Transcript

Science is great, and the material world is wonderful.

What we can know of it and control it is great, but is that all there is to reality?

Maybe something as mysterious as friendship or falling in love can be reduced to glands or to chemicals or something.

Even things that we experience in ordinary life don't seem understandable simply in a scientific way.

There are elusive realities.

Looking around this place, this beautiful place, what inspired these people to do it?

Oh, it's chemical reactions of the brain?

Doesn't that seem inadequate as an explanation?

I find that fascinating.

You don't for a second denigrate the visible world or deny what science knows about it, but there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, or your chemistry, or your physics, or your science.

So I wouldn't pose an either/or like there's science and there's magic, or there's science and superstition.

There's science and then there's... wow, there's super science.

Thomas Aquinas called theology the sacra scientia; it's the holy science.

It's a way of knowing; I think we have to recover that.

I would submit that the doctrines concerning the so-called last things—hell, purgatory, and heaven—are simultaneously the most fascinating and the most objectionable of all the Catholic Church's beliefs.

When people want to critique or dismiss Catholic doctrine, they will often point to the supposed incompatibility of affirming the existence of an all-good God and an eternal hell, a place of unending torture.

At least from the time of Marx and Freud, many would point to the doctrine concerning heaven as an indication of, at best, the Church's naïveté and, at worst, its duplicity.

Is the belief in a place of perfect happiness after we die not a classic case of wishful thinking, childish fantasizing?

And hasn't it been used as opium for the masses?

Simply a way to mollify people enduring the agonies of life?

Even many Christians who gladly accept the doctrines of heaven and hell find the teaching on purgatory bizarre and arbitrary, lacking any biblical foundation.

Everyone, believer and non-believer alike, wonders and worries at some point about what will happen after we die.

Hamlet spoke of that bourne from which no man returns, and the entire To be or not to be speech reflects an uneasy, bewildered fascination with what awaits us once we've shuffled off this mortal coil.

Everyone loves a ghost story, in part because of its cathartic quality, but also because it seems to provide some hint of another world.

More to it, the doctrines of heaven, hell, and purgatory beguile us precisely because of our sense of justice.

Far too many good people die without receiving in this life a sufficient reward for their goodness, and many wicked people die without being compelled in this life to pay for their wickedness.

If God is just, it seems there has to be some state of being, some place in which these injustices are set right.

And so we turn to the last things.

What does the Catholic Church teach in regard to heaven, hell, and purgatory?

What does it hold concerning a dimension that we cannot directly see but that nevertheless intrigues all of us who live on the near side of the sleep of death?

T.S. Eliot said that Western literature is divided between two truly great figures: Shakespeare and Dante, with all the rest qualifying as secondary.

If Eliot's right, how wonderful that the principal work of one of the two greatest writers in the West has to do with our subject: heaven, hell, and purgatory.

Dante composed his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, when he was wandering in exile far from his beloved Florence, a city to which he would never return.

It was during those lonely years, when he was lost both personally and politically, that Dante composed this work on the world to come.

The Divine Comedy is obviously a work of creative imagination, so we shouldn't take it with complete literalness.

Nevertheless, it's informed by very sound theology and marked at every turn by the perceptiveness of a transcendentally great poet who is also a profound believer.

Therefore, as we seek to look through the veil into the world to come, we can take Dante as a very reliable guide.

Dante's first stop, and ours, will be hell.

Dante is led through hell by the Roman poet Virgil.

They move downward through the topography of hell, winding their way on an ever-narrower path until they come to the very bottom, where they see Satan himself.

The devil, first of all, is not standing amidst fire, but rather stuck in ice, frozen in place.

St. Augustine defines sin as being incurvatus in se, caved in on oneself.

We are meant to break out of the narrow confines of the self and to mix with the world.

We are, by nature, hungry for the fullness of being.

To sin is voluntarily to turn away from this and to reign as the sovereign of one's own little kingdom.

In Dante's imagination, Satan has great wings like a bat.

We are meant to fly.

Chesterton asked, Why don't they?

His answer?

Because they take themselves so lightly.

Sin is a heaviness, the state of being weighed down.

We try to fly, flapping our wings, because that's our nature, but all we succeed in doing is making the world around us colder.

Satan, for Dante, is responsible for the frozen meteorology of hell.

Satan has three faces, mimicking the three persons of the Trinity, because he dared to grasp at godliness.

All of us sinners, deep down, think that we're God because we're convinced that the universe revolves around us.

Dante tells us that from all six of his eyes, Satan weeps.

Sin, self-absorption, being stuck in the narrow confines of the ego, is above all sad.

There's nothing glamorous about evil; it is depressing, soul-shrinking, and finally powerless.

When Virgil and Dante approach Satan, he does nothing to stop them.

Like someone caught in a deep depression, he doesn't even notice them.

This is the total self-absorption of hell.

Hell, like heaven, can be anticipated even now.

Whenever we choose the iciness of self-absorption, we are tasting hell.

Why is Satan where he is?

The short answer: because he wants to be there.

The doctrine of hell really is a corollary of two more fundamental convictions, namely that God is love and that we are free.

As I said before, love is not simply an attribute of God, not simply something God does from time to time.

Rather, love is what God is.

God's love, therefore, is like the sun that shines on the good and bad alike.

What makes all the difference is how that love is received.

If we freely receive it positively, we bask in its light and warmth; but if it's resisted, it becomes like a torture to us.

C.S. Lewis said it's precisely the love of God that lights up the fires of hell.

What could that possibly mean?

Well, think of someone who's been stuck in a deep mine for several days and now they're suddenly brought out into the bright glare of the sunlight.

It would be like agony to them.

Or think of someone in a terrible frame of mind; who is most annoying to them?

Precisely someone who's relentlessly cheerful.

God's love is eternal; God's love is absolute.

What makes the difference is how we freely respond to it.

We can say yes, or we can say no, and that's the terrible truth in some way about human freedom.

God gave us the ability to say yes to Him or to say no, so finally it's up to us.

If you put the onus on God, you shouldn't put it on God; the onus is on us.

Do you accept this life?

Do you jump into the party?

Do you join it?

Or are you like that person who sits sullenly in the corner while the party swirls around them?

If anyone's in hell—and again I say if because we don't know if anyone's there—it's because they stubbornly are sitting in the corner of the party while the whole thing festively swirls around them.

Not that God has sent them to the corner; they've sat sullenly in the corner, and they won't move.

Thank you.

If the doctrine concerning hell is the most disturbing and puzzling of all the teachings in the Catholic system, probably the teaching about purgatory is a close second.

For many Christians, even many Catholics, purgatory seems to be just a holdover from the Middle Ages, a superstitious and unnecessary teaching with no real biblical support.

Given the way that purgatory was used, at least indirectly, in the Middle Ages as a form of fundraising, think of the buying and selling of indulgences.

Martin Luther and the other Protestant reformers were sharp critics of the doctrine of purgatory.

But what does the Catholic Church teach in this regard?

Here's the formulation found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

All who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation.

But after death, they undergo purification so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.

The Church gives the name purgatory to this final purification of the elect.

Consider how a bad action performed repeatedly twists the will, predisposing it to choose along the same negative line in the future.

This sort of sin, therefore, needs correction.

The wounds that it leaves need healing, and the negative tendency it inculcates needs redirecting.

Loch Durg is a rocky, uninviting island located in the middle of a forgotten lake in northwest Ireland.

To this place, strangely, thousands of people come every year in order to make a penitential spiritual retreat.

They are ferried to the island and then told to take off their shoes and socks.

They are to remain unshod for the duration of their spiritual exercise.

They spend the first day praying the Rosary, walking on their knees over punishing beds of stone, and attending services.

For that day and night, they are not permitted to sleep; if they doze off, attendants rudely awaken them.

After two and a half days of practically constant prayer and spiritual exertion, the retreatants are ferried back to the mainland.

In the Middle Ages, this island was known as St. Patrick's Purgatory.

A popular legend said that the entrance to purgatory was nearby.

We can dispense, of course, with the crude literalism, but we should still pay attention to the association of what took and takes place on Loch Durg and what the Church means by purgatory in the supernatural sense.

Those who come to the island love God; they wouldn't go through such punishment unless they did.

But they recognize imperfections in themselves which need to be corrected so that their relationship to God might be set fully right.

Therefore, they willingly go through a crucible.

Just as denizens of hell, if there are any, are there freely, so those who pass through purgatory do so because they want to.

Once more, this has nothing to do with a supposed cruelty or capriciousness on God's part; it has to do with the sinner's perceived need to deal with the effects of his sin.

Imagine a worldly person—self-absorbed, superficial, spiritually undeveloped—who suddenly experiences a conversion to God.

He perceives the inadequacy of his life, and he wants to change.

So impulsively, he leaves his job and travels to Calcutta to help in the work of the Missionaries of Charity.

As he shares the lives of the sisters and joins in their daily task of caring for the most wretched, he is, objectively speaking, in heaven, for he’s fully surrendered to a life of love and self-denial.

But his years of hedonism, materialism, and self-absorption have so poorly disposed him to such a life that he experiences it as hellish suffering, awakening in him the deepest anxiety and resentment.

Now, if he remains open to the life, if he continues, despite his resistance, to give himself to it, he will find in time his resistances weakening and his faults purged away.

He will discover at last that it is possible to walk the path of love effortlessly and freely, and at that moment, the place of suffering will become a place of springs.

This, I think, is an apt analogy for what the Church means by purgatory.

There are many people who leave this life as friends of God, but far from able to live the life of heaven effortlessly, they require, accordingly, a Loch Derg, a Calcutta—a necessarily painful training in the way of love.

Isn't this a little much?

Well, in a certain way, yes.

I mean, it’s kind of an extreme example of the penitential exercise.

You know, look at the areas of life we engage in.

If we’re trying to get better at a sport, think of the Chicago Bears getting ready for their season, doing two-a-day workouts in the August sun, pushing themselves to the limits.

Think of someone training for a marathon, how they’ll run and run and run.

Think of someone training to play the piano or to learn the guitar until their fingers are bleeding.

We do all kinds of things to the extreme if we want something, if we want some excellence, if we want some perfection.

Well, look, compare playing the guitar, playing football for the Chicago Bears, and running a marathon to eternal life.

The people here recognize the importance of the spiritual as the prime value.

What are they doing?

They’re going to a kind of extreme to discipline themselves and to mortify themselves to attain this perfection, this spiritual perfection.

So I think if people are willing to do it for football, shouldn’t they do it for their eternal life?

We’ve been talking about hell and purgatory, states of being that transcend the world of ordinary experience.

But is this kind of speech even coherent?

Why should we imagine that there is anything beyond what we can see, touch, and measure?

There’s a line in the Creed to which we rarely attend.

The Creed speaks of God, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, of all that is seen and unseen.

The Bible is intensely interested in the full panoply of visible things—human beings, plants, animals, trees, the earth itself, and even those things that crawl upon the earth.

But the Bible is also interested in that whole realm of God's invisible creation, those beings at a higher pitch of existence.

I'm talking about the angels.

Now, I know in this day and age, to talk about believing in the angels seems at best charming and at worst naive and superstitious.

But think of it this way: given what we know about the enormous variety of God's physical creation, is it likely that between this physical world and God there simply yawns this great abyss?

Both Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages and Teilhard de Chardin in modern times said no.

It's far more likely that space is filled with an equally great variety of spiritual creatures.

Here’s how Thomas Aquinas talked about the angels: he said they are separated intelligences.

Here’s what he means: they are spiritual beings endowed with mind and will, but they’re not tied to matter the way that we are.

The angel knows and wills, but at a much higher pitch of intensity, not tied to matter.

And that means, Thomas said, that every angel is his own species.

I know that’s kind of a strange idea, but it’s interesting when you think about it.

What makes me an individual of the species humanity is this particular body that I have, these flesh and bones.

An angel, though, is not tied to matter; therefore, each angel is his own species or type.

Look, here’s what it means: imagine every human being who has ever existed, every human being currently existing, and every human being who will ever live until the end of time.

Now, imagine all of them gathered together as one great archetypal human.

That would give you an idea of what one angel is like.

It also helps to explain why, in the Bible, the typical reaction to an angel is fear.

In our tradition, the angels are associated with the praise of God.

We imagine them around the throne of God, offering praise to the Lord.

In fact, the highest angels, the Seraphim, derive their name from a Hebrew word that means the burnt ones.

They’re on fire; they’re so close to the presence of God.

We also speak, in this context, of the singing of the angels.

Now, don't over-literalize that language.

What it means is the harmony of mind and will among the angels as together they praise God.

This is also why, liturgically, we seek to join our voices to the voices of the angels.

We say, Lord, may our praise be one with theirs, as we sing Holy, Holy, Holy.

What we’re praying is that we might find the same communion of mind and heart that they find in heaven.

The word angel is from the Greek word angelos, which just means messenger.

That’s why St. Augustine said angels are named not from their nature but from their mission.

Angels are sent; we hear of Gabriel sent to the Virgin Mary to announce the Incarnation.

I've already spoken about that stratios, that whole army of angels that announce the Good News of Christmas.

Angels, though they are purely spiritual beings, can interface with our world.

How do we understand that?

Think of this: a three-year-old child couldn’t possibly move into an adult conversation, but an adult could condescend, could stoop low, and enter into the thought world, into the imagination of a child.

In a similar way, these beings at a higher pitch of existence could condescend to enter into our world to interface with us.

If you're still thinking, I don't know, it just seems sort of naive to believe in angels, think of that line from Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Hamlet turns to his friend and he says, Horatio, there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamed of in your philosophies.

Maybe it’s our rationalism and our materialism that are too cramped, that prevent us from appreciating this invisible world of God’s creations.

Now, just as there are fallen, wicked, compromised human beings, so the Church believes there are fallen, wicked angels—angels who have fallen out of the right praise of God and have turned in on themselves in pride, becoming, as it were, spiritual black holes.

Imagine the most wicked person you know; now transpose that wickedness to a higher and more intense spiritual plane, and you have some idea of what the Church means by a devil.

Now, we have to be careful here.

Christianity is not a Manichaean system, not a black-white war of good against evil.

The devil is in no sense God's rival; the devil is a creature of God, and whatever the devil is and does is through God's permission.

Nevertheless, we shouldn't underestimate the spiritual warfare.

St. Paul said we do battle not with flesh and blood, but with powers and principalities.

The Book of Revelation speaks of the war of the angels which has spilled over into our dimension.

I'm standing here in the Cathedral of Orvieto before what I think is one of the most chilling religious paintings in the world.

Luca Signorelli did this wonderful scene of the Antichrist.

You see him there in the middle; he looks for all the world like Jesus in the face, in his vesture.

But then you see that troubling expression on his face, and then you notice the devil whispering in his ear.

And then this beautiful detail: see how the devil's hand comes through his vesture, so it looks for all the world like his own hand.

How do devils interface with our world?

Sometimes in very direct and frightening ways—talk to anyone involved seriously in the work of exorcism.

But more often than not, the devils insinuate themselves through temptation, moving us off of the praise of God and into their own dark spiritual space.

Again, you might be wondering, isn't this all kind of medieval to be talking about devils?

Isn't evil caused by wicked human hearts, by fallen and wicked human institutions?

Look, the Bible knows all about fallen individuals; it knows all about structural sin, institutional sin.

But the Bible insists there’s a third and more pervasive, more mysterious, and more frightening level of dysfunction.

It speaks of these fallen spirits.

Here’s the good news: Christ has done battle with all these different levels of evil.

He's done battle with individual sin and conquered it.

He's done battle with institutional sin and conquered it.

And yes, he's done battle with this spiritual dimension and has conquered it.

Therefore, we know that even in the midst of the spiritual struggle, we are on the winning side, and therefore we can be, in the spiritual life, happy warriors.

I remember years ago, when I lived in Paris, going through the Picasso Museum.

It's this château that's just filled with these Picasso works of art; every room was a different period.

Picasso was so fecund in his creativity that there'd be this period in one room, then another period in the next decade, and it never stopped changing.

That guy never quit.

Well, that’s what you see all around the physical world.

Why would we imagine that God’s creativity is limited to this universe that we can measure and see?

Isn’t it likely even that it stretches way beyond it to other dimensions?

That’s where the angels would come in.

Is there any way of saying how many?

No, I don't know.

Thomas Aquinas says he thinks there are a lot of them, and what I like about that answer is: why not?

How many bugs are there?

A lot of bugs.

How many fish are there?

Millions of fish.

You walk on the ocean shore, and you see the zillions of little shells left behind.

If God is that exuberant in his creativity here below, why wouldn’t he be so exuberant above?

So, I sort of like that answer: there are a lot of them, but who knows?

In coming to the topic of heaven, we’ve come to the end of this series because we’ve come to the very goal of the Catholic faith.

Everything else I’ve talked about—God, Jesus, the Church, liturgy, sacraments—all of it is meant to conduce finally to heaven.

God wants to share with us His own Trinitarian life, and that means the life of love.

Heaven is love; it’s love brought to fulfillment and completion.

That’s why St. Paul can say there are three things that last: faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love.

That’s because, in heaven, faith and hope will have faded away, but love remains.

There are many images in the Bible and the great tradition for heaven: think of eternal life, eternal rest, the banquet, the wedding feast.

All these say something true and right about heaven, but all fall short of that reality which eye has not seen and ear has not heard.

There are three images in particular I want to focus on: the beatific vision, the city, and the new heavens and the new earth.

Let us consider first the beatific vision.

One of the most beautiful symbols of this can be found in the great Cathedral of Notre Dame.

St. Thomas Aquinas, who would have known this building when he was a professor of theology in Paris, said that the human spirit is structured in such a way that it pushes beyond itself toward the good, the true, and the beautiful.

The mind seeks the truth, and it finds it to some degree in this world, but it's never enough because the mind seeks absolute truth.

The will seeks the good, and it finds it to some degree within this world, but it’s never enough, finally, to satisfy the will.

The soul seeks the beautiful, and to a limited degree, it finds it; it achieves it in this world, but it’s ordered toward the beautiful itself.

There’s a kind of holy longing in us.

There’s an aching, a restlessnes, that pushes us beyond anything in this world toward a transcendent truth, a transcendent goodness, a transcendent beauty.

This is why, as C.S. Lewis so clearly saw, the most exquisite experiences in life— aesthetic pleasure, sexual intimacy, deep friendship—are always accompanied by a certain aching sadness, a sense that there must still be something more.

Heaven is what corresponds to that desire beyond desire and to that searching beyond searching.

The mind and the will, despite or because of all their achievements here below, still want definitively to see.

I first laid eyes on the North Rose window at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on June 12, 1989. When I saw the rose window, I stood mesmerized for 20 minutes by its sheer beauty.

Then, every single day that I was in Paris until I returned home for Christmas, I went to that spot and stared at the great wheel of the North Rose window with its myriad parts and harmonious interconnection.

With the sunlight shining through it, it certainly qualifies as a beautiful thing, but its beauty is in service of a higher good, for it’s meant to be a foretaste of the beauty of the beatific vision.

One of the clues to this transcendent purpose is in the window's numeric symbolism.

Around the central figures of Christ and His Mother are eight small circles.

Then, on the next major row, we find 16 circular images, medallions in French.

On the next row, twice 16, which is 32 images, and then finally another row of 32. If we add 32, 32, 16, and 8, we arrive at 88. In a word, the entire window is an artistic meditation on the number eight.

Then we recall that eight is a symbol of eternity since it stands immediately outside of seven, which evokes the seven days of the week or the completed cycle of time.

Another clue is found in the very complexity and inexhaustibility of its composition.

Why was I drawn for so many days to look at that rose?

Probably because there was just so much to take in.

The vision of God is like that.

Saint Bernard reminded us that the beatific vision is not something we take in all at once.

Rather, the more we see, the more we want to see.

The more we know of God, the more we want to know; the more we explore, the hungrier we are to explore even more.

Thomas Aquinas said that the saints in heaven realized to their delight just how incomprehensible God is.

I realize that all this talk about knowing and seeing can give the impression that the life of heaven is a passive and lonely business, a bit like taking a solitary stroll through an art gallery.

We wonder, wouldn’t even the most compelling and beautiful vision in time become tiresome?

That’s why we have to supplement this idea of the beatific vision with that of the City of the Heavenly Jerusalem.

There’s nothing passive or individualistic about a city bustling with energy, life, and creativity.

Cities are places where communal activities and entertainments of all varieties are unceasing.

Life in the Heavenly Jerusalem is something like that.

In union with the angels and the saints, our minds, wills, and energies fully alive and properly focused, we will live in thrilling interdependent communion with one another.

Here below, because of our sins and the natural conflicts of finite existence, communion is so rare, so hard to achieve.

But in the city on high, when we’ve been raised to a new pitch of ontological perfection, and when the self-absorption of sin has been burned away, we will rejoice in one another’s accomplishments and delight in the harmony that we can achieve together.

The final image I’d like to consider is that of the new heavens and the new earth.

Many Christians are more Platonist than biblical in the measure that they see the goal of the spiritual life as getting out of this world and going to heaven.

Or to put it more precisely, to facilitate the soul’s departure from the body and its subsequent journey to a purely immaterial realm.

But this is just not what Christian hope is really about.

The Apostles' Creed concludes with the statement: We believe in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting, and the Nicene Creed closes with, We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

Neither declaration of Christian faith speaks of the conviction that the soul will escape from the body and live forever in a disincarnate state.

Rather, both speak of resurrection, which involves not the leaving behind of the body but the transfiguration of the body.

The risen Jesus appeared very much in an embodied state to His disciples.

He said, Touch me and see that I have flesh and bones.

The God revealed in the Bible made the physical universe and took infinite delight in it.

Genesis reminds us that He found it all very good.

Presumably, the biblical God who made the good earth has no intention of giving up on it, but rather wants to save it and redeem it.

This is precisely what the language of the resurrection of the body is all about: not an escape from matter, but a renewal of it.

What will the resurrected body be like?

Drawing inspiration from the gospel descriptions of the risen Christ, Thomas Aquinas speaks of its subtlety, by which he means its time- and space-transcending capacity; of its radiance, by which he means its luminous brilliance; and of its agility, by which he means its suppleness and athleticism.

He imagines the glorified body as a body fully itself, but exercising its power at a qualitatively higher degree of perfection.

John Polkinghorne, a theologian and particle physicist, has offered some fascinating speculations regarding the resurrected body.

He speculates that at death, that form is remembered by God, preserved in the divine mind, and then reconstituted with a new and immortalized materiality.

You might imagine the way in which the form of a picture could be preserved in a computer and then downloaded in a number of new instantiations—bigger and more impressive than the originals—because it would be informed by the same pattern.

This new body would be in continuity with the old one, but yet be something altogether new, something more splendid and complete.

Could this same manner of thinking help us to conceive what a new heavens and a new earth might be?

It’s been said that the best way to prepare ourselves for life in the world to come is to cultivate our capacity for surprise.

We’re doing the best we can.

I mean, we try to find imagery for heaven.

Eye has not seen, ear has not heard, but God has prepared for those who love Him, the Bible says.

It’s like a different dimensional system.

I mean, how do you begin to explain what’s at a higher pitch when you’re in this system?

Think of a square or a triangle.

They’re in two dimensions, but now you lift them up into a third dimension and you make the square into a cube and the triangle becomes a pyramid.

Well, see, in the two-dimensional world, you can’t even imagine, What do you mean?

What are you talking about, a cube?

Or what do you mean, a pyramid?

You can’t imagine it within this framework.

But see, in that example, what’s cool about it is you retain the squareness of the square, you retain the triangularity of the triangle, but you’ve now raised them up to a higher pitch.

That’s what Paul called a resurrected body.

So we have these lowly bodies here below; we don’t so much get rid of them as they’re now brought up to a higher pitch of expressiveness and of life.

That’s heaven.

Catholicism is a way of seeing; Catholicism is a manner of life.

Catholicism has a distinctive texture, feel, and resonance.

It all begins with, revolves around, and leads to Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh.