The contrast between heaven and earth is one of the most pervasive concepts in religious language, a commonplace so common that we rarely stop to think about its meaning. What does it mean, in mythopoetic terms and in literal terms? To put it plainly, what is heaven and what is earth?

I was blessed to be brought up in a household of faith, and from the earliest age I can remember my thoughts and imagination were formed by religious understandings. As a child, looking at the world around me or contemplating the celestial skies, I felt the presence of what I would, with an adult vocabulary, describe as a divine presence or order. I had learned in school that the planet Earth was, so far as we knew, the only place in the solar system that could produce and support life. Contemplating the vastness of the universe, and the small hospitability of Earth: both filled me with awe.

Not only in this cosmic sense, but also in the more intimate everyday realities I was sure of the benign presence of a wise and good God. I felt it in nature and the seasons, in the love of my family, in the rhythms of life. Through various patterns of tension and relief, suffering and consolation, sickness and recovery, I felt the presence of God working through the world around me. Though I was far from being able to articulate it this way, the world seemed a book of signs in which God’s presence, mystery, and message could be read.

The contrast between heaven and earth is one of the most pervasive concepts in religious language, a commonplace so common that we rarely stop to think about its meaning. What does it mean, in mythopoetic terms and in literal terms? To put it plainly, what is heaven and what is earth?

The question is not as naïve or rudimentary as it may seem. Much disagreement between religious believers and rationalists turns on misunderstandings about language. Rationalists have long held that traditional religious beliefs represent a simplistic, puerile, pre-scientific way of looking at the world. In responding to this attack, believers will often rush to insist that certain beliefs are moral or metaphorical or symbolic, not literal. In a sense, both sides are wrong, and C. S. Lewis helps us to see why.

Lewis’s fascinating argument occurs in Miracles, and his discussion turns on the language which the religious tradition uses about heaven or the heavens. We all know that scripture, and ancient religious thought generally (whether Jewish, Christian, or pagan) locates the realm of God or the gods in the celestial heavens, i.e., the sky.

There are, however, different kinds of space, and ancient man made no distinction between the kind of “space” (we might also say “dimension”) occupied by God and the visible heavens. This is because the kinds of analytical distinctions we take for granted were foreign to them. For them, what we call “spiritual” and “physical” reality were one and the same; they saw reality whole, not parceled out into neat compartments. And our sense of space is predicated on our understanding of the space-time continuum, a modern development in thought. Most importantly, ancient peoples had a lively symbolic imagination, but it was closely tied to factual reality.

As Lewis points out, there are solid mythopoetic reasons for the association of divine power with the sky. The sky is the source of light, and thus illumination (in every sense) as well as nourishment and life. Also, the blue sky suggests boundless infinity, which is what God has and is. Because God knows our frame and how our imaginations are wired, he may well have implanted in us the association of the divine “space” with the celestial heavens.

For convenience, Lewis lists the various possible senses of the word “heaven”:

“Earth,” meanwhile, means the realm of human beings, and just as “heaven” is associated symbolically with the sky, so “earth” is associated with the soil or the planet we inhabit. But it too is a dimension or realm, not simply a “physical” place.

Yes, the rationalists are wrong in the sense that they are missing that that there is a whole dimension of human reality, beyond the scientific, to which religion addresses itself. As Galileo wisely said, religion teaches one how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.

But what if the breach between symbolic and literal language used about realities like heaven, sin, etc., were in fact only apparent and not real? What if it has to do with the evolution of knowledge and thought generally, of ways of conceiving of reality? The fact is that religion and science were simply not separated in the minds of ancient man. That separation happened later in our intellectual journey. Religion, for the ancients, was always related to a cosmology, or a way of conceiving reality as a whole, including what we today think of as “physical” reality.

Yes, we have discovered, through scientific inquiry, that there is no literal abode of God in the sky—one thinks of the Soviet astronaut who failed to discover God in the solar system. But only someone who thinks heaven is a location in the space-time continuum would be disturbed by this. Our knowledge of the material reality advances—and with it, our sense of various parts of reality as distinct. But this does not change the spiritual truth of religious doctrines like that of heaven as God’s dimension.

This seeming breach between heaven and earth, between symbolic and literal language, between spirit and matter, is in fact (Lewis argues) a symptom of our Fall. It is the Incarnation of Christ and his bodily Resurrection that help us close the breach and put all these things back together in harmony.

Matter is itself “spiritual” inasmuch as it is inspirited by God. Thus, when St. Paul contrasts the “earthly body” and the “spiritual body,” he is not contrasting matter with the nonmaterial (that would be Platonism). Rather, he is contrasting a kind of materiality that is corrupted by sin and a glorified materiality reimbued with the spirit of God, which we see in Christ’s resurrected body. Heaven is not a place “up there,” but it is rather God’s kingdom that is gradually breaking into our world like sunlight into a dark room, thus filling the breach between God and man.

The same point applies to Paul’s saying about the present world “passing away.” He certainly does not mean that materiality as such is passing away; what is passing away is the present state of creation (material and spiritual) as being in captivity to sin.

This apparent breach which we find in ourselves between matter and spirit, between the literal and the symbolic, is thus a metaphor for the larger process of salvation and redemption.

It seems to me that we as a civilization still haven’t come to terms with the Resurrection, even after 2000 years. Perhaps that is why we inadvertently dilute our Christianity with doses of fatalism, Stoicism, Platonism, systems of thought that imply a strict separation between the created world and an ideal world beyond. When we speak, carelessly as we often do, about “the world,” we need to make sure we distinguish between the world of God’s good creation and the world as captive to sin, as Paul so clearly did.

I firmly believe that were we really to believe in the resurrection, our attitude toward life would be changed. Perhaps this is why we tend to avoid it; the joy is too much for us to take in. In “The Weight of Glory” Lewis suggests: “If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak.” We should be bold enough to desire, and ask for, the full happiness that is offered us.

All this applies to our understanding of that all-important word “heaven.” Believers today, it seems to me, use the term altogether too carelessly. It is a word with inexhaustible meaning, as Lewis’s list suggests. In the strictest sense, “heaven” refers to the state of a blessed soul after death, when it is cared for by God and enjoys the blissful vision of him. But our final goal is the general resurrection, involving a New Creation in which all God’s faithful will be given new and glorified bodies and the material creation will be renewed, in ways we cannot yet fathom.

Of course, elements of the heavenly state (e.g., the Beatific Vision) will continue after the general resurrection, so perhaps it makes sense to refer to it too as “heaven.” But we should take care about the poetic diction we employ in talking about heaven, which oftentimes is inspired more by Platonic than by classically Christian understandings. The theologian N. T. Wright calls “Platonic escapism” a conception of heaven that is disembodied, overly abstract, and tacitly leaves out the resurrection.

We need, in short, a more robust sense of the doctrine of the kingdom of God. And if heaven is to be conceived as God’s space or dimension (not a “physical space,” for God is everywhere), this means that the kingdom of God promised in the Gospel is a reality that is gradually seeping into our world.

Does this sound like the stuff of science fiction? Science fiction authors are certainly familiar with the concept of parallel worlds and planes of existence; perhaps the rest of us should get up to speed. For what the tradition teaches us is precisely that two worlds are converging, that Heaven is coming to Earth for its healing and renewal. The prayer that Jesus taught us articulates this doctrine precisely, and far more pithily than I have been doing: “Thy kingdom come, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The points at which heaven and earth intersect—prayer, liturgy, contemplation, and also good works—are what we should be seeking here and now. Call them thin places or liminal spaces if you like, areas where the veil between heaven and earth becomes diaphanous and we can penetrate through to God’s realm.

Granted, these are deep mysteries, and not anything we can fully understand at present. And this is one of the reasons why believers should not be snide toward honest nonbelievers, those who are unable to wrap their mind around the idea of another world. The idea that there are two different kinds of space, two different kinds of materiality; the idea that Jesus is presently in his bodily, resurrected form in a dimension of reality which we cannot presently see or touch—all this is bewildering to us. But is it any more bewildering than the visible universe itself, and the strange things scientists tell us about it?

Yes, the kingdom of God is gradually seeping into our world—N. T. Wright ingeniously compares it to fresh grass growing through a sidewalk—through the benign and divine conspiracy of the Church. And Advent is the season that looks forward to Christ’s second coming, the end of times, and the completion of the kingdom, topics shrouded in mystery and speculation. If we want to know what Jesus’ second coming will look like, where do we go for guidance? How is modern man, aware of the mythopoetic power of faith but still expecting the mysteries of faith to be in harmony with (even if transcending) the rational, scientific dimension of reality, to conceive of Christ’s coming again to earth? Will he show up incognito—as an ordinary parish priest, perhaps—much as he did at his first coming? And what will he do then? How will he carry out his judgment?

Jesus himself tells us, “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.” And the Catholic catechism drives home the point: “We know neither the moment of the consummation of the earth and of man, nor the way in which the universe will be transformed.” This seems to be a door beyond which human reason, at present, is unable to pass. Even so, we cannot help from asking questions, questions which I believe take faith and reason to pretty near their present limits.

But as I think of these things I am stopped by the words of the psalm: “O LORD, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me.” Perhaps a cue for me to cease speculation.

Just a few words more. The Catechism informs us: “The form of this world, distorted by sin, is passing away, and we are taught that God is preparing a new dwelling and a new earth in which righteousness dwells, in which happiness will fill and surpass all the desires of peace arising in the hearts of men” (1048).

In a homily one recent Sunday, our priest stressed that God is bringing things to their consummation, which immediately made me perk up. Every year we go through the ritual of hope and expectation, but hope has an object and we cannot help asking when it will come to fulfillment, when the dress rehearsal will end and the performance will begin, when the business-as-usual of the workaday world will yield to something sublime and awesome.

The gospel for that Sunday had these words of Jesus: “Learn a lesson from the fig tree. When its branch becomes tender and sprouts leaves, you known that summer is near. In the same way, when you see these things happening, know that he is near, at the gates.”

Are there any signs, however small, that the kingdom is on its way to full completion, that an apotheosis is near at hand, that heaven and earth are about to come into alignment? And if so, how shall we get ready?

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The featured image is “Apocalypse” (1831) by Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.