{"id":4458,"date":"2018-06-30T11:08:10","date_gmt":"2018-06-30T11:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/06\/30\/would-heaven-be-boring\/"},"modified":"2018-06-30T11:08:10","modified_gmt":"2018-06-30T11:08:10","slug":"would-heaven-be-boring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2018\/06\/30\/would-heaven-be-boring\/","title":{"rendered":"Would Heaven be Boring?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maybe not<\/a>. (HT: V. Vohanka)<\/span><\/p>\n

Related: Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision?<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

My post concludes as follows:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Beatific<\/a>But if the afterlife is not Life 2.0  and is something like the visio beata  <\/em>of Thomas Aquinas, wouldn't it be boring 'as hell'?  Well, it might well be hell for something who was looking forward to black-eyed virgins and a carnal paradise.  But suppose you are beyond the puerility of that view.  You want not sex but love, not power but knowledge, not fame but community, not excitement but peace and beatitude.  You want, finally, to be happy.<\/span><\/p>\n

Would the happy vision be boring?  Well, when you were in love, was it boring?  When your love was requited, was it boring?  Was it not bliss?  Imagine that bliss ramped up to the maximum and made endless.  We tire of the finite, but the divine life is infinite.  Why then should participation in it be boring?  <\/span><\/p>\n

Or consider the self-sufficient bliss tasted from time to time here below by those of us capable of what Aristotle calls the bios theoretikos<\/em>.  Were you bored in those moments?  Quite the opposite.    You were consumed with delight, happy and self-sufficient in the moment. Now imagine an endless process of intellectual discovery and contemplation.<\/span><\/p>\n

What I am suggesting is that an afterlife worth wanting would be one, not of personal prolongation, but one of personal transformation and purification along lines barely conceivable to us here below.  God is just barely conceivable to us, and the same goes for our own souls.  So we ought to expect that the afterlife will be the same.  If we descry<\/a> it at all from our present perspective, it is "through a glass darkly."<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maybe not. (HT: V. Vohanka) Related: Conceiving the Afterlife: Life 2.0 or Beatific Vision? My post concludes as follows: But if the afterlife is not Life 2.0  and is something like the visio beata  of Thomas Aquinas, wouldn't it be boring 'as hell'?  Well, it might well be hell for something who was looking forward to black-eyed … Continue reading “Would Heaven be Boring?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aquinas-and-thomism","category-heaven-and-hell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4458\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}