by Stephen Cave
WHERE IS HEAVEN?
DANTE had little reason to doubt either his own cosmic significance or that of mankind as the primary actors in God’s great plan. He was convinced that the earth was at the center of the universal order and that heaven awaited the virtuous. Indeed, he claimed to have been there.
Dante boldly claimed that his epic was reportage—that his descriptions were not merely a product of his judgment or imagination but what he had actually seen. Many seem to have believed him: his fellow poet and admirer Giovanni Boccaccio reported that those who passed Dante in the street would marvel at how his beard seemed charred and skin darkened from his adventures in the fiery realms of hell. Even those who may have regarded his account as more like a religious vision than a report of a physical journey found it so persuasive that they believed that, like the Bible, it must at the least have been divinely inspired.
His masterpiece opens on the day before Good Friday in the year 1300, with Dante lost in a forest and being harassed by wild beasts. He is rescued by the soul of the Roman poet Virgil, who offers to guide him out—albeit via the spirit world. His guide then takes Dante through hell, where the souls are “in such pain That every one of them calls out for a second death”; up to purgatory, where the souls “though in the fire, Are happy because they hope … to join the blessed”; and thence to the very edge of heaven, but as a pagan, Virgil can go no farther. He therefore hands his charge over to none other than the beloved Beatrice to act as guide through the celestial realm, where, in Dante’s view, she clearly warrants a place.
Dante gives us a perfect picture of the medieval geography of the afterlife, complete with maps: Hell, following convention, is in the bowels of the earth. Its nine circles go deeper and deeper toward the core, with ever-more-terrible punishments being meted out on increasingly wicked sinners. In the lowest pit of the lowest circle, Satan is entombed to the waist in ice, futilely beating his monstrous wings. As Dante, like most educated people of his time, believed the earth to be a globe, he and Virgil are able to pass by Satan and go farther through the earth’s core, at which point they begin ascending up toward the surface of the Southern Hemisphere. Emerging, they find Mount Purgatory, an island mountain with seven terraces whose summit, high in the sky, is the Garden of Eden. From here, heaven is within reach.
Dante’s portrayal of heaven itself reflects the conflation of cosmology and religion that was normal at the time. In the Hebrew and Greek of the Bible—as still in many modern languages—the term “heaven” refers to both the sky and the abode of God. This for Dante and his contemporaries was a literal truth. They believed that the earth was at the center of the universe, and around this center turned layers of “celestial spheres” that held the heavenly bodies. These spheres were heaven, home of the souls of the righteous: the first sphere both held the moon and was the abode of those souls who had been virtuous but inconstant; the fourth sphere, for example, held the sun and was the residence of the souls of the wise, such as Thomas Aquinas. Then came various planets, until the eighth sphere, which held the fixed stars along with the saints and the Virgin Mary.
Beyond that was the “primum mobile”—the “first moved” sphere whose motion was controlled directly by God. It was the realm of the angels, and beyond it, in the empyrean, which transcended physical space, dwelled God himself. This was in keeping with Christian tradition: when the disciples watched while Jesus, forty days after his resurrection, “was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” (Acts 1:9), they would have understood this to be a literal ascension into heaven, physically situated beyond the sky. Dante claimed to have been there, and his fellow medieval Christians on reading his travelogue could look up into the clouds and dream that their souls might one day follow in his footsteps.
THE discovery a few centuries later that the earth was not the center of the cosmos—or even of our little solar system—came therefore as something of a shock. This view took more than a century to become accepted after Nicolaus Copernicus published his arguments in 1543 and was fought by the Catholic Church at every step. In the trial of Galileo, who provided further evidence for the Copernican view, it was condemned as “heretical, for being explicitly contrary to Holy Scripture.” When the monk and astronomer Giordano Bruno added that the sun was just one of many stars in a potentially infinite universe, he was burned at the stake.
The Copernican view was a major blow to humanity’s cosmic significance. In Dante’s universe, we are at the center of creation, with God and his angels all around us. This is the reassuring image that Dante and his contemporaries would have had as they stared up at the stars. But in the Copernican universe, we are adrift on one of many planets, revolving around one of many stars in an enormity of cold, dark space. As C. S. Lewis observed, when we moderns now look up to the stars, it is not to the firmament of angels looking kindly back, but out—endlessly out—into the lonely void.
As telescopes grew more powerful and knowledge of cosmology improved, the prospect of finding the heavenly host receded. No matter how hard the astronomers looked, no angels could be seen plucking harps amid the stars. The advent of human space travel dispelled the illusion once and for all. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, is reported to have commented, “I don’t see any god up here.” The American astronauts who landed on the moon, though fond of quoting Scripture, did not meet the souls of the “virtuous but inconstant” promised by Dante. We humans currently wandering the surface of planet Earth appear, as far as we can see, to be alone.
Some biblical literalists continue to believe that heaven is physically located in the distant realms of space, but the evidence of science makes this view nothing more than a curiosity. Most believers have instead taken refuge in the slippery language of “another realm,” “other dimensions” or “alternate universes.” Although these words are also used in science, the claim that heaven resides in such spaces is not based on scientific evidence or even compatible with it. The hypothesis about the nature of the universe called “string theory,” for example, posits some number of extra dimensions beyond the usual four—a fact that has given hope to some of the faithful. But these dimensions are not alternate realities where paradise might be hiding; they are part of this universe and are (if they exist) very, very small—meaning many orders of magnitude smaller than an atom. Unlikely, therefore, to contain the New Jerusalem.
This is embarrassing, not only for our sense of cosmic significance but for the Soul Narrative itself. Before Copernicus, its advocates were always fairly sure about where their souls went: up or down, to the sun or the stars, beyond the horizon or under the earth. Now, however, we have searched all these places. Each time one of these sites is found to be empty of souls and angels, believers relocate heaven to the next place that we cannot so easily check—until we can, when it moves on again. It is not a track record that inspires confidence.
Souls, if they are to live forever, must live forever somewhere, but it is not at all easy to say where. Defenders of supernatural realms must explain what makes these supposed spaces more than just fantasy. Seeming to find it a little awkward, clever theologians invariably try to avoid the question of heaven’s whereabouts as much as possible. When put on the spot, they tend to take something of a mystical turn. The aforementioned theologian Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, for example, writes that heaven “lies neither inside nor outside the space of our world” but rather is “the new ‘space’ of the body of Christ, the communion of saints.” Well, that clears that up, then.
BUT the Copernican was only the first of two revolutions that threatened both the Soul Narrative and our hopes of going to heaven. The second, of course, was Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which placed us humans firmly on the family tree with apes, pigs, lizards and plankton. This raised many difficult questions for the conventional narrative of our place in the universe, some of which we will look at in the next chapter when we consider the scientific sea
rch for the soul. One of the most pressing is what, if we are just one of countless species in the complex web of life, makes us so special that we think we have been picked out to live forever.
The Soul Narrative allows us to dream that we are part angel, part brute—and that the angelic part of us is both the more important and destined to live forever. The Darwinian revolution points to a different conclusion: that we are pretty much just brute. It is difficult to believe that God made us in his image when the evidence suggests we evolved very gradually over an immense time span. And biologically speaking, we are very similar to chimpanzees—not to mention other hominids such as Neanderthals. If God made us in his image, then he must have made them in his image too.
The assumption behind the worldview of Dante was that we humans are the point and purpose of creation, living in a world made for our moral and spiritual edification. But seen in the great sweep of the evolutionary history of life, this view seems madly arrogant. Most of the history of life has been dominated by single-celled bacteria, and indeed they form most of the organisms currently alive today. In fact, some biologists argue that multicellular organisms such as you and I are effectively just colonies of bacteria-like cells. Much more plausible, then, to think that a supreme being has made bacteria to rule the earth—perhaps, even, that they are in its omniscient but single-celled image.
As we are just one species among millions, it is not obvious why a supreme being would want to have every human soul who has ever lived hanging around his heavenly abode forever. Or why he might not choose bacteria, dolphins, or chimps for company instead. But assuming such a being would be so generous as to single us out for all this attention, we might ask just what such an eternity would be like.
BEYOND THE PEARLY GATES
FOR some ancient cultures, as we have seen, the next world was a dull, unchanging half-life. But for many others, it was very much like this world, only better. Vikings who died in battle, for example, would go to Valhalla—a large hall where they would drink beer and prepare for further fighting. Muslims expect a paradise called “the Garden” in which there will be all those things that are scarce in the Arabian desert from which Islam stemmed: rivers, fountains, shady valleys, trees, milk, honey and wine—not to mention, for the men, seventy-two female companions each.
The theologians who developed the Christian idea of heaven frowned upon such carnality. These were intellectuals and ascetics, and like Plato, from whom they borrowed their idea of the soul, they imagined a heaven fit for philosophers. This is the paradise of St. Augustine, in which a lifetime’s study and worship would be rewarded with the chance to contemplate the divine forever. Throughout most of the church’s history this has been the orthodox view, as it is in keeping with the modest descriptions of heaven in the Bible as a place of light whose inhabitants “are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night” (Revelation 7:15).
This is known as the “theocentric” view of heaven, as it is centerd on the adoration of God to the exclusion of almost everything else. It was the orthodoxy in Dante’s day and is reflected in the exquisite poetry in the third part of his Divine Comedy, “Paradise.” In Dante’s vision, virtue in this world is rewarded with closeness to God in the next, and the most virtuous of all sit in a great rose-shaped amphitheater, gazing up to contemplate the glory of the Lord. Here they enjoy an eternity of happiness and tranquillity.
The theocentric heaven is, however, not everybody’s idea of a good time. The ethnologist Élie Reclus writes of Christian missionaries attempting to convert a group of Inuits with the promise of a God-centerd heaven. After listening to the account of paradise, one Inuit asked, “And the seals? You say nothing about seals. Have you no seals in your heaven?” “Seals? Certainly not,” replied the missionary. “We have angels and archangels … the 12 apostles and 24 elders; we have—” “That’s enough,” cut in the Inuit, “your heaven has no seals, and a heaven without seals is not for us!”
Seals might be a rather rare request, but many people expect more from heaven than an eternity of singing hosannas. In particular, they hope to be reunited with lost loved ones, to see again a child who died too young, converse once more with departed grandparents or feel the embrace of a husband or wife who went before them. This is the “anthropocentric” vision of heaven, one centered on the human. Throughout the history of the Soul Narrative, there has been constant tension between the mystical vision of the theocentric heaven and the more lively and recognizable afterlife promised by the anthropocentric version. This tension was a prominent theme in medieval verse, as the poets struggled to reconcile deeply felt worldly passions on the one hand with the prospect of an eternity of quiet contemplation on the other—a problem to which Dante, as we will shortly see, devised a unique solution.
In the West, the widespread acceptance of the theocentric vision was finally toppled in the time from the American Civil War in the 1860s to the First World War of 1914–1918. The advent of industrialized warfare left behind millions of bereaved wives, mothers and fathers, and they had clear expectations of their religion: to give them their boys back. This fostered the development of the Spiritualist movement, which portrayed the afterlife as a sociable community where people might pursue hobbies, look up old friends and generally live in an idealized version of small-town America or rural En gland.
This tension continues, with the theocentric vision largely defended by high-minded theologians—such as Pope Benedict XVI—and the anthropocentric view promoted by preachers keen to keep their congregations. The popular version has transformed with the times into a Hollywood heaven, a pick ’n’ mix paradise where, according to the American evangelist pastor James L. Garlow, “your every desire is satisfied more abundantly than you’ve ever dreamed.” This is a vision for the consumerist age when people are used to getting what they want—and what they want does not stop at a harp and a halo. Not even freedom from worldly suffering excites those in the West who now live in unprecedented ease. So we are lured into church with promises of a heaven containing, in Garlow’s words, “buildings, art, culture, and music … goods, services, major events, transportation, and communications.” But attractive (or dreadful) as such a vision might be, it raises some tricky questions.
ONE day when Jesus was preaching in the temple, he was approached by some Sadducees (who rejected the idea of an afterlife). They said to him: According to Jewish law, if a man dies leaving a wife but no children, then his brother should marry the widow. Now there were seven brothers: the first married, but died, so the second married the widow; but he too died, so the third married her, but he too died, and so on until the seventh brother was dead, whereupon the woman died too. In the afterlife, whose wife would the woman be? (Luke 20:27–33.)
Jesus’s answer neatly avoids the problem: those who earn a place in the next world, he said, “neither marry nor are given in marriage … for they are like angels.” But this reply is a blow to those who wish for an anthropocentric heaven, in which you might indeed expect relationships like marriage to continue, or at least be an option. But Jesus—like the skeptical Sadducees—was aware of the many paradoxes to which this would lead.
Take, for example, a husband who dreams of going to heaven to be reunited with his dear departed wife. A reasonable wish, you might think, to have fulfilled in paradise. But it turns out that his wife’s idea of heaven is instead to be in the arms of her childhood sweetheart. How, then, will both husband and wife find eternal happiness? Transferring human relations to eternity does not magically solve their problems—indeed, it only exacerbates them, making them more painfully clear. We have desires that are simply incompatible—my idea of paradise, for example, might be to see you every day, yours to never see me again. You might think Grandpa is up there waiting for you, but perhaps he would rather be playing poker.
Advocates of heaven often claim that all its inhabitants will be happy and good and will somehow just get along: “there is no jealousy, no competition, no cheati
ng, no corruption, and no scandal … and all residents like as well as love one another,” according to one modern guide to the Christian afterlife. But it is difficult to see how this is compatible with their being real human beings. The reality of human psychology means that any community will experience conflict, dissatisfaction, frustration and, given a few billion years, boredom. It might be possible to imagine people who could live together for eternity without ever getting on each other’s nerves, but such people would be very different from me and you. And if we are to be somehow transformed so as to be entirely immune to ill feeling, irritation and boredom, we might ask whether it really is still you or I at all.
The reality of the anthropocentric view is that in positing a heaven in human terms, it cannot avoid importing human problems. The Islamic afterlife, as we saw, is a particularly colorful one, with endless feasts on sumptuous cushions in beautiful gardens, with rivers of milk and honey. All of which sounds fine for a vacation but is unlikely to suffice for infinity. For the virtuous male Muslim there awaits the added perk of lovely-eyed virginal female companions. This, however, is unlikely to make the hereafter paradisal for female Muslims—though some traditions suggest they too will be given heavenly escorts. But even if, as one ancient commentary holds, there are seventy-two of these creatures per person, this still might seem thin gruel for a billion billion billion years—and that would not even be the beginning of forever.
