The primary way that C.S. Lewis caught my attention as a writer was his ability to make an analogy. This was attractive even before I became a teacher and realized the importance of analogy in the classroom. This was attractive to me even before I began to read heavily the works of St. Thomas Aquinas (namely, the Summa Theologiae, referred to heretofore as ST) and his insights concerning analogical language and our knowledge of God.
The blessed burden of the apologist, teacher, and evangelist is to creatively find new expressions by which to present the ever-ancient Faith. When it comes to Purgatory and the Christian understanding of the afterlife, I present a unique, engaging, and—I believe—persuasively accurate analogy.
We first must grant, as the Church does, that God is omnipresent. This is known by natural reason, but is also implied heavily in revelation (see Psalm 139 and Colossians 1:17). This omnipresence can be understood according to Aquinas’s third way, which demonstrates that God is the only necessary being in which all contingent beings subsist (ST I. Q 2. A 3). This is because God is being itself, what Aquinas called ipsum esse, and every other contingent thing’s existence participates within this ground of being (ST I. Q 4. A 2).
Aquinas also describes this omnipresence as “in all things by His power, inasmuch as all things are subject to His power…He is in all things by His essence, inasmuch as He is present to all as the cause of their being” in ST I, Q 8, A 3. Since God is utterly simple, as Aquinas shows in ST I, Q 3, God’s power being present somewhere is God being present.
If God is omnipresent, and everything that exists must exist “within” the ground of being, then this would also include hell. This is difficult to accept at first since there is theological language that describes hell as the absence of God, most notably the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 1033 and 1035.
I acknowledge the weight of this source, but like so much of the language that surrounds the afterlife, it is often more poetic than analytical. There are many distinctions to be made when it comes to how the “presence” of God can be reconciled given the fundamental, necessary reality of God’s omnipresence. However, this is not the scope of this article. What I seek to present is an imaginative presentation of how these realities can be understood.
Another important consideration is what the Bible says about the presence of God, which is consistent across the Old and New Testaments. Deuteronomy 4:24 and later Hebrews 12:29 describes God as a “consuming fire.” This is also illustrated in the famous burning bush scene with Moses in Exodus 3:14. God presents Himself as fire at the dedication of the Temple in 2 Chronicles 7:1-2, and Pentecost in Acts of the Apostles 2:3 as well.
When people think of fire and the afterlife, they think of Hell. Catholics may include Purgatory, but it would strike many as strange to say that fire should be applied to heaven. But is not heaven the unmitigated presence of God, the consuming fire? I bring this up to emphasize that God’s presence, as a consuming fire, can be understood to include all three “stages” of the afterlife.
Which brings me to my analogy. Maybe it has been a while for some of us since we have attended a high school or college party. If nothing else, you can imagine the scenario played out in an early 2000s high school movie as well. You walk into the house, and I bet everyone there falls into three different categories.
First, there are those who are enjoying everything the party has to offer. They walk in ready to party. This is due to their disposition as extroverts and because they know everyone there and how to party. Second, there are those who want to be there, know people, were invited by the host, but need to warm up to the party a little. They hang around until someone invites them into a circle or on the dance floor, maybe after some libations help them loosen up. Finally, there are those at the party that you wonder why they even showed up. They sulk in the corner, give dirty looks to other attendants, and generally bring down the vibe. Their presence at the party is actually making them more miserable.
How many different parties are taking place? One. But how many different parties were experienced? Three. The party is equally present to everyone attending, but that presence is experienced according to the attendees’ relationship to the party itself.
As you have probably figured, the group ready to party are the saints. They have made their entire lives a preparation for the full presence of God. Because God is sacrificial love, their preparation included heroic sacrifice done out of love. The second group, those who warm up to the presence, experience a purification in order to enter into the party more fully. The third, those whose presence in the same party is painful, are embittered to the party itself.
To clarify, the “party” is “God’s presence,” which does not change as God is immutable (ST I, Q 9, A 1). What changes is one’s experience of God’s presence. God’s presence is mitigated on earth, according to God’s will, so it is experienced differently than it will be in the afterlife, but it doesn’t make God less omnipresent. Similarly, God is omnipresent in the afterlife, but that presence is experienced differently depending on one’s relationship to God. The three different party-goers represent three different states of relationship, which is what causes the different experiences.
This is not meant to be a trite comparison of the joys of heaven or the purification of love. This is a reconciliation of a truth about God, His omnipresence, with a seemingly contradictory truth about the afterlife that can hopefully help the Christian view of the afterlife appear more reasonable. We are all going to die. We are all going to experience God’s presence. We just get to choose how we enter into it.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
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