Article IV: On the Duration of Virtues

St. Thomas, I-II, q. 67, art. 1-2; De Virt., q. 5, a. 4.

612. Principle. In the blessed there remain those virtues which include no imperfection repugnant to their state. - Whence moral virtues remain, not indeed:

a) as to the material element or inclination to their acts, for in the future life there will not be exchanges and distributions of things, nor dangers of death, nor delights of foods and sexual matters, etc.; - but

b) as to the formal element, which is conformity to right reason, or as to their essence, insofar as the appetite, whether rational or sensitive, will be wholly and in all things conformable to reason; whence those virtues will exercise other acts, conformable to heavenly life. Say the same of prudence, which is concerned with the same matter as the moral virtues. Whence, according to Augustine, De Trin., l. XIV, c. 9, "it will belong to prudence to place or equal no good before God, to fortitude to adhere firmly to Him, to temperance to delight in no harmful defect"; likewise it belongs to justice to be subject to God. - Nevertheless:

c) before the resurrection, temperance, fortitude, and other virtues concerning passions will not exist except in root, because they are in the sensitive appetite, concupiscible and irascible; and that appetite cannot exist without the body.

The same must be said of the souls of purgatory; but in the damned there can be no virtue properly so called or perfect.

613. Corollary. - Likewise the intellectual virtues remain according to the formal element, or essence, because their subject, the intellect, is incorruptible, and it always preserves the intelligible species on which intellectual virtues depend. But they do not remain according to the material element, that is, according to the images of imagination which we use in the sciences, nor according to the acts of this life, because for these are required images which cannot exist without the body. And in this sense the Apostle says, I Cor. XIII, 8: knowledge will be destroyed, namely, as to the mode of operating of this life, but it will have another act.