Beatitude is supreme happiness. The query before us is not whether God will give the blessed supreme happiness, but whether He is their supreme happiness. To put it another way, it is not whether He will give them beatitude as something different from Himself, but whether He will give it to them by giving them Himself. The answer, interestingly, depends on the sense in which the question is asked – for there are two ways of taking it, and they must be treated differently. With this Article we tremble at the threshold of the Gospel.

We saw at the outset of the book that Thomas Aquinas considers reason a preamble to faith. But to faith in what? Human life is triply haunted, by the specter of absurdity, by the burden of brokenness and guilt, and by the dread of mortality and incompleteness. Can there be meaning, can there be healing and forgiveness, can we be everlastingly fulfilled? According to St. Thomas, the answers to these three questions are provided in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, who bore our sins and opened the path to the Father. This scandalizes us because if the Gospel is true, then the facile and comforting proposal of “many roads to heaven” is false. It scandalizes us even more because it asks something of us. And so the Treatise on the One God is not the end of our investigation, but the beginning.