The Penny Catechism sums up all we need to know for practical purposes:-
Q. Where is Jesus Christ?
A. As God, Jesus Christ is everywhere. As God made man,
he is in heaven, and in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar.
Yet it is natural for us to ask, ‘where is heaven?’ Or perhaps, more precisely, ‘where is heaven in relation to earth?’
Some people would say that this is a misguided question. They think of heaven and earth as spatially unrelated. According to this view, asking how far it is from heaven to earth would be like asking how far it is from Iceland to 1964. If they are orthodox, and accept that Christ still has a material body, they would in effect be saying that there are (at least) two different universes.
There are two problems with this. First, a philosophical one. Is it conceivable that any material body can travel from place A to place B, except by passing along a continuum uniting A and B? It seems not. St Thomas, at any rate thought not: Summa Theologiae 1a, q. 53, ad 2: ‘to move from one place to another without passing through the middle can pertain to an angel but not to a body’.
Secondly, a theological problem. Again according to St Thomas, there is only one universe (‘mundus’ – which means universe, not ‘world’ in the sense of an inhabited orb). He argues this both on the basis of Jn 1:10, mundus [not mundi] per ipsum factus est; and on the general principle that ‘whatever things are from God, have an ordering to Him and amongst themselves’. Considering His absolute power, that is, His power as mentally distinguished by us from His wisdom, God could have created any number of universes existing simultaneously, each ordered to Him, but not ordered among themselves. But this would have been to introduce an imperfection into creation.
So it seems to me that there is a distance, in principle expressible as a number of miles, between heaven and earth; though God has ordained that no mortal being will ever cross it.
February 24, 2012 at 11:12 pm
Its odd how often this topic comes up actually. Any chance you might attempt a demonstration of the philosophical argument?
February 25, 2012 at 10:27 pm
“Suppose a body which we will call Z to be in motion from A to B. It is clear that Z, as long as it is wholly in A is not in motion; and in like manner when it is wholly in B, because then the movement is past. Therefore if it is at any time in motion it must needs be neither wholly in A nor wholly in B. Therefore while it is in motion, it is either nowhere, or partly in A, and partly in B, or wholly in some other intervening place, say C, or partly in A and C and partly in C and B. But it is impossible for it to be nowhere, for then there would be a dimensive quantity without a place, which is impossible. Nor again is it possible for it to be partly in A and partly in B without being in some way in the intervening space. for since B is a place distant from A, it would follow that in the intervening space the part of Z which is in B is not continuous with the part which is in A. Therefore it follows that it is either wholly in C, or partly in C, and partly in some other place that intervenes between C and A, say D, and so forth. Therefore it follows that Z does not pass from A to B unless first of all it be in all the intervening places: unless we suppose that it passes from A to B without ever being moved, which implies a contradiction, because the very succession of places is local movement.” (Supplement to the Summa, q. 84, a.3)
February 25, 2012 at 4:25 pm
Conceptually, solutions to this problem seem quite elementary. If God created the universe with four spatial dimensions rather than three, and with the fourth inaccessible to us in our mortal forms, then heaven could simply be a parallel slice metrically as close to our slice as one wishes.
Pure speculation, of course…
February 25, 2012 at 10:30 pm
Is there any way of showing that 4-dimensional space is more than just a ‘being of reason’?
February 26, 2012 at 8:50 am
If one inspects the proofs that Aquinas gives in Ia.q53 and in the reply you give to aelianus above, one notices that he is stating an early form of the intermediate value theorem and in his demonstrations he is assuming that space is a continuum and that local motion is continuous.
One must immediately enquire as to whether these assumed continuity properties of space are real or of reason themselves.
So, in parrying your question, I plead that I merely offer such examples to show that the idea that heaven is spatially connected to what we take as the universe is not repugnant to reason.
May I counter with the following question? If heaven is a “part” of what we understand as our three dimensional space, what form of ordination would prevent us from going there?
February 26, 2012 at 9:10 pm
I’d say that it’s self-evident that 3 dimensional space and local motion are both continuous; for a 4th dimension, it may be possible, and that may be the answer to my original question; I’m simply unsure whether it can be shown to be possible.
As to what kind of divine ordination could prevent us from going to heaven in this life – well, God could do it in any way.
February 25, 2012 at 10:01 pm
Another reason why it would be strange if Heaven were a different universe is that in Christ the renovation of this world has begun; his resurrected body is the first bit of the “new earth”.
A nice thing is that because of natural concomitance Christ’s place is present with him in the Eucharist — so that wherever that place might be it is also in the Blessed Sacrament.
March 12, 2012 at 4:38 pm
Yes, and therefore also a real relation to the Blessed Virgin and to the bodies of other saints who are already risen.