The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas and His Interpreters (2nd ed.)

Description

What kind of natural desire is this? How can there be a natural desire for what can only be supernaturally obtained? How can such a desire be reconciled with the gratuitousness of grace and glory? What are its implications for apologetics? These and similar questions have caused a debate to rage for centuries over the proper interpretation of the natural desire to see God. This work seeks to determine the nature of this desire and its relationship with the supernatural order through an examination of the thought of St. Thomas and some of his most prominent interpreters, including Scotus, Cajetan, Suárez, and Henri de Lubac.

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Read this The Thomist review of it.

See this post regarding desire for God.

left off reading about Denis the Carthusian (ch. 5), but read the book's conclusion (2nd part of the last chapter, ch. 16, PDF pp. 462 ff.; the first part of ch. 16, "Summary of the Arguments" 30pp., PDF pp. 430 ff., is good, too.)

p. 438 (PDF p. 473) gives the virginity : marriage :: supernatural : natural analogy (cf. La virginité chrétienne by Bourassa, S.J.):

Showing that human nature has a connatural end in which it finds a proportionate fulfillment in God is also of great value in manifesting the goodness of the natural order as such, and of human nature in itself. This affirmation of the goodness of human nature and its natural orientation to God is crucial in maintaining the Catholic notion of creation, as opposed to deviations such as Manichean dualism, and the excessive pessimism shown by Luther, Calvin, and Jansenism in holding that human nature was completely corrupted by original sin.

Just as the exceeding value of virginity for the sake of the Kingdom of God is not to be affirmed by denigrating the sanctity of marriage, so too the transcendent goodness of grace and the supernatural is not to be exalted by debasing human nature in itself or depriving it of a proportionate end in God. The recognition of the goodness and coherence of the natural order and its proportionate end does not close human nature into itself, for man's connatural end is not man but God. On the contrary, it shows all the more the exceeding goodness of our gratuitous elevation to share in God's own beatitude.

The next page gives another good analogy:
God's freedom to create (∵ bonum est diffusivum sui.) > He didn't create :: supernatural elevation > state of pure nature.