Heaven: A Traveller’s Guide to the Undiscovered Country. Peter Stanford
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context which links Judaism with other belief systems.
The visions are not ends in themselves, but means to an ineffable religious experience that exceeds normal concepts. They will be conditioned by the particular religious tradition of the mystic. A Jewish visionary will see visions of the seven heavens because his religious imagination is stocked with these particular symbols. Buddhists see various images of Buddhas … Christians visualise the Virgin Mary. It is a mistake for the visionary to see these mental apparitions as objective or as anything more than a symbol of transcendence. Since hallucination is often a pathological state, considerable skill and mental balance is required to handle and interpret the symbols that emerge during the course of concentrated meditation and inner reflection.
(from A History of God)
Hence, arguably, St Paul’s reticence and refusal to go into detail. His experience had frightened him. However, the episode potentially offers a bridge between Judeo-Christian images of heaven and Eastern concepts of nirvana. Moreover, it brings monotheism and pantheism closer together. Islam too, as we shall see, had a similar tradition with Muhammad ascending symbolically to heaven where he saw and yet did not see the divine presence. That final lack of precision is key to identifying Throne Mysticism. The author must struggle but fail to find the right words, whether it be because they are unsure about what exactly they are seeing, or whether, like St Paul, they simply refuse to go into detail.
On another level, Jewish Throne Mysticism links the outward search for a blueprint of heaven with an acknowledgement that afterlife can only ever, for the living, be an imaginary thing, a type of contemplative experience. This is an important thought to keep in mind when examining the final book of the Bible, Revelation. The traditional view is that Revelation was written by the apostle John in the closing years of the first century, when he had been exiled to the Greek island of Patmos. As a source of inspiration to a Christian church then being persecuted by the Romans, he sent out a vision of the final victory of God to the seven churches of Asia. The basis of this judgement is not obvious from the text, religious scholars point out, and the only consensus is that the author was a person called John who considered himself called to be a prophet. Arguably the Bible’s only thorough-going apocalyptic text, Revelation postdated both Paul and the Gospels, and its picture of heaven is clearly governed more by political realities of the time than by any pure or philosophical vision of paradise. Heaven is described in such a way as to cast a poor light on the fate of the late first-century Israel and to mark a stark contrast with the Roman world. If it was composed, as has been suggested, during the persecution of Domitian (AD 51–96), then the terrible fate of the damned towards the end of the book could be read as a quite unholy fantasy about what Christians would like to do to their persecutors if they ever got the chance.
The author of The Revelation to John recounts in classic apocalyptic style how a door was opened in heaven and an angel took him up to watch a heavenly liturgy. The spectacle is something of a cross between a tacky musical extravaganza, a freak show and a zoo, but it remains the most detailed – and the most quoted – of the Bible’s very few descriptions of the place of eternal rest for the faithful. God presides at the centre of events in human form, seated on a throne:
Round the throne in a circle were twenty four thrones, and on them I saw twenty-four elders sitting, dressed in white robes with golden crowns on their heads. Flashes of lightning were coming from the throne and the sound of peals of thunder, and in front of the throne were seven flaming lamps burning, the seven spirits of God. Between the throne and myself was a sea that seemed to be made of glass, like crystal. In the centre, grouped around the throne itself, were four animals with many eyes in front and behind. The first animal was like a lion, the second like a bull, the third animal had a human face and the fourth animal was like a flying eagle. Each of the four animals had six wings and had eyes all the way round as well as inside; and day and night they never stopped singing. (Rev 4:1–8)
As part of the liturgy, the four horsemen of the apocalypse appeared and were sent to earth to wreak God’s vengeance and dispense His judgement. There were, the author reported, a huge number of people in front of the throne who had been persecuted for faith. ‘The one who sits on the throne will spread His tent over them,’ the author writes, in what must be a direct reference to Paul. They would never go hungry or thirsty again. There would be no sun or wind to plague them because the Lamb who was at the throne would be their shepherd and lead them to the springs of living water where God would wipe away their tears.
The combination of the rituals of a secular court and a Christian liturgy is emphasised later in Revelation when the exact lay-out of heaven is given, based on a Jewish synagogue and the Temple itself. This new Jerusalem would be surrounded by high walls, with twelve gates, each watched over by a designated angel. It would be square in shape – 12,000 furlongs (1500 miles) long and 12,000 furlongs wide. The walls would be of diamonds (echoes of Enoch), and the city itself of pure gold that would have the appearance of polished glass. There would be no day or night – God would provide the light.
Any ambiguity about the new Jerusalem being real and concrete is abandoned by Revelation. It is self-consciously a work of imagination and dazzling imagery. Though it appears superficially to be endorsing the hopes of the Babylonian exiles in the Book of Isaiah, it is reinterpreting them, detaching heaven from this world and relocating it in the cosmos, albeit maintaining a symbolic link. So when the author writes of Jesus returning to earth, banishing Satan and initiating one thousand years of messianic rule (the biblical millennium which got fundamentalist Christians over-excited in 2000), he should not be taken too literally. After this one thousand years Satan’s power would be much reduced but he would still harry and mislead humankind. Finally, he would begin a final futile attack by besieging ‘the camp of the saints which is the city that God loves. But fire will come down on them from heaven and consume them’. In the moment of God’s ultimate triumph, the Book of Life would be opened. Those named in it would be saved and ascend to heaven, those not would be consigned to the depths with Satan.
Frustratingly, once again this heaven of the clouds is only partly described:
Then the angel showed me the river of life, rising from the throne of God and of the Lamb and flowing crystal clear down the middle of the city street. On either side of the river were the trees of life, which bear twelve crops of fruit in a year, one in each month and the leaves of which are the cure for all nations. (Rev 22:1–3)
The references to the throne at the centre of events suggests another possible reading – in line with Jewish Throne Mysticism – that would make Revelation a very dramatic vision of transcendence which exists behind outwardly recognisable phenomena and which may break out at the end of time. The author, in this scenario, was trying to envisage poetically, with equal measures of ecstasy and awfulness, the Second Coming and the presence of God on earth.
Despite its drama, end-of-time flavour and position as the eye-catching final act of the Bible cycle, Revelation can in no way be counted as resolving all remaining unanswered questions, least of all those about a mental, imaginary or physical heaven. Despite the lack of a clear vision for Christianity on the subject throughout the New Testament, at least the parameters of the debate had been established. By taking bodily resurrection from Judaism and the immortal soul from the Greco-Roman tradition, Christianity had the makings of a distinctive position. As yet that paradise was overshadowed by the anticipation of an actual Second Coming. When this failed to materialise, and as the early Christians suffered persecution and death for their new-found faith at the hands of the Roman Empire and its pagan citizenry, the issue of eternal fate gradually came more and more to the fore in the debate and divisions of the early Church Fathers.
CHAPTER FOUR The Compensation Culture
In its first half-millennium, Christianity grew from being a fringe cult in Galilee to multinational status as the official religion of the Roman Empire. If its rise was meteoric, it certainly wasn’t smooth. There were periods of intense persecution by the authorities, and even after the Church had seemingly reached a safe harbour by joining forces with the Roman establishment in AD 381, its problems were not all solved, for by AD