Et Incarnatus Est – The Prior’s Blog

“Jesus said to them, ‘Is not this why you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God?  For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven.’” [Mark 12: 24-25]

When we rise, “we shall all be changed” [1 Cor 15: 51] from this life as we know it to a life akin to the angelic life.  What does this mean for us?  What are angels, exactly, and why should the angelic life be desirable?

God “makes the winds his messengers,” as Psalm 104 (103): 4 tells us.  Unfortunately, this is not the best translation for our present purposes.  It is another of those places where the old, rickety translation better conveys the tradition.  The Douay-Rheims renders the verse this way:  “Who makest thy angels spirits.”  For good measure, the King James Bible reads almost exactly the same: “Who maketh his angels spirits.”

So if, in the life of the world to come, at the resurrection, we will ‘be like the angels,” this must mean something like the privileging, enlarging and fulfillment of our spiritual natures.  It does not mean the loss of our bodies, but their transformation by the illumination of grace, into pure ‘spiritual bodies’.  (N.B.  All of 1 Corinthians 15 is worth reading in this context.  I will append what I consider to be the core of that chapter’s message at the end of this post.)

Here, alas, we come to a major stumbling block for discussing the life of the world to come.  For when we speak today of ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’, we mean something like the very opposite of what is meant in classical theology, which is to say that we have largely reduced these concepts to the very physical realm from which they ought to be distinguished.  When persons today claim to be ‘spiritual’ and not religious, they often sense something overly ‘fleshly’ in religious observance:  legalism, party spirit and the like.  But in setting out to find something ‘spiritual’ instead, they most frequently fall into the mistake of elevating feelings above reason, of seeking freedom in autonomy—the freedom, that is, to create their own rules.  And frequently these ad hoc rules privilege emotions in such a way as to imprison us in our ‘flesh’, that part of us to which emotions properly belong.

Similarly, ‘soul’ is used almost exclusively in contemporary parlance to mean ‘feeling’.  To the earnest, urgent question that taxed classical philosophers from Aristotle to Gregory of Nyssa—“What is the soul”—we moderns can jokingly respond, “What a jazz musician has.”  When we refer to ‘soul music’, we do not mean that it is music which displays an elevation of intellectual and aesthetic qualities.  This is not to say that soul music has no place in our world, only to point out the degradation suffered by the soul in such casual re-definitions.

Traditionally, the soul and spirit have been taken to be that part of us which is ‘spiritual’, the part that separates us from ‘brute’ animals.  Our spiritual nature consists of intelligence, imagination, creativity, appreciation of beauty, free will and the acknowledgment of moral choices, and so on.  It is these faculties that make us already ‘like the angels in heaven’.  To the extent that we live at the spiritual level of existence, we already live the angelic life.  This does not in any way denigrate the body, but elevates the body to its proper pitch, directing the emotions toward their proper fulfillment as well.  The Transfiguration of Christ is a foretaste of how the body appears when the spirit is revealed in its final state.  That this can happen already on earth is manifest in many lives of the saints.

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1 Corinthians 15: 35-53

But some one will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?”  You foolish man! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.  And what you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain.  But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body.  For not all flesh is alike, but there is one kind for men, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish.  There are celestial bodies and there are terrestrial bodies; but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.  There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for star differs from star in glory.

So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable.  It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power.  It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body.  Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.  But it is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual.  The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven.  As was the man of dust, so are those who are of the dust; and as is the man of heaven, so are those who are of heaven.  Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.  I tell you this, brethren: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.  For this perishable nature must put on the imperishable, and this mortal nature must put on immortality.

These meditations on heaven will be anything but systematic.  I hope, in any case, that they will encourage readers’ own reflections.  For a fine and stimulating systematic treatment, I recommend the book The Life of the World to Come by the unjustly neglected Abbot Anscar Vonier, OSB, late abbot of Buckfast Abbey in England.  What follows will be indebted to one of his observations.

Whenever we recite or chant the Creed, we profess to “look forward to…the life of the world to come.”  Following Abbot Vonier, I want to point out two aspects of this line.  First, the word used in the Latin version of the Creed is exspecto, which means ‘to look out for, to await, to expect’.  This range of meanings differentiates our desire for heaven from worldly hope.  For example, I hope to finish the current series of reflections…but I might not actually see this hope through to fruition.  By contrast, God’s kingdom will come whether I desire it or not, and nothing I do can hasten or delay its realization.  When we pray “thy kingdom come”, we are asking God for the change of heart that will bring about in us a foretaste of the peace and joy of His kingdom even now.  As we consent to be changed, our waiting will be marked by a greater and greater desire for the final manifestation of His kingdom.  Vonier connects this desire to the Christian theological virtue of hope.

The second important aspect is what we await.  According to the Creed, it is not heaven but ‘life’—a new kind of life, but still congruent with what we already know by experience.  Too often, we understand abstract ideas like the ‘beatific vision’ as negations of life as we know it.  The very fact that we limit ourselves to talking about the world to come as ‘heaven’ is an indication of this impoverishment.  Instead, the Biblical witness offers us “new heavens and a new earth [Rev 21: 1]” in which God dwells together with His people.  God’s glory is the very light that permeates all creation [21: 23], such that the new earth is “full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea [Is 11: 9; Hab 2: 14].”  In the beatific vision, we see God’s light in all creation, and we see all creation in God’s light.