a. About the Opinion Itself and the Manner of Positing it

20. As to this second question the assertion is made [Henry of Ghent, Quodlibet 13 q.12] that beatitude perfects the essence more principally than the power.

21. The way of stating it is as follows: “Beatitude consists more principally in the object, which is uncreated beatitude, insofar as this is the good of the created will. Now the soul or the angelic nature is transformed by means of the will, so that, to the extent possible for it, it is converted into the object, and this by force of love, according to what Dionysius [Divine Names ch.4] says, that ‘love is a virtue that transforms and converts the lover into the beloved’; and Hugh of St. Victor says about ‘acute and super-fervent heat’ [Commentary on Celestial Hierarchy 6 ch.7] that ‘love wants to make you one with it’, namely the beloved; and later, ‘love inserts itself so that, if it could be done, the lover would be what the beloved is’, namely the one he loves, ‘and thus in a certain marvelous way it begins, by the force of love, to be expelled and go outside itself’.”

22. From this as follows: “That the nature which loves should go out of itself and begin to be what it loves can only come about by circumincession, a circumincession not of the soul and of a created nature that in-flows into deity, but rather the converse, so that in such created nature nothing should appear save divine dispositions, indeed, so that it should not appear to be anything other than God - just as iron glowing in fire shines and burns the way fire does, as if it not be, and not appear to be, other than fire.”