Now, to speak about Catholic ideas about the afterlife in particular
@adrian009
Catholic doctrine obviously presupposes the traditional, tripartite division of
heaven, purgatory and hell, which everybody is familiar with, as well as the Abrahamic idea (shared with orthodox Islam and Judaism) of the resurrection of the dead.
In Catholic Christianity, heaven is called “
supreme beatitude” the latter word being Latin for “a state of utmost bliss” and it consists of the eternal enjoyment of the “Beatific Vision”. This state of being is an eternal and unmediated perception of the Essence of God.
The New Testament itself tells us that the ideal goal is a "
peace" beyond all understanding in which the individual is "
filled with all the fullness of God" (
Ephesians 3:14-21) described later on by the early desert fathers through the use of the words
apatheia (state of imperturbable calm) and
theosis (deification/union with God).
God permits us by grace to share in His own Beatitude, His own happiness or felicity. This is what the state of heaven essentially consists of.
Theosis, in this life, is a foretaste of that glorious existence of the Blessed in heaven, whereby we participate in the divine nature (as much as is possible by God's power in this life), through the gift of infused contemplative prayer.
Heaven, Purgatory and Hell are spiritual states of being (as opposed to physical locations) that occupy no location in space and are even apart from time as well, with the souls of the deceased thought (according to time-honoured, theological speculation) to exist in something mysterious called “
aeviternity”.
It entails a mode of existence which is a form of “
participated eternity". It lies between the timelessness of God and the temporal experience of material beings - to us, for all intents and purposes, it is akin to “no-time” - although this isn't strictly true.
St. Thomas Aquinas explained it all thus in his
Summa Theologica:
newadvent.org/summa/1010.htm#article3
In this way time has “before” and “after”; aeviternity in itself has no “before” and “after,” which can, however, be annexed to it; while eternity has neither “before” nor “after,” nor is it compatible with such at all.
There isn't really any succession of moments in aeveternity, as we would understand it. Here is how a Church approved mystic, Blessed Henry Suso, described this state of being from alleged direct, mystical experience (a foretaste of eternity):
"…Eternity is life that is beyond time but includes within itself all time but without a before or after. And whoever is taken into the Eternal Nothing possesses all in all and has no ‘before or after’.
Indeed a person taken within today would not have been there for a shorter period from the point of view of eternity than someone who had been taken within a thousand years ago…
Now these people who are taken within, because of their boundless immanent oneness with God, see themselves as always and eternally existing
Indeed a person taken within today would not have been there for a shorter period from the point of view of eternity than someone who had been taken within a thousand years ago…
Now these people who are taken within, because of their boundless immanent oneness with God, see themselves as always and eternally existing…"
- Blessed Henry Suso (c. 1296-1366), German Catholic mystic & Dominican priest (The Little Book of Truth). p320
We don't claim to know
if any individual person
is or ever
will be in hell. It is simply a possibility, whereby one is "
separated from God forever by their own free choice" in a "
state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed" (CCC 1033).
One can expect that most human beings will first undergo
purgatory after death, since it seems apparent to the majority of theologians that a sizeable chunk of humanity is neither wilfully evil nor particularly saintly.
Terrestrial “time” is not part of the doctrine of Purgatory either. Here is what Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in 1988 (before he became Pope Benedict XVI):
“…The transforming ‘moment’ of this encounter [Purgatory] cannot be quantified by the measurements of earthly time. It is, indeed, not eternal but a transition, and yet trying to qualify it as of ‘short’ or ‘long’ duration on the basis of temporal measurements derived from physics would be naive and unproductive. The ‘temporal measure’ of this encounter lies in the unsoundable depths of existence, in a passing-over where we are burned ere we are transformed. To measure such Existenzzeit, such an ‘existential time,’ in terms of the time of this world would be to ignore the specificity of the human spirit in its simultaneous relationship with, and differentation from, the world…”
(Ratzinger, Eschatology, p. 230)
His Holiness reiterated the same point in his 2007 encyclical
Spe Salvi:
Spe salvi (November 30, 2007) | BENEDICT XVI
The fire of Purgatory which both burns and saves is Christ himself, the Judge and Saviour. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgement. Before his gaze all falsehood melts away…
It is clear that we cannot calculate the “duration” of this transforming burning in terms of the chronological measurements of this world. The transforming “moment” of this encounter eludes earthly time-reckoning—it is the heart’s time, it is the time of “passage” to communion with God in the Body of Christ. The judgement of God is hope, both because it is justice and because it is grace…
46. With death, our life-choice becomes definitive—our life stands before the judge. Our choice, which in the course of an entire life takes on a certain shape, can have a variety of forms. There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. This is a terrifying thought, but alarming profiles of this type can be seen in certain figures of our own history. In such people all would be beyond remedy and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: this is what we mean by the word Hell. On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbours—people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfilment what they already are.
46. Yet we know from experience that neither case is normal in human life. For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil—much filth covers purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul.
There is a popular misunderstanding of these states of being, that they are "physical locations". But it is near-impossible theologically, because heaven/hell/purgatory are not
bodily phenomenons, as St. Thomas Aquinas explained during the Middle Ages:
"...Incorporeal things [ie spirits] are not in place after a manner known and familiar to us, in which way we say that bodies are properly in place; but they are in place after a manner befitting spiritual substances, a manner that cannot be fully manifest to us..."
- Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274), Summa Theologiae, Supplement, Q69, a1, reply 1, Doctor of the Catholic Church
Or an EWTN article explains:
Heaven, Hell and Purgatory
Pope John Paul II pointed out that the essential characteristic of heaven, hell or purgatory is that they are states of being of a spirit or human soul, rather than places, as commonly perceived and represented in human language. This language of place is, according to the Pope, inadequate to describe the realities involved, since it is tied to the temporal order in which this world and we exist. In this he is applying the philosophical categories used by the Church in her theology and saying what St. Thomas Aquinas said long before him...
At the General Audience of Wednesday, 28 July 1999, the Holy Father reflected on hell as the definitive rejection of God. In his catechesis, the Pope said that care should be taken to interpret correctly the images of hell in Sacred Scripture:
"The images of hell that Sacred Scripture presents to us must be correctly interpreted. They show the complete frustration and emptiness of life without God. Rather than a place, hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy. This is how the Catechism of the Catholic Church summarizes the truths of faith on this subject (n. 1033)."
There is no ontological sense in conceptualising heaven, hell or purgatory as places in the same way as corporeal objects in spacetime. You could sort of fudge it by saying "oh but its a special spiritual place for bodiless conscious beings," but since we cannot fathom or relate to this in a physical way, that's akin to denying a location.
You need to wait till the resurrection of the dead for anything approaching the material, and even in this case we arise as "
spiritual bodies" which is to say, not the physical world as we know it but rather glorified matter in which the spiritual soul is paramount (i.e. the resurrected Jesus could appear in different forms, walk through walls and was mistaken for a ghost or disembodied spirit by his disciples before allowing himself to be touched, to get the point across that he had a body).
This is what St. Paul referred to in
1 Corinthians 2:9 -
What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived -- the things God has prepared for those who love him
This is the same manner in which the Beatific Vision of the Divine Essence will be enjoyed by the blessed in heaven.
So, I think it is really wrong-headed to think of the Catholic afterlife in terms of
space or
location.