Our Aristotelian Catholic theologian, the author of the endeavour to rationalize Catholic feeling, St. Thomas Aquinas, tells us in his Summa (prima secundae partis, quaestio iv., art. i) that “delight is requisite for happiness.  For delight is caused by the fact of desire resting in attained good.  Hence, since happiness is nothing but the attainment of the Sovereign Good, there cannot be happiness without concomitant delight.”  But where is the delight of him who rests?  To rest, requiescere—­is not that to sleep and not to possess even the consciousness that one is resting?  “Delight is caused by the vision of God itself,” the theologian continues.  But does the soul feel itself distinct from God?  “The delight that accompanies the activity of the understanding does not impede, but rather strengthens that activity,” he says later on.  Obviously! for what happiness were it else?  And in order to save delectation, delight, pleasure, which, like pain, has always something material in it, and which we conceive of only as existing in a soul incarnate in a body, it was necessary to suppose that the soul in a state of blessedness is united with its body.  Apart from some kind of body, how is delight possible?  The immortality of the pure soul, without some sort of body or spirit-covering, is not true immortality.  And at bottom, what we long for is a prolongation of this life, this life and no other, this life of flesh and suffering, this life which we imprecate at times simply because it comes to an end.  The majority of suicides would not take their lives if they had the assurance that they would never die on this earth.  The self-slayer kills himself because he will not wait for death.

When in the thirty-third canto of the Paradiso, Dante relates how he attained to the vision of God, he tells us that just as a man who beholds somewhat in his sleep retains on awakening nothing but the impression of the feeling in his mind, so it was with him, for when the vision had all but passed away the sweetness that sprang from it still distilled itself in his heart.

    Cotal son to, che quasi tutta cessa
    mia visione ed ancor mi distilla
    nel cuor lo dulce che nacque da essa

like snow that melts in the sun—­

    cosi la neve al sol si disigilla.

That is to say, that the vision, the intellectual content, passes, and that which remains is the delight, the passione impressa, the emotional, the irrational—­in a word, the corporeal.

What we desire is not merely spiritual felicity, not merely vision, but delight, bodily happiness.  The other happiness, the rationalist beatitude, the happiness of being submerged in understanding, can only—­I will not say satisfy or deceive, for I do not believe that it ever satisfied or deceived even a Spinoza.  At the conclusion of his Ethic, in propositions xxxv. and xxxvi. of the fifth part,