Ending in Love
I have been accompanying a couple intending on becoming Catholic next Easter.
At our most recent session, we covered the end of our segment that dealt with the clauses of the creed, which meant that we had to cover the four last things of Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell.
Somewhere in the course of prefacing what these four last things were, I blurted out a line that said something to the effect that, if the Christian life - in the vein of Augustine’s theology - is a constant question to oneself of “what is it that I love, and consequently what do I want to cling to”, the four last things were the definite answer to those questions.
Initially, a part of me wondered where that came from, though upon reflection it would make sense in light of the one liner (attributed to St John of the Cross) that “at the evening of our life, we would be judged by what we love”.
It also made sense given the way we began our accompaniment towards becoming Catholic, with the motif that Jesus is the response to the question posed to us by our desire for reality in its fullness. Driven by our desire we will, like the blind man Bartimaeus (the one who constantly called out “Jesus! Son of David, have pity on me”) is brought to encounter Jesus, who then poses the question “What do you want me to do for you”. In other words, the beginning of the encounter with Jesus is the question: What do you desire? What do you Love?
As I wrote in a previous post, if the arc of our life begins with the question of love, it will also end with the conclusive answer to that question of love. Both question and answer are woven through each of these four last things.
In the case of Death, whose horizon is characterised by the death of all corruptible things, that horizon feeds back to a question to us on this side of death: what have we spent our lives desiring and on what have we rested our hearts upon? Do we love the things that pass way, or have we sought our stability in something whose stability lasts beyond death?
In light of the question posed at Death, Judgement then becomes the decisive point at which the question gets answered, and from which one’s destination is determined. Judgement then is not simply the tribunal in which a judge arbitrarily imposes a sentence on you. Rather, the act of judgement is made by the one who loves onto themself, concerning where - or who - their cumulative acts of love cleave them to.
In light of the first two, the third last thing of Heaven is the destination for those who have set their hearts on the things - or more correctly the person - who endures through the changes of a world that will eventually cease to be. Such a love, which Augustine has called the Amor Deus or the love of God, leads one to an expansive world comprised of the great multitude of those who, having their hearts converged on God, also have their hearts joined to one another in a common celebration of love.
By contrast, the fourth last thing of Hell is made up of those whose love has no horizon beyond themselves. As such, love of this sort ends up curving into and eventually collapsing onto themselves. Hell then is the natural terminus of those who, in their love of self, have turned their hearts away from God. Furthermore, the world of those who love only themselves is the inverse of those who, in loving God, also are able to rightly love each other. In other words, the hell of self-love is an ever shrinking world of isolated monads. In contradistinction to Hell, Heaven is the world made of an ever expanding world of saints in communion with one another.
As we progress through the Advent season, we can take the opportunity to reflect upon what and who we love, as well as give thanks to the one who, in crashing into our world of loves twisted by sin, also opened the door through which this ever expanding communion of saint can be accessed.
A blessed Adventide and eventual Christmastide to all.
We will be taking a break and return to regular posting (and a special announcement) in mid-January. In the meantime, please take the opportunity to revisit Matthew Tan’s other works on Linktree.
