Opinion

Philosophers and theologians don’t speak the same language, but they have more in common than we think

Rite & Reason: While philosophy can generate wisdom, religion is needed to put flesh on the bones of philosophy

The northern lights rise in the night sky in Iceland on March 9th. For centuries, Christians believed heaven was located beyond the visible skies. Photograph: Sigga Ella/New York Times

Carmel Heaney
Sun Apr 7 2024 - 00:30

For centuries, Christians believed that heaven was located in a place beyond the visible skies. This concept is embedded not only in church liturgy, but in art, music and language. Heaven was a city, the New Jerusalem, inhabited by choirs of angels and the souls of the just, with God presiding not only as a father but as a king.

The idealised heaven was formulated in the early days of Christianity in the context of Greco-Roman cosmology of the time. Aristotle had posited that in a spherical, earth-centred, and finite cosmos the earth was surrounded by a layer of air (later called “atmosphere” from the Greek word meaning ‘’vapour”). This in turn was surmounted by a circle of fixed stars. Above that was the highest heaven, the empyrean, a sphere of fire. Plato held that the soul ascended to the sky after death. These theories, the science of the day, accommodated Christian beliefs.

Throughout the early Middle Ages, theologians developed the theory that heaven was located in the empyrean. Basil, the fourth-century bishop of Caesarea, applied this theory to his interpretation of the Genesis narrative. When Copernicus in the 16th century developed a heliocentric astronomical model, the earth was displaced from its pre-eminent position at the centre of the cosmos.

Some 50 years after Copernicus, Galileo’s pioneering work made telescopic observation of space possible. This revealed that the stars, instead of forming a fixed cordon sanitaire around the empyrean, were actually scattered around space.

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Theology, however, failed to keep pace with these extraordinary discoveries and a widening rift between religion and science emerged. Yet, even in the ages before these discoveries, an alternative concept of heaven existed: that heaven was in no one place but everywhere.

The anonymous early 14th-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing declared that heaven is a state, not a place. The concept of the great chain of being in medieval cultus linked God with all created things – plants and animals as well as humans. Francis of Assisi exemplified this strain of spirituality, which identified God with the natural world rather than with the outer regions of the universe.

The essential nature of heaven, whether referred to in the prayers of medieval mystics or used metaphorically in a secular, contemporary context, is that it is a state of happiness and that it lasts forever.

The element of eternity raises the question of the nature of time – whether it is embedded in reality or is a human construct. Philosophers and physicists have wrestled with this problem for centuries. Einstein in the theory of general relativity proposed that time is a fourth dimension of space. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had this to say in his Tractatus: “Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy ... if by eternity is understood not infinite temporal duration but non-temporality, then it can be said that a man lives eternally if he lives in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”

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His contemporary, Martin Heidegger, proposed radical ideas on the subject in Being and Time (1927): “Time is not just a succession of moments but the simultaneous experience of past, present and future. In the context of temporality, human beings relate to being itself. Being is the ultimate source of everything in the universe, including human beings. Each human being is in the world in a specific place and at a specific time but always in the web of the great process of Being. Authentic living is to connect with this reality.”

The philosophy of Heidegger and related thinkers reversed the trend of Cartesian theory which had held sway in the western world since the 17th century. René Descartes’ famous dictum “I think, therefore I am” was posited on the separation of mind and body. Heidegger and others spoke for the interconnectedness of all things, including mind and body.

While philosophers do not use theological language, the concept of “being” could conceivably act as synonym for God. One could argue that while philosophy can generate wisdom, religion is needed to put flesh on the bones of philosophy.

For Heidegger, the authentic state of being ends in death, but Christianity envisages an afterlife. There is a certain synchronicity in the experience of a Christian mystic such as Teresa of Avila and that of a person being “in-the-world” in the Heideggerian sense. For both, it is the experience that heaven is here and heaven is now.

As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end.

Dr Carmel Heaney is retired from the Department of Foreign Affairs and a freelance writer

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