ABSTRACT
Medieval Christians took it that the highest human good is a certain kind of relationship to God, a relationship of enjoyment, often referred to as beatific vision, in which the intellect has immediate access to the divine essence such that the desires of the will are fully satisfied. But, according to one of the most prominent medieval theologians, Thomas Aquinas, no human being is naturally equipped to have such access to the divine essence. We need both an extrinsic power added to our nature and divine actualization of that power. This tells us something about the relationship between human nature (conceived along broadly Aristotelian lines) and human well-being. For Aquinas, success in the category of human nature radically underdetermines human well-being. Our human nature just doesn’t give us the capacities we need in order to achieve the highest human good. Therefore, relative to the saints who enjoy beatific vision, every merely human being is disabled.
