Article one sets Aquinas's argument that the vision is the only end that satisfies the intellect's natural desire to know its cause. A major twentieth-century Catholic controversy turned on exactly that claim, and it split Thomists against each other rather than Catholics against Protestants.
Henri de Lubac's Surnaturel (1946) argued that later scholasticism had distorted Aquinas by inventing a hypothetical "state of pure nature," a merely natural human end short of the beatific vision that God could in principle have created humanity for instead. De Lubac held that Aquinas's own texts support no such alternative: human nature as it actually exists has a genuine, built-in desire for the vision of God, so grace perfects an orientation nature already has rather than being added to a nature that would have been complete without it. Neo-Thomists led by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange objected that this collapses nature and the supernatural together, making the vision of God owed to human nature rather than a free and unmerited gift, which they regarded as jeopardising grace's gratuity.
Rome intervened directly. Pius XII's 1950 encyclical Humani Generis criticised theologians who held that God could not create rational beings without ordering them to the beatific vision, a position closely associated with de Lubac's, and de Lubac was for a period restricted from teaching and publishing. He was later rehabilitated, advised at the Second Vatican Council, and was made a cardinal in 1983, and his broader reading has since become considerably more influential than the neo-Thomist position that opposed it, though whether the desire for God is built into human nature or added as a separable gift remains argued over rather than closed.