Chapter 3: Happiness and Beatitude in St. Thomas Aquinas: The Divine End of Human Life

This chapter explores St. Thomas Aquinas’s synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and Christian revelation to define human happiness. Aquinas distinguishes between imperfect happiness (felicitas), achievable on earth through reason and virtue, and perfect happiness (beatitudo), the ultimate human end. He argues that only the direct vision of God in the afterlife can satisfy the will’s infinite desire for the good and the intellect’s infinite desire for the truth, a supernatural gift received through grace. This Thomistic vision is contrasted with modern transhumanism, which seeks a similar state of “super well-being” and “super-intelligence” through technology—a form of self-deification rather than divinization by grace. The chapter concludes by introducing the “Hypnosphere,” a modern technological environment that hijacks this innate longing for beatitude, instrumentalizing it for control and trapping desire in a cycle of unfulfillment.


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