Question 24
How do grace, beatific vision, and God all in all fulfill creatures without completing God?
Consummation is creation's transformation in communion, not an achievement that supplies a missing perfection to God.
In this question
The short answer
Grace raises creatures into a communion with God that ordinary created existence does not itself entail. Beatific vision gives immediate knowledge of God without making a finite knower comprehend divine infinity. Resurrection and renewed creation fulfill real created subjects rather than absorb them. The name the All expresses God's simple plenitude as source and final good. God does not become the All through creation; creation comes to participate fully in God as the All. That consummation does not, by itself, prove every person's salvation.
A gift beyond ordinary dependence
Every creature depends on God for being. Sanctifying grace adds a different gift: participation in divine life through Christ and the Spirit. It heals and elevates the recipient for communion beyond natural powers. The divine initiative is gratuitous; the fact that a creature exists does not establish a claim upon this supernatural end. CCC 1996–2000.
Participation names real received possession without making every reception identical. A stone's existence, a person's moral action, the life of grace, and the Son's unique humanity require different accounts. Supernatural fulfillment belongs to the creature while exceeding its own resources.
Maximus juxtaposes the persistence of embodied human nature with becoming God by grace. This supports real deification without identifying created and divine natures. The wording is quoted through Korb; adopting it does not adopt the article's further disputed interpretation of deification as hypostatic identity or attribute the site's constructive metaphysical model to Maximus.
man will remain whole man in soul and body, owing to his nature, but will become whole God in soul and body owing to the grace and the splendor of the blessed glory of God
Immediate vision without comprehension
The beatific vision concerns God himself, not a created image that stands in for him as the object through which the divine essence is seen. This immediacy does not eliminate God's enabling grace or make the knower infinite. The Catechism confesses the face-to-face vision of the divine essence and communion with the Trinity. CCC 1023–1028.
To see truly is not necessarily to exhaust what is seen. The creature can receive a perfected act of knowing without becoming the source's equal in intelligibility. This distinction allows genuine fulfillment without possession by mastery. It also sets a limit to the language of mediation: the created conditions enabling vision do not become an intervening representation substituted for God.
The All and the future of creation
The All names plenitude as origin, sustaining gift, and final good, rather than an aggregate made by adding creatures to God. In Paul's resurrection argument, all in all follows Christ's reign, the defeat of death, and the handing over of the kingdom. This is a revealed horizon of consummation, not a deduction from noncomposition alone. 1 Corinthians 15:20–28.
Resurrection confirms that communion does not discard embodied persons. Renewed creation preserves created reality in a transformation whose detailed manner is not disclosed. Histories of care and freely enacted goods matter already; their worth is not postponed until completion. The new achievement is their perfection in God. God receives no additional deity from the world he fulfills. CCC 1042–1050.
Verses 20–28 concern Christ's resurrection, his reign, the defeat of death, and the kingdom's consummation. The Son's subjection is read within the incarnate economy, without assigning him an inferior divine nature.
And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then the Son also himself shall be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.
The strongest objection
Does all in all guarantee that every person will be saved?
The phrase cannot bear that conclusion by itself. Its context concerns Christ's victory and the final ordering of creation to God. Judgment, freedom, damnation, and hope require their own theological warrants. Communion without absorption preserves personal reality; it does not remove the need to discuss a person's relation to the gift or authorize certainty about every final outcome.
What follows
- Grace, immediate vision, resurrection, and renewed creation belong to Catholic teaching. The All is this project's constructive name for their connection with simple plenitude; it is not a separate proof of universal salvation.
Sources
Connections
- Resurrection and beatitude
Immediate vision and lasting created identity belong to the account of fulfillment.