by Brian Griffith.
If heaven was a realm of ultimate purity where the purest souls would dwell forever, then the ways people imagined paradise revealed their images of human perfection. If all vices or corruptions were cleansed away, what would true purity be like? In Buddhist nirvana or Hindu moksha, “paradise” was a state of mind, free from the suffering caused by desire, or the illusion of delimited identity. Souls free of such afflictions would no longer be drawn to incarnate in the material world, and instead would rest in heavenly bliss. In the literalizing or esotericizing teachings of most religions, the other world had several levels, ranging from lowest to highest. These levels included hells, purgatories, and heavens, usually leading upward to the highest court of God. In such cosmic orders, all souls would find their places according to their degrees of purity from worldly corruption.
On the other hand, heaven might be imagined as the fulfillment of every desire. Muslim theologians and poets commonly portrayed heaven as realm where the deserving would enjoy all good things forever. When Christian clerics such as Thomas Aquinas heard of Muslims describing heaven as an abode blessed with the joys of good food and sexual love, they responded with derision. The early Anglican bishop Joseph Hall admonished the Muslims, declaring that “Nature has no place in glory; here is no respect for blood; none of marriage; this grosser acquaintance and pleasure is for the paradise of Turks, not the heaven of Christians.”
In Christian tradition, sexuality was usually identified with the flesh, which was left behind after death. While sex on earth had to be conducted in a pure, strictly monogamous way, it seemed obvious that in the next world sex would have no place at all. Reportedly, Jesus claimed that men and women in heaven would not be married, but would live “like angels” (Mark 12:25). Paul explained that for those saved through Christ, there was neither male nor female (Galatians 3:27–28). That could mean that the genders were equal before God, but many Christians felt sure it meant that the saved in heaven would be androgenous spirits.
Over the next several centuries, Christian writers imagined heaven in ever-greater detail. According the “Apocalypse of Paul,” a gnostic text from around 350 CE, heaven had several levels for souls at different levels of sanctity. The Third Heaven was a luxurious garden of fruits, honey, and grapes, and this paradise was reserved for believers who had kept themselves pure from any sexual relations outside marriage. Those who had remained celibate their whole lives and suffered for God would receive blessings that were seven times greater. Concerning the moral of this story, Bart Ehrman observed that “Faith in Christ is not enough. A Christian had better not fall short in any way.”
In the more ascetic or monastic versions of Christianity, the highest courts of heaven were reserved for those untainted by sins of the flesh, or those who had fully repented from carnal desire. Those who aspired to live on earth as they would in heaven practiced holy chastity. And those who attained heaven would be freed from all corruptions of the body. As Augustine explained in great detail:
Both sexes will arise. For there will be no lust there, which is the cause of shame. For before they sinned they were naked, and the man and woman were not ashamed. So all defects will be taken away from those bodies, but their natural state will be preserved. The female sex was not a defect, but a natural state, which will then know no intercourse or childbirth. There will be female parts, not suited to their old use, but to a new beauty, and this will not arouse the lust of the beholder, for there will be no lust, but it will inspire praise of the wisdom and goodness of God, who both created what was not, and freed from corruption what he made.
For over 1,000 years, such visions of purity in heaven seemed to eliminate all notion that lovers and spouses might continue their special relationships in paradise. Christian clerics portrayed heaven as a place of adoration for God, where the saved never ceased to sing His praise. It seemed sacrilegious when some chivalrous poets portrayed visions of courtly love as the ultimate paradise, or even told of true lovers renouncing heaven to spend eternity in hell with their soulmates.
In recent centuries, however, the clerical vision of heaven as an everlasting worship service gave way to popular demand for greater sentimentality. Increasingly, love for God in heaven included love for neighbor, and those who died in Christ would rejoice to meet their loved ones there. Growing numbers of “romantics” insisted that passionate love was actually the most spiritual thing of all, both on earth and in heaven. In a book frankly named Pleasing Explanation of the Sensuous Pleasures of Paradise (1504), a celibate monk named Celso Maffei (1425–1508) described a paradise where the saved enjoyed glorified heavenly bodies, with love freed from all concern to control sins of the flesh: “Thus we will embrace our fathers, brothers and sisters. … The saints especially, will embrace Christ, who in turn will embrace them. … The same can be done to our beloved ones and to whatever male and female saint we want to kiss.”
Clearly, many Christians saw spirituality as less a matter of purity than of relatedness. These people couldn’t imagine heaven without the reunion of loved ones. Increasingly, they portrayed heaven as a place of communion, where the saved would share boundless affection. Some artists or poets portrayed souls arriving there, and being tenderly embraced by welcoming female angels. After his wife died in 1698, John Dutton was moved to write “An Essay Proving We Shall Know Our Friends in Heaven,” telling of how he would be reunited with her. However, Dutton was still puritanical enough to insist that their reunion would be strictly spiritual. There could be no sexual love in heaven, as otherwise “the angels … would certainly be seduced from their innocence and fall as Adam did.” Similarly, Lutheran pastor Philipp Nicolai emphasized (ca. 1600) that love for God and neighbor in paradise would be purely spiritual, with “no sinful concupiscence, no lascivious lust, no Epicurean pig’s desire.”
This slowly growing debate over the nature of heaven gradually escaped clerical control. Differing visions of ultimate love were competing for favor in a gradually more literate court of public opinion. For example, building on the counter-clerical literature of courtly love, Friedrich Schlegal published a novel called Lucinde (in 1799), which many readers denounced as pornography, and many others praised as a handbook for the religion of truest love. The book’s hero Julius proclaimed that his relationship with Lucinde was a “timeless union … of our spirits, not simply for what we call this world or the world beyond death, but for … our whole eternal life and being.”
By the 1800s in England, idealization of the family produced an afterlife vision of couples united in domestic bliss forever. This portrait of paradise proved enormously popular, especially among women, but many traditional clerics felt compelled to denounce it. A pious dean at St. Paul’s cathedral poured scorn on the very idea: “So these pious ladies desired to go to heaven, not as St. Paul did, ‘who desired to depart and be with Christ,’ but to be with their ‘John’ … amid all the amusements of earth and senses. Such degrading views of eternity are worthy rather of a Red Indian’s expectation, than of a Christian’s.” The women this dean denounced tended to feel that he was the one whose views of eternity were degrading. It seemed like an increasingly open question whether admission to paradise required upholding or abandoning such judgements.
—from the working draft of “How to Qualify for Immortality,” by Brian Griffith