16 - Resurrection and Eschatology

Summary

Toward the end of his life, Aquinas delivered a series of catechetical talks in the vernacular on the Apostles’ Creed to an Italian audience, which were preserved in Latin by his secretary, Reginald of Piperno. Its eschatological themes, including the resurrection, would have been of huge importance to Aquinas’s audience.¹ His exposition shows his commitment in faith to the future resurrection of all the dead for judgment, and to an eternal reward bestowed on those who die in a state of grace and an eternal punishment for those who die in sin. In our own times there has been widespread theological debate over whether an eternal hell will ever be populated, especially in view of those passages in Scripture that suggest a renewal of creation. In Aquinas’s time and place there was no such controversy about hell. But while the beatitude of heaven enjoyed priority over hell in his theological thinking, with infernal punishment understood to consist primarily in the eternal loss of the beatific vision, fundamental to each was the bodily resurrection common to both the blessed and the wretched.