I read somewhere, in a far distant spacetime, that Medieval theologians had a one-line joke: Heaven and Hell are the same place. An inch-millisecond ago by cosmological standards, circa 1900, Albert Jay Nock left the Episcopal priesthood and later said it was partly because he couldn’t see that many human beings had much in the way of life in them in this mortal realm and couldn’t see how such creatures could possibly enjoy life without end. Need I add that Mark Twain claimed he couldn’t imagine a Heaven consistent with Christian beliefs where Americans would be happy.
In terms of theology, I have a quibble or two with each statement but no substantial problem with the main messages, very much overlapping though I’m sure Nock and Twain would have put in their interesting two bits. God can save who He will but it’s not so easy to imagine that everyone, even some very nice men and women, could be happy in Heaven according to Christian beliefs, or Jewish beliefs for that matter.
In various writings, I’ve made substantially the same claim by stating that Heaven isn’t an everlasting DisneyWorld, a place where passive pleasure-seekers can enjoy just the right mixture of nice foods and nice shows and nice rides for time without end. To enjoy Heaven, a human being would have to be a member of the Body of Christ, the perfected and completed community of all human beings who are God-centered, though I admit to not being able to define that term since I know pious men and women who seem bereft of true love or any other passion but perhaps the desire to feel good about themselves and I know skeptics or atheists who have a profound piety though seemingly directed to entities or communities in Creation rather than to the Creator.
I will not claim to be able to identify those who will enjoy Heaven but I will claim that merely entering into Heaven will likely be a frightening and disorienting experience even for those who truly love God.
As is my inclination, I was stirred by a current reading to write about thoughts which I’ve been playing with for months. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert is a strange book to those not fully inebriated upon the modernist sensibility. The strangeness is fully embodied in the title character.
Madame Emma Bovary, wife of a country doctor named Charles Bovary, was born into a prosperous farm family and was apparently well-educated in a convent school to perhaps the pre-college level in some subset of the liberal arts. She could play the piano well, had some true literacy, and showed life only in response to events which are legitimate but quite optional parts of some human lives, such as a ball at the home of a rich aristocrat. She had no real appreciation for music, being almost literally a hairless ape who had been trained to strike skillfully at piano keys in certain patterns. She showed no more appreciation for literature. Even as a mother… She farmed her daughter out to a wet-nurse and was mostly annoyed by the young girl after taking her back into her dysfunctional home.
She was much like that morally insane American who so obsessed Hermann Melville, though he chose to write a book about a more courageous and honest version than the typical American or Madame Bovary. Captain Ahab knew he was in rebellion against Creation and he pushed forward in that rebellion to his own willful destruction. He knew he had an insides, a stew of desires and views of what was right and wrong, and he had no intention of surrendering to reality, to making peace with a Creation not to his standards, let alone shaping his thoughts and feelings and actions to accord with what the Almighty had created.
Madame Bovary, the younger, was different in that she seemed to honestly believe she could pursue desires in conflict with her moral character, her family life, her social life, and so forth, and attain those desires without doing great harm to herself or those she cared about, at least in an occasional and mostly self-indulgent way. (To be fair, she first took up her corrupt ways after being seduced rather forcefully by a country squire of sorts whose life seems to have followed the general pattern of Flaubert’s.)
The book, Madame Bovary, ends sadly and a bit ambiguously, especially regarding the state of Monsieur Bovary’s moral and cognitive and spiritual state. At least ambiguity seems to have been intended by the author and probably seen by most readers. I don’t think there is so much ambiguity in Madame Bovary’s deathbed scene when she grabbed the crucifix from the priest’s hand and planted upon the corpus of Jesus Christ the most passionate kiss of her life.
There is a romantic group in Christianity, those who believe that Heaven can be won with a single decision, a great flood of passion coming at but an instant. That flood can even occur on the deathbed after a life of systematic sinning, murdering, stealing, sadistic abuse of other human beings. Only God knows for sure, but I wouldn’t count on that being a possibility after you’ve sinned to your greatest extent. If Hitler had surrendered and confessed to the errors of his ways, if he had promised a life of repentance, would we have believed him? Some take William the Conqueror’s deathbed conversion, his repentance, seriously. After a life of killing and looting and even castrating his conquered enemies, he becomes God’s good servant. As some would say, “Right.” He might have convinced me if he had repented when he was still young enough and robust enough to act as he was truly inclined to do. It would have led to a gradual, long, painful process of reshaping himself.
Until we’re in Heaven, if we are resurrected to be the comrades of Jesus Christ, we won’t know, not about ourselves and not about William the Conqueror or Hitler or the lesser sinners such as the real-life Madame Bovarys. But, if we are to do our duty of guidance of our own selves and others around us, we must do our best to attain some serious understanding of this matter.
This all leads me to consider the meaning of that Medieval joke—Heaven and Hell are the same place—in light of my understanding of Creation and further leads me on to a claim I made years ago: the saved will be those capable of enjoying Heaven.
Who can enjoy Heaven? What could that mean? Wouldn’t anyone wish to go to Heaven? Certainly, in the story told by most Christians, we’re all gifted at our conception with some sort of immortality and we each go to Heaven or Hell. Given that choice…
But all such stories should be evaluated given not only the Biblical promises but also the best possible understanding of human animals, of living creatures in general, of spacetime and matter, of history and the other sorts of stories we tell about ourselves and our world, of music and the ways in which we build houses and factories and temples. Theologians and philosophers should take on their vocations of firming up certain truths, however poorly we can state them, about revelation and being. Those stories have to be told in terms of the best, most exact, understandings we have of human beings and their world, even the entirety of Creation now that we have better knowledge and intellectual tools to start understanding the full spectrum of created being, abstract to concrete.
I’ll quickly return to discuss the case of Madame Bovary and Gustave Flaubert himself, according to some quips he made and some of the events of his life.
The problem with Madame Bovary from the standpoint of a rational Christian anthropology is that she lived inside of herself, a sometime torrid stew of dreams and desires, though in her earlier years, her insides had been a somewhat calmer stew of `rich-peasant’ and Catholic-school dreams and desires. Even when Madame Bovary seems to have accepted grace, passionately kissing the crucifix on her deathbed, we have to wonder what was really happening. Was she all of a sudden embedded in God’s Creation, acknowledging she was truly a creature of created being, a manifested thought of God? Or was she still a free-standing modern individualist looking out upon a world which existed to be used for self-defined purposes and to self-centered goals?
Let me use a method of argumentation which traditionalists use (properly in some cases) as much as Marxists use it (improperly in nearly all cases). Let me appeal to the words of men truly deserving the respect due to sages. Let me quote words both profoundly insightful regarding the current state of Western man and also prophetic. These two men come from the Jewish tradition but I think there to be much that is shared, especially in this matter, by Jewish and Christian traditions.
First, in response to those who take too seriously the passionate deathbed conversions of fiction and history (Emma Bovary and William the Conqueror):
[T]he essence of religion does not lie in the satisfaction of a human need. As long as man sees religion as a source of satisfaction for his own needs, it is not God who he serves but his own self. [page 350, God in Search of Man, Abraham Joshua Heschel]
On the same page, Heschel somewhat restates the claim: “The purpose of religion is not to satisfy the needs we feel but to create in us the need of serving ends, of which we otherwise remain oblivious.”
God doesn’t exist to serve us, though He offered to serve us if we enter His community—for my current efforts, it matters not if we understand that community as the People of Israel or the Christian Church and I tend to think both are part of the Body of Christ though some Jews might not like that way of putting it. In important ways, God truly serves the Body composed of His friends and servants; by so serving, God serves each of the members of that Body. At the same time, it’s also true that God, as Creator, serves in some significant sense all that He created—to His ends and for His pleasure. But God as Creator serves all the lilies of the field and the beasts of the forest. If you submit to God’s `servitude’ in only this way, you might be headed to the same permanent grave as those lilies and beasts.
I’ll quote another Jewish thinker of great insight and wisdom:
In the Western Protestant tradition of Edwards and Schleirmacher we take it for granted that emotions speak for the private individual, not the nation. In the tradition of philosophy from the Greeks onward, moreover, emotions speak not rationally but irrationally. This other view, that of the ancient sages (a view that is also gaining currency in contemporary philosophy and psychology), sees the matter differently. It regards emotions as artifacts of culture and conceives that emotions lay down judgments. They therefore emerge as rational, public, and social, speaking not only for the individual but also to him or her. Feelings, too, define modes of symbolic behavior, as noted. When we examine the doctrine of emotions in the canonical writings of formative Judaism, we enter a world to which it is self-evident that feeling is subject to law and emotion is a matter of lesson and tradition. [page 51, Judaism in the Matrix of Christianity, Jacob Neusner]
Red-hot passions, soaking in one’s own holy juices, can be a step toward God and toward a membership in the Body (Church and People) composed of those to be saved. As the individual human intelligence must be disciplined to an intellect appropriate to that Body, and appropriate to some civilization of this mortal realm on this side of death, so our feelings and emotions must be disciplined to the forms of feelings and emotions which are—as Barzun said of intellect relative to (individual) intelligence—the communal and capitalized form of individual feelings and emotions. (See Intelligence vs. Intellect for my discussion of the book, The House of Intellect by the recently deceased Jacques Barzun.)
The issue is still greater than feelings and even wider than feelings and mind. Our actions also have to be disciplined to the law and the tradition, however we define those. I discussed this in another essay earlier this year: Do We Need Heart and Hands as Well as Mind to Understand Reality?.
The conclusion is that Madame Bovary would be able to enjoy Heaven, she would be suited to salvation, to the extent that she could and would become a true member of the community of those who are true friends of God, a community that we Christians believe to include Jesus Christ, both man and God, creature and Son of Mary as well as God and Son of the Father. If God and Heaven remained objects of Madame Bovary’s passions, Heaven would be Hell for her.