Imagine being asked to make a travel brochure for Heaven. Could you do it? The goal is to make one of those glossy things beloved by all-expense paid resorts or cruise liners. But, your brochure will be about Heaven.
The challenge: make the Heaven brochure more enticing than the Caribbean resort’s brochure.
When you actually start imagining the pages of your brochure, what do you include? After saying in Big Letters “Best Place Ever!” what do you say?
The popular head picture of heaven is one of changeless perfection, sometimes in imagery of harps, halos, and clouds, sometimes in imageless concepts of abstract spirituality. That may be heaven for angels, but it’s more like hell for humans
That is Peter Kreeft in Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing. Kreeft knows we have a Heaven Problem. Heaven sounds boring. Obviously Heaven won’t be boing, but if you think about every description of Heaven you have read and imagine it is forever, well…
As Kreeft notes, this is similar to Milton’s problem in Paradise Lost. Satan is way more interesting that God in that book. It isn’t even close. In fact, Kreeft argues, there are only four modern writers who even managed to make good seem more fascinating than evil. (C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.)
Kreeft wants to convince us that Heaven is not boring. Asking, “How can heaven not be boring?” he immediately replies, “There are six things to be said in answer.” My hopes went quite high. After all, I have long been annoyed by the fact that heaven seems so boring. I would love to have explained the error of my thinking about heaven so that I can start thinking about heaven as exciting and interesting.
Sadly, Kreeft’s six answers are all just variants on one answer. The answer: Boredom is a product of living in Time. Heaven transcends Time. So, Heaven is not Boring. QED.
Sigh. I knew that part already. It doesn’t help.
Why do I find this book so frustrating? The failing is clearly in me. Early on, Kreeft asks us where we can turn to figure out the nature of heaven, that place for which we long. “To what, you ask, can I turn now?”
To your own heart. It is a teacher you can trust, for it will not despise you (it is you), and it is wiser than your head, wiser than you think. Listen to your heart. It will tell you for what you may hope; it will tell you “the meaning of life” if only you listen deeply. It will tell you of heaven…
What you will find in your heart is not heaven but a picture of heaven, a silhouette of heaven, a heaven-shaped shadow, a longing unsatisfiable by anything on earth. This book tries to raise that picture to consciousness.
In the contest between my heart and my head for being the source of understanding, I am afraid I am much too beholden to my head. All these attempts to speak to my heart, to raise whatever pictures linger in my heart to consciousness in my head are all far too mushy for my tastes. I see the shape of Kreeft’s arguments, but they just don’t fully resonate.
That conclusion sounds more critical of the book than it is meant to be. After all, if I tried to write a 200 page book about Heaven, I know full-well that it would end up sounding, well, terribly mushy. There are no edges here to describe.
Indeed, the only person whose description of Heaven is one that I can fully embrace is Dante’s:
for my sight, becoming pure,
rose higher and higher through the ray
of the exalted light that in itself is true.
From that time on my power of sight exceeded
that of speech, which fails at such a vision,
as memory fails at such abundance.
Just as the dreamer, after he awakens,
still stirred by feelings that the dream evoked,
cannot bring the rest of it to mind,
such am I, my vision almost faded from my mind,
while in my heart there still endures
the sweetness that was born of it.
I love that description; Heaven really is beyond words. Kreeft is trying to use words to describe what Dante found no words to describe. While I admire his attempt, it is not satisfying. However, we can give him a pass on this; it is hard to imagine it is even possible to provide a description of Heaven which will make it sound exciting. Our Language simply doesn’t have the words for it.
However, Kreeft wants to do more in this book than convince us that Heaven is not boring. He wants to convince us that we know Heaven exists because our hearts long for it. If you explore your heart, Kreeft assures us, you will find this:
What you will find in your heart is not heaven but a heavenly hole, a womblike emptiness crying out to be filled, impregnated by your divine lover…
What you will find in your heart is not heaven but “the highways to heaven”…
What you will find in your heart is not heaven but the finger pointing to heaven…
Many books have explored the heaven-shaped hole in the modern head, the meaningless of atheist and secularist philosophies. But there’s not a single book in print whose main purpose is to explore the heart’s longing for heaven. For the heart is harder to explore than the head and has fewer explorers. The field of the heart has been largely left to the sentimentalists. But sentiments are only the heart’s borders, not its inner country. We must discover this “undiscovered country.”
But, is that right? Theologically, I have no problem accepting the statement that we created beings are incomplete without a relationship to God. I can even agree that there is something in our hearts which longs for that relationship with God. But that is not what Kreeft is arguing.
He goes the extra step. He assures the Reader, no matter who that Reader might be, that if the Reader looks at the heart, that heaven shaped hole will be found. Is that true? Does everybody secretly know they long for heaven? Kreeft argues:
We have a homing instinct, a “home detector,” and it doesn’t ring for earth. That’s why nearly every society in history except our own instinctively believes in life after death. Like the great mythic wanderers, like Ulysses and Aeneas, we have been trying to get home.
That argument is just silly. Yes, Aeneas and Odysseus long for home, and yes they both visit the land of the dead, but in both cases the home for which they long is most certainly not the afterlife. This is just the flip side of Freud’s argument that despite the fact that lots of people have this oceanic feeling of eternity, because Freud does not have it, it does not exist. The lack of logic in Freud’s argument does not make the reverse argument any better. If someone insists that their heart does not have a heaven shaped hole in it, do we just tell them, “Well, yes it does”?
That criticism, however, might be terribly unfair. Perhaps I am still just using my head when Kreeft is trying to speak to my heart. I don’t know.
But, this is what I learned in Kreeft’s book: maybe, just maybe, I have been thinking about Heaven all wrong. Maybe it is not something about which I should be thinking at all. Maybe the reason heaven seems so boring is purely the result of wanting to use my intellect to ponder it. Maybe if I just felt the idea of heaven with my heart instead of thinking about it with my head, I’d have a better understanding of it.
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