is natural to him;
he is all false and it is he who gave falsehood its birth.

—or in the Douay Version:

he is a liar and the father of lies.

If Christians can be found to ignore the other angels, it seems an excess of rashness to ignore this one.
But to return to their great rebellion.
We have seen that their sin was some form of self-assertion.
It may be worth pausing at this first and most catastrophic of all sins to consider the nature of sin.
In angels or men sin is always an effort to gain something against the will of God.
Thus for angels and men sin is essentially ludicrous.
All alike are made by God of nothing;
all alike are held in existence by nothing save the continuing will of God to hold them so.
To think that we can gain anything by hacking or biting or furtively nibbling at the Will which alone holds us in existence at all is a kind of incredible folly.
It is precisely because apart from God we should be nothing, that Pride is the worst of all sins,
for it is the direct assertion of self as against God.
It is sin in its nakedness: all other sins are sin dressed up a little.
Other sins are an effort to gain something against the will of God,
pride is the claim to be something apart from the will of God.
I have said that sin is incredible folly.
But it is made to look credible by the ease and frequency with which we do it.
Sin is madness, but it is possible.
Why?
There is a profound mystery here:
a mystery at its very darkest when we ask how pure spirits could have been guilty of a folly so monstrous,
but a mystery still even when any one of us consider his own most recent effort to gain something against God's will.
The rebellious angels must have known that it was madness, yet they did it;
but after all, any instructed Catholic knows that it is madness, yet he does it.
Sin, in fact, is not simply a matter of knowledge, mysterious as knowledge is;
it is a matter of that far more mysterious thing, WILL, at the very ultimate point of its mysteriousness, its freedom of choice.
The will, if it wants intensely enough, can ignore the intellect's information and go for what it wants.
Even if the intellect knows that the thing will bring disaster, the will can choose it ;
even if it knows that the thing cannot be had at all, the will can still fix itself upon it.
Not even by the intellect is the will coerced.
Created beings are the resultant of infinite power working upon nothingness,
and they are free to fix their choice anywhere between those two extremes.
To choose anything at all as apart from God is quite literally to choose nothingness, for apart from God everything is nothing.
To choose God is to choose the infinite.
Either way, whether we choose nothing or the infinite, we cannot be either, but we can possess either.
We are free to choose.