Beatific vision
A person or angel possessing the beatific vision reaches, as a member of the communion of saints, perfect salvation in its entirety, i.e., heaven.
Pace in the Catholic Encyclopedia (1907) defined the beatific vision: The immediate knowledge of God which the angelic spirits and the souls of the just enjoy in Heaven.
It is called "vision" to distinguish it from the mediate knowledge of God which the human mind may attain in the present life.
"[21]Methodist co-founder Charles Wesley, in his 1747 hymn "Maker, in Whom We Live", described union with God through the Holy Spirit as "beatific sight": Spirit of Holiness, let all thy saints adore / thy sacred energy, and bless thine heart-renewing power.
/ No angel tongues can tell thy love's ecstatic height, / the glorious joy unspeakable, the beatific sight.
[6]The church believes in the beatific vision because Jesus experienced it from conception to ascension, taught about it and promised it, and makes Catholics foretaste it by faith.
The catechism elaborates that the saints' happiness includes not just joy, but also glory (knowledge of one another's dignity), honor (reverence for one another as adopted sons of God), and peace (fulfillment of all the heart's desires).
Moreover, the catechism adds, the beatific vision will, on Judgment Day, make the saints' resurrected bodies impassible (free from inconvenience, suffering, and death), bright as the angels, agile (free from the limitations of space-time), and subtle (as subject to the soul as the soul is subject to God).
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the beatific vision is God opening himself in an inexhaustible way to the saints,[25] so that they can see him face to face,[26] and thereby share in his nature,[27] and therefore enjoy eternal, definitive, supreme, perfect, and ever new happiness.
[52] Because Jesus is considered God and man, His human nature experienced the beatific vision from conception to His ascension into heaven.
[54] Thomas Aquinas defined the beatific vision as the human being's "final end" in which one attains to a perfect happiness.
"[55] But this kind of perfect happiness cannot be found in any physical pleasure, any amount of worldly power, any degree of temporal fame or honor, or indeed in any finite reality.
But we cannot attain to this happiness by our own natural powers; it is a gift that must be given us by God, who strengthens us by the "light of glory" so that we can see Him as he is, without any intermediary.
This union comes about by a kind of "seeing" perfectly the divine essence itself, a gift given to our intellects when God joins them directly to Himself without any intermediary.
The Sacred College of Cardinals held a consistory on the problem in January 1334, and Pope John backed away from his novel views to the more standard understanding.
His successor, Pope Benedict XII, in the bull Benedictus Deus, taught that the saved see Heaven (and thus, God) before Judgement Day.
[65] The Catholic Encyclopedia defines the beatific vision as the immediate knowledge of God enjoyed by all the heavenly creatures.
