happiness demands delight, and this is a thing which has very little to
do, with rationalism and is only attainable when we feel ourselves
distinct from God.

Our Aristotelian Catholic theologian, the author of the endeavour to
rationalize Catholic feeling, St. Thomas Aquinas, tells us in his
_Summa_ (_prima secundae partis, quaestio_ iv., _art_. i) that "delight is
requisite for happiness. For delight is caused by the fact of desire
resting in attained good. Hence, since happiness is nothing but the
attainment of the Sovereign Good, there cannot be happiness without
concomitant delight." But where is the delight of him who rests? To
rest, _requiescere_--is not that to sleep and not to possess even the
consciousness that one is resting? "Delight is caused by the vision of
God itself," the theologian continues. But does the soul feel itself
distinct from God? "The delight that accompanies the activity of the
understanding does not impede, but rather strengthens that activity," he
says later on. Obviously! for what happiness were it else? And in order
to save delectation, delight, pleasure, which, like pain, has always
something material in it, and which we conceive of only as existing in a
soul incarnate in a body, it was necessary to suppose that the soul in a
state of blessedness is united with its body. Apart from some kind of
body, how is delight possible? The immortality of the pure soul, without
some sort of body or spirit-covering, is not true immortality. And at
bottom, what we long for is a prolongation of this life, this life and
no other, this life of flesh and suffering, this life which we imprecate
at times simply because it comes to an end. The majority of suicides
would not take their lives if they had the assurance that they would
never die on this earth. The self-slayer kills himself because he will
not wait for death.

When in the thirty-third canto of the _Paradiso_, Dante relates how he
attained to the vision of God, he tells us that just as a man who
beholds somewhat in his sleep retains on awakening nothing but the
impression of the feeling in his mind, so it was with him, for when the
vision had all but passed away the sweetness that sprang from it still
distilled itself in his heart.

_Cotal son to, che quasi tutta cessa
mia visione ed ancor mi distilla
nel cuor lo dulce che nacque da essa_

like snow that melts in the sun--

_cosi la neve al sol si disigilla_.

That is to