March 19, 2006

Dear Colleague,

    One area where the human imagination fails miserably is the envisagement of heaven. No wonder so few of us are tempted by its lures to behave well on earth. Who, after all, wants to wear a night gown and sing interminably on a bank of fluffy clouds, or, to offer a more specific example of heaven--Mormons'--a place that offers "lakes, forests, brilliant flowers, and remarkable buildings" (Colleen McDannell & Berhard Lang, Heaven: A History, p. 314)? The problem rests with the word "place"--that heaven is a place. Christianity teaches that, after death, a human being sheds his or her material grossness to become  a corporealized spirit, or soul. Material grossness requires location and place, corporealized spirit or soul does not. What is heaven like, this dwelling place of corporealized souls, angels, and God himself? As Dante pictures it, heaven is the opposite of hell. Whereas hell is vividly geographical, cluttered like a Victorian drawing room with horrible nooks and corners, heaven has no bounded place, no landscape. Rather, "the whole outward aspect of things is resolved into light and motion." Place or landscape becomes a "dance of geometrical patterns, touched in from a palette of pure light." Humans in heaven are not depicted as shapes, but rather as "living lights that 'nestle in their own brightness' and as voice and words" (Dorothy Sayers, "A Note on the Divine Comedy," in C.S. Lewis, Essays Presented to Charles Williams, pp. 30-31). Voice. Now, that's interesting, for it may just be that voice is the best synecdoche for the whole person: far more than appearance, voice captures the unique character of an individual. With the passage of the years, a person may be unrecognizable as his face sags, his hair thins, or because he has grown a beard, but his voice remains much the same throughout his adult lifetime.

    In the effort to envisage heaven as a place, two further difficulties arise. (1) A place is primarily for the group rather than for the individual, and (2) a place is stable rather than fluid, constantly changing. Of course, an individual occupies space and has a place--his own bed in the house, for example. But, generally, larger places are designed for the group. Take the classroom. It is full of identical chairs even though the students who sit on them vary noticeably in size and weight. Students are not supposed to have much individuality, which is why they are made to sit on identical chairs, and, in earlier times, not even on chairs but on benches. In heaven, however, humans are so individualized, possess such unique personalities, that, even in the choir, they must be presumed to sit, not only on chairs, but on chairs each of which has a distinctive shape and design. In heaven, in other words, the communal does not threaten to absorb the individual, nor does the individual threaten to break up the communal. And that's hard for us to conceive.

    The second difficulty lies in the theological supposition that humans in heaven continue to increase in beauty and wisdom throughout eternity; they grow, and yet retain a sense of identity, just as--at a much more modest scale--I am, for all the increase in experience and knowledge, the same person I was seventy years ago. But if humans continue to grow--indeed, constantly grow--how can the environment--heaven--remain unchanging? And can it be that the increasing instability of places in this life and in our time be a preparation for the "instability" in heaven? By the way, Dante, for all the power of his imagination, was unable to imagine a heaven that could increase in beauty over time.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu