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I encounter the word "beatified love" in a comment in other channels and it said that beatified love is higher than beatific vision which a soul can experience in the heavenly kingdom. What am I looking for? Is there any biblical reference that points out to the word "beatified love"? Is there a traditions that holds beatified love is higher than beatific vision? Is beatified love an official doctrine to a Catholic belief or did any Christian or other faith also are using this phrase beatified love in their teaching that a soul can experience in heaven?

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"the love of God is better than the knowledge of God"

beatified love is higher than beatific vision?

Perhaps you are asking if love of God is greater than knowledge of Him? St. Thomas Aquinas writes (Summa Theologica q. 82 a. 3 c., quoted in Petri 2016 p. 247, ch. "Love in the Summa Theologica"):

When, therefore, the thing in which there is good is nobler than the soul itself, in which is the idea understood; by comparison with such a thing, the will is higher than the intellect. But when the thing which is good is less noble than the soul, then even in comparison with that thing the intellect is higher than the will. Wherefore the love of God is better than the knowledge of God; but, on the contrary, the knowledge of corporeal things is better than the love thereof. Absolutely, however, the intellect is nobler than the will.


Degree of knowing God in the Beatific Vision depends upon one's merits.

From my answer here:

When we behold the Beatific Vision in heaven, we do not become God; we maintain our individuality. We will know God as perfectly as His grace enables us us know him,* but not as perfectly as He knows Himself.

*There are hierarchies in heaven; not all saints (i.e., those in heaven) are equally close to God [i.e., not everyone sees God as equally deeply in the Beatific Vision]. The Blessed Virgin Mother is closest in her relation to her Son.

St. Thomas Aquinas writes in his Compendium Theologiæ cap. 106 ("Fruition of Natural Desire in the Beatific Vision [in Heaven]"):

…the most perfect way of attaining likeness with God: to know God in the way He knows Himself, by His own essence.

Of course, we shall never comprehend Him as He comprehends Himself. This does not mean that we shall be unaware of some part of Him, for He has no parts. It means that we shall not know Him as perfectly as He can be known, since the capacity of our intellect for knowing cannot equal His truth, and so cannot exhaust His knowability. God’s knowability or truth is infinite, whereas our intellect is finite. But His intellect is infinite, just as His truth is; and so He alone knows Himself to the full extent that He is knowable; just as a person comprehends a demonstrable conclusion if he knows it through demonstration, but not if he knows it only in an imperfect way, on merely probable grounds.

This ultimate end of man we call beatitude. For a man’s happiness or beatitude consists in the vision whereby he sees God in His essence. Of course, man is far below God in the perfection of his beatitude. For God has this beatitude by His very nature, whereas man attains beatitude by being admitted to a share in the divine light, as we said in the previous chapter.

and here:

everyone in heaven is not equal [in their beholding of the Beatific Vision] because of the diversity of their merits.

The degree of closeness to God in heaven [i.e., how deeply one sees God in the Beatific Vision] depends on one's merits. The Council of Florence, under the authority of Pope Eugenius IV (1431-1447), defined the dogma (DZ 693) that

the souls of those, who … are immediately received into heaven, … see clearly the one and triune God Himself just as He is, yet according to the diversity of merits, one more perfectly than another.

Since the Blessed Virgin Mother has the greatest merits, she is the closest to God in heaven.

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  • Geremia thanks for your answer, but somehow it does not expound why beatified love is greater than beatific vision as qouting St.Thomas "Wherefore the love of God is better than the knowledge of God; but, on the contrary, the knowledge of corporeal things is better than the love thereof. Absolutely, however, the intellect is nobler than the will"..In the bible Jesus said the greatest of this is Love...we know God created the world by his Love & Wisdom...and in Heaven we will be judge according to love and not according to knowledge...I'm still looking for a more substantiated answer.Godbless Mar 14, 2018 at 0:53
  • @jongricafort I've never heard of "beatified love".
    – Geremia
    Mar 14, 2018 at 17:24

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