Doubt IV: Whether the third beatitude, Blessed are they that mourn, corresponds to the gift of knowledge

Since temporal things are possessed with excessive joy because the vileness of these things is not known, and heavenly things still, beneath the bitter rind of the letter, are found tasteless; hence the mind cannot acknowledge its blindness, and much less can the will turn it away by a salutary mourning:

Therefore the holy Doctors, St. Thomas here, St. Bonaventura, cap. 3. de septem Donis, assert that the third beatitude corresponds to the Gift of science.

It is proved first from St. August. supra de sermone Domini in monte, cap. 9. Then, because the gift of science teaches one to pass right judgment on the creatures on account of which man is turned away from God and slides into miseries, and therefore to that right judgment of science there corresponds the mourning, whereby one is turned away from the evil of lust, and from the languor of concupiscence, and is converted to the evil of one's own blindness, to be bitterly bewailed, as that word of the Psalmist says: I shall reflect upon all my years in the bitterness of my soul. From this Gift of science also arises the reward of this beatitude, namely that supernal consolation, whereby man, having clearly seen the vanity of the creature,¹ and tasting the goodness of God, is filled to the marrow. But this consolation is promised not to those who revel, but to those who mourn; nor can they mourn who do not pass through the gift of science to the contemplation of pure truth, as the Seraphic Doctor concludes here. ¹ Editor's note: the print/OCR reads 'qua homo perspecta dens creaturae vanitatem' (djvu layer: 'qua homo pcrfpcta denscteatutz vanitatem'); 'dens' is a defective letterform or stray mark and is not Latin; rendered as 'having clearly seen the vanity of the creature' without it.