In Our Time - Heaven

Episode Date: December 22, 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ideas of heaven and the afterlife. The great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote 'that in the end language can only be related to what is experienced here, and given that the hereafter is not here, we can only infer'. Aquinas encapsulated a great human conundrum that has preoccupied writers and thinkers since ancient times: what might heaven be like. And although human language is constrained by experience, this has not stopped an outpouring of artistic, theological and literary representations of heaven. In the early Middle Ages men ascended up a ladder to heaven. In his Divine Comedy, Dante divided heaven into ten layers encompassing the planets and the stars. And the 17th century writer John Bunyan saw the journey of the soul to heaven as a spiritual struggle in his autobiography, The Pilgrim's Progress. But what exactly is heaven and where is it? How does the Protestant conception of the afterlife differ from the Catholic conception? How does one achieve salvation and what do the saved do when they get there? And, if heaven is so interesting, why has western culture been so spellbound by hell? With Valery Rees, Renaissance scholar and senior member of the Language Department at the School of Economic Science; Martin Palmer, Theologian and Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture; John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the medieval theologian St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, quote, that in the end language can only be related to what is experienced here, and given that the here after is not here, we can only infer. Aquinas encapsulated a human conundrum that's preoccupied thinkers

since ancient times, what might a heaven be like? And although human language is constrained by experience, this hasn't stopped an outpouring of artistic, theological and literary representations of heaven. In the early Middle Ages, men ascended up a ladder to heaven. In his divine comedy, Dante divided heaven into ten layers encompassing the planets and the stars. And the 17th century writer John Bunyan saw the journey of the soul to heaven as a spiritual struggle in his autobiography, the Pilgrim's Progress. But what exactly is heaven and where is it?

How does the Protestant conception of the afterlife differ from the Catholic conception, how does one achieve salvation and what do the save do when they get there? And if heaven is so desirable, why has Western culture been so spellbound by hell? With me to discuss heaven are Valerie Reese, Renaissance scholar and senior member of the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, Martin Palmer, theologian, and director of the international consultancy on religion, education and culture, and John Kerry, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. Barbara Rees, let's start with the ancient Egyptians and their ideas of the afterlife. Do you tell us about that?

Well, we can go back 6,000 years at least to ideas of heaven and hell starting to be differentiated and spelled out in some detail. And the ideas remain constant right through Egyptian culture and then came from there into Greek culture and from there to the Romans and to us. And the heavens would, in that part of the world, the heavens are clear. The sun is in the center of the heaven at new. and it progresses from east to west and the alignment of the Nile, from north to south.

It just seemed as though the whole cosmos was perfectly laid out, and people became fascinated by the stars and very accurate observers of the movements of the stars. And then the sun, as it made its nightly journey under the earth, a whole theory was developed about what happened there in the journey in the realms of darkness. And all this was then applied to the journey of the soul so that souls should aspire to reach the world of the stars and the gods, but that they might have to travel through this dark underworld to get there. And the Egyptians developed the idea of judgment very early on

that the soul after death would be required to give an account of its life on earth and what ills it had or hadn't committed. an account to whom? Give an account to the gods in the presence of the spirit of truth and the image that appears from about the Middle Kingdom onwards is of a heart, your heart, being weighed in the balance against the feather of truth. And if your heart is heavy with the clinging effects of misdeeds, then you will be that the scale pan will go down on the side of the heart compared with truth and you'll be consigned to a waiting monster

who will devour you or thrown into fires and that will be the end of that or at best you'll wander among all the punishments of the underworld and the demons and the grotesque goings on. So that's that platform and it does, people listening will think, yes, that heaven and hell are very recognisable heaven and hell in many of the religions, several of the religions

with which we were brought up. Can you tell us when heaven appears in the Bible, the first time it appears now? Well, the Bible begins earlier than recorded versions of it. The first five books are certainly in written form by the 5th century BC, but it's a much older oral tradition. And in the biblical account of events,

heaven appears right from the very first verse of the very first chapter of the first book of Genesis, and appears with regularity right throughout to the penultimate verse of the Book of Revelation. So heaven is a constant theme in the Jewish and the Christian tradition. And it begins with, in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. And then the very first steps are the separation of a firmament of heaven, dividing the waters. And the Hebrew word for heaven is shamayim, which was later glossed either to mean shamayim, water is there,

or a combination of ash and maim, fire and water. And people were fascinated by the possibilities of what was heaven made of. Was it watery? Was it all about the separation of waters? We know that water vapour and clouds are somewhere up there. But we also know that it's the realm of the stars which are fiery and it's the abode of God. Thank you. Martin Palmer, the notion of heaven had been developed by the monotheistic Zoroastrians in the 6th century.

Can you tell us about that, what they did with this idea? Yes, what they did was to bring in an element of morality and of personal morality that I think probably wasn't so strong in the Egyptian tradition. I may be wrong here, Valerie, but what Zarathustra, who we know from the Greek tradition as Zoroaster brought in, was this notion that the world was divided between two forces that were struggling for supremacy. There was the good God and there was the bad God. And the good God was, to a certain degree, a wounded God,

a God that could not actually achieve goodness without our help. And therefore, within Zoroastrian teachings, if you worked for the good, you were helping God to re-establish the good upon this earth and throughout the universe. If you didn't, then you were de facto siding with the evil. And so when you come to the point of death, you come to what in Zoroastrian teachings is called the Bridge of the Separator.

And at the bridge of the separator, if you have sided with evil, you are stuck with evil. If you have sided with good, with Ahura Mazda, the good god, then he will see you safely over that bridge. So what Zoroastrianism brings in in the 6th century BC is a notion that where you go in the afterlife depends very much on the moral choices you make here, not just whether you've been good in a conventional sense.

I think one looks at particularly the early biblical traditions, you have a very strong sense of ancestors and of the ancestors watching over you to some extent. What Zoroastrianism brings in is this moment. moral choice, you can actually decide where you're going to go in the afterlife. You mentioned the individual coming in there, and it's a time around the world where the individual is becoming more recognised. Can you develop that a little bit? It's very striking. You find it happening in almost exactly the same time in China with the growth

of Confucianist thinking versus Taoist thinking. You have it with the growth of Buddhism, where you can pursue a personal path, not so much to heaven, but to extinction of the soul. And I think what you see is a breakdown of the traditional culture, which is that the ancestors are who control your destiny. And the ancestors exist in this strange world. They're gone, and yet they're not quite gone. And I think if anybody's ever had a domineering granny or grandpa, then you can understand ancestor worship.

Basically, they were difficult in this life. There's no reason to believe they're not difficult in the next life. But your life here is the focal point of their action. What happens with the growth of individualism is that suddenly it's you and your journey beyond this world that becomes important. And briefly, how do is our artis and feed into Judaism? Well, primarily through the experience of the exile

when the Jews were exiled to Babylon in the 6th century and suffered really from what I think one can only describe as massive culture shock. They were suddenly a defeated nation, their land had gone, and their notion that God was the god of that particular, a plot of land, is shattered. But what then happens, which is so brilliant, is that they then conclude that God is actually the God of the entire world, whereas many people would have given up.

And I think there's evidence in Britain. We've had various religions that have died in the prehistoric periods where apparently it looks as though the gods had failed the people, the crops failed, there were climate change and so forth. What the Jews do is to say, no, maybe were the ones at fault here. Maybe were the ones who have not thought. thought big enough. You get this extraordinary expansion of thinking from essentially a tribal guard to a universal god. And that feeds into Christianity. And John Kerry, one of the earliest

recorded Christian notions of heaven was presented by the early church father, Tertullian, in his work Despectaculous. Yes, that's right. About 200 AD. Can you tell us about him and about what he said in that? Yes. Tatullian was, as you say, one of the founders of Western Christianity. In day spectacularly, he's talking about going or not going to the theatre and to the spectacles in the amphitheatre. He advises Christians against this. And he says that if they only wait until they join the Blessed in heaven, it'll be much better there because they will be able to watch the torments of the dam.

The acrobats that they didn't watch on earth will be performing much more nimbly because they'll be jumping about in the flames. And the tragic actors will be be bellowing much more loudly because they'll be roasting. And the philosophers, the pagan philosophers and the magistrates who condemn Christians, they'll all be in the fiery pit. And it will be one of the eternal joys of heaven to watch them.

And, of course, if you don't take pleasure in that, you will go against the will of God, who has willed their eternal damnation. and it'll be better than anything on earth and it will last forever. I think one ought to put against that. I think Christian notions of the afterlife are more varied because the biblical accounts are not really very detailed, or at least they confine to a few details.

So you've got the Italian embroidering in that grotesque and horrible way. I think a more attractive sort of view of heaven comes from England, actually, in the 14th century. A poem called Pearl. Beautiful poem. And strange, no one knows who wrote it, written in the Midlands in the mid-14th century, quite, quite different and not biblical at all, where a man who has lost his child, the child, a daughter, died before she was two. He's walking and he sees a river,

and the other side of the river is this beautiful, a paradise with flowers and so on. And a young woman whom he recognises, is as his daughter. It's this idea that the blessed are in heaven, not at the age they died, but the perfect age. She's in her 20s. This is a common Christian belief, as you know.

And she speaks to him, they converse. She tells him, yes, she is, his daughter, and she is queen of heaven. And he says, very tactfully, how can you be, you die when you were two? And she says, oh, we are all kings. and queens in heaven. It's very, very beautiful.

And again, a part of Christian belief. The Narnia film, which many listeners will have seen recently, repeats that. The children in Narnia all get crowned. And some of the critics have said, how can it be that they're all crowned? They're not kings and queens, they just come from the London suburbs. Well,

that's Christian belief. You're all kings and queens and have crowns. Mindy, just around this section of there's Yokanan Ben Zakiar, a rabbi from the first century AD, it's back to what we said at the beginning of the poem, really. No eye can see, no ear can hear, no mind can comprehend what heaven is like.

So we're back to just to reiterate, maybe the three of you want to come in, on this difficulty of describing what no one has seen. Well, it's a huge problem, but it's one that has, I use the phrase carefully, be deviled religious language for millennia. And I think the best way to sum it up is the story that is credited to the Buddha,

but I've also heard it in Jewish Christian and Muslim sources, which is the story of the turtle and the fish. There's a turtle and a fish in the sea. And one day the fish says to the turtle, go out onto the dry land, wander around, come back and tell me what it's like. So the turtle comes out, he walks across the hot sand, he wades through a little stream.

I know they can't do this, but bear with me, climbs a tree, etc. Walks through the grass. Comes back and the fish says, right, tell me what it's like. And the turtle goes, well, hot sand is absolutely nothing like wet sand. And walking through the open air is nothing. like swimming in the sea, and climbing a tree is nothing like bumping into seaweed.

And the fish goes, don't tell me what it isn't like. Tell me what it is like. And the turtle goes, I can't. There is absolutely nothing in your experience that I can relate this to except what it isn't. And I think constantly throughout, certainly throughout Judaism, Christianity in Islam, and I would argue Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism, you have this tension between people who want to describe, as John's beautifully summed up, how awful it's going to be for the people you really can't stand, and how wonderful it's going to be primarily for yourself and a few chosen friends, over against every single faith which says,

look, that's only images we have no idea. We have no language, actually, to describe heaven. So we have two authoritative persons telling us that Aquinas and telling us that we can't describe it. Nevertheless, we're going to be faced with the rest of the programme talking about people who, one way and another, They described it in words, in images, and so let's get cracking on that one. Because it hasn't stopped people attempting to do it, inferring.

Valerie Reese, for the early Christians, the idea of the ladder begins to develop, doesn't it? You'll go up the ladder. Well, the ladder is there from the book of Genesis onwards, because there's Jacob's ladder when he lies down to sleep at Bethel, and there are angels going up and down that ladder, and it reaches into heaven. There's also the ladders, particularly in the contemplative orders of monks, there's St. John Climachus, the Hermit, who has a 30-step ladder, which are stages of contemplation,

and it's all worked out in great detail, so that others can follow. And this is all tying into that idea of where you want to go as a place where the concerns of bodily life fall away, and the mind is focused and held in contemplation. John Kerry, to come back to the 14th century, which gave us the pearl, it also gave us Dante's divine comedy. Could you tell us, first of all, about Dante's idea of heaven in that?

Yes. For heaven you go upwards and upwards through the spheres of the universe, as Dante understood it, with the seven planets from the Earth. You start in the earthly paradise. Dante and Beatrice start there. And then they go upwards, and it gets lighter and lighter and more beautiful and the music more beautiful as you go up. You go through the moon, you go through Mercury, go through Venus, so on and so on.

until you reach the outer firmament, the fixed stars, and then the Empirion, and then the Empirian, the saved, the blessed, are seated on thrones in tears, and it's like a great white rose, Dante says, with the angels like bees ministering to the dead. And then, very far away, first of all in British's eyes, he sees three little globes that are the Trinity. but can only really visualize them for a fraction of a second.

So it's a progressive upward movement. There are very interesting things about Dante's heaven. One is that you don't forget about the earth. It's extremely palochial. Most of the people come from Florence and have got very definite ideas about the Florentine politics. Dante gets lectured by a 12th century ancestor of his who complains about the immigration problem

Florence is actually, he says, going down, tone terribly lowered by people from the countryside. And then also it's a place of knowledge. It's not this blissful contemplation of God that some Christian accounts have. It's very, very intellectual. He's lectured about everything, about astronomy, Roman Empire, by Justinian,

theology by Thomas Aquinas. I mean, it's a very, very cerebral journey. And thirdly, very important indeed, it is graduated. There are ranks. Can we go back to St. Paul, Martin, in time, that is, or on to St. Paul, in linear time here. He, too, heaven for him is hierarchical letters, which John has just described in Dante. Why was he representing it like that?

Well, St. Paul has to grapple with two almost irreconcilable issues, which, as really the first major theologian of the Christian tradition, he has to deal with. The first one is the Jewish, the Hebrew concept of bodily resurrection. And the whole theme of whether there was life after death was a tremendous debate at the time of Christ. We know from the Gospels that the Pharisees believed in life after death. The Sadducees didn't, and in fact denied it. So you have a tremendous debate, and the debate also focused on, well, how were you physically manifested in the afterlife? And then he's trying to reconcile this and his writing in Greek.

And in Greek, the notion that your body would be part of your eternal life was anathema. And the body was simply a trap, a tomb for the soul. And death allowed the soul to reunite. But he then has this extraordinary bit, very odd bit in two Corinthians, where he brags. And he brags about how more spiritual than all the other apostles he is And as evidence of this, he says, and he speaks in the third person, he says, I know a man who was taken up unto the third heaven.

Now, in his thinking, there were three heavens. There is the vault of heaven that Valerie was describing earlier, which comes from the biblical tradition at the very beginning of the world. You have a physical firmament created. Then above that is the sphere of the sages, the wise, those who have been saved, or those who are blessed, the righteous. And then above that, we come to the Empirian to this experience of the blinding presence of God.

And again, Paul is grappling with issues here. Could you actually see God face to face? Because in the Old Testament, in the Hebrew Bible, you couldn't. I think we should bring hell into the discussion at this point and start with Dante, because you've described Dante's heaven. Could you briskly give us his hell? I think hell offers more variety, you might say, than heaven. There are many, many more ways

of being wicked and of being damned. And the principle behind Dante's hell is the punishment fits the crime. You know, if you have been a fortune teller, you have your head twisted backwards so that you can only look behind you and you have to walk backwards forever because you

were presumptuous, him for telling the future. If you were flatterer, you're covered in filth. Thieves are punished in a particularly ghastly way because they were stealthy. They're in pits of snakes, which are stealthy creatures, and whenever you're bitten, your body falls into ashes, and then it gets reconstituted and you're bitten again, forever and ever and ever. Suicides, a hang on trees and so on.

The lustful, the most beautiful bit at the start, Francesca telling her how she fell in love, and the lustful are swept around in winds because they couldn't control their passion, so now they can't control themselves. I think, I mean, people used to say it's much, much better poetry than the Paradiso. It's pretty loathsome also, and I think even Dante was ashamed of it. It is very light to tell you, and it's joying in the sufferings of someone else. Dante, at one point, towards the end of one of the cantos,

is terribly interested in a horrible quarrel between two damned souls and Virgil, who is his guide, reprimands him, and says it's vulgar to take pleasure in that kind of thing, which could be a comment on the whole of the world, of the inferno. Malory, can you give us Mary Reese, can you give us some idea of the visual, one or two of the most powerful

visual representations of hell? Well, there are marvellous visual representations in the 15th century. I'm thinking of works of Hieronymus Bosch and all these surreal creatures that inflict all the punishments that Dante had described. But

there's a long tradition. It goes back longer than that, medieval goblins and hobgoblins. You can see them in manuscripts embedded in the architecture of cathedrals, there are always one or two of these little funny faces. But there was a whole system of art, and it's interesting that in the 1481 edition of Dante's works, which was when Dante really became very, very popular again in Florence, Botticelli did the illustrations for it. And the illustrations for hell are much more interesting

than the ones for heaven, for this very reason that imagination can run riot with all these images of ghastly creatures and people suffering, whereas when he gets to heaven, it's mostly repetitive images of dialogue between Dante and Beatrice. Unfortunately, hell almost sort of brings up the very, very worst in human imagination. What is interesting is that heaven often brings up the most banal. I mean, we'll all be singing the Christmas Carol, which ends up, and all in white we stand around. I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it's terribly banal. Do you really want to spend it?

and eternity. I'm standing in white scene. I'd much rather had dante's, I think, but the idea... I don't really be careful that we don't make it sound as a particular Christian. The idea that heaven's boring is there, actually, Milton. Milton's heaven is a place of great discontent, as you know. One third of the heavens rebel on our throne out. And Mammon, one of them, said afterwards how wearisome it was, warbling, alleluius, nothing else to do.

I rest my case. Very like George Orwell, who said that... It's going to be a failure of imagination on the part of all of us, not to understand. Absolutely, of course it is. Not to understand the intensity of continuous ecstasy. You're absolutely right. And of course, that goes back to what Valerie said

about this very, very early notion of the brain. It's all your brain is weighed against the feather of truth. It's your brain that goes wrong. And if you cannot understand the ecstasy of seeing God, then you're cast out quite rightly. Orwell, again, who I'm afraid would not have gone to heaven, said and wouldn't. wanted to said that the Christian heaven

was like choir practice in a jeweller's shop and that's about the view of that Mama has. They're quite nice phrases and it's fun but I don't think they're taking it on I mean not really taking it because it's hard to take on because what Aquinas said and what the rabbi, the first century rabbi said we haven't got the

words but imagination can perhaps take us purgatory and the split between the Catholic and the Protestant notions of heaven and hell play a very important part as this develops in let's say well since after 15, 17 when Luther put the pieces on the... So can you just give us that quickly,

please, Martin, Mr. What happened there? You can actually see it in any old churchyard or church in Britain. The Catholic notion is that you are saved by being a member of the church. That's all you need to do. So if you go to a great cathedral like Wells Cathedral, the West Front depicts the Judgment Day,

the damned going to hell and the Just Rising. And that's kind of like a presentation of where you're at. Then you enter the church and through the journey of the church up to the mass, up to the crucifixion and beyond that, to the Lady Chapel where you can ask our lady to intercede for you, the saints and the whole superstructure of the church is there to save you and to carry you forward into heaven.

And in a sense, your own personality is not that important. You're saved by the church. Now then, move on to the Reformation. If you look at an English churchyard, you will not find a single gravestone outside the church that is prior to the Reformation, because in a sense, you just were saved by being a member of the church. Then you get gravestones.

Why? Because you are now having to negotiate, in the Protestant tradition, a personal relationship with God. And God is going to judge you on what you did, not on what you belonged to. I want to bring in Marcella Ficino. Fichino has a very forming influence on the development of this idea.

He does, yes, behind a lot of these ideas that develop later, through all the writers, even right into the romantic, ideas of heaven being present here and the visible traces. First of all, he takes on board very seriously the idea that everything in heaven has its reflection and its counterpart on Earth. And in a practical sense, you can apply this. So if you feel your life is not quite going the way it should, you can actually draw

upon the heavenly realms of all the different planetary levels so that if you feel you need more illumination, you turn to things. of the sun, and this can be at the level of sounds, of attuning your ear to music that corresponds with that, or it can be making various medicinal drinks for yourself from various herbs. And it's all about balancing and making your life in conformity with the full range of heavenly gifts that are available to a human being. So we've got very much the idea here of the heavens being within. How long, John Kerry, do you think that these ideas about heaven and hell sort of beat through Western literature, just to stick to the West.

Well, that idea of the heaven within you is very important, I think. Henry Vaughan, wonderful Welsh poet in the 17th century, says, I saw eternity the other night, you know, like a great ring of pure and endless light. He sees the dead, I see them walking in an air of glory. He can't quite find the words, but you know, you feel he's felt it. And the heaven within is wonderfully done too by Treherne, 17th 17th century. some mystical, who says that you must get to be like a little child. A child was like Adam in paradise, didn't know about property,

didn't know things belong to people. And he would work and work, he says, to get back to that. So the heaven within is very, very powerful light through, I think. Thank you all very much to Valerie Reese, Martin Pum and John Kerry. Next week we'll be talking about the orostaya by Iskulles, revenge, murder most foul, vengeance in the family, and a fragile resolution through law. Thank you for listening.

We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.ukuk forward slash radio 4.