ABSTRACT
Building upon the Augustinian theme, Thomas Aquinas concludes that our ultimate good – our beatitude – cannot reside in earthly life or temporal goods. It must be a state of repose in satiety. The anxious enjoyment of temporal goods can hardly be that. ‘Beatitude, as it is a perfect and sufficient good, excludes every evil and fulfils every desire’. But our earthly life, even if it is as fortunate as it can be, always contains evils, gnawing at the heart. It leaves unfulfilled desires: to hold on to what the authoors are losing, to have back what they have lost, to escape the risk of losing what they still have. When they look back fondly to a time, a place, or a person now lost to us, they feel the pricking of a hopeless desire for return. As Proust wrote: ‘the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment’.
