When in 1999 Pope John Paul II pronounced that heaven was a ‘blessed community’ which was ‘neither abstraction nor physical place’, he was following the recent tendency to underplay what could be regarded as the Churches’ trump card. Clerics are curiously nervous of mentioning heaven, despite its potential as a crowd puller, especially with the elderly. When a senior English archbishop gave an address at a Roman synod the same year, in which he blandly mentioned heaven in passing, I wrote to him to ask if we might meet so he could develop what seemed an intriguing theme. He wrote back by return saying that he was busy for the foreseeable future and couldn’t really add to the words he had offered already. Yet he had said nothing.
One might almost conclude that the Western churches are, behind the scenes, realising that their Buddhist and Hindu confrères in the East have hit upon something in their lack of interest in the afterlife and so are gently repositioning their doctrines as a result. But that would be to ignore the lesson of history. For the Pope’s almost embarrassed talk of heaven is part of a long Christian tradition. There are mentions of heaven aplenty in the New Testament. Some Christian fundamentalists believe that the Book of Revelation goes so far as to provide a street plan. Saint Augustine, arguably the most influential writer and thinker in Christian history, would, however, be pleased to hear the modern-day Vatican trying to quell speculation on the hereafter. In the fifth century he insisted that heaven was ‘ineffable’ – beyond words. It was indeed Augustine who established the term ineffabilis in theology as a way of summing up one of his favourite maxims – that it is easier to say what God is not than to say what He is.
Augustine’s word, rather like John Paul II’s, has not always been law in this, nor in other matters. Sketching out their own imaginary topography of Christian heaven has been a long line of theologians, mystics, artists, writers and the builders of the great Gothic cathedrals, whose spires reached to the skies. Usually starting with Revelation, which pictured paradise as a cleaned-up version of Jerusalem without its Temple, these seers have constructed the pearly gates and enlisted harps (first heard in the New Testament Apocrypha – the early Church texts considered too unorthodox to make it into the Holy Bible).
Outside the cloister, Dante mapped out his Paradiso of the skies in the fourteenth century with Renaissance precision and with every bit the same authority as he had invested in his Inferno in the bowels of the earth, though by a quirk of human nature it is the latter that has continued to fascinate us more. The same, incidentally, is true of John Milton in the seventeenth century. His Paradise Lost has been vastly influential in shaping modern thinking on the Devil and his hellish lair, but those sections of the text which describe heaven are overlooked. Perhaps it is a desire amongst readers not to appear presumptuous as to their final destination that has traditionally allowed hell to eclipse heaven in terms of the popular imagination. Or perhaps it is just the dominance of fear in our emotional range. More practically, it may be art for once imitating the attitudes of those in power. The post-Reformation churches of Milton’s time were much keener on frightening people in to the pews with talk of hell than in enticing them with pictures of heaven.
Despite its unfathomable promise, heaven has eternally been the poor relation of hell; the quieter, paler sibling, the bland-looking friend that some attractive men and women take round with them so as to make themselves shine ever more brightly in comparison. George Bernard Shaw waspishly remarked in Man and Superman (1903): ‘Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.’ Shaw may have correctly identified early the relative silence on heaven that took hold in the twentieth century, but he was, of course, exaggerating for effect. Down the ages, when heaven has occasionally managed to raise its subtly attractive head above the flames of the hell fires, it has gripped imaginations and produced some memorable and influential images. This is the world of Fra Angelico’s Last Judgement, Luca Signorelli’s Coronation of the Elect, William Blake’s The Meeting of a Family in Heaven and Stanley Spencer’s Resurrection: Cookham, a place of music, dancing, good health, sex, self-congratulation and plenty. It is the Elysian Fields, an image shamelessly borrowed from Virgil by the early Christians and entered symbolically through a gate, where, according to the Aeneid, those amongst the dead chosen for their heroic virtues ‘train on grassy rings, others compete in field games, others grapple on the sand; feet moving to a rhythmic beat, the dancers move in formation as they sing’. Heaven is where, according to Dante, the ‘Great Light shines in three circles’, where, the Revd Charles Kingsley wrote to his beloved wife, Fanny, ‘marital love will be without oscillation, even at the same glorious full tide of delight’, and where, in Steven Spielberg’s Always, Audrey Hepburn presides in a green glade.
Despite official urgings to the contrary, theologians, artists and writers have kept up a lively debate about the nature of heaven. There are three basic views. The first has appealed most to theologians and mystics – somewhere we spend eternal solitude with God alone. Here the traveller is in an unknown territory without landmarks, somewhere imaginable only in moments of intense prayer or spiritual introspection. All earthly relationships – spouses, parents, children – are as nothing in this place, and the body and bodily pleasures are exchanged for a vaguely defined inner peace. The imagination, a key component in any approach to heaven, is directed solely to God Himself and the backdrop is irrelevant. For the medieval mystics, God was so much the centre of their reveries that heaven was sexual fulfilment with Christ the Bridegroom.
The second view is much more tangible, familiar and easy to plot. It allows for some overlap between heaven and earth, and hence relationships outside the central bond with God. The necessary inspiration is all at hand. In the one and only conversation I ever had with my mother about death, on the occasion of my grandmother’s death, she told me that her own image of heaven was of a welcoming committee of my great aunts greeting their sister with, ‘Well, Annie, what took you so long?’ This is the flip side of Jean-Paul Sartre’s remark in Huis Clos that ‘hell is other people’. The same may be said, in more upbeat mood, of heaven.
The hopes of being reunited in death were never more poetically expressed than in the seventeenth century by Henry King, Bishop of Chichester, in his celebrated An Exequy, written in 1657 after the death of his wife, Anne:
Sleep on (my Love!) in thy cold bed
Never to be disquieted.
My last Good-night! Thou wilt not wake
Till I thy fate shall overtake;
Till age, or grief, or sickness must
Marry my body to that dust
It so much loves; and fill the room
My heart keeps empty in thy tomb.
But hark! My pulse, like a soft drum
Beats my approach, tells thee I come;
And, slow howe’er my marches be,
I shall at last sit down by thee.
The thought of this bids me go on,
And wait my dissolution
With hope and comfort.
The third and commonest approach historically is a hybrid of the first two – somewhere to be with God alone, yet also a place where the imagination inevitably wanders into providing some shape and form, usually a garden, and to other relationships which may continue from earth.
All three approaches have their appeal depending on whether it is comfort, freedom from fear, or the search for another dimension beyond the banalities of earthly life that is prompting the seeker. Opinion has vacillated between this trinity – one theocentric (or based on God), another anthropocentric (focused on