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Introduction to Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing (Part II of II)
Peter J. Kreeft

The Deathly Consequences of the Death of God

When the eternal Thou dies, humanity and nature become alienated—worse, they die too. The death of God is the death of nature and of humanity.

First, of nature. Once heaven is no longer a Father, nature is no longer a Mother. “She” becomes “it,” demythologized into dead atoms rather than living spirit. Her life forms are seen as merely external forms of merely physical life, evolving from the lifeless dust and returning to the dust again. The fundamental world-stuff is the dust of death.

Second, humanity in turn is reduced to a natural, not a supernatural being; highest among life forms, we too are made of the dust, and our destiny is simply to return to the dust. A new unity between humanity and nature arises to replace the old spiritual unity: the unity of dust, physical unity. Humanity and nature are one in death. First God dies; then humanity and nature are alienated; then humanity and nature die and find their oneness in death. When God is dead, death is God.

“God” here includes objective Truth and objective Goodness. The extent to which the consequences of the “death of God” have permeated Western civilization can be gauged by the extent to which people feel uncomfortable with such phrases as “objective Truth” and “objective Goodness,” “eternal verities” and “absolute values.” Even the linguistic shift from speaking of “goodness” to speaking of “values” reflects the death of God, for “goodness” is an objective concept, while “values” is a subjective concept, especially when used in the plural. “Good” means what is really good, but “values” mean whatever I (or we) value—our “sense of values.” Similarly, the shift from the use of the words “truth” and “knowledge” to the use of the word “consciousness” reflects the death of God and of objective Truth. For “knowledge” connotes a real, objective Truth—“knowledge” is always “knowledge of”—but “consciousness” can be a world unto itself without any objective Truth outside it to refer to or above it to judge it. “Knowledge” can be wrong (judged by objective Truth); knowledge can fail to reach its object, since it has an object. “Consciousness” need not have any object, thus is not judged, thus is never wrong.

Dostoyevsky saw with prophetic clarity that the death of God entails the death of objective Truth and objective values when he wrote, “if God does not exist, all things are permissible.”[17] Nietzsche and Sartre, from the opposite (atheistic) point of view, agree. Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols makes terrifyingly clear that when God is dead, “Truth” is dead too; and Sartre argues that “there can no longer be an a priori Good because there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think.”[18]

What then is left? God is dead; truth is dead; goodness is dead; humanity is dead; nature is dead. We can only blow up the bubble of death, empty within and empty without but expanding in size and power. As Nietzche saw, the “will to power” replaces the “will to truth.” If there is no God to fill us with his life, we can still fill nature with ours. If we cannot be spiritually impregnated by God, we can still physically rape Mother Nature. The “conquest of Nature” is the first idol that arises from the death of God.

“The conquest of Nature” means two things: power over nature and power over society, physical and social engineering, technology and totalitarianism. Both are extensively present in the modern West, the democratic West as well as the communist West. Democracy is no sure bulwark against totalitarianism, for democracy and totalitarianism are answers to different questions, not mutually exclusive answers to the same question. Democracy is an answer to the question: In whom shall the political power be located? The answer is: the people at large, or the majority of voters. Totalitarianism is an answer to the question: How much of human life shall be politicized, publicized, communalized? The answer is: all of it. Totalitarianism, though not as advanced in the democracies as under communism, is making inroads here. As the communist bloc is catching up to us in technology, we are catching up to it in totalitarianism, though more slowly. The two forms of humanity’s conquest of Nature are joining forces. Thinkers like Heidegger, Solzhenitsyn, and William Barrett insist Russia and America are spiritually indistinguishable insofar as they pursue the same end (the conquest of Nature) by different means.[19]

Despite the popularity of the Kingdom of This World on both sides of the iron curtain, the Kingdom has cracks in its foundation. Once this is seen, three reactions are possible: (1) a turning to the true kingdom, the Kingdom of God, (2) a turning to another idol-kingdom, the Kingdom of Self, or (3) a turning to nothing, to despair, loud or quiet.

The cracks in the foundation of the Kingdom of This World all amount to this: the idol simply doesn’t work. It does not deliver what it promises: heaven on earth, or even happiness. Pascal puts it very simply: “All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. . . . Yet all men complain. . . . A test which has gone on so long, without pause or change, really ought to convince us that we are incapable of attaining the good by our own efforts . . . this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite object.”[20]

The history of revolutions is most instructive here, and most depressing. Nowhere, perhaps, is the gap between promises and deliveries, the ideal and the real, more astonishing. The only thing more astonishing is the fact that we are not astonished by it, that we blandly accept it with the words “Oh well, that’s human nature.” Consider the difference between “liberty, equality, fraternity” and the Jacobins, Robespierre, the guillotine, and the eventual dictatorship of Napoleon; between the “new order” National Socialism promised and the old barbarian disorder it delivered; between “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and the dictatorship of the Kremlin. Then consider the fact that this discrepancy is the rule, not the exception. Our history is largely the history of hypocrisy. All sane men and women prefer peace to war, justice to injustice, understanding to misunderstanding, love to hate, freedom to enslavement; yet their history—our history—is a desert of war and injustice with rare oases of peace and justice. In heaven’s name, why?

To reply that it is because history is determined by the few bad guys oppressing the many good guys is impossibly naive. However different the political structures, the few necessarily emerge from, represent, and are followed by the many. They are humans, not Martians or demons; they are we. Furthermore, those nations that have overthrown the few by revolution are precisely the ones that best illustrate the discrepancy between the ideal and the real in the history of those revolutions. Every revolution has betrayed its ideals. (America never had a real revolution, only a War of Independence. Yet America, too, is increasingly betraying its original ideals.) Why?

I once had a dream that answered this question for me. It went like this. I had always thought that if I could only have adequate answers to two great questions, I would be wise: What is and what ought to be? What is the nature of reality and what is the purpose of human life? In the dream I realize that I (and everyone else) have answers to these two questions but not to a third question, and that is why we are not wise.

I find myself in the dream naked in a desert. There is nothing around me but sand—no trees, no lakes, no buildings, no animals. Everything is reduced to its lowest common denominator: stuff. And thus I know the nature of reality. Every form of stuff is made of stuff, matter; and I know matter because I too am made of matter. I know matter more adequately than a brilliant physicist who is an angel could know it: I know it from within. I also know; therefore there is mind as well as matter. That, too, I know from within. Finally, I know there is a God, for there is a sun in the sky (the sky seems to symbolize spirit, as the sand symbolizes matter, and the sun seems to be a God-symbol). However, I cannot see the sun, for every time I turn to look at it, it moves so as to stay behind my head all the time. But it always casts a shadow, so I know it is there.

So I know the nature of reality: sky and sand, “the sky above, the mud below,” spirit and matter; and I am both. Now for the next question: What should I do? What is the good, the end, the goal of my existence? As soon as I ask the question, I receive an answer I know is true, even though it sounds crazy, because it comes out of the sun and simultaneously out of a large yellow disc in my chest. The answer is, “Build the Taj Mahal.” (The Taj Mahal has always been to me the most beautiful, the most perfect building, and here it seems to symbolize the ideal society, the society we all want.)

I start to argue with the voice: How about a sand castle? I can’t build the Taj Mahal; I don’t even know the principles of architecture, and I have nothing but sand to build with. But the voice says to me: You can’t argue with me, you are me, or rather I am you. Where do you think I’m coming from, anyway? I look, and the voice is coming from the yellow disc in my chest. My own heart demands the Taj Mahal; it is I, not another, who demand perfection.

Then I realize the point: Even though I have adequate answers to the first two great questions (and so does everyone else), I am not wise because I do not have an answer to the third, far more difficult question: How? How does the naked ape build the Taj Mahal from sand? Though I know what I am and what I must do, I have no hope of doing it. It is the third question, the question of hope, that stumps me.

I think I will wake up now, having learned my lesson; but I don’t. And as I begin to get bored, I fool around with the sand and begin to think: There’s nothing else to do but to start building. Suppose I make some bricks out of this sand and build a brick wall and then a brick factory; and then I’ll build harder bricks in the brick factory and make a brick shovel to dig until I find some stone. Then I’ll build a stone smelter and smelt some iron ore out of the stone, and I’ll redo the Stone Age and the Iron Age and the Bronze Age—eventually I’ll redo all of human history, learn the principles of architecture, and build the Taj Mahal. I’m Adam, and I’ll do it right this time.

So I start making bricks. But I have no water or straw to mix with the sand. So I spit on the sand, and pull some hair from my head to mix with it, and the bricks hold together. I start to have optimistic dreams about the Taj Mahal, but the dreams are suddenly dashed. For as soon as I build the first brick wall up to six feet high, it collapses. Even when I build it three or four bricks thick, even when I dig a deep foundation for it, it always collapses as soon as it reaches six feet.

And that’s the end of the dream. No Taj Mahal. Not even a brick factory. Just failure.

The symbolism and the lesson seem obvious. What I’m teaching myself in the dream is that I can’t make something bigger and better than myself. I can’t pull myself up by my own bootstraps. Like water, I can’t rise above my own source. The first wall of what was eventually to become the Taj Mahal was built not just by me but of me: my hair and my spit was mixed with the world-stuff, the sand. Our societies come tumbling down because they are built of us: inferior material. We are the problem of war, of slavery, of injustice. The external war is just the outworking of the internal war. In the words of America’s greatest philosopher, Walt Kelly, author of the Pogo comic strip, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

That’s why the Kingdom of This World is as full of sand as the Kingdom of the Self; it is built by and for and of the Self. Self can no more find heaven in its world than in itself. To quote Pascal once again, “The Stoics say: ‘Withdraw into yourself, that is where you will find peace.’ And that is not true. Others say: ‘Go outside; look for happiness in some diversion.’ And that is not true: we may fall sick. Happiness is neither outside nor inside us: it is in God, both outside and inside us.”[21]

Not only may we fall sick, but we will certainly die. The fact of death, life’s only certainty, is the unanswerable refutation of both kingdoms. It is instructive that the most prominent representatives of the Kingdom of This World, the Marxists, have absolutely nothing to say, amid the tons of ink they spill on every other conceivable topic, about death except to condemn concern with it as “morbid.” And Marxism is not the only philosophy whose ship of hope founders upon the rocks of death:

Almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth. And . . . lest your longing for the transtemporal should awake and spoil the whole affair, they use any rhetoric that comes to hand to keep out of your mind the recollection that even if all the happiness they promised could come to man on earth, yet still each generation would lose it by death, including the last generation of all, and the whole story would be nothing, nor even a story, for ever and ever. [22]

The turn from the Kingdom of This World to the Kingdom of the Self does not solve the problem of death, but it is popular nevertheless, especially in America. Our Declaration of Independence includes one of its most famous slogans: “the pursuit of happiness.” It seems providentially fitting that the last published writing of the most brilliant and influential Christian apologist of the century, C. S. Lewis, was entitled, “We Have No ‘Right to Happiness.’”[23]

But wait. Didn’t the Greek and medieval philosophers say that all we do we do for the sake of happiness, that happiness was the end of human life? Yes, but they meant by “happiness” something quite different than what we moderns mean; for them “happiness” was an objective rather than a subjective term. It meant the state of spiritual health, eudaimonia, literally “good-spirit-ness.” It was not primarily a matter of feelings. For us, if we feel happy, we are happy; if we don’t, we’re not. The ancients, on the other hand, could feel happy and really be unhappy (for example, a successful tyrant), just as you can feel healthy and really be unhealthy. Or vice versa, as in the case of Job. A test question to distinguish the objective and subjective meanings of “happiness” is whether suffering can be part of happiness. In the modem, subjective sense, it can’t (unless you’re a masochist): in the ancient, objective sense, it can. Suffering is an occasion for wisdom, and wisdom is an essential ingredient in happiness. If happiness is objective, if it is not in us but we are in it, then its objective laws and principles may require subjective suffering on our part. Most great men and women of the past have both experienced and taught the creative value of suffering, the objective happiness of subjective unhappiness. Modern subjectivists cannot make that distinction.

The Heart as Teacher

We have seen how our idolatrous society cannot give us an answer to the question of heaven, the question of hope, the question of happiness; that its two kingdoms are idols; and that it is silent, hypocritical, or a failure in answering this crucial question. What can substitute for our traditionless society in teaching us what we may hope for? To what, you ask, can I turn now? Where am I to search? Which guru or authority or spiritual salesman should I listen to?

To your own heart. It is a teacher you can trust, for it will not despise you (it is you), and it is wiser than your head, wiser than you think. Listen to your heart. It will tell you for what you may hope; it will tell you “the meaning of life” if only you listen deeply. It will tell you of heaven.

Is heaven, then, in the heart?

By heaven, no! We have just exposed that idol, the Kingdom of the Self. Even though the heart’s “inner space” is infinitely greater than all “outer space,” heaven is infinitely greater than anything that has ever entered into your heart. Remember, “eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man.”[24]

What you will find in your heart is not heaven but a picture of heaven, a silhouette of heaven, a heaven-shaped shadow, a longing unsatisfiable by anything on earth. This book tries to raise that picture to consciousness.

What you will find in your heart is not heaven but a heavenly hole, a womblike emptiness crying out to be filled, impregnated by your divine lover. Heaven is God’s body; earth is ours.

What you will find in your heart is not heaven but “the highways to heaven.”[25] The highway is internal, not external; you can’t get to heaven by rocket ship. But what is internal, what is in the heart, is only the highway, not the goal. Heaven is infinitely greater than your heart.

What you will find in your heart is not heaven but a finger pointing to heaven. The Zen masters say: A finger is excellent for pointing at the moon, but woe to him who mistakes the finger for the moon!

But though you do not find heaven in the heart, you do find heaven with the heart. The heart is the gate of heaven and of hell:

Zen Master: I will show you the gates of heaven and hell. (He smacks the disciple from behind with his sword.)

Disciple (unsheathing his sword): You fake! I’ll kill you!

Master: Here open the gates of hell.

Disciple (sheathing his sword): I see.

Master: Here open the gates of heaven. [26]

Do you see? The heart is a great teacher. Listen to your heart. This book aims to help you do just that. It is a tour guide for your spiritual spelunking, your exploration of the heaven-shaped cave in your heart.

Many books have explored the heaven-shaped hole in the modern head, the meaninglessness of atheist and secularist philosophies. But there is not a single book in print whose main purpose is to explore the heart’s longing for heaven. For the heart is harder to explore than the head and has had fewer explorers. The field of the heart has largely been left to the sentimentalists. But sentiments are only the heart’s borders, not its inner country. We must discover this “undiscovered country.”

It is an undiscovered country because of the mistaken assumption that the heart’s business is not to see but only to feel. Pascal’s famous dictum, “the heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing,” is usually misunderstood—in fact, it is turned upside down—and interpreted as irrationalism.[27] But it says exactly the opposite: The heart has reasons. We must not patronize them or explain them away. The heart sees, and we must look with it, not only at it, if we are to see. When our eyes are healthy, we look with them, not at them; when they are diseased, we look at them or ask a doctor to look at them. We should do the same with the heart, our inner eye, our third eye. The psychiatrist looks at it when it is malfunctioning, but when it is functioning naturally, we look with it.

The activities of the heart are to believe, to hope, and to love. Each of the three has eyes. Take love. Look at the difference between looking at love and looking with love. When you read the verse from the Song of Songs in which the bridegroom says to the bride, “Behold, you are all fair, my love; there is not a spot or wrinkle in you,”[28] do you think this is delightful but foolish? That love is blind? Then you are looking at love, not with it, and looking at it as something pathological: a blindness. The lover insists on exactly the opposite: that he is not blind, that he sees something that is really there. Not the lover but the loveless one is blind; he sees only the caterpillar, while the lover sees the butterfly. Love has X-ray vision. In the Song of Songs, according to the wisest interpreters, the bridegroom symbolizes God and we are the bride. God believes in our butterfly, hopes for our butterfly, loves us as butterflies. We see the present sinner; God sees the destined saint. Dare we call God a fool? His judgments are not blind but clear-sighted, accurate, and exact. Love is the highest accuracy. How can love be blind? God is love. Is God blind?

So we had better believe him when he calls us “all fair.” Human lovers share the divine secret; they also see with the heart. Only one who loves you really knows you, and the deeper the love, the deeper the knowledge. The nonlover may know everything about you, but only the lover knows you. Everyone agrees with this in practice, if not in theory. Whom do you trust to understand you best, a genius who hates you or is indifferent to you, or a simpleminded person who loves you?

Take Dante, poetry’s greatest lover. No woman has ever been so extolled in verse as his Beatrice. Now suppose you told Dante, in your reasonable, “realistic” way, that his Beatrice was really only a very ordinary girl, the daughter of a Florentine merchant, and not the goddess his poetry makes her out to be; that he was only “projecting” his own poetic beauty onto Beatrice. I think he would challenge you to a duel to defend the honor of his beloved; and then, much more important, if you both survived the duel, he would challenge you to a debate. He would argue and insist that his seeing of Beatrice is objectively true and the whole world’s seeing is false.[29] The lover’s X-ray vision sees through the beloved’s body, temperament, and behavior into the heart; heart sees heart; “deep calleth unto deep.”

According to the Greek philosophers, reason is the highest thing in us. Reason should judge love; we are to love and live according to reason. But according to Christianity, we are to love beyond reason, as God does, with agapē, nonjudgmental love, love that does not follow worthiness but creates it. Reason follows love rather than love following reason; only if we love will we know. When asked how to understand his teachings, Jesus replied, “If your will were to do the will of my Father, you would understand my teachings.”[30] On another occasion he said, “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.”[31] What we see, what we understand, of God and each other, depends on our heart, on our faith and hope and love.

This must be dismissed as nonsense in science, of course, for science operates on the principle not of trust but of mistrust, systematic doubt—like a prosecuting attorney. It cross-examines nature, “puts Nature on the rack and compels her to bear witness,” as Bacon puts it.[32] But in personal relations the opposite holds; we know only when we trust and love and hope for the other. You can’t understand a person as an object of inquiry, as you can understand nature, for the very good reason that a person is not an object, therefore not an object of inquiry. What makes a person is precisely being a subject, not an object. To know a person you must get within, you must “walk in his moccasins.” This is the work of the heart.

The heart, then, has eyes. Its deepest love and longing, the longing that nothing earthly can satisfy, is an eye. It sees something; it tells us something. It is not merely a psychological fact, a piece of flotsam or jetsam on our inner psychic sea. Instead of looking at it and explaining it, or explaining it away, let us look with it. This book is the thought-experiment of looking with the eye of the heart and exploring what we see of the deep desire hidden there, the desire for heaven.

It is an obscure and dangerous journey. The deeper we go, the less clear we become to ourselves. Heidegger gives a devastatingly honest answer to the fear that if I take this journey, “I hardly know anymore who and where I am”: “None of us knows that, as soon as we stop fooling ourselves.”[33] What lamp lights up our interior well as we descend to where the surface daylight no longer shines? We find a glow emanating from the depths, an interior source of light: the eye of the heart. Where head-lights fail, the heart lights up itself.

Our strength to make this descent is our vulnerability. To ascend the sky of reason we must become hard: doubting, critical, endlessly testing and proving. We need hard heads but soft hearts. Here in the depths, our strength is our softness. We must become little children, for only a little child is strong enough to open the greatest gate, the gate of the Kingdom of heaven. That gate is the heart, and who can open your heart like a child? The child in us is called by three names: faith (trust, openness), hope (idealism, wonder), and love (adoration, yea-saying). These are all terribly vulnerable things, quickly laughed at by a cynical, sophisticated world.

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. [34]

Read that wonderful quotation a second time—slowly and thoughtfully and heartfully this time—and ask yourself honestly: Is this true? Is this the secret in me?

If it is, we’d better start exploring it.