Related articles and links |  1 of 5

Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?
—Robert Browning

According to a recent snippet in Harper's magazine, the reach of American entrepreneurship has exceeded that of the builders of the Tower of Babel and extends into heaven itself. Afterlife Telegrams offers to deliver messages to the dead for a price of $10 a word (with a five-word minimum) by way of terminally ill patients who promise to deliver the messages upon "passing into the afterlife."

In the fine print of the agreement, however, it warns customers that it cannot guarantee the message will get through. "The truth is," Afterlife Telegrams solemnly warns, "no one knows what happens when someone dies."

According to a spate of books reaching back several years, however, it is clear that lots of people have thought they knew what happens when someone dies, and they have described it in considerable detail. Indeed, the description of heaven and other aspects of the afterlife occupies a prominent place in the history of Western ideas. Describing heaven has rarely been the result of idle speculation or objective biblical theology, but has customarily been about what is, and what should be, going on in this world.

Several recent books present startling historical arrays of portraits of heaven. Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang's Heaven: A History has won considerable notice for its sweeping coverage of both popular and élite accounts of heaven. Jeffrey Burton Russell covers much the same ground in his more recent survey, A History of Heaven, but is stuck on Dante's vision. In The Early History of Heaven, J. Edward Wright examines views of heaven outside Israel and the church that might have influenced biblical concepts. And Alister McGrath's Brief History of Heaven intentionally draws more on literature than on theology.

Several themes stand out among the riches of these volumes. Perhaps the most crucial of these is that heaven in fact has not been portrayed as a boring place, but the location of the highest aspirations of the human heart. Since human hearts vary in their aspirations, however, the views of heaven do, too. Many accounts of heaven focus upon the loveliness of God and the experience, therefore, of what is called the beatific vision. Since God is the most beautiful of all, heaven consists simply in the eternal contemplation and enjoyment of God.

This view of the ultimate destiny of the blessed is typical of mysticism around the world, whether Jewish kabbalah, Islamic Sufism, or Hindu bhakti (devotional) traditions. And it stands literally at the center of Dante's vision of paradise, as the saints sit in ordered circles around the Trinity, gazing at God forever in their appropriate ranks in a giant rose bowl—yes, not unlike the football stadium in Pasadena, in which no one pays attention to the other fans but only to the activity in the middle, in this case, God himself.

The Old and New Testaments, however, emphasize the destiny of the blessed as a sort of garden city, a New Jerusalem fit for inhabitants who enjoy it in resurrected bodies. Thus the medieval image of the walled garden emerges over and over again (which many readers will recognize as a recurring motif in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia).

Heaven's most welcoming features seem to correspond nicely to inhospitable counterparts on earth. Heaven is a safe and orderly place, versus the threatening chaos of most societies in history. Heaven is a clean and beautiful place, versus earthly squalor. Heaven is a place of abundant food, splendid clothes, delightful music, and running water—all luxuries denied so many on earth. And heaven is even fragrant. It is fascinating to a modern, middle-class North American, whose nose is rarely troubled by anything worse than someone's excessive perfume, to read so many accounts of sweet smells in heaven—until one remembers how olfactorily overwhelming so much of Europe would have been until recently.

next page... |  1 of 5

share this page

June 2003, Vol. 47, No. 6