ABSTRACT
In this chapter I intend to defeat the aforementioned objection by doing two things. First, I show that Aquinas’s own account of perfect human beatitude does include a place for human community. I do this by drawing not only on Aquinas’s discussion of beatitude in his more systematic works, but also by noting what he has to say about the next life in his Biblical commentaries. Second, I argue that Aquinas’s way of speaking about the proper place for human community within an account of human beatitude is philosophically advantageous in that it successfully synthesizes two incomplete models of blessedness, models I will refer to as the erotic conception of heaven and the communitarian conception of heaven, respectively.
