Heaven: The Beatific Vision

In heaven the blessed will directly see the very essence of God. “We shall see him as he is” (I John 3:2).God is supremely intelligible or understandable, and is himself the determining of the creatural intellect to know him in his essence. To know God thus is to behold the beatific vision.

After the general resurrection when bodies and souls will be reunited, the blessed will not behold God’s essence with their bodily eyes. For bodily eyes, even when theyare glorified, behold bodily things, and God’s essence is not bodily. Those that see God in heaven (before or after the resurrection of the body) see him with the mind, the intellect-strengthened, elevated, and illumined by the Light of Glory.

No creature can know God exhaustively, so as to know all that God knows. This would mean the encompassing of the infinite by a finite understanding; this is utterly impossible. Therefore, the blessed see God in his essence, but they do not see all that God sees. Even the angels “who know all things in God,” do not know all that God knows. The term “all things” means “all that they know.”