more poetically expressed than in the seventeenth century by Henry King, Bishop of Chichester, in his celebrated An Exequy, written in 1657 after the death of his wife, Anne:
Sleep on (my Love!) in thy cold bed
Never to be disquieted.
My last Good-night! Thou wilt not wake
Till I thy fate shall overtake;
Till age, or grief, or sickness must
Marry my body to that dust
It so much loves; and fill the room
My heart keeps empty in thy tomb.
But hark! My pulse, like a soft drum
Beats my approach, tells thee I come;
And, slow howe’er my marches be,
I shall at last sit down by thee.
The thought of this bids me go on,
And wait my dissolution
With hope and comfort.
The third and commonest approach historically is a hybrid of the first two – somewhere to be with God alone, yet also a place where the imagination inevitably wanders into providing some shape and form, usually a garden, and to other relationships which may continue from earth.
All three approaches have their appeal depending on whether it is comfort, freedom from fear, or the search for another dimension beyond the banalities of earthly life that is prompting the seeker. Opinion has vacillated between this trinity – one theocentric (or based on God), another anthropocentric (focused on the human) and the third without a grand tag, but fundamentally a cocktail of the other two. Often all three have been promoted by different groups at the same time and the Churches, for their part, have never quite made up their minds.
The New Testament, for example, talks of heavenly liturgies, bodies that are but spirit and an angelic, celibate lifestyle in the hereafter. In the same theocentric vein, St Augustine spoke of death as the ‘flight in solitude of the Solitary’. The Protestant reformers, the Puritans and the Jansenists embraced the God-centred view of heaven. Yet alongside this trend, there has been a parallel one which insists on creating heaven in the image of a spruced-up earth. In the second century, Irenaeus of Lyons, taking his lead from Revelation, held that the chosen would, for a thousand years after their death, inhabit what was in effect a renewed earth. In this plan whatever you had been denied the first time round, you received in abundance in the rerun.
Heaven as a compensation for all you have missed on earth has always been an attractive gospel. In Renaissance times, theologians joined with humanists and artists in humanising heaven. Borrowing from the Golden Age and the Isles of the Blest (an alternative form for the Elysian Fields) of classical mythology, they fashioned a ‘forever environment’ where men and women met, played, kissed and caressed against a pastoral backdrop. Often God would be removed from direct participation in this pleasure garden and heaven would be given two or even three tiers, the furthest away being the domain of the exclusively spiritual, characterised solely in terms of intensity of light.
More recently in the eighteenth century, the influential, though much-neglected writings of the Swedish scientist-turned-religious-guru Emanuel Swedenborg gave the earth-linked heaven a romantic edge. He is one of the architects of the modern heaven. His Heaven and Hell, part of a body of works known as Arcana Coelestia, which were much-read and remarked upon by the remarkable William Blake among others, describes the author’s encounter with angels as he moves between the spirit world and the material world. It was an image to inspire both popular nineteenth-century authors and twentieth-century film-makers who turned heaven into a cosy, twee copy of the earth, where love and good will conquer all.
There has always, it should be noted, been traffic between the different positions on heaven. Usually it has ended up in the fudge of the third way. Some of those who once preached of a God-centred heaven changed their mind in later life when it seemed they were about to test the validity of their theories. Augustine, in old age, began describing an afterlife where God was very important but where there was time too for long lunches with old friends and enjoyment of physical beauty, but without, of course, his bête noire, sex.
The rise of Christian fundamentalism has added a new twist to the eternal three-way split. For many born-again Christians have embraced a concept known as rapture, which represents a new departure in thinking about heaven. It has grown out of a very particular reading of St Paul’s prediction that when God descends in judgement ‘those who have died in Christ will be the first to rise and then those of us who are still alive will be taken up in the clouds, together with them, to meet the Lord in the air’ (I Thess 4:14–17). This meeting will, the new breed of fundamentalists believe, be shortlived; a refuge in the time of trial predicted by Revelation before Christ instigates a millennium of direct rule on earth and the visitors to heaven return to take their rightful place at his side. The concept that heaven can be a temporary haven, almost a holiday destination, goes against every other Christian tenet. Yet it is disarmingly popular. A key exponent of rapture, the former Mississippi tug-boat captain turned Christian fundamentalist, Hal Lindsey, has seen his book, The Late Great Planet Earth, sell thirty-five million copies worldwide.
Such a reappraisal illustrates, in one sense, how flexible the idea of heaven (and indeed the New Testament) can be in the hands of believers. Something that can only live in the imagination is, by its very nature, almost impossible to control. Yet for many of us who have some kind of faith, it can be, for much of our lives, almost an irrelevancy. Until very recently, on the rare occasions that I plucked up the courage to look my post-mortem fate straight in the eye, my instinct had always been to postpone thinking about heaven. Focusing on the next world, it seemed to me, was a cop-out.
Heaven, I therefore know from experience, can very easily be left to one side as one of those tricky parts of the total religious package, accepted implicitly but without thought, something to think about on a rainy day. It largely depends on what stage of life you’re at. If the subject did come up in my teenage years at my Catholic school, it was as the flip side of hell, an altogether more worrying entity in those angst-ridden years. Heaven was certainly too much to contemplate in my fallen adolescent state. In my twenties, I lacked the romantic spirit of Keats who, at the age of twenty-five, when passion for life is at its peak (and also just a year before his death), wrote in Ode to a Nightingale:
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
But in my late thirties, the recent experience of losing one of my parents and then a much-loved mother-in-law has led me, if not to welcome death as a form of release like Keats, then to consider both it and heaven as never before. As I drove behind the hearse carrying my mother’s coffin to the church for her funeral, I thought of all the hundreds of times I had seen other sombre processions pass and scarcely paused in the business of living, let alone said a prayer. Belief, A. A. Gill once wrote, is like
