As It Is in Heaven: Some Christian Questions on the Nature of Paradise

By Caitlin Smith Gilson

The loss of a real and heartfelt belief in God--and by "real" I mean an experience that is both steady and moving, ethereal though down-to-earth, sentimental but never trite--comes from an earlier more foundational loss, namely that of an ardent and directed desire for heaven, and more specifically, that paradisal longing for the resurrected life. This book seeks to recover the neglected nature of heaven, degraded into something "out-there" and unknown, degraded further into a vague wish for immortality and the often empty words of consolation. Or even worse, the almost comic book reduction of heaven to an earthly social(ist) paradise, the immanentization of the Christian eschaton. The vague "better place," which is meant well, often means nothing at all, or worse than that can hamper us when approaching and engaging the mystery of grief. This book will address and interrogate various questions about the nature of the afterlife--on the status of guilt, forgiveness, friendship, love, embodiment, sexuality--and propose various paths to answers. We are talking about that sacred innermost promise: the hope of paradisal reunion most secret and yet most universal, never abstract and shapeless, but embodied and individual. We must wonder whether our casual forgetting of this estuary of human hope, the resurrected life, has caused us to lose ourselves in such a way that we do not even know what we have lost.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Apr 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781725295636

Caitlin Smith Gilson

Caitlin Smith Gilson is Professor of Philosophy at University of Holy Cross, New Orleans.

Book preview

Introduction

Returning to the Order of Heaven

T

hrough a generally Thomistic

understanding of the unity of body and soul, and in conversation with selected literature and mystic traditions of East and West, this book will address and interrogate various questions about the nature of the afterlife, and propose various paths to answers. The scholarship will inform, but will be carried by the tone of natural conversation. In doing so, we seek to enable the work to unfold within the honesty of sheer, needful reflection upon the dearest of all things. For indeed, we are talking about that sacred innermost promise: the hope of paradisal reunion most secret and yet most universal, never abstract and shapeless, but embodied and individual. And through it all, we must wonder whether our casual forgetting of this estuary of human hope, the resurrected life, has caused us to lose ourselves in such a way that we do not even know what we have lost. Are we akin to Plato’s prisoners in the allegory of the cave?

¹

Should one be released and run to the light in thanksgiving, such a one would only have been imprisoned bodily but never entrapped in heart and mind. But the prisoner who is released is so spiritually blinded that he turns back, preferring his prior infirmity: this shows us the terrifying profundity of true lostness. It is a debilitating form of forgetfulness that renders us unable to recall that we ourselves are amiss, and missing the most precious of possessions. By losing any genuine sense of paradise, are we making ourselves into the image of something degrading because fleeting and failing?

You have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing in your sight. Surely everyone stands as a mere breath. Surely everyone goes about like a shadow. Surely for nothing they are in turmoil; they heap up, and do not know who will gather.

²

When we look at the many things that bring us joy in this nomadic world, whether it be laughter, intimacy, childhood, we find that these things are dependent upon a human nature built in layers of conflicting fabric. Each of us is:

A.a yearning remembrance for a pre-fall state we cannot quite recall, let alone recover. We glimpse it in childlike innocence and yet long for this strange, un-known, un-grasped state with a stubborn and persistent wantonness that itself becomes either the terrible hubris within all human goals and motivations, the resignation to the meaningless labor of Sisyphus, or the holy eros that leads to the sheer agapetic sublimation necessary for faith:

B.in a fallen state that struggles to make good out of evil, so that the things we cherish have their goodness spread, indeed woefully diluted, among natures and conditions that must be transformed to a state of perfection and, to our fearful minds, may not survive such a vast transformation;

C.a participant in the flesh and blood of Christ within the twofold reality of resurrection as hope-filled promise and certitude as trust. This mystery unites the theological certitude of faith as grace with love as the offer of the highest, truest, most beautiful union of lover and beloved, and hope as kenotic, utterly emptying itself, denoting a movement or a stretching forth of the appetite towards an arduous good.

³

The Christian is both certain and in total longing, in the presence of Christ who has already run to us, and running towards him all the same.

And the paradox of it all is that in order for us to long genuinely and fiercely for these transformations, we must recover how they are not vitiated or lessened presences, while at the same time we must systematically let go of every earthly love up until the moment of death. The recovery of paradise in our hearts is a strange and potentially unforgiving affair, but perhaps the most meaningful act of our lives, for through it we can understand the meaning behind the first commandment: love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.

⁴

Somehow, we must simultaneously experience a letting-go, a type of holy forgetfulness that transgresses and reshapes all things, while hoping for union and reunion with our loves not in a vague form of all-ness, but in a dramatic uniqueness particular to the drama of each human person. How is that possible? And how is it to be lived out? Both unobtainable and necessary, we must find ourselves inhabiting an impossible yet essential harmony: we must be transported to the best of what life is in all its beauty, exotic and familial, but from within the very pulse of a non-annihilating sense of relinquishing everything that we are, with rapt exactingness and relentless precision. We must understand with joy that to relinquish, and to be relinquished, is bliss itself while that very bliss is perfumed with the transcendent incarnation of all of earth’s beautiful things.

I think there is no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child’s faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do. What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you feel you can’t believe, you must at least do this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.

⁵

Heaven is the summit and joy of human existence and, at the same time, strangely neglected. We understand it to be the estuary of the Good in which we shall have no other desire than to remain there eternally;

⁶

that while unseen at present, it is, in fact, the only reality truly experienced as is;

⁷

that paradise is the precious crown and treasure;

⁸

and that either we suffer here in this world through our ardent yearning for God, or suffer in the next through our obstinate denial of him.

⁹

Yet still, in all of this, heaven escapes us. And by this, I mean that the very texture, the filling, the tender incarnality of the place or state or realm or habitation eludes capture with a pervasive and abrupt persistence. And because we are unable to focus our lens to get a substantial glance, we are historically tempted to focus our belief on those so-called more important things, which are important to the faith but only within the context of salvation, and salvation is homecoming, and homecoming is heaven. All roads lead to heaven, from the exitus to the reditus. And it is the little things, the specifics, the minutiae that have always characterized a human life embodied by finitude and the longer way

¹⁰

of flesh and blood. Thus, the longer way of embodied human life cannot be bypassed in the architecture of heaven because heaven is realized in Christ. In unity with Christ, our flesh and blood are incarnated beyond transitoriness, and shot through with a durational eternity.

¹¹

The radicality of such kenosis is stunning: because Christ is God and flesh, heaven itself is transcendentally incarnated. Wounded as it may be, our own flesh still has the signatories, the entelechy, to give us a glimpse into heaven’s fitting abode.

¹²

We are neither angels nor beasts, instead we stand on the horizon between time and eternity.

¹³

What can we grasp of heaven that properly befits the created nature God gave us and that Christ realized in the incarnation? Perhaps, though, this state of blindness, this unclarified texture, is precisely the point; we are to be in the dark, we are not ready, nor worthy, and ever in need of grace. But at the same time, if we leave that sightlessness unnurtured, unattended, un-wrestled, does heaven, the only place we will ever truly see as is, devolve into emptied abstractions? And then what shall we see? This kenosis is, again, innumerably wondrous: when Christ realizes heaven for human beings, he does so by merging—and without annihilation of their dramatic differences as such—the presence of heaven on earth and even, and more secretly, the presence of earth in heaven. In heaven resides the taste, the hunger for the earthy, the carnal, the dust and the clay, transfixed and transposed.

I am their father, says God. Our Father who art in Heaven. My son told them often enough that I was their father.I am their judge. My son told them so. I am also their father.I am especially their father.Well, I am their father. He who is a father is above all a father. Our Father who art in Heaven. He who has once been a father can be nothing else but a father.They are my son’s brothers; they are my children; I am their father.Our Father who art in Heaven, my son taught them that prayer.Sic ergo vos orabitis. After this manner therefore pray ye.Our Father who art in Heaven, he knew very well what he was doing that day, my son who loved them so. Who lived among them, who was like one of them.Who went as they did, who spoke as they did, who lived as they did.Who suffered.Who suffered as they did, who died as they did.And who loved them so, having known them.Who brought back to Heaven a certain taste for man, a certain taste for the Earth.My son who loved them so, who loves them eternally in Heaven.He knew very well what he was doing that day, my son who loved them so.

¹⁴

This twofold union of heaven’s foretaste on earth and earth’s carnality permeating heaven impresses upon us the distinctive anti-fantasist, fully substantialized drama of our human natures always stretching and inclining towards heaven. The desire for heaven is not a peripheral yearning, an accoutrement to life’s goals, a wish-fulfilling sentiment soon left at the wayside from childhood to maturity; instead, it is what finally unveils and completes our open human nature. More still, as the Father is only Father in relation to the Son, and the Son is only Son in relation to the Father, then the Father, like the Son, has given himself need. That need is for their home to be our home, that God is only home because we, in our flesh and blood realized in Christ, audaciously co-substantiate heaven undergirded by God’s sheer eternalizing presence—this is the true happily ever after.

¹⁵

Christ has given to human beings far more than we deserve: we are not worthy for you to enter under our roof, but only say the word. The Word has been incarnated and the roof is formed in this unity of spiritual eternity and bodily duration. What Christ has given us is himself and thus a co-substantiating power within the very architecture of paradise!

Thus, the wellspring of resources, particularly theological and philosophical discussion on the nature of the human person in relation to God, have not been thoroughly applied to a dwelling on the concrete questions each human person raises when confronted with death. What St. Paul understood to be truly our home is set aside, and this causes a loss in genuine belief in God, and in the formation of a Christian community. Tertullian’s credo quia ineptum loses all its invitational ardor and then becomes what it opposes: a literal defense that belief itself is unworthy of belief. How can we search for heaven if it is not dreamt of? When undreamt by our flesh and blood we deny ourselves, we deny our humble but central role in the co-substantiating power that gives heaven its erotic presence, degrading paradise into an empty and spaceless vortex of onticity.

When the afterlife is no longer strained to be imagined, fleshed out in our longings, envisioned as a dramatic commingling of philia, eros, and agape, its architecture recedes only to the depository of thoughtlessness, the unthought festivity that secretly begins the turn away from God more primordially than any atheistic philosophical system. All atheisms begin in a misunderstood human nature, and that error of all errors originates in the loss of heaven, for our human nature is realized only in our permanent home.

¹⁶

While the human soul does have a mode of knowledge separate from the body,

¹⁷

we are not angels, and to mis-envision heaven as if we were unembodied angelic intellects would relinquish the true joy and the engagement of happiness and community befitting the embodied natures endowed by our Creator. Furthermore, our souls were not produced before our bodies, for such a production would undermine the very nature of the soul for the benefit of the body and the body for the benefit of the soul.

¹⁸

Any sense of heaven that undercuts this created unity is far more Cartesian than Catholic and thus far more unworthy of belief.

While mindful that heaven is no mere better dressed earth, we must also see what is to be seen in this penultimate world of penultimate joys, as an inkling of the paradisal home to come.

¹⁹

We must recover the unbroken thread within our flesh and blood that connects us to the one truly Good Reality, the fairy tale to end all fairy tales that may be too good for us, but not too good to be true. We must recover this thread from its opposition—the thoughtless better place, which hasn’t enough substance to be the estuary where all desires flow in ecstasy and surrender.

If you read fairy-tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other—the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales. The whole happiness of fairyland hangs upon a thread, upon a thread. . . . This great idea, then, is the backbone of all folk-lore—the idea that all happiness hangs on one thin veto; all positive joy depends on one negative.

²⁰

Christ is the great idea, the backbone of existence, the greatest story ever told precisely because he radically fulfills the innermost yearning of the fairy tale. Our thread is trust, the painful and purgative grace of trust that rises like fragrance within us. Happy are we who trust in Christ: all positive joy rests on his story that ends all stories:

Happy are those who trust in the

Lord

, who rely on the

Lord

. They will be like trees planted by the streams, whose roots reach down to the water. They won’t fear drought when it comes; their leaves will remain green. They won’t be stressed in the time of drought or fail to bear fruit.

²¹

Christ alone achieves what they anticipate, seek, and yearn for: the happily ever after, substantiated through his consummatum est, wherein suffering as totalizing abandonment becomes impossibly but essentially so, the place for union, joy, peace, and play.

²²

When Christ realizes heaven through his incarnation, he gives us so much more fertile ground in which to long for our home than the superficial celebration. The latter functions on an unthought acceptance of the soul as accidentally united to the body. This serious misunderstanding generationally vacates the sense of flesh ennobled by Christ which is far more than transitoriness and is, instead, the saturated presence of the divine—with rivers as bright as crystal, and trees yielding fruit, where there is no longer any night because the face of God will be brighter and warmer than the light of lamp or sun.

²³

The laborer may finally put down his axe and shovel, and enter the field of play, where walking turns into leaps and dancing, and words meld into singing and praise.

²⁴

The fairy tale senses perfection in the most liminal manner, but must leave it undefined, framed by the closing lines happily ever after. The story of Christ’s gift is the happily ever after because he breaks the chains of death and thus breaks all stories, and invites us to share in his glorified body. When we do not pant like the deer for heaven, we unknowingly reduce the Christ-event to a narrative of wishes and ideals. We place Christ within the better place that cannot capture or enrapture a heart, that cannot raise even the most horrendous suffering into its dignity. We have lost Christ as the very story of life itself. Our faith is for the childlike, not the childish, for the warrior, not the coward. And this is so often misunderstood. What we are called to recover is the dramatic desire to enter into the beauty of the truest story, and through it, the love, hope, and redemption of transfigured souls.

²⁵

The boy eating some one’s apples in some one’s apple tree should be a reminder that he has come to a mystical moment of his life, when one apple may rob him of all others. This is the profound morality of fairy-tales; which so far from being lawless, go to the root of all law. Instead of finding (like common books of ethics) a rationalistic basis for each Commandment, they find the great mystical basis for all Commandments. We are in this fairyland on sufferance; it is not for us to quarrel with the conditions under which we enjoy this wild vision of the world. The vetoes are indeed extraordinary, but then so are the concessions. The idea of property, the idea of some one else’s apples, is a rum idea; but then the idea of there being any apples is a rum idea. Not only can these fairy-tales be enjoyed because they are moral, but morality can be enjoyed because it puts us in fairyland, in a world at once of wonder and of war.

²⁶

The Hunt for Heaven

Let us now apply many of the meaningful contributions of the Christian enterprise to the essential and often uncharted territory of the afterlife. If heaven is our home, then I hope that the teachings of Christian philosophy and theology, when applied to their proper home, will serve to illuminate and guide our intellectual and spiritual conversations. In particular, the difficult metaphysical and phenomenological implications of the afterlife will come to the forefront of our discussions. We shall address whether or not there is a profound inconsistency when we posit St. Thomas’s substance-based metaphysics and a disembodied state as posed in heaven. In order authentically to address such a critique and others, we will clarify the distinctions between heaven as the pre-resurrected state, and then the resurrected state of the glorified body, as discussion will naturally straddle these two states of being. Thus, ours is an intensive meditation on the loss of any substantial sense of heaven and its vast consequences. The notion of mythos, even and especially imagination and fiction, not as falsehoods but as primal compact expressions of the inexpressible, will be addressed. What happens to a culture, particularly a religious culture, when its underlying mythos is diminished? And this question gets us to the core of the unfortunate separation between the theologian and the saint which von Balthasar had raised years ago.

In modern times, theology and sanctity have become divorced, to the great harm of both. Except in a few cases, the saints have not been theologians, and theologians have tended to treat their opinions as a sort of by-product, classifying them as spiritualité, or at best, as théologie spirituelle.

²⁷

After Anselm, Bonaventure, and Aquinas, how strange—and yet is it not a critical indicator that something is amiss—that so few theologians have been saints? The practice of theology and the quest for sanctity have not only undergone a trial separation, seen other people, explored life apart, but have even accepted their divorce with the pride of a secularist badge of honor.

The deepest mythoi permeate the soil of existence and direct culture to flower, and through it the transcendent expressions of faith and sanctity deepen every facet of life. Western civilization is most deeply an expression of the Christian mythos, and we can see today why the Catholic Church is so much under attack, both from within and without. If one is to change, overcome, cancel Western culture, it must attack and subvert Judeo-Christian values, first intimidating them into a private-only existence, and then through a hostile neglect that causes these values to wither away, because their roots, their mythos, died without the sunlight of natural public practice. When virtues are exercised only privately, they are no longer virtuous and instead will inevitably become the basis for a deceitful civilizational decline, one that dresses up mob-mentality as wisdom and prudence.

²⁸

What we seek to express through our dwelling on heaven is that Christianity is the greatest mythos of all myths, because it is the transcendent Truth itself that enables all other myths, fables, hopes, and dreams to spring up and yearn for sunlight like the winter’s tulip. Chesterton again reminds us of these long untended