A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence,by Jeffrey Burton Russell (Princeton University Press, 220 pp.; $24.95, hardcover). Reviewed by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who teaches history, literature, and women's studies at Emory University.
Traditionally, the promise of heaven has offered Christians—and, in different
ways, Jews and Muslims—the reward for the suffering they endure and the
virtues they strive to practice during their life on earth. The Christian
understanding of heaven depends upon and embodies the realization of the
victory over death that Jesus offered and, beyond that, the indescribable
joy of abiding within the radiance of God's love.
Jeffrey Burton Russell, professor of history and religious studies at the
University of California at Santa Barbara and author of a magisterial,
four-volume history of the Devil, begins this extraordinary book with the
reminder that heaven represents the fulfillment of our existential longing
for ultimate connection. Normal human beings, he writes, long for "three
things that cannot be attained in this life: understanding of self, understanding
of others, understanding of the cosmos." Indeed, he insists, we are created
precisely "for the connection with others, for the connection with the cosmos,
for the dynamic connection among ourselves and with God." Our pleas for
connection are often met with silence, "but if we listen, the silence sings
to us." Heaven is that singing silence: "Heaven is reality itself; what is
not heaven is less real. Hell is the contradiction of heaven; it is the absence
of reality."
That the reality of heaven transcends human understanding, imagination, and
expression has never dissuaded human beings from fashioning images and
descriptions of it. ...
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