The Beatific Vision

John Zaleski

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“Do not be afraid.”1 Those were the words that heralded Christ’s birth. They were well chosen; for the angel who spoke them cut a fearsome figure. To those poor shepherds, on a cold night, he must have seemed the fullness of God’s majesty. But he came to deliver a message that was far from majestic. Christ was born, a baby, smaller than the animals grazing the fields. But the angel had said something else very strange and unexpected. His awesome presence had rent the sky, his light had filled the plains, he had trumpeted his voice and bellowed forth: “I bring you good tidings of great joy.” 2 These words must be our measure and our guide. They must be our key to understanding the incarnation, when God became man in Christ. For they reveal something wonderful. In the incarnate Christ we find an immense and all-encompassing joy. We find the fullness and meaning of happiness.

But to start out speaking of the incarnation is to begin our story in medias res. So first we go back, to the beginning. And here Christian belief is adamant: there is a beginning. The world starts at a finite point, at creation. But the world also has an eschaton, an end toward which all things move. John Bunyan compared this cosmic journey to the progress of a pilgrim advancing toward a celestial city. In some ways Homer’s Odyssey seems more apt. It has more the wildness, the strangeness, the unevenness of the world. But it also has a journey toward an end, an end which is also the source. It has a journey home; and that is the foundation of the Christian faith. No matter how wild and erratic life may be, it moves yet in one direction, a return to the source of all things and to an everlasting home. But if the basis of the Christian faith is that we are headed home, the peak, the great towering spire is that we are already there.

But what is this home, this source, goal, and end of human life? In the final canto of Dante’s Paradiso, the poet stands in the uppermost region of heaven. There he beholds God, describing him as L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle, or “The Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” 3 T.S. Eliot praised this canto as “the highest point that poetry has ever reached or ever can reach.” 4 At any rate, it expresses the highest point that human life can ever reach. It depicts a deep communion with God, the mind beholding the divine essence. Thomas Aquinas termed this the beatific vision, an intellectual or spiritual experience cast in the language of sight. St. Paul gave hope to this when he wrote, “Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.” 5 This is it, the end goal of human life: to live in, to know, and to behold the perfect and eternal love – a vision that transforms the whole world, so that in the words of Dante, our will and our desire are moved by the same love that moves the stars. 6 We become in harmony with each other and with all creation, united in love and in the beauty and joy that are identical with love. For the love of God can never be separated from the love of neighbor. The vision of God always turns us to a vision of each other. And in this vision, in a renewed earth, we live in a joy that passes all hope or understanding. We are home at last.

Anyone can see that the current human experience is far from the beatific vision of Dante, Aquinas, and Paul. We are still Odysseus, striving toward our Ithaca, longing for our home, but not yet there. In another sense, however, our odyssey is already complete. Right before Christ’s birth, Mary and Joseph are found seeking an inn; they join the entire world, seeking a home. But their search ends as soon as they find the manger, and the search of all the world ends when in that same manger, Christ is born. The great joy of the incarnation is that we are not left only to long for some future vision. We need look no further than Bethlehem in the time of Augustus, we need achieve no higher vision than the vision of a man, to see and to know the Love that moves the sun and the other stars. To return to a previous metaphor, we might say that we are still Odysseus sailing home, but all Ithaca has joined us on the ship.

Christ himself gives voice to this paradox as he hangs on the cross. In chilling words he cries out the first verse of the twenty-second psalm, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani? – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” 7 These words could be said to express the human condition. We are stripped of the beatific vision, the world seems lonely, unity gives way to antagonism and selfishness; the world seems deprived of the perfect love and joy that is found in God. But when God himself takes on this condition all is transformed. For then the beatific vision comes to us. No matter how alone or estranged we feel, we share the very same condition as the one alone on the cross, as the infinite and everlasting love. Even when evils surround us most we are in the deepest communion with God. So, even when we are furthest from this vision and this end goal of all the world, we are already there, and in Christ we see – in a human face, even, foreshadowing that time when we shall see “face to face” – the love that never ends.

We must strive not to commit the error of thinking the incarnation is only a matter for moments of sorrow or loneliness, or even moments of grand emotion or great events. The incarnation touches the tiniest and most insignificant of things, and reveals not only a deep and powerful joy, but a light-hearted mirth, which for its very lightness could not be of more serious or earnest concern. Christ spent a month in the desert, he wandered up mountains alone to pray, he endured the scourging and the crucifixion; his life seems wild, almost inhuman, like a strange and mystical flame. But we mustn’t forget that his life was also one of dinner parties, of work in the carpenter shop, of resting on hills by the sea. At his birth, wise men brought him gold, frankincense, and myrrh. But the earth brought him stars, lowing cattle, and a cradle of hay. With Christ, the world participates in the eternal love and lives in a communion with God that is the very fullness of the beatific vision, because in Christ God himself becomes part of the world. All things, no matter how small, are caught up in this. In tedious labor, in silent drifting contemplation, under the warmth of the sun, under the light of a star, we always live in a deep communion with Christ, with God, and with Love. Thus in all things we participate in the beatific vision; for in every moment, in every least and lowest thing we share the life of Christ, who shows us always the face of God. Only one attitude is compatible with this. All the fibers of our daily existence cry out an ode to joy. We cannot escape the sound, we cannot escape the mirth; it bowls us over. All we can do is let out a roaring laughter or a quiet smile.

In the fullness of this happiness reflecting on the incarnation, we see the very meaning and essence of happiness. The love which is the source of so much joy is a self-giving, even a sacrificing love. St. Paul describes the incarnation itself as a sacrifice, a kenosis, or self-emptying of God to take on the finitude and the sufferings of the human condition. Happiness, we see, is not simply pleasure. It is something more subtle, something that involves a willingness to give and to surrender our selves. Perhaps, one might even say, in order to be truly happy one must empty himself, one must join to the kenosis of Christ. Making oneself big does not bring happiness; others make us big in that we are loved, even with an eternal love. But if we can keep both things in our mind at once, if we can let others build us up, while we empty ourselves, if we can behold the breadth of the cosmos, the grandness of the divine as a small but loved creature, then we have found the summation and the meaning of happiness.

This joy puts us in touch with the eternal, yet no one can avoid feeling the yoke of time and the tug of life’s journey. One must ask, where are we left? Where are we left when the angel chorus fades, when Paul and Aquinas put down their pens, when Dante returns to earth? Where are we left? Miles of ocean still separate our ship from home. Nevertheless we are left not only with great joy but with patience. Knowing the love of God and the joy that springs from this love, knowing the beatific vision in Christ and in our midst, we may be patient longing for the time when the world shall reach its everlasting end, when we shall finally see face to face. Until then, let us join our voices with the Scotsman, George MacDonald and say, “I wait; asleep or awake, I wait.” 8

1. Luke 2:11. The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version, ed. Wayne A. Meeks et al. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1993).

2. Ibid.

3. Dante Aligheri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Aligheri: Paradiso, ed. and trans John D. Sinclair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939) 484-5.

4. T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays: 1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932) 212.

5. 1 Corinthians 13:12. Harper Collins: NRSV.

6. Dante Aligheri, 484-5.

7. Matthew 27:46. Harper Collins: NRSV.

8. George MacDonald, Lilith: A Romance, (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1924) 351.

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