What makes heaven satisfying? The question is not an idle one, for even fervent Christian believers wonder at times whether heaven will not turn out to be, well, a bit boring. We are dramatic creatures, after all, and if we struggle on occasion to enjoy a documentary about a very saintly person, preferring instead the dynamism of a Scorsese film with its more colorful sinners, we might with good reason also suspect that heaven will not keep us much engaged. 

These sentiments are perhaps inevitable for us, immersed as we are in the warp and woof of fallen finitude and the hues of historicity. We cannot imagine an end to history, even as we cannot—if we attend honestly to our deepest longings—reconcile ourselves to a “bad infinity” of endless finite goods. It is the latter, in fact, that bores us when we try to imagine heaven. To put it another way, we yearn most fundamentally not for any finite pleasures but for Pleasure itself. “I can’t get no satisfaction” because “satisfaction” remains always just out of reach. It moves us such that we move ourselves—for without the promise of satisfaction we would do nothing—but we never quite attain it here below. To that degree, we are all Sisyphus, and the immensity of our desire outstrips any object entering our field of view. It might even surpass any object we can imagine, if our failure to desire heaven is any indication.

So we might ask: is Heaven possible? Does our seemingly infinite desire correspond to an Infinite Object, or is this “desire for desire” itself a function of our tragic finitude? When Calvin wrote that human mind is an idol factory, he presumed a distinction could be drawn between false gods and the true one. But perhaps it cannot. Perhaps our infinite desire signifies only a lack within us, irremediable because coterminous with our finitude, whereby we generate gods (or God) ad infinitum. And the more self-conscious the finite desire, the more magnificent its divine object.

This species of Feuerbachianism would spell the death of Christianity, for built into the faith’s very rational coherence is the anthropological, and eschatological, claim that we are made ad imaginem Dei, both in God’s image and towards it in the quest for desire’s rest. The Object of desire does exist, we affirm, and it is our final and first cause. But if this Object were “placed” before us, could we recognize it? Asked differently, the question is revealed to be the anthropological question as such: what is the human person created in God’s image? More precisely, what is the human will? Is it an abyss generative of the endless stream of desires with no intrinsic end, like a question that could never recognize its own answer, or is it a rationally ordered teleology which—albeit “through a glass darkly”—already implicitly knows its consummation? This is the question that must be answered in any account of the possibility of Heaven. 

In what follows I suggest an answer to this question concerning the will and the possibility of its ultimate satiation, but I will not do so through a purely philosophical investigation. (While I consider a philosophical response possible and necessary, it is not within my purview to attempt one here). I wish instead to give an explicitly theological argument in favor of one philosophical view of freedom and the will, namely the “intellectualist” account, over against the “voluntarist” view (both of which I will define momentarily). Such a theological argument must not, of course, exclude philosophical considerations existing alongside the givens of revelation. Intellectual probity demands that what remains within the domain of “nature”—and the human will is certainly that—be investigated fully by reason’s own powers. But since the intellectualist view is frequently dismissed as contrary to experience—don’t we quite regularly act, in full knowledge, against what we know as the good?— an argument from “grace” or revelation may cause the reader to investigate the position more carefully before rejecting it. If that occurs, then these reflections will have served their purpose. 

In the course of answering our question of whether heaven is possible, we will also consider the question of the will and the doctrine of eternal torments. For many today in the Church, the question is more likely to be how hell can be possible, given the reality of God’s nature as love and His desire for all to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4). The most popular answer to this question in the last century has been the “free-will defense” for hell, an apologetic that while relatively new to Christian history has nonetheless displaced more traditional theologies of hell centered on God’s justice or inscrutable will. Briefly stated, the defense maintains that God’s respect for human freedom is so great that He will allow his human children to reject Him, even to the point of eternal separation from Him (an idea perfectly encapsulated in C.S. Lewis’ pithy line from the Problem of Pain: “the doors of hell are locked on the inside”).¹ In investigating this explanation for the possibility of hell, I seek to disclose a troubling theological implication of the voluntarism undergirding the view. Namely, the voluntarism of the free-will defense renders heaven itself impossible. Seen from another perspective, voluntarism makes it impossible for creatures like us, with our rationally deliberative nature, to enjoy heavenly life without suffering ontological mutilation in the process. What I mean will become clear, I hope, in the telling.  

So, to definitions. For our purposes here, I define the “intellectualist” account of freedom as simply as possible: whatever humans choose, we choose under the guise of the good, or because we believe what we choose to be good for us in some way. Obversely, we never choose evil as such, with the avoidance of the good serving as our fundamental goal. There is no sin for its own sake. As Socrates puts it in the Protagoras: “[N]o one goes willingly toward the bad or what he believes to be bad; neither is it in human nature, so it seems, to want to go toward what one believes to be bad instead of to the good.”² Any view which denies these claims can be put under the title of “voluntarist,” and while a number of distinctions could be made between different voluntarist accounts, I take them to be of secondary importance in respect to this fundamental difference. Many Christians today feel compelled to join voluntarists in rejecting intellectualism in light of the reality of sin and its radical perversion of our desires. The depth of humanity’s depravity was one of Christianity’s chief anthropological disclosures in its apocalyptic and, albeit gradual, tectonic upending of the ancient world. We can, in fact, desire evil for its own sake, as St. Augustine is understood to have realized when, in his own original sin, he stole those historic pears from the garden of his youth: “I simply wanted to enjoy the theft for its own sake, and the sin.”³ Whether Augustine in this text in fact denies the Platonic intellectualist view of the will is another question, beyond this article’s consideration, but I cite this purple passage from the Confessions first because, taken as a stand-alone slogan, it serves as a perfect précis of the voluntarist position, and second, because it underscores the importance of the question of the will in the course of Christian history. No mere quibble of abstruse philosophy and theology, the embrace of voluntarism or intellectualism will inevitably alter our construal of other doctrines, such as eschatology, anthropology, and Christology. On that score, I contend here that the intellectualist account of freedom best accords with two of the data of revelation, namely the indefectibility of the beatified human will and the integrity of human nature in its divinized state, as Chalcedon teaches in its doctrine of Christ’s two perfect divine and human natures. Before getting there, however, we had better first attend to angels. 

In question 62 of the Prima Pars of his Summa Theologiae, Aquinas investigates the perfection of angels in their state of glory. It is useful to attend to how Thomas studies angels, for angels in theological thought are often limit cases for exploring philosophical concepts, such as “body” or “will.” They are, in other words, “useful to think with.” When Thomas asks in Article 8 of this question whether beatified angels can sin, he answers with a resounding no. I reproduce the answer here:

“I answer that, The beatified angels cannot sin. The reason for this is, because their beatitude consists in seeing God through His essence. Now, God’s essence is the very essence of goodness. Consequently the angel beholding God is disposed towards God in the same way as anyone else not seeing God is to the common form of goodness. Now it is impossible for any man either to will or to do anything except aiming at what is good; or for him to wish to turn away from good precisely as such. Therefore the beatified angel can neither will nor act, except as aiming towards God. Now whoever wills or acts in this manner cannot sin. Consequently the beatified angel cannot sin.”⁴ 

Let us examine this answer piece by piece. First, the angels in question are supernaturally beatified, which means that they have already made the fundamental choice for God, a decision which God in turn crowns by confirming their will in eternal beatitude. (The relevant article is number 2 in the same question, which affirms that angels make this choice because of God’s grace directing them to a supernatural end beyond their nature). Despite their lack of discursivity (at least in its human mode), angels nonetheless have a history. Indeed, any creature that is not God must, since only God as actus purus is beyond potency and thus beyond the realization of potencies in deliberative choices, which is what in fact constitutes a history. And so history for the blessed angels concludes in the beatific vision in which they reach their rest, the transcendental Object of their desire which, while inchoately known to them, motivated them in the first place to seek full communion with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, the divine goal of desire.

Second, Aquinas compares the beatified angels’ indefectibility to the non-beatified human who in every action formally seeks the Good (“the common form of goodness”), even while lacking a direct vision of God. The comparison is instructive. Both actions, of beatified angels and of every-day humans, are determined transcendentally by the Good, such that Thomas can say it is impossible to will against the Good formally or the Good directly when it is in one’s sights, as it were. You cannot eat with the intention of growing hungrier, just as you cannot choose any finite reality except as it appears good to you in some fashion, with the purpose of sating the transcendental desire for the Good as provoked in any particular moment. This means that every choice made here below—formally conditioned by a transcendental longing for the Good as such—bears an analogue to the choices the beatified angels make in their heavenly state.

The third point relates directly to the nature of this angelic, beatified choice. Thomas says that these angels can neither will nor act except as aiming towards God. Since they directly know the Good which makes all created realities good, they can accurately rank-order finite goods so as to serve their ultimate Good, God. This state is simultaneously more determined and yet paradoxically more free than that of the not-yet-beatified person, who acts towards the Good formally but can fail to accurately assess which particular finite goods actually serve in worship of God. Yet eschatological angelic determination—and let us remember that particular operations of the will are contingent and not pre-determined⁵ — renders any particular choice this angel might make immediately and necessarily God-directed. The necessary but insufficient condition of freedom, namely deliberation, remains intact in this blessed state, but sin nevertheless becomes impossible, for in this eschatological state there is no longer any conflict between finite goods and the Infinite Good in which the angels participate. The Augustinian maxim, “Love, and do what you please,” can summarize the telos of the spiritual life precisely because it describes the essence of the life of heaven.

Given the will’s dual nature, its appetible and rational structure, as well as our current condition of ignorance, a finite will could only be decisively confirmed in the Good by directly knowing it. And if, as Augustine wrote, perfect happiness consists in the knowledge that we will never lose the happiness we have obtained, then eschatological joy depends on this confirmation of the will. In this life, all goods possessed are conditional, subject not only to external fluctuation (good weather today, hurricane tomorrow) but also to the decline in the moral life which is always a possibility for creatures not identical with their attributes (I grow in wisdom, but I am not Wisdom, and so I can revert to foolishness). Yet in the eschaton, God will be all in all (1 Cor. 15:23); Divine Wisdom will dwell fully in created wisdom, and so an identity of sorts obtains between creature and Creator without thereby violating the Creator/creature distinction. The “of sorts” in the identity consists both in that perfect knowledge granted to the intellect and in the confirmation of the will which makes our every action identical with God’s action in us (“Christ who lives in me”). Thus is longing for the Good as such fulfilled and finite potency reduced to one perpetual act of divine life in the creaturely mode. We call this the beatific vision or deification, and it is supreme bliss.

I wrote earlier that these reflections concerned not just eschatology but also protology. To see why, let us revert to the thought of Maximus the Confessor, that great Eastern master of protology. Maximus’ dispute with the Origenists of his day concerned their picture of creaturely history, one which can be summarized in the neat sequence of “rest-movement-rest.” The logikoi, pre-incarnate human spirits, were in their beginning joined to the Logos. But they grew sated and so fell into movement and diversity. One day they will be rejoined to the Logos and will regain their former state. Maximus rightly perceived that if this schema were correct, that perpetual happiness which Augustine so desired would become a metaphysical impossibility. For if we existed in a state of perfect satisfaction and subsequently fell from it, what guarantees that our eschatological bliss will not be susceptible to the same fracture? An eternity of falls and restorations then awaits us.  

Maximus’ response turned the Origenist system on its head: it is movement that is our initial state and rest our final goal. Taking this Maximian insight and applying it to our question, we recognize that the movement constituting the journey to divinization logically entails a distance to be traveled. And that means that no creature can possess the full vision of God in the creature’s first moment—not even Lucifer, the son of the morning. 

This conclusion carries important implications for the free-will defense of hell, as recent debates concerning universal salvation have shown. Supporters of this defense of hell—which is voluntarist in its essence—often invoke the fall of Satan as an insoluble problem for those who think all God’s children will eventually yield to their Maker when granted the full vision of his love. If Satan could revolt against God even when enjoying his presence, as the highest of God’s creatures, then what gives us confidence that the will is as rational as intellectualists say it is? Is not Satan’s example proof enough that the will is an irrational abyss whose contours none can descry? But as we have seen, this appeal shipwrecks on the same shores as Origenism—it makes the eschatological confirmation of the will impossible, since we can have no promise that God in Himself could ever permanently satisfy us. It is a profound irony that intellectualist universalism provides the only bulwark against an Origenism implicit in voluntarist philosophies of eternal damnation. 

These theological considerations should be enough to discard at least the free-will defense of hell, if not but voluntarism with it, since heaven becomes unachievable under these assumptions. But there is another, more anthropological problem with voluntarism in relation to eternal beatitude. Suppose a voluntarist grants our argument so far but claims nonetheless that in the eschaton God extrinsically removes the creature’s capacity to will anything other than the good. With an arbitrarily drawn line, God puts an end to history so that the “game” of earthly existence might possess some identifiable limits. If God gave you legs in order to journey to our heavenly homeland, he promptly amputates them upon arrival, to signify that your trek is over. Heaven is possible, only freedom cannot be found there; on this account, the human in her eschatological state is ironically less free than before deification, given that the possibility of choosing against God—something assumed to be intrinsic to human freedom as such—has been abolished. But what then of God’s purported respect for creaturely freedom? It seems God only honored the dignity of freedom as a means to an end, but not as something constitutive of the human creature as such, something meant to be supernaturally crowned with natural indefectibility. The acquisition of virtue in this world proved, in the final analysis, to be only a test, not a transformation that, compelled and completed by grace, catapults us into a higher mode of being. 

This understanding of the value of deliberative liberty is a problem, for it makes unthinkable any answer to the question of why God might have allowed our first parents the liberty of a fall if, all along, he intended to dispense with this rather troublesome aspect of our nature. Of course, this issue of why God permitted the fall is the very definition of a question wrapped in an enigma, so when I say that the voluntarist account makes any answer inconceivable, I am not implying that the other, intellectualist side can produce a fully satisfying response. I mean only that there is a necessary, formal structure to any adequate answer to this question, and it goes something like this: “Deliberative liberty is a necessity for finite rational creatures to achieve union with Divine Love and is thus ultimately a good.” But such an answer becomes incoherent if liberty can be removed from human nature willy-nilly. As we saw above, the voluntarist account, when faced with the pressures of avoiding an endless cycle of falls and restorations, must in fact jettison freedom, and here we find that voluntarism must also sacrifice the rational aspect of the will as intrinsic to the human person, in order to ensure heavenly stability. 

But in an intellectualist account, the will of the beatified or divinized creature retains both its appetible and rational aspects, even if the appetite for the Good is completely sated so as to make an irrational choice against God only an abstract possibility, one never again actualized. The critic might suggest that the divergence between these two views—the voluntarist and the intellectualist—turns out to be no more than a distinction without a difference: both render sin de facto impossible in the age to come. Upon closer scrutiny, however, this is revealed to be false, as we have already suggested above. For the voluntarist, human nature in its heavenly state is so altered that it becomes unrecognizable. Its logos, or nature, has changed, to employ once again Maximus’ language. For the intellectualist, by contrast, it is the tropos, or mode of being of human nature, that changes when directly confronted with the Good. The Christological upshot here is that Christ’s earthly temptations are real insofar as he can theoretically choose finite goods in an improper fashion—turn these stones into bread—but his incarnate contemplation of the visio dei prevents such a lapse from ever occurring. Volitional deliberation concluding in sin becomes in the beatific vision therefore only an abstract possibility, albeit one intrinsic to human nature as such, like the shadow naturally produced by a body under limited light. But there, where all is Light, there is no shadow, though the body remains. Seen in this light, voluntarism abolishes human nature in order to save it, rendering God’s original gift of deliberative liberty inscrutable in the worst way while also, and more disastrously, making heaven impossible. Only an intellectualist account of freedom, then, coheres with the truth of revelation that our heavenly felicity is secure, that Desire’s question indeed has an Answer—and that this answer is Love’s eternal recognition and delight.