It reveals to me that Thomas Aquinas was wrong about an important issue. Created things DO NOT contain an “appetite for likeness to God, making that their last end.” Man is born in sin and seeks not God nor can he draw near to God lest He is drawn. Flowers and birds have comprehension of their creator - they glorify Him none the less by being as He created them. We glorify Him by being as He created us - in the beginning, when He created Adam and Eve and there was no sin. This is why being born again is cause for celebration in Heaven - we THEN can glorify our Father and Creator by being how He intended us to be.
“All things then exist for the attaintment of the divine likeness; and that is their last end.” This sounds so much like pantheism that I wonder if this explains a bit of the universalism apparent in some RCC doctrine.
No, the quote from Aquinas certainly does not alter what the Scripture says - that people are born in the image of their parents, incapable of doing anything good, in need of Christ for life itself - and the good works that follow the new birth.
Oops - third sentence should have read: “Flowers and birds have NO comprehension of their creator - they glorify Him none the less by being as He created them.”
Sorry about that, chief.
“”It reveals to me that Thomas Aquinas was wrong about an important issue. Created things DO NOT contain an “appetite for likeness to God, making that their last end.””
You are not understanding properly
Here is more...
How God is the End of all Things
God is at once the last end of all things, and is nevertheless before all things in being. There is an end which, while holding the first place in causation according as it is in intention, is nevertheless posterior in being; and this is the case with every end that an agent establishes by his action, as the physician establishes health by his action in the sick man, which health nevertheless is his end. There is again an end which is prior in causation, and also is prior in being: such an end one aims at winning by one’s actions or movement, as a king hopes to win a city by fighting. God then is the end of things, as being something which everything has to gain in its own way.
2. God is the last end of things and the prime agent of all (Chap. XVIIhttp://www2.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/etext/gc3_17.htm). But an end established by the action of an agent cannot be the prime agent: rather it is the effect produced by the agent. God therefore cannot be the end of things as though He were anything established in being thereby, but only as some pre-existent object for them to attain.
4. An effect tends to an end in the same way that the producer of the effect acts for that end. But God, the first producer of all things, does not act in view of acquiring anything by His action, but in view of bestowing something by His action: for He is not in potentiality to acquire anything, but only in perfect actuality, whereby He can give and bestow. Things then are not directed to God as though God were an end unto which any accretion or acquisition were to be made: they are directed to Him so that in their own way they may gain from God God Himself, since He Himself is their end.