Heaven: A Traveller’s Guide to the Undiscovered Country

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 410 Rome itself was sacked by the Goths and the empire crumbled in the West, posing the challenge of a period of instability, decline and lawlessness.

Within the burgeoning Church community were many rows and splits. Once the hope of an imminent Second Coming, so tangible in the New Testament, had passed, the leadership began to adjust to working with, and explaining God’s role in, an imperfect world. They had to build a comprehensive theology to unite and bring order to their Church, based on ideas, which were often confused, passed down by the first generations of Christians. What ultimately emerged was certainly more systematic, more enforceable, though often no more coherent. In the case of heaven, this was the period in which the three distinct positions – theocentric, anthropocentric and a combination of both – emerged.

The names of three ‘early Church Fathers’ in particular dominate this era of consolidation, and they can mark for us the boundaries of the debate on the nature of heaven. These Church Fathers were not, as their designation suggests, a static group of theologians stooped endlessly over their Bibles. Indeed, there was as yet no Bible as we now know it (this was completed by Jerome, in c. AD 404). They were not only theologians, but administrators, builders, guides, preachers and proselytisers. The first of these remarkable men is Irenaeus of Lyons (c. AD 130–c. 202), who, as a youth in Smyrna in Asia Minor, trained under Bishop Polycarp. Irenaeus later claimed that his mentor had ‘known John and others who had seen the Lord’. Details of Polycarp’s martyrdom are amongst the earliest recorded to have survived, and they give an insight into the persecution that the early Church routinely endured. Challenged by the Roman pro-consul in Smyrna to disown Christ, he refused and was burnt alive in 155. ‘The flames made a sort of arch, like a ship’s sail filled with wind, and they were like a wall around the martyr’s body; and he looked, not like burning flesh, but like bread in the oven or gold and silver being refined in the furnace.’ (Ancient Christian Writers Series, Vol. 6)

Martyrdom was a recurring theme of Irenaeus’s life. After escaping the persecution in Smyrna by travelling to Rome, he later pitched up in Lyons, then a major trading station, second in size in the West only to the imperial capital itself. Its mixed community had sporadic bursts of intolerance, and in a series of flare-ups between 175 and 177 local Christians were targeted and killed by the mob, with the connivance of the local Roman governor. Irenaeus survived, succeeding the murdered Bishop Pothinus as Christian leader in the city. Pothinus’s sufferings are recorded in Eusebius’s early fourth-century History of the Church and clearly illustrate the trials the early Christians faced and the pressing need Irenaeus consequently felt to console his congregation with the hope of eternal life with God.

Blessed Pothinus was over ninety years of age and physically very weak. He could scarcely breathe because of his chronic physical weakness, but was strengthened by spiritual enthusiasm because of his pressing desire for martyrdom. Even when he was dragged before the tribunal … and the whole populace shouted and jeered at him … he bore the noble witness. When the governor asked him ‘Who is the Christians’ God?’, he replied: ‘If you were a fit person, you shall know.’ Thereupon he was mercilessly dragged along beneath a rain of blows, those close by assailing him viciously with hands and feet, and those at a distance hurling at him whatever came to hand, and all thinking it a shocking neglect of their duty to be behind-hand in savagery towards him, for they imagined that in this way they would avenge their gods. Scarcely breathing, he was flung into prison, and two days later he passed away.

(Eusebius: History of the Church, edited by Andrew Louth)

Pothinus was one of the earliest saints of the church. His feast day, 2 June, marks the day not of his birth but of his death – for that, it was believed, was the time of his birth in heaven. This gives us an insight into how the first Christians regarded death at the hands of their tormentors, and the particular appeal it must have had for some as a sure-fire ticket to eternal life with God. Martyrdom was seen as a magnificent catapult to a heavenly place. Moreover, it was believed that the sacrifice of the martyrs would hasten the Second Coming, for their enemies were seen in these apocalyptic times not just as lions and gladiators, but as embodiments of the Devil. The corollary of doing battle with Satan was safe passage to heaven, as can be seen in The Passion of Perpetua, reputedly the autobiography of a young mother torn limb from limb by wild beasts in Carthage in 203 on account of her faith. While still in prison awaiting her fate, Perpetua dreamt of fighting Satan – in the form of ‘an evil-looking Egyptian’. She also ascended in her imagination to heaven on a golden ladder.

I saw a garden of immense extent in the midst of which was sitting a white-haired man dressed as a shepherd; he was tall, and he was milking sheep. And he raised his head and looked at me and said ‘Welcome, child.’ And he called me and gave me a mouthful of cheese from the sheep he was milking; and I took it with my hands and ate of it, and all those who were standing about said ‘Amen.’ And then I woke up.

(translated by J. Armitage Robinson)

This is classic vision-literature and the symbolism of the eternal reward should outweigh any temptation to draw a literal interpretation, but Perpetua’s account, as well as highlighting the attraction of martyrdom, also demonstrates the ongoing and widening (in terms of the details summoned up) tendency to imaginatively explore the landscape of heaven.

Back in Lyons, there were more practical problems confronting Irenaeus. Christians there had been burnt alive by their persecutors who then threw their ashes into the Rhone in a calculated riposte to what they clearly saw as the foolish and even dangerous idea of bodily resurrection. As a gesture, it had great impact. The destruction of the body by flames and the scattering of mortal remains prompted fears amongst the survivors that such treatment left their loved ones with no hope of heaven come judgement day. (Catholicism for this very reason remained opposed to cremation until the late twentieth century.) Irenaeus’s response was to calm such fears and, in the process, fashion a theology of heaven which presented it explicitly as the reward for indignities suffered in God’s name on this earth. A decent reward, if it was to have the desired effect, needed to be specific, so Irenaeus spoke not in vague, imaginary tones but in tangible terms of a cleaned-up version of this life.

In making an explicit link between martyrdom and a well-defined reward in heaven, Irenaeus may have taken his cue from the many pagan religions which were still strong throughout northern Europe in this period. If the martyrs were seen as warriors for the Christian cause, then there was a clear parallel with the warriors of the Teutonic mythological system, which continued to dominate on the German plane and in Scandinavia. It taught that those who lost their lives in battle for their gods would enjoy eternal life in Valhalla, a great palace presided over by Odin, the god of war and wisdom. Valhalla was a martial heaven, its rafters made of spears and its roof of polished shields. It had 540 doors, each wide enough to accommodate 800 warriors marching abreast into battle with the devil-like Fenrir and the powers of the underworld. When they were not fighting, the warriors were singing battle songs, recalling great generals, feasting on a magic boar, Saehrimnir, and drinking the mead of the she-goat, Heidrum, served to them by valkyries, armour-clad maidens who were at their disposal. Physically far removed from any Christian notion of heaven, Valhalla’s importance was more psychological than physical, an example to Irenaeus with a proven track record of how to use a tangible afterlife to inspire his troops in what was, in these times of persecution, a fight to the death for their faith.

The world itself was not flawed, Irenaeus taught. It had been, and remained, God’s creation. The problem was the Romans. His road map of heaven removed them from the picture, along with all other tormentors and sources of grief, but left the basic terrain as it was on earth. Often described as the greatest theologian of the second century, Irenaeus decanted much of his thinking into Against Heresies which survives complete in a Latin translation. It details a three-stage plan of eternal life, one following the other: the here and now, the Kingdom of the Messiah, and the Kingdom of God the Father.

In the present, there was persecution, brutality and a time of trial, but that was created by man and not by God. Principally, it was the Romans and their pagan allies who were at fault, but on a more philosophical level, Irenaeus identified original sin, the betrayal of God’s creation by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, as having left all of humankind with an openness to choose evil over good in this life.

As a counterbalance to this persecution, Irenaeus then allowed for a world stripped of such negative influences – the Kingdom of the Messiah. This was the equivalent of the thousand-year rule of the Messiah over the earth predicted in Revelation – which historians suggest was a Christian text far more important to apocalyptic minds in the second century than the Gospels – and Irenaeus was again keen to stress to his readers that such passages should be taken literally, not as some sort of metaphor. In his reading of Revelation, Irenaeus found an explanation for the delay in the Second Coming. For first, the book predicted, there must be a battle between good and evil on earth. The struggle of the Christians with their Roman persecutors was, for Irenaeus, just that. The many martyrs were therefore the preface to a second coming and the establishment of a messianic kingdom. ‘For it is just,’he wrote in Against Heresies, ‘that in the very creation in which they toiled or were afflicted, being proved in every way of suffering, they should receive the reward of their suffering. In the creation in which they were slain because of their love of God, in that they should be revived again.’

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