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What a find! While browsing through some very old books at a recent visit to St. Ignatius Library, (a Traditional Catholic library) I found myself reaching for a tiny, old, dusty book on the bottom shelf, titled Our Home in Heaven by Max Caron. Dated 1915, Nihil Obstat: Joannes N. Strassmaier, S.J., Censor Deputatus; Imprimatur EDM. CAN. Surmont, Vicarius Generalis... The text on the inside cover reads: From the French of the Abbe Max Caron, Superior of the Little Seminary at Versailles, Translated by Edith Staniforth.
This book is a thrill of the infinite. Consider the fact that God is not finished with His Creation, the world, the universe the infinite. We are living in His pause. On the 7th day He rested... what next?
"Where is the place of immortality?" A celebrated impious writer said, speaking of the Christians: "They do not know where to place their heaven, which is a proof that it does not exist."
We begin by asking ourselves whether it is from Science that we must seek enlightenment as to the origin, and end of human destinies. Far be it from us to speak ill of Science! Have not our Sacred Books pronounced this great saying: The Master of all Science is God? Although the laws which constitute Science are as old as the world, we have only begun. * Science had promised us to do away with Mystery. Not only has it not done away with it, but we see now clearly that it will never elucidate it.
Philosophers too, so magnificent in their promises, fail miserably in their accomplishments. * It is true that, from time to time, beautiful pages on God, the soul, virtue, immortality, flow from their pen, inspired by the sheer weight of truth. For every soul is naturally Christian. And having, nearly always, been born and brought up in the truth, they only lose it by degrees. But, by a just punishent of their pride, night has succeeded in their soul to the truth they have disowned and betrayed. And after a flight that carries the reader away, turn over the page, and you come across some such avowal as this:
"Ah! my friend, how unfortunate we are, we poor philosophers, for whom the prolongation of our existence is only a hope, an ardent desire, a fervent prayer! Would that I possessed my mother's virtue and her faith! To argue is to doubt, and to doubt is to suffer! Faith is a sort of miracle. What happiness it gives when it is sincere, when it is strong! How often in my study I have raised my eyes to Heaven, and asked God to reveal to me, and still more to grant me, immortality!"...Santa Rosa
The solution then is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, indeed, does not teach like a rhetorician; He makes no use of oratorical delivery; He does not discuss like a Master before His disciples; He affirms as God: "I am," He says, "the Way the Truth, and the Life." Such light is shed by His words, such certainty is evolved from His statements that the understanding is dazzled, the will subdued, and the soul, enraptured, can only repeat the cry of admiration: "Never did man speak like this man!"
But the words of the God of the Gospel are never more positive than when He speaks of the kingdom of Heaven from which He came, and to which He will soon return in order to prepare a place for us:
"What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?
Not only our soul will live beyond this world. We are a natural whole, (Bossuet) in order that our immortality should be perfect, our body must live again with our soul in the world beyond the grave.
St. John 5: "Amen, Amen, I say unto you, the hour cometh wherein all that are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that have done good things shall come forth unto the resurrection of life.
As there is only one God, so there is only one Universe. This earth itself revolves in Heaven, is one of the elements of Heaven, and represents for us a place of abode in Heaven. Peaceably seated on this earthly barque, already we float in the infinite, our eternal habitation. But alas! ...we, poor sons of Adam, poor daughters of Eve, we know only too well that the world we inhabit does not represent to us an abode in Heaven! The hurricane of sin has passed over our globe, and of a world which should have been a Paradise for man, it has made a valley of tears.
With all its present splendour, the Universe is not yet completed. The great work of Creation will only attain perfection when the Seventh Day is accomplished.The six days which Moses speaks of in Genesis were periods, each of which may have lasted thousands of centures. God was then preparing a temporal abode for man: the Earth. The Bible says: on the Seventh Day God rested. "Nothing moves for the sake of moving," said St. Thomas, "but in order to arrive." St. Peter wrote: There will be one day, new heavens and a new earth. The great Apostle Paul is plainer still:For every creature groaneth and travaileth in pain even till now...waiting for the adoption of the sons of God.
Words of Bossuet..."The eternal repose of the Blessed was figured to us from the beginning of the world, when God, having drawn His creatures out of nothing, and disposed them in such an admirable order during six days, proceeded to establish and sanctify the day of rest, in which, as Holy Scripture says, 'He rested from all His work.' You know well, Christians, that God, to whom nothing is difficult, does not need relaxation from His work, and you also know that, having consecrated this day of rest, He has not ceased since then to act incessantly. My Father, said the Son of God, worketh even unto now, and if He ceased for a moment to sustain the whole Universe by the might of His power, the sun would stray from its course, the sea would burst its bounds, the earth would totter on its axis - in short, all nature, in one moment, would not return to its original chaos, but be totally lost and cease to exist. When, therefore, it pleased God to sanctify the seventh day, and to constitute it His day of rest. He wished to make us understand that after the continual action by which He developed the whole order of the ages, He had appointed a last day, in which He would rest with His elect. This is the mysterious Sabbath, this is the day of rest which is reserved for God's people, according to the doctrine of the Apostle: Itaque relinquitur sabbatissimus populo Dei in the learned Epistle to the Hebrews."
It is very evident, indeed, that this Universe which dazzles us with its splendour, and makes us giddy with its immensity, is only a palace in process of construction. The suns, the stars, the innumerable worlds which we see with our eyes, or suspect through our calculations, are only the materials which are being used for the eternal dwelling which God is preparing in order to receive His Elect, and which He will inhabit with them.
"Source of all our blessings," cried St. Augustine, commenting on God's rest on the seventh day, "give us Thy peace, a peace which cannot decay. For this admirable and beautiful harmony of so many excellent creatures will pass away on the day when their end is accomplished. They will have their evening as they have had their morning." Confessions, book 13, chap. 35
But this is such a great truth, and it opens out already such vast horizons to our mental visions of the eternal world, that we wish to enlarge on it, and that is what we shall do in the two next chapters.
Let us never turn our backs on Science: for God made it, and in the Holy Scriptures He is pleased to call Himself the Master of Science; Deus scientiarum Dominus est. The different sciences, indeed, even when they remain purely natural, are so many avenues which end in, or rather which rise to the only centre: "Truth." Now, Truth is God. "A little learning takes us away from God; a great deal brings us back to Him" . . . Bacon
Contemplation of the heavenly spheres resulted in the Lawgiver of Astronomy Kepler to write the ecstatic words..."Eight days ago I saw the first ray of light; three days ago I saw daylight; now at last comes the full blaze of sunlight, the most admirable contemplation. There is nothing to hold me back; I surrender to my own enthusiasm. I am ready to challenge mankind with the frank confession that I have stolen the golden vessels of the Egyptians in order to build a tabernacle for my God far away from idolatrous Egypt. If men pardon me for this, I shall rejoice; but if they are irritated against me, I am resigned. The die is cast, I shall write my book. Whether it is read now or in a future age matters little to me. It can afford to wait for a reader. Did not God wait six thousand years before giving Himself someone to contemplate His works?"
In short, the great astronomer had just perceived that our world is only a grain of dust in comparison with the immensity of the Universe. By the sole power of his genius, Kepler had divined the immensity of the Creator's work. The marvellous laws which govern Creation had been made manifest to him; and his soul was dazzled and confounded in the presence of such power, such greatness, and such beauty. The Universe which he suspected of being immense we now know to be, in a measure, infinite. All know that the ray of light which starts from an object carries with it the image of that object as it was at the moment when the ray left it. Thus the ray of light which started from our earth six thousand years ago bears with it to the worlds it reaches at this moment the sight of Adam and Eve awaking to life in Paradise from the hand of God! The ray which will bring them the vision of the Son of God dying on Calvary to save the unhappy children of Adam and Eve will only reach them in four thousand years. God, who is present in these worlds as He is present everywhere, sees it. This gives us an idea of that truth which the Christian religion lays down as a dogma, that for God there is neither past nor future, but that all the events which have happened, or will happen, in time are always present to His vision.
But what confounds our imagination, yet fills it with delight, is the fact that these millions of worlds we should, no doubt, say hundreds of millions, instead of remaining stationary in the depths of the sky, as they appear to us, journey through space with a giddy velocity. They resemble a countless fleet navigating in an ocean without shores. Each vessel, preceded or followed by ships like itself, carries out its evolutions round a superior ship, which in its turn obeys the orders of the flag-ship. But this fleet never returns to the same quarter. Neither does it revolve on itself; but with stupefying precision, and a rapidity which defies all calculation, it seems to advance towards a mysterious harbour situated in infinite depths! Confronted with the marvels of God's almighty power, poor human science has nothing left to say. But the Christian religion has in store for us sublime answers as Max Caron continues to explain.
THE TEACHINGS OF FAITH...""But we look for new heavens, in which justice dwelleth."_St. Peter Let us listen to Jesus Christ, when He speaks of Heaven to His Apostles, in His admirable discourse after the Last Supper: "Whither I go you cannot come...In my Fathers's house there are many mansions....I go to prepare a place for you. And if I shall go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to Myself, that where I am you also may be." St. John 13 &14.
Not only is there one Heaven, according to Scripture, distinct from the world we live in, but there are several, since St. Paul tells us that he was rapt in ecstasy, even to the third heaven. St. Peter also says: "When the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with the burning heat, we look for new heavens and a new earth...in which justice dwelleth.
Origen, at the beginning of the third century, speaking of the death of Christ, said: "The altar was Calvary, but the blood of the Victim bathed the Universe."
The supreme law for all creatures is to tend to perfection. This law may meet with obstacles in the case of creatures indowed with free will, such as Angels and men, but in the case of purely material creatures it cannot fail to be fulfilled. Consider the stars in their evolutions across space: they have to traverse incommensurable distances with inconceivable rapidity; but not one of them is ever behind its time, even a quarter of a second! Yet most of them have been coming to the meeting-place for thousands of years, and thousands of millions of miles!
If you ask Theology where the Universe is going to the answer is easy; "Nothing moves for the sake of moving, but in order to arrive." . . . St Thomas. The world we inhabit and all the other worlds in existence are marching towards their completion that is to say, their full perfection.
Yes, for us who believe in the Gospel, it is more than a hope, it is a dogma; there exists already in the mysterious depths of the Universe a transfigured world which is the abode of Christ and His Elect. This is the dogma which, the Church brought back from the mountain of the Ascension, and from that time she continually discourses on it to her children. Hear what the greatest of her doctors, St. Augustine, declares in the first centuries of the Christian era: "Do not doubt that Jesus Christ as man is now in the place from whence He will come again. Do not forget, and retain faithfully what the Christian Faith teaches us, that Christ is risen from the dead, that He has ascended to Heaven, that He is seated at the right hand of the Father, from whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead. Accoding to the testimony of the two Angels, He will come again in the same manner as He was seen ascending to Heaven - that is to say, in the same form, and with the same body, to which He has given immortality without in any way changing its nature.
"we have not here a lasting city, but we seek one that is to come." Hebrews 13; 14.
If scientists tell me that this world which is now my Universe is being hurried away in the wake of other worlds which are infinitely more powerful, and which will one day absorb it, I listen with pleasure, for my Sacred Books have already told me this, and I was convinced of its truth. This little earthly Universe is only a tent set up for the passage of the Elect; and one day, when the great human caravan has finished its passage from time to eternity, God will fold this tent as men do in the desert when the last traveller has gone.
But, above all, let the scientists tell me of the splendours of those distant regions which derive their light from suns impossible to count; repeat to me the harmonies of those choirs of stars marching like armies; describe to me, if you will, those collections of stars on which the glow of a thousand thousand dawns sheds the light of an eternal day: my soul leaps with a divine enthusiasm. For I recognize then the regions of which the great Apostle of Christ, my master, had a glimpse in passing, but of which he was powerless to tell us more than that.. "eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived; what God has prepared for His elect."
If in certain respects the world was made for men, it is necessary that when man's body is glorified, the elements which compose this world should also be improved, in order that Creation may become a more suitable abode and wear a more smiling aspect. For the Apostle says that corruption cannot possess incorruption. Places which have been profaned by certain crimes must undergo a purifying process before the holy mysteries can be celebrated there; in the same way the elements must be purified before their glorious transformation. (St. Thomas, supra, Q.LXXIV)
St. Peter informs us that this transformation of the world will take place by fire. When the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with the burning heat, we look for new heavens and a new earth, in which justice dwelleth.
Let us not believe that these worlds with which Divine power has peopled space will one day be annihilated. Why, indeed, should God have drawn the Universe from nothingness if He was one day to plunge it back again?
As we have said already, the Universe does not return to nothingness; on the contrary, it continues its march towards that perfection which is the plenitude of its being. On this point Science agrees with Theology; and common sense declares it by the very name of Universe which is given to Creation as a whole, for the etymology of this word in universus; turned towards unity.
When the millions and hundreds of millions of worlds now scattered throughout infinite space have attained the point assigned to them from the beginning by almighty power, when the heavens have been dissolved and purified by the heat of fire, then, according to St. Peter, will come the great day of the Lord. Then the seventh day of the week of Creation will end, and the work of the Creator will attain perfection. Then there will be one fold and one shepherd, as Christ declared. It is evident that this was the eternal world which the great Seer of the Apocalypse beheld in the distant centuries to come when he penned these lines: And I saw a new heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and the sea is no more. And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, "Behold the dwelling of God with men, and he will dwell with them. And they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes. And death shall be no more; neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain any more, For the former things have passed away." Apocalypse 21
From: Our Home in Heaven by Max Caron
