What we really long for after death is to go on living this life, this same mortal life, but without its ills, without its tedium, and without death.  Seneca, the Spaniard, gave expression to this in his Consolatio ad Marciam (xxvi.); what he desired was to live this life again:  ista moliri.  And what Job asked for (xix. 25-7) was to see God in the flesh, not in the spirit.  And what but that is the meaning of that comic conception of eternal recurrence which issued from the tragic soul of poor Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality?

And this beatific vision which is the primary Catholic solution of the problem, how can it be realized, I ask again, without obliteration of the consciousness of self?  Will it not be like a sleep in which we dream without knowing what we dream?  Who would wish for an eternal life like that?  To think without knowing that we think is not to be sensible of ourselves, it is not to be ourselves.  And is not eternal life perhaps eternal consciousness, not only seeing God, but seeing that we see Him, seeing ourselves at the same time and ourselves as distinct from Him?  He who sleeps lives, but he has no consciousness of himself; and would anyone wish for an eternal sleep?  When Circe advised Ulysses to descend to the abode of the dead in order to consult the soothsayer Teiresias, she told him that Teiresias alone among the shades of the dead was possessed of understanding, for all the others flitted about like shadows (Odyssey, x., 487-495).  And can it be said that the others, apart from Teiresias, had really overcome death?  Is it to overcome death to flit about like shadows without understanding?

And on the other hand, may we not imagine that possibly this earthly life of ours is to the other life what sleep is to waking?  May not all our life be a dream and death an awakening?  But an awakening to what?  And supposing that everything is but the dream of God and that God one day will awaken?  Will He remember His dream?

Aristotle, the rationalist, tells in his Ethics of the superior happiness of the contemplative life, bios theoretikos; and all rationalists are wont to place happiness in knowledge.  And the conception of eternal happiness, of the enjoyment of God, as a beatific vision, as knowledge and comprehension of God, is a thing of rationalist origin, it is the kind of happiness that corresponds with the God-Idea of Aristotelianism.  But the truth is that, in addition to vision, happiness demands delight, and this is a thing which has very little to do, with rationalism and is only attainable when we feel ourselves distinct from God.