As It Is in Heaven

Some Christian Questions on the Nature of Paradise

Caitlin Smith Gilson

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781725295629, 9781725295612
• eBook ISBN: 9781725295636
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

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.

Part I:

Heaven and the Transcendental Meaning of Death

1

Do We Lack and Long in Heaven without Our Bodies?

With St. Thomas:

For the human soul is immortal, and continues after its separation from the body. Yet union with body is essential to it, for by its very nature soul is form of body. Without body it is in an unnatural condition; and what is unnatural cannot go on forever. Therefore the soul, which is perpetual, is not for ever apart from the body, but will be united with it. The soul’s immortality, therefore, seems to demand the eventual Resurrection of body.31

Perhaps the hesitancy we face when attempting to dwell on heaven is rooted in the crisis of the separated soul, which conjures an anti-phenomenological state uncomfortably closer to non-being than to the concrete life of carnal existence. If we take the dry Thomistic language that the soul is the form of the body and realize it in its luminous radicality, not only is the body for the benefit of the soul, but the soul also achieves its perfection and raison d’etre in the body. If the soul is the form of the body, how can it be claimed that we do not lack and long in heaven and yet how can we lack, and audaciously claim such a possibility, now wholly united with God?32 The state of the separated soul is, indeed, the crisis that hits at the very core of our unrepeatability as persons within the dignity of human nature. The objector in prima pars question 90 argues a neat solution: “the end is proportionate to the beginning. But in the end the soul outlasts the body. Therefore, in the beginning it was created before the body.”33 To which St. Thomas responds briefly, clearly, incisively. Through it, the sheer directionality is manifest: humans who seek heaven, more interiorly yearn for the paradisal abode of the resurrected state: “That the soul remains after the body, is due to a defect of the body, namely, death. Which defect was not due when the soul was first created.”34 Are we to concede then that the end in heaven, as a separated soul, is not proportionate to the beginning, united to a body, since the soul was not created before the body, but conjointly with it?35

St. Thomas in prima pars question 89 goes to great explanatory lengths to show that in our separated state, contrary to the objectors (including Aristotle), we do in fact have knowledge. This is necessary if he is to claim heaven as the perfected state for humans. But the Angelic Doctor well understands the delicacy, almost impossibility, of clarifying such a position:

Hence it is as natural for the soul to understand by turning to the phantasms as it is for it to be joined to the body; but to be separated from the body is not in accordance with its nature, and likewise to understand without turning to the phantasms is not natural to it; and hence it is united to the body in order that it may have an existence and an operation suitable to its nature. But here again a difficulty arises. For since nature is always ordered to what is best, and since it is better to understand by turning to simply intelligible objects than by turning to the phantasms, God should have ordered the soul’s nature so that the nobler way of understanding would have been natural to it, and it would not have needed the body for that purpose.36

The body is not united to the soul accidentally; if it were, such difficulties as to how we have knowledge in our separated state would quickly vanish. But because it is of the soul’s very nature, for its very good, to be united to a body, and to phantasms and sensible examples for its knowledge, St. Thomas must illustrate how the soul within the line of created substances is the lowest of intellectual substances and as such has intellective power by the influence of the divine light. Aquinas’ resolution never forsakes the predicament, the paradox, the ever-present crisis inherent in the state of the separated soul—a crisis for too long sidestepped by the “better place.” In the line of beings, truly it is higher and nobler to be like the angels who receive knowledge by turning to intelligible objects, rather than having to deal with the exhaustive longer way of the flesh, which understands by turning to phantasms. But the former, while befitting an angel, does not befit a human soul. This would render the body accidental to the soul, which would wholly undermine the integrity of human nature and material creation. With the nihilists, what then would be the point of it all? But at the same time the strength of their unity, where the soul is the form of the body, poses the threat that the interior principle is corrupted with the death of the body and the loss of the phantasms, since turning to the phantasms is essential to human knowledge. Nor can heaven be a state of quasi-inactivity, where memories of one’s human life, the imprint of the intelligible species from a lifetime’s embodied experience with the phantasms, somehow sustains the soul. Such a state seems to be more the foundation for hell rather than heaven and itself poses problems since, at least, human memory does not function outside a repeated turning to the phantasms. If God had willed human souls to attain knowledge in like manner as the angelic species, then, for St. Thomas, human knowledge would become unclarified, non-specific generalities. The human soul is not the right template to understand separated substances. Could it? Perhaps. But should this be its perfection? No. A thin un-waxed paper cup given at the dentist for gargling is not the proper container for hot coffee. It may hold the coffee briefly, but the experience of it would be fraught with fear of spillage, and be a distracted and caustic state, less perfect than its designed and intended use.37 And herein again lies the problem, the crisis, of the state of the separated soul, which is so masked by the “better place” mantra. And that very masking perniciously heightens the loss of credulity in the faith, subsequently degrading and deforming the proper theology of the body that opens the door to a proper glimpse of the heaven that visited earth.

How then does the Angelic Doctor authentically resolve such a difficulty, one that influences every arena of human life? We have learned a number of intensifying but essential realities:

1.If heaven necessitated a form of knowledge equivalent to the angels’ direct turning to the spiritual substance, then we would be in an existential impasse: heaven would not be a state of perfection for the human person. If heaven were a state void of knowledge, this would be plainly absurd. We are clearly walking an existential and conceptual tightrope, particularly when St. Thomas navigates the related question as to whether the sensitive powers remain in the separated soul.38

2.Faith and reason are not opposed, faith enables reason to gain humbling ac...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Heaven and the Transcendental Meaning of Death
• Part II: Heaven & the Mystery of Forgiveness
• Part III: All This and Heaven Too: The Resurrected State
• Bibliography