As we’re finishing our squid salad, the priest launches into his heaven jokes. He’s not wearing a clerical collar, just a casual checked shirt, the kind you’d get at Brooks Brothers, and he tells jokes with the ease of a person who has a gift for making people laugh. If you can call a priest a flirt—and I think you can—then this one is. He tells the one about Pope Benedict XVI and the dissident theologians who ascend to heaven to await their judgment. There’s the one about Pope John Paul II in heaven, bargaining with God over what gift to give the faithful people on earth.
And then there’s the one about the Jesuit priest and the Franciscan priest who go on a road trip to Florida and get hit by a truck. The clouds part, the pearly gates appear, and the two priests stand outside in eager anticipation of their eternal destiny. The gates open and a red carpet magically rolls out and stops at the feet of the Jesuit, who stands, gaping, as all the saints walk down the carpet and embrace him. A choir of angels begins to sing. Then a blue carpet rolls out on top of the red one, and the Blessed Virgin Mary appears. Finally, a white carpet rolls out on top of the other two, and Jesus himself walks through the gates. Together, the joyful band—the saints, the Virgin, the Lord, and the happy Jesuit—turns to enter the City of God. The gates close.
The Franciscan, bewildered, is left alone. Finally, a small wooden door in one of the jeweled walls opens and a shabby monk in a brown cassock beckons him in. “What’s this?” the Franciscan asks. “I’m happy to be here and all, I’m not complaining, but my friend the Jesuit, he got red carpet and blue carpet and white carpet, he got saints and choirs of angels, and he was greeted by the Blessed Virgin and the Lord himself.”
His host claps him warmly on the back and as the two walk into the holy city, he says, “That’s the first Jesuit they’ve seen up here in fifty years.”
I laugh from my gut, and my companion, who is, not surprisingly, a Jesuit, smiles a small, pleased smile. Father James Martin—Jim to his friends—knows well how crazy the idea of heaven is to anybody with a rational mind. Martin, who holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, worked at General Electric before he decided more than two decades ago, at the age of twenty-seven, to become a priest. Martin came home from work one evening, dissatisfied and burned out, and turned on PBS to find a documentary about the famous American monk and spiritual writer Thomas Merton. He started to think seriously about giving his life to God. Now the culture editor of the Jesuit magazine America and the author of a spiritual memoir, My Life with the Saints, Martin is an urbane and media-savvy professional Catholic, one of the people journalists frequently call for perspective, or just snappy quotes, when the pope comes to town or when the Vatican issues an incomprehensible statement on a politically explosive issue—the official embrace of a Holocaust-denying bishop or a further clarification of its reaction to the U.S. sex-abuse scandal. Martin’s heaven joke is funny, of course, because in the Catholic world Jesuits have the reputation of being worldlier than other priests. They tend to be irreverent and anti-authoritarian. When a priest gets in trouble for speaking out against the Vatican or teaching an unconventional view of Jesus, you can almost guarantee that he will be a Jesuit. Jesuits drink, they smoke, and they like good restaurants. The first time I heard this joke, the role of the Jesuit belonged to a lawyer.
The joke is also funny (I’m reminded of the comedian Sarah Silverman’s line, “If you have to explain it, Steve, it’s not funny”), because it invokes every heaven cliché we Americans know and makes them ridiculous. You have gates and clouds and choirs of angels. You have saints and the personage of God himself. You have a judgment and an inexplicable heavenly hierarchy. Above all, you have a joke-teller whose job description, you would have to assume, must include a sincere and considered belief in heaven, making fun of the whole thing. Jim Martin does believe in heaven. “It’s a beautiful idea,” he says. He thinks about it all the time.
When I ask him how he does imagine heaven, Martin casts around for answers. He talks, with excited anticipation, about meeting the saints, which is not surprising. Martin believes, as Catholics always have, that the saints populate heaven. Martin especially likes the early-Renaissance Fra Angelico fresco The Just Join the Angels in Paradise, a detail from The Last Judgment, in which saints clasp hands with angels and dance in a circle in a rocky, blossoming garden. He likes the saying attributed to the nineteenth-century French nun Thérèse of Lisieux, “I believe in hell, but I believe it is empty.” A student of the historical Jesus, Martin hopes that in heaven a true account of Jesus’s life will be revealed to him, but he says, in an abashed way, that he understands that in heaven he may no longer care to know the things he yearned to know in life. He is convinced that individual identities and love between people will be preserved in heaven. “In some way,” he says, “we will be recognized and welcomed by those we know…. God would not destroy or end relationships.” Jim Martin is living proof that you can believe in heaven—and that you can believe that heaven is unbelievable at the same time.
THE HOME OF GOD
Before diving into centuries of discord over concepts of heaven, over what kinds of bodies we will have and whether our pets can go there, I want first to establish where we agree. What are we talking about when we talk about heaven? God lives there, of course, and his angels do, too. Angels have been thought to live in heaven at least since the days of the Hebrew Bible, when God sent them to earth—notably to Abraham and Moses, then later, in the New Testament, to Mary, mother of Jesus—to convey His messages. These were not the winged cherubs of Hallmark cards, but splendid-and-petrifying agents of the Lord who prompt stammers of fear and disbelief from those who encounter them. “For beauty is nothing,” the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, echoing the Old Testament authors,
But the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
And we are so awed because it serenely disdains
To annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
Pearl gates, jeweled walls, and gold streets have entered the popular imagination through the book of Revelation, the last (and most controversial) book of the Christian Bible, which most scholars believe was written around 95 CE. Saint Peter standing at the gates, checking off the names of the naughty and nice like Santa Claus, the straight man in so many heaven jokes—this has its roots in the Gospel of Matthew, where Jesus tells his disciple Peter that he’s in charge of the church going forward. “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” A throne room, a banquet, a wedding—these images have their seeds in the Bible, as well as in other contemporaneous writings.
Descriptors of heaven have always been the best, the highest, the most that a people could imagine. The nineteenth-century British aesthete and Anglican pastor Sydney Smith famously mused that in heaven one might “eat pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.” In the 1890s, when American industrialists were building great railroads, a popular folk song compared heaven to a train station. “You’ll behold the Union Depot into which your train will glide; / There you’ll meet the Superintendent, God the Father, God the Son,” are the lyrics to “Life’s Railway to Heaven.”
Imam Salahuddin Muhammad converted to Islam from an historically black church when he was thirteen years old, and now he works as a chaplain both at Bard College in New York State and at Fishkill Correctional Facility nearby. When he teaches Islam to inmates, he does not describe heaven as the Qur’an does, with its fountains and running water. “We have water,” he told me in a phone call. “We have water running all the time. I use street language for them. I say, ‘Anything we can get in life, it’s going to be better than that. Cadillacs, or diamonds, or money—they will be plentiful for you.’”
According to a 2002 Newsweek poll, 71 percent of those who say they believe in heaven conceive of it as “an actual place,” and in this chapter I will explore the most important areas of agreement. It’s a place you go after you die. From childhood, most of us imagine heaven as directionally “up,” beyond the sky, though its exact location is a matter of much dispute. It is the home of God and the faithful. It is perfect. It looks like a garden, and maybe also a city. And though it is an actual place, it is also eternal and infinite: it exists after the world ends, even after time ends. So although heaven is a “place,” earthly notions of time and space do not apply there. When we use the word heaven, we mean all these things—and, of course, much more.
The English language makes talking about heaven uniquely difficult. The word heaven in English carries all the agreed-upon meanings—a place you go after death, the home of God, perfection, eternity, and so on—plus whatever else you dream of, minus whatever you don’t believe. When we say “heaven,” we mush all the ancient theological meanings together. We mean the place where we live with our spirits or souls after death and the place we inhabit with our resurrected bodies. We mean a place that occurs at the end of the world and a place that exists in real time, now. This messy conflation causes agonies especially for biblical scholars and historians who wish we would take more care with our vocabulary and say “resurrection” when we mean “resurrection.” When the biblical authors said “heaven,” they didn’t mean what we mean today. “The whole first-century conceptuality of heaven is so completely different from post-enlightenment western assumptions that one really has to dismantle the way one hears the word and begin again,” the Anglican Bishop of Durham, England, N. T. Wright, wrote to me in an e-mail. In this book, I use the word heaven in its largest, messiest, most modern sense—and, following Wright’s advice, dismantle it when I can.
The early rabbis had a different word for each heavenly concept. When they meant “the place in the sky where God lives,” they used one Hebrew word—shamayim, which means, simply, “sky” (or, more rightly, “skies,” for the word is plural). When they meant “the good place you go after you die,” they used Gan Eden, which means, of course, the Garden of Eden. When they meant “the restored earth at the end of time,” they used the phrase olam ha-ba, or “the world to come.” Malchut shamayim meant “the Kingdom of God,” the community of God’s followers on earth. (Because observant Jews don’t write or say the name of God, they used shamayim—skies—in this case to stand for God or heaven.)
No word in Hebrew or in English carries the most potent modern meaning of the word heaven: a parallel universe that exists in real time, where God lives together with his angels and the souls of our beloved departed, and which occasionally and unexpectedly intersects with and affects our world. When we tell our children that Grandma is with God in heaven, this is what we mean—a real place, where real action is going on somewhere else. When we imagine angels floating on clouds in heaven, playing harps and blowing trumpets, or our dead smiling down upon us as we go about our business, we have this meaning in mind.
Science fiction and fantasy offer more vivid and seductive embellishments. In another realm, good creatures are at war with the forces of evil, and though regular earthlings are powerless to affect the outcome, the fate of our planet and everything we treasure—from our children to our democracy—is at stake. The Matrix movies, the novels of Robert Heinlein, the Harry Potter books, the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien, the works of Madeleine L’Engle—all these use the parallel universe as their foundational idea. In the third Lord of the Rings movie, the great wizard Gandalf describes heaven as a place separated from earth by a scrim of weather. He comforts the hobbit Pippin, traumatized by battle, with this: “The gray rain-curtain of this world rolls back,” he says, “and all turns to silver gloss. And then you see it…white shores and beyond a far green country under a swift sunrise.”
“Well, that isn’t so bad,” says Pippin.
“No, no it isn’t,” Gandalf replies.
Tolkien’s friend C. S. Lewis, also an Oxford scholar, wrote The Chronicles of Narnia as a Christian allegory. The main characters of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which is the first book in the series, are four English children who discover another world behind a row of fur coats in a closet. They are children because, of course, this is a children’s book—but also because in Christianity children have special access to heaven. As Jesus says, “Let the little children come to me and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs.” In that book, there’s a mighty battle, in which the children fight on the side of the good. At the end, Narnia, once on the brink of destruction, turns into something like heaven. The four children are given thrones to sit on and crowns to wear. “They lived in great joy,” Lewis writes, “and if they ever remembered their life in this world, it was only as one remembers a dream.” (At the end of The Last Battle, the final book, the children are killed in a train accident and—after Narnia’s destruction and restoration—actually wind up in heaven: “All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”)
From the parallel universe, angels—creatures with God-given powers—descend to earth to interact with favored humans. Such popular movies as Ghost and City of Angels show angels (or in the case of Ghost, a spirit), saving special people from death or despair. In Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, the despondent and self-hating George Bailey is rescued from suicide by Clarence, a novice angel who comes down from heaven on Christmas Eve to show poor George what life on earth would be like without him. Clarence is sent down by Saint Joseph, who has heard the prayers of George’s family. In America today 31 percent of people believe that they get “definite and specific” answers to their prayers at least once a month.
At least since 600 BCE, Jews have understood daily prayer—the facing toward Jerusalem, the binding of foreheads and arms with leather straps and boxes called tefillin, the reciting of the Shema, Israel’s most ancient declaration of monotheism—as an activity that connects them, literally, with the Kingdom of God. Alan Segal is the Ingeborg Rennert Professor of Jewish Studies at Barnard College in New York, a specialist in the Bible—and, especially, in biblical views of the afterlife. He speaks (or reads) countless languages, ancient and modern; his undergraduate course, Life After Death, is always overenrolled. He works out of a cavelike, book-crammed office, which, he boasts, “is relatively large for Barnard.” He holds seminars there; it’s easy to imagine six or eight graduate students squeezed around the small table, drinking tea from the plug-in pot. Segal reminds me that even modern Jews talk about “taking on the yoke of heaven”—that is, making a direct connection to the Kingdom of God—when they pray.
Segal tells me that the Essenes, an ascetic community of Jews who lived on a desert plateau near the Dead Sea around the time of Christ, left behind records of their religious rituals and prayers. According to these documents, discovered in caves in the middle of the twentieth century and known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Essenes believed that when they prayed they were enacting “a replica of what’s happening in heaven,” says Segal. “So exact that you’re never sure whether they think they’re in heaven or whether the angels are down on earth.” (So convinced were the Essenes that their liturgies on earth mirrored the singing of angels in heaven that they did not excrete on the Sabbath—for that was not something the angels did. “God,” explains Segal, “doesn’t like the smell of human excrement.” When I e-mail this last bit of information to my friend David Gates, he responds, “I never thought the Essenes were playing with a full deck anyhow.”)
Even today, observant Muslims, Christians, and Jews regard liturgical prayer—as well as the singing and chanting they do during worship—as activities that connect them, in real time, with heaven. Father Eugene Romano, a Roman Catholic priest who runs a community of hermits in suburban New Jersey, said it most explicitly. I visited him one wintry afternoon. The Hermits of Bethlehem dwell in small huts surrounded by tall pines in a secluded grotto just yards from some of New Jersey’s most ostentatious mansions. Father Romano told me that he thinks about heaven most often when he’s saying the Lord’s Prayer, something he has done tens of thousands of times since he made his first Holy Communion when he was eight years old. “Every time I celebrate mass, I believe we are celebrating the eternal banquet in heaven…just to say mass slowly and reverently, for the good of souls and the praise of God, is such a powerful thing.”
IN THE SKY
I went to see Alan Segal because I wanted to ask him why we believe God lives in the sky. It is the most fundamental of all ideas about heaven, yet it seemed to me not at all obvious. Why not in the leaves of the trees, or in the ocean, or, as the Balinese Hindus believe, in every rock and grain of rice? Yet the image that endures—in old European paintings and contemporary greeting cards, in cartoons and in the iconic poster for the Warren Beatty movie Heaven Can Wait—is of heaven as a place in the firmament amid the clouds. Some medieval painters even showed Jesus ascending to heaven on a kind of invisible elevator—only his feet and ankles are there at the top of the picture; the rest of his body is presumably above the frame. When Michelangelo painted his vision of God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, the Lord was, literally, directly above—so that your neck hurts to look at him—enveloped in gauze, floating against a backdrop of blue-gray sky, surrounded by angels. Spend two minutes on YouTube and you can discover dozens of homemade videos by people who have recorded the signs of God they’ve seen in the sky. One, a cloud in the shape of a cross, has been viewed nearly a million times.
Even the smallest children understand heaven as a place that’s above and beyond the earth, both real and supernatural at once. After I wrote this sentence, I tested to see if it was true. As I was putting my daughter, Josephine, nearly five at the time, to bed, I asked her, “What is heaven?” We were lying together in the dark, and she sat up, gesticulating toward the ceiling. “It’s up there,” she said, “in the sky.” Then she lay back down. She paused. And continued: “Heaven is farther away than outer space, but it’s near outer space. It’s just an inch away from outer space. God lives there.” The ancient Hebrews, like Josephine, simply assumed that God was “up.”
Segal thought my question strange. We had gotten take-out sandwiches at a Barnard snack bar and retreated to his office, where we sat together before a computer concordance, showing Bible verses side by side, offering them in any number of English translations as well as in Hebrew and Greek. Segal is a large man in his sixties, who started out studying to be a rabbi but is now peevish about God. (We were once having drinks at a café on the Columbia University campus, when he said, “If the God of Israel exists as the Torah describes Him, I’d just get under my desk and wait until it was over.”) His face is broad and angular. When I asked him to find me evidence that the authors of the Bible thought of God as inhabiting the sky, he gazed at me sideways. “I’m not sure where you’re going with this,” he said.
Almost every ancient religion in the West, Segal tells me, had a primary god, and that god lived high above the earth, in the sky or, as the ancient Greeks believed, on a mountain called Olympus. More than a thousand years before Christ, the ancestors of the people we now call Jews lived side-by-side with other people, whom the Bible calls Canaanites. The Hebrews believed in One God, but the Canaanites, who for centuries resembled the Hebrews in almost every other way (their houses and their farms are, according to archaeological records, virtually indistinguishable), believed in many, whom they worshipped using idols. They had a deity called Ba’al, a sky god who controlled the weather, especially rain and storms. Like the God of Abraham, he was inexplicable and full of contradictions, both sustaining and short-tempered, terrifying and glorious. In the Ancient Near East, where winter rainfall was unpredictable, often accompanied by harsh storms and followed by months of drought—and where three thousand years ago most people were farmers—a weather god would have had the power to give life and to take it away.
The Egyptians, the Hebrews’ neighbors to the southwest, also believed that gods lived in the sky—and that the pharaohs, after death, ascended there to join them. The Egyptian god of immortality was Osiris, who lived among the stars in the constellation we call Orion. “The pyramids,” Segal explains, “are like giant spaceships taking you up to the Lord.” (This idea of heaven as a place in outer space exists even today. In the movie South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, the animated series’ goggle-eyed antihero Kenny ascends to heaven through a star-speckled galaxy wearing his trademark parka. He arrives at something that looks like a gate, made of clouds. A loud buzzer sounds, and Kenny falls into hell.)
In the Torah—the first five books of the Bible from Genesis to Deuteronomy—heaven is almost always just shamayim, the skies. Like my daughter, the people of the Torah understood God to live both in and beyond the sky. Segal describes the Hebrew God as master of the heavens and points to Genesis 14, where He is “possessor of heaven and earth.” Like Ba’al, the God of Abraham is “clearly a weather god,” Segal tells me, a creator who has the power to make storms and lift the seas. In Exodus, the Lord helps Moses and the Israelites safely cross the Red Sea: “At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up, the floods stood up in a heap; the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.” In Exodus, Psalms, and elsewhere, God acts on behalf of his people from his abode above them, raining down manna, “the corn from heaven.”
If God lives in the sky, then what people know, or think they know, about the architecture of the universe informs the way they envision heaven. In the Middle Ages, the predominant view of cosmology was founded in the ideas of Aristotle, which had been refined by the first-century astronomer Ptolemy. According to Aristotle (fourth century BCE), the earth sat at the center of a series of as many as fifty-five nested crystalline spheres. Each of the heavenly bodies—the sun and moon, and all the planets—was mounted upon one of these spheres. Encircling all the spheres was an engine-sphere called the primum mobile. So powerful was the primum mobile, it made all the others move.
For more than a thousand years, this cosmological plan, or something like it, went unquestioned, and the religious repackaged it to reinforce their theology. It was understood that God Himself inhabited an immobile sphere beyond all the others; it was He who made the planets move. A Jewish text from the first century CE describes an ascension journey by someone named Rabbi Ishmael through seven spheres, or palaces, until he arrives at last at the throne of God. In Muslim tradition, the prophet Muhammad went on a “Night Journey.” He ascends through seven spheres to heaven, where he at last meets Allah, who commands Muslims to pray fifty times a day. (On his way back down, he meets Moses, who tells him that fifty times is far too many, and that he should go back and renegotiate the deal. Muhammad bargains Allah down to five.)
In Christian cosmology, there were nine spheres, and each sphere correlated both to a planet and to a species of celestial creature or a Christian virtue. So, according to diagrams drawn in the Middle Ages, the sphere of the moon was occupied by God’s angels whose energy moved it around the earth. The sphere of Mercury was occupied by archangels, while cherubs lived in the sphere of the fixed stars. The outermost sphere was the Empyrean, the home of God: heaven. It was stationary, perfect, and eternal. God’s love in heaven caused the planets to circulate. When Dante ascends in “Paradiso” to the highest heaven, this is where he’s going: to a place of
light that flowed as flows a river,
pouring its golden splendor between two banks
painted with the wondrous colors of spring.
Around the year 200 BCE, some Jews began to believe that the faithful among them would ascend to heaven where they would live as themselves with God after they died. This was a radical change. Until then, heaven, shamayim, was the home of God—not of people. But history and culture had begun to breed in certain Jewish sects an overwhelming sense of doom; they were having premonitions about the end of history. The Jews who wrote prophetic scripture began to talk about eternal life with God as a reward for those who were “righteous.” I will explore this shift more fully in the next chapter. It’s enough to say here that until 200 BCE people didn’t go to heaven. After 200 BCE, some of them did.
Scholars call this view—certainty about the imminent end of the world combined with a great hope about justice for the faithful in eternity—apocalypticism. The broad outlines of apocalyptic thinking go like this. Somewhere, in another dimension, the angels of heaven are at war with the forces of evil. God’s side will ultimately win a battle that will bring about the end of the world. At that time, heaven will come to earth, and everything that is bad, corrupt, and sick will be renewed and purified. The decayed corpses of the dead will come to life in a perfected state. (Just how that works is also the subject of a later chapter.) Heaven will exist on earth. This worldview took hold among some Jews in the centuries before Christ—including, probably, Jesus himself. Today, most fundamentalist Jews, Muslims, and Christians—from the Lubavitch Jews who live in tight-knit communities in Brooklyn to the post–9/11 jihadis to the fundamentalist Christians who believe President Barack Obama is the Antichrist—are motivated by their conviction that the world will end soon, and that a savior will come to a restored earth to reign in peace. At that time, as the book of Revelation puts it, “God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”
Rivkah Slonim is a handsome woman in her forties who was raised in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. I rang the doorbell of her childhood home one December night when she was visiting her father, and she took me next door to her brother’s house, where we spoke quietly for an hour in his elegant, if sterile, foyer. Seven of her nine children have not yet flown the nest, and the atmosphere next door, she said, was hectic. The floors in her brother’s house were new and gleaming, and I sat on a small Victorian couch, wondering whether to put my water glass on the narrow windowsill to my right or on the polished wood beneath my feet. Across from me, on a wall by a staircase, was a portrait of the late Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the charismatic leader of the Lubavitchers who died in 1994—and who some Lubavitchers continue to believe is the Messiah. (Slonim does not adhere to this minority view, she says.)
Slonim is a Lubavitcher, a member of an ultra-Orthodox group whose religious observance is at once stringent and ecstatic. She dresses modestly, in a suit jacket and a skirt below her knees. Her manner is warm and open. She runs the Chabad House at the State University of New York at Binghamton, three and a half hours away, a center for on-campus Jewish outreach known for its come-one-come-all Sabbath dinners and its Bacchanalian Purim celebrations. Slonim speaks movingly of her hope that by living a life in which she adheres as closely as possible to the 613 mitzvoth, or commandments, which as she understands it God wants every Jew to perform, her soul will achieve after death a kind of supernatural intimacy with God—a physical, romantic wholeness and a complete understanding of her life’s purpose that is the hope of every Lubavitch Jew. “The ultimate reason for doing mitzvoth is to be connected to the divine,” she says. “The doing of mitzvoth is a sensuous coupling between God and his people.”
Among Jews, Lubavitch theology is unique and controversial. Like the Essenes, and many other apocalyptic believers since, the Lubavitchers believe the end of time is near and will be followed by the redemption of the world. The life and death of their Rebbe, who encouraged his followers to get ready for the Messiah, heightens their anticipation of the end—something Slonim says she believes in “one million percent.” When the end comes, she says, paraphrasing the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides, “knowledge of God will fill the earth like the waters cover the seas.” Until then, she and other Lubavitchers, like other religious Jews, continue to do their mitzvoth and to pray for their dead with a prayer called Kaddish. Through Kaddish, Jews believe family members on earth can help expedite a soul’s eventual ascension (through purifying, Dante-like layers) to God. Depending on a person’s behavior in life—the rigor of his or her adherence to the mitzvoth—each soul requires purification of a different intensity. The eleven months of Kaddish, says Slonim, is “like a dry cleaner, the time when the soul is cleansed of the stains of the world.”
THE PARADISE GARDEN
All three major monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—hold that in the new world, when God purifies what humans have defiled, He will perfect the universe and everything in it by fusing together or reinventing heaven and earth. Jewish and Islamic traditions generally talk about this new world as a Paradise garden—in Hebrew, Gan Eden; in Arabic, Jannah—a symbolic restoration of Eden where man and woman once lived without sin together with God. According to the 2002 Newsweek poll, 19 percent of Americans say they imagine heaven as a garden. Christians, who inherited Jewish tradition and Scripture, use garden imagery when they talk about heaven—but they frequently use urban images, too. Christianity was brand-new when the Romans leveled its birthplace Jerusalem in 70 CE, and all the residents there suffered the psychic trauma of that destruction. Jews say that in the new world they’ll get their sacred Temple back; Christians imagine “the New Jerusalem”—a new, glorious, sparkling, walled city in which Jesus himself, according to the Book of Revelation, is the temple. According to the Newsweek poll, 13 percent of Americans imagine heaven as a city.
The world of the Bible was, mostly, a desert world—a world of farmers who yearned for rain and feared the weather. Gardens—walled, protected from the elements and avaricious predators, abundant with ripe fruit, flowing with water, honey, oil, and wine—were the best kind of place a poor desert farmer could imagine. Indeed, a verdant and protected garden was almost beyond imagining. Garden walls and gates are crucial to the biblical imagination; the idea of heaven as the Romantic poets or the American transcendentalists had it, as untamed nature—mountain ranges and rolling fields—was possible only when humans had sufficiently built insulating walls around themselves.
In Eden, according to Genesis, God put “every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food,” as well as a river that parted four ways, and “every animal of the field and every bird of the air.” There He put the tree of knowledge, of course, which had not yet been eaten from. Abundance, perfection, innocence, a time before strife and disappointment—Eden is all of this.
Christian monks in the Middle Ages believed that the Garden of Eden existed somewhere on earth, but it was far away and impossible to attain. Through or beyond Eden was heaven. In an effort to orient Christian believers properly in the world, these monks drew maps—less for navigational purposes than to illustrate the primacy in the world of Christ and heaven. They put Eden on these maps, far off to the east (Genesis describes Eden as being in the East), sometimes behind walls, rivers, or mountain ranges. The Ebstorf map, created in the thirteenth century and destroyed in the bombing of Hannover in 1943, showed Eden beyond China, behind a ring of mountains. The Hereford map, at Hereford Cathedral, in England, drawn around 1300, is more than four feet long and five feet high and depicts a whimsical world, where monsters and dog-headed men reside on blobby continents. Palestine is disproportionately large, to accommodate all the biblical scenery. Eden is behind an impassable wall near the top; directly above, Christ sits in judgment. Eden—and heaven—exist, but you can’t get there from here. Christopher Columbus thought he had found Eden or something like it when he landed in South America in 1498. “I believe that the earthly Paradise lies here, which no one can enter except by God’s leave,” he wrote. Three-hundred-odd years later, the reclusive American poet Emily Dickinson wrote that
“Heaven”—is what I cannot Reach!
The Apple on the Tree—
Provided it do hopeless—hang—
That—“Heaven” is—to Me!
In medieval and Byzantine art, heaven was signaled by gold paint. Flat, two-dimensional saints and angels floated in orderly rows against gold scrims. Halos designated divinity—an appropriation by Christian painters from the Greeks, via the Roman artists who used halos to crown images of their emperors. In the Renaissance, as art and philosophy turned their focus away from an idealized Christian community and toward the individual, images of heaven changed, too, and the Garden of Eden became a popular subject, with people and animals frolicking in all innocence. In Sandro Botticelli’s La Primavera (1477–1478), what some interpreters view as the Blessed Virgin stands in the center of a lush wood on a flower-strewn meadow. Angels dance around her, free of constraining garments, their bodies seemingly weightless. The branches over their heads offer abundant fruit, within easy reach of plucking. (In this heaven, Dickinson’s apple is easily attainable.) In Benozzo Gozzoli’s fifteenth-century fresco in Florence’s Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, Paradise looks like Tuscany, with cypress trees in rows, birds flitting among rocky outcroppings, flowering trees and berry bushes in bloom. One of God’s angels has wings like a peacock’s tail. “Paradise,” said the Florentine statesman Lorenzo de’ Medici, “means nothing other than a most pleasant garden, abundant with all pleasing and delightful things.”
This image, a lush and peaceful garden, protected from the corrosive influences of the world, where people live in harmony and innocence, still lingers in popular concepts of heaven. In Just Like Heaven, a 2005 movie starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo, a heartbroken landscape architect falls in love with the lively spirit of a woman whose comatose body is near death in the hospital. Near the end of the film, he restores her to consciousness with a kiss, but she cannot remember who he is. He jogs her memory—and resuscitates her love—by building her a rooftop garden, canopied, blossoming, and abundant. The garden is heaven on earth, a place away from the world where this contemporary Adam and Eve can pick up where they left off, wiser from their encounters with mortality, but existing in all innocence again.
The word paradise has its roots in the word pairidaeza, which means “walled garden” in the ancient language of the Persian priesthood, and many ancient cultures—the Greeks and the Egyptians—talked about a safe and fertile place where certain people would go after death. In the fifth century BCE, the Greek poet Pindar talked about this place as the Isle of the Blessed:
There flowers of gold shine like flame,
Some on bright trees on the land,
Some nourished by the sea.
“Paradise” continues to hold connotations of safety and abundance. Paradise Valley is one of Arizona’s most affluent communities, with an average household income of over $150,000 a year; Paradise Garden is one of the country’s largest mail-order flower-bulb business, and also the name of a restaurant-nightclub in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where people from Russia get married and hold boisterous parties with much drunkenness and sparkly outfits. It shares its name with the all-you-can-eat buffet at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas: there diners feast on a fresh fruit bar, a salad bar, prime rib, and littleneck clams as they look out of floor-to-ceiling glass panes at flamingos playing among waterfalls.
Nowhere is the idea of heaven as a paradise garden more important than in Islam, established in the seventh century CE in one of the hottest, driest, most inhospitable spots in the world. No wonder, then, that the Qur’an, Islam’s holy book, promises that after death, the faithful will go to a garden. They will inhabit “gardens beneath which rivers flow,” and rest among fountains “gushing in torrents at their command.” There are four rivers in the Islamic paradise, one of milk, one of honey, one of wine, and one of water. As befits a religion founded in a place of relentless heat, Islam promises that in paradise, food won’t spoil. The paradise gardens produce a variety of fruits, but especially pomegranates. (In some mystical Jewish traditions, heaven is also described as a garden of pomegranates, and when the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung had a near-death experience, he imagined himself to be in a pomegranate garden, too. Pomegranates—indigenous to the Middle East—are significant because their dramatic red color symbolizes blood, and their many seeds fertility.)
In the Muslim paradise, according to the Qu’ran, there is wine (forbidden to Muslims on earth), but it doesn’t make you drunk. Men who have spent their lives toiling beneath a burning sun or brutally fighting over small patches of sand will greet each other with the word salaam, or “peace.” They will wear gold bracelets and green robes of silk and recline upon upholstered couches while waiters pass goblets of cool, thirst-quenching beverages. Sensual pleasures of every sort will be granted in Paradise, not least among them the attentions of the houris—dark-eyed, full-breasted spirit women, who live “confined to pavilions…undefiled before them by humans or Jinn.” (“Jinn,” according to the Qur’an, are spirits made by Allah from fire, neither angels nor demons.) The Hebrew Bible and the New Testament may be vague about heaven, but the Qur’an is not.
THE HEAVENLY CITY
Fighting for parity in our imaginations is the idea of “the New Jerusalem,” the celestial city. In 1987, the actress Diane Keaton made a strange little movie called Heaven, in which she interviewed dozens of people about what they imagined heaven to look like. A surprising number—surprising to me, because “city” never enters my own notions of heaven—cited urban places. “Like L.A., New York, Chicago,” said one. “Seven million times bigger than New York City,” said another. The conservative Roman Catholic priest Father Richard John Neuhaus, who passed away in 2009, liked to imagine heaven as something like Manhattan. An intellectual and an aesthete devoted to his many friends, Neuhaus adored his hometown. “I have sometimes suggested,” he once wrote, “that over the heavenly gates will be a sign: ‘From the Wonderful People Who Brought You New York City, the New Jerusalem.’…I add that those who in this life did not like New York City will have another place to go.”
Jerusalem was the center of Jewish (and Christian) life from at least 600 BCE until 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed it and dispersed the people who lived there. It was not a large town, or politically very important. But at its center, on a high hill, the same hill where Abraham reportedly drew his knife to slay his beloved son Isaac, was the Temple. It was the most sacred place in Judaism, the province of the highest priests, site of the only altar on which Jews were permitted by law to make their sacrifices. Its destruction—not once, but twice, first in 586 BCE and then in 70 CE—created psychic wounds from which Jews still suffer today. The heavenly city promised in the book of Revelation is Jerusalem, more magnificent than it ever was in reality. The narrator sees “the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God.” It has jeweled walls and pearl gates and streets of gold. The earliest renderings of heaven in Christian art depicted the “Heavenly Jerusalem”: a mosaic from 440 CE on the walls of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome shows a glittering blue-gold city, with the apostles, rendered as lambs, waiting outside the gates.
All of the churches in America’s cities do good deeds in one way or another—homeless ministries and soup kitchens, economic renewal and education programs—and many of them use “New Jerusalem” language to inspire and motivate their volunteers. In 1993, Anthony Pilla, then the Roman Catholic bishop of Cleveland, launched “The Church in the City,” which still gives grants for urban renewal projects. In a speech, Bishop Pilla made the link between a better Cleveland and heaven. The New Jerusalem, he said, “is a promise, a challenge and an invitation…to begin now to participate in the life of that heavenly city by practicing the mercy and justice that will make our earthly cities a reflection of that city which is to come…even as we wait for new heavens and a new earth, let us begin to build a new city of justice and peace.” A Salt Lake City urban planner named Mike Brown, who is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, fantasized on his blog about the opportunities in heaven for a man with his skill set. “I dream of someday sitting in the back of a room and having the Lord Himself call on me to be part of the committee to design the New Jerusalem.”
Most of us imagine that heaven is all these things—city, garden, banquet, home—and none of them, too. It is, we tell ourselves, beyond human understanding. Owen Gingerich is an astrophysicist at Harvard University who spent his boyhood in a small Mennonite community in Iowa and continues, at age eighty, to believe firmly in a supernatural, creative God. Gingerich is an expert both in “the heavens”—that is, the sun, the moon, the stars, and the forces that make them move, as well as galaxies beyond the ones we can see with our telescopes—and in “heaven.” He has participated in innumerable Faith versus Reason debates, debates he considers, on some level, fruitless. God is God, he would argue, and nature is nature. I visited him because I hoped he might have some idea about where heaven, physically, might be.
He does, but his idea would not help anyone seeking to find heaven in a spaceship. Gingerich is a small man with a full head of white hair, and on the day I met him he was wearing jeans and a casual blazer. He is known for being something of a jokester: when teaching Newton’s third law of motion to undergraduates, he used to propel himself out of the lecture hall using a fire extinguisher. The afternoon I visited Gingerich followed a wet and stormy morning, and the professor’s parrot-blue rain gear—jacket and pants—was draped over the chairs in his office. When I asked him, “Where is heaven?” he rose and, without explanation, walked over to a shoulder-high safe within his office. From it, he pulled out a small English almanac dated 1592—and illustrated with drawings of the universe as conceived by Copernicus.
Copernicus envisaged all the planets circling the sun. In one conceptual sweep, he overthrew all the Aristotelian conventions about the earth’s place in the universe, and, by extension, the location of heaven. Earth (and its inhabitants) was no longer neatly contained beneath the sphere of the fixed stars, protected and governed by God in heaven. Copernicus described a boundless universe; God’s home—now also out of bounds—had to be reimagined completely. “There was a lot of trauma with abandoning heaven as a nearby, physical place,” Gingerich says. “People had to get over that.”
Within the pages of the four-hundred-year-old pamphlet was a small, folded map, which Gingerich showed me, handling his precious book casually, as though it were the latest issue of National Geographic. There was the sun, encircled by Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn—the only planets then discovered. Surrounding them all, marked by tiny stars extending outward to the edges of the page, was the infinite universe. Printed in the margins was this explanation by the English astronomer Thomas Digges: “This orbe of stares fixed infinitely up extendeth hit self in altitude sphericallye.” It is here, beyond the stars and the orbiting planets, that heaven lies, “the very court of coelestiall angelles devoid of greefe and replenished with perfite endlesse joye the habitacle for the elect.”
The more we know about the universe, the more we have to reimagine heaven, the “habitacle for the elect.” We know for sure it is not in the sky, Gingerich tells me, nor is it anywhere in the known universe. For Gingerich, who by profession imagines places he cannot see, the out-of-place-ness of heaven presents no conceptual problem. Modern astrophysicists talk about multiverses, parallel universes beyond the spaces we know, governed by physical laws other than the ones we understand here. “These multiverse spaces are very much like heaven,” he tells me, “something we can conceptualize but never observe.” Heaven is simply…somewhere else. Its location is, as Gingerich says, “unanswerable”—but the question does not keep him up at night.
More challenging to Gingerich is the idea of submitting his individuality to the perfection of eternity, for humans are biochemical organisms that change from one decade to another—indeed from one millisecond to another. We grow, we learn, we remember, we forget, we deteriorate. We eat, we digest, we excrete. We make love, we sleep, we awake slightly different from what we were yesterday, our fingernails and our hair invisibly longer. The tendons that move my fingers over this keyboard wear out over time, the skin on my hands grows more delicate. Yet the movement of my fingers produces this book—eventually—and as I write I learn things I didn’t know before. For Gingerich, the most difficult question about heaven is not where but how. How will the human organism, so defined by change, exist in eternity?
“Personally,” says Gingerich, looking at me over his wire-rimmed glasses, “I say heaven is a great mystery. If I’m me, and I have an infinite amount of time, what will I do to stop from being bored? I imagine I will be learning Arabic and Sanskrit and learning it and forgetting it over and over again. I would like to see my mother again. But am I going to see my mother again as a thirty-year-old and me as an eighty-year-old?…What is it that constitutes me? How can it be preserved when we’re part of an ever-changing stream? Are we going to be in a changeless state? But if we’re learning, we’re changing. The whole concept is so full of conundrums; one has to have hope in one type of continuity, but a continuity so inconceivably different from what we’re in now that you get a headache from imagining it.”
How much easier, says Gingerich, to imagine heaven as they did in the Middle Ages, a nearby physical place where God lived with saints and angels, arranged in neat rows, like a church choir. With our angel-studded Christmas cards and blue-sky children’s books that show heaven as a pretty place “up there,” Gingerich says, we are “still stuck—with one foot in the Middle Ages and the other foot on this modern view of space.” I go home on the Amtrak train, wondering how on earth people might take comfort in a place they cannot know.