The Spirit of glory: Towards a pneumatological construal of the beatific vision

Abstract This essay considers whether eschatological speculation is appropriate in light of the mystery of human suffering. I argue that a pneumatological construal of the beatific vision offers important resources for this question. In the beatific vision, the Spirit perfects the human person by bringing them to participatory attention to the whole of their life, so that the person participates in the final event of making meaning out of the life lived. There is no general, all-encompassing description of how this heals a history of suffering, because the redemption happens in the attention shared between each particular individual and God.