While one disagrees with much of the book, Simon Gaine, in a recent work arguing that Jesus had the beatific vision throughout morality, correctly noted that one cannot attribute both the beatific vision and faith to Jesus—it is either one or the other:
It is here that we meet the mutual exclusion of faith and vision. Not only do rational creatures need one or the other for such knowledge of what is so transcendent, but it must be either one or the other. Once human beings see for themselves in heaven, their certainty can no longer be derived from the authority of divine witness, because what was formerly unseen by them is now plainly open to their sight. Now it might be urged against this position that its mutual exclusion of faith and vision depends on a narrow understanding of faith that defines it only in intellectual terms. In response one can say that this mutual exclusion depends necessarily not on the theory of faith being narrowly intellectualist, but on the cognitive element being recognized as a key consistent feature of faith’s total reality. Hence, even where faith is broadly understood in terms of all its Scriptural elements, the recognition of this essential element of assent to what is unseen means that the act of faith as a whole and vision of the same object will be mutually exclusive.
Balthasar recalls that some medieval theologians allowed that the gift or habit of faith did continue in heaven, but that in the state of vision it never passed into act. This theory would have the merit of being able to cope up to a point with an exegesis of 1 Corinthians 13.13 that had faith remain for eternity, should that exegesis have proved unavoidable—the gift of faith would endure for ever but always be inactive. Aquinas, however, was among those who thought that even the habit, which was of its very nature suited to a situation where God was still unseen, passed away or rather passed into vision. The fact that faith no longer remains hardly lessens its importance for Aquinas but reinforces the close relationship that obtains for him between faith and vision. Intending the ‘definition’ of Hebrews 11.1 in a scholastic idiom, he spoke of faith as ‘that habit of mind whereby eternal life begins in us, causing the intellect to assent to things not seen’. Faith, by which we believe God so as to make our way to our heavenly highly as to think of it as the very ‘seed’ of the beatific vision, we can appreciate that, just as for a seed to germinate fully means that there is no longer a seed, so where faith comes to maturity, there is no longer any faith.
These principles cannot but apply to the earthly Christ . . . .if we cannot explain Christ’s human knowledge as a whole in only natural terms, we must explain it partly in supernatural terms: Christ’s knowledge of the Father in the Gospels is surely one that surpasses the power of human reason to obtain. Thus we must conclude of Christ’s human mind what must be concluded of any created mind elevated by supernatural knowledge. Either Christ has such knowledge by God by seeing the divine essence for himself in his human mind, or he has knowledge of what he does not see there by accepting it on the authority of divine knowledge. However one conceives the broader picture of Christ’s human knowledge, it must therefore include within it either the vision of the blessed or the knowledge that arises from the habit of faith. Without either one or the other of these it must be reduced in respect of knowledge of God to the purely natural level. But, whichever of these he does have, it must exclude the other.
Attempts to find a supernatural ‘middle way’ between faith and vision thus founder. (Simon Francis Gaine, Did the Saviour See the Father? Christ, Salvation, and the Vision of God [London: T&T Clark, 2018], 118-19, italics in original)
