This past Sunday we celebrated the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord, the day Jesus ascended into heaven from the Mount of Olives. I was sitting in St. Clement of Rome parish church, attending the first mass offered by Fr. Eric Olson, who had been ordained a priest the previous day, listening to the homily by Monsignor Joseph Pins, and thinking about its implications.

Scenes from the Life of Christ: Ascension

Giotto di Bondone (1304 – 1306)

Cappella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua

During the homily I was reminded of the following paragraph from “A Free Man’s Worship” by the well-known atheist of the past century, Bertrand Russell:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

Broadly speaking, there are three possible answers to the question: Where do we find true happiness? Nowhere, somewhere in this present world, or above this world.

The first answer is nihilism. That seems to be Russell’s position. For Russell, though we may take pleasure in various objects and activities, we must always keep in mind the over-arching meaningless of it all. Russell mistook scientism for science, as though the use of experimental methods that do not detect purpose shows that there is no meaning or purpose, and as though such methods are the only way we can acquire knowledge of the world. However, the meaningfulness of our choices and actions is something we all already know directly and communally, as we perceive a world around us laden with purposiveness. We wrestle with explaining our deep sense of meaning, and being reconciled to it. It would be very odd if we all wrestled with something that we did not know and was not there.

The second answer is some sort of materialism or idolatry, the idea that true happiness can be found in some finite or temporal thing. For such a person life centers around various material or bodily goods, or even fame, glory or power. Usually, however, these goods all have their value in relation to the person himself, as he tries to make himself his own last end.

The third answer is that man has a super-natural end, an end above nature, above and beyond this world, in something infinite and eternal. Aquinas addresses these options in his Treatise on Happiness, which is the first twenty-one questions of the First Part of the Second Part of the Summa Theologiae, especially Question 2.

Aristotle and Aquinas argue that because we are by our very nature rational animals, we cannot be satisfied by anything that does not satisfy our rational appetite. A pig may be satisfied by the fulfillment of its bodily appetites, but a humman can never be entirely satisfied by the fulfillment of his bodily appetites. All men by nature desire to know, says Aristotle. Our rational appetite is our desire to know and understand, not only in breadth of knowledge, but in depth, pressed onward by that underlying and relentless “Why?” that continually persists at the very center of our being. Questions of meaning and purpose, for Aristotle and Aquinas, cannot be separated from questions about our natural appetites, because satisfaction is the satiation of an appetite or multiple appetites. Hence to know what satisfies man as man, we must know what is man’s deepest appetite. Our deepest appetite is in our highest power: reason. That deepest appetite is our will, the appetite of reason. It is also referred to as the heart; this is the spirit of a man. Reason by its very nature seeks and ultimately rests only in the First Cause and Final End, as even Aristotle understood. This helps explain why reason is that whereby man is made in the image of God. Man necessarily, by his very nature as a rational animal, can never be perfectly satisfied by anything other than knowing God.

But God can be known by man in two ways: by way of man’s natural power of reason, or supernaturally, by the infusion of divine grace through which man’s reason is elevated beyond its natural ability. As known by man’s natural power of reason, God is known as Maker or Creator, good and just, all-knowing and all-powerful. That is man’s natural end, to know God as God can be known by the natural power of reason. Achieving that end results in natural happiness, similar to that described in Book X of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. But, by the infusion of divine grace, which is the gift of participating in the divine nature, man is taken higher, higher than man could go by his natural power of reason. By divine grace man is elevated gratuitously into the inner life of the Holy Trinity of divine Persons, and knows God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The perfection of grace is glory. The glorification of man is the entrance into the Beatific Vision. That is man’s supernatural end, a supernatural happiness immeasurably exceeding natural happiness, because this is a participation in the very happiness of God Himself. So both man’s natural end and man’s supernatural end are God, but as known by our rational power, and as known with the aid of divine grace, respectively. Fr. Robert E. Barron S.T.D. explains in this video how by grace the Christian does not merely know God from the outside, but is brought into the inner life, the inner-Personal community, of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Of the three answers to our question, Christ’s Ascension points to the third answer, because when Christ ascended, He did not merely change spatial locations. He is not somewhere in outer space, holding His breath until His return. At His Ascension, He took His human nature, and thus our human nature, into heaven. The natural was elevated to the supernatural. In His Ascension, Jesus showed us our own supernatural end, that our path to true happiness takes us above and beyond this present world. The Beatific Vision is not ultimately the resurrection of the body and the recovery of the four preternatural gifts. It is not an endless immortal life in a restored Eden. Heaven is the eternal Trinitarian Life, and entering into heaven is the culmination of what we call theosis. This is scandalous to the mind without grace, but for those with grace, this is the hope of glory.