Will we be bored in heaven after an eternity? I was asked this question by a friend yesterday after Mass--she was passing the question on after having been asked it by her brother (if I am properly recalling). Can we be blissfully bored? Can the state of infinite happiness exist alongside of infinite boredom? My instinctive answer is no.
In order to give a better, answer, it's worth recounting a story about Saint Thomas Aquinas. Here is a saint whose philosophical writings are so formidable that they cannot be ignored; of, perhaps I should write, they cannot be ignored by any philosopher who wants to appear as other that ignorant. They most certainly aren't ignored by good Catholic philosophers, who are largely his intellectual disciples; or by good Catholics who have read their Catechisms, since the catechism draws very strongly on the Summa Theologica (and other works of the saint). The total written output of this saint is enough to fill a small bookshelf.
Oddly enough, he left his magnum opus unfinished. Nor was this because he did in the midst of writing it: he ceased writing it months before his death. Why would the world's greatest philosopher--certainly of his time, perhaps of any time--deliberately leave his last and greatest work unfinished? It was not for lack of ideas, for he still had much philosophy and theology to summarize and synthesize.
The build-up to this sudden retirement took place earlier, in a dispute he had with another philosopher over the nature of the Eucharist.Having come to loggerheads in this argument, Saint Thomas is said to have thrown his treatise at the foot of the crucifix and said something to the effect of , "Well let the Lord Himself judge whether I've written rightly or not." He is then said to have begun to pray before the altar--perhaps he celebrated Mass, as some accounts say. After a long time spent in prayer, a voice came from the cross (or the corpus thereupon) which said, "You have written well of me Thomas. What will you have as your reward?" Some accounts will translate his response as, "Nothing, Lord. I am doing it all for You."
I think that there is a probably a better translation, though I don't speak Latin and am not sure that the actual original response was recorded exactly at the time or whether it was later. According to this account, he replied, "Only Yourself, Lord." After all, being the philosopher that he was, I would rather expect Saint Thomas to ask for true and perfect, everlasting happiness--which means that he would have asked for his highest good, really the Only Good which matters. That is, he would have asked for God Himself, or union with God. If this good is granted, no other good is necessary; if not, no other good is sufficient. In any case, this reply must surely have pleased God; after all, He was most pleased (1 Kings 3:5-13) with King Solomon when he asked for wisdom (or "an understanding heart")--and Saint Thomas asked for something better than wisdom.
Here I can only speculate. I suspect that since God granted King Solomon's request for a discerning heart, He probably also granted Saint Thomas' request for Himself, and not merely during the afterlife. The accounts say that Saint Thomas was in ecstasy of vision; I think it was a foretaste of the beatific vision itself. It is known that he stopped all work on the Summa as well as the other volumes he was writing at the time. When his friend (and secretary) Brother Reginald asked him to resume his work months later, he replied definitively that he was finished writing: "I can write no more. What I have seen makes all of my writings seem like so much straw." A lifetime of writing by arguably the most brilliant mind to have lived, and he himself declared it all as straw next to what had been revealed to him, so great was that vision.
Perhaps that is what heaven will be like. Saint Thomas Aquinas had a foretaste of the beatific vision which we shall all experience in heaven, and in this brief foretaste discovered a bit of Divine Wisdom--and was utterly astounded by it, for it was inconceivably greater than all of his philosophy. God is the Word, He Is the Logos, Divine Wisdom. He Is also infinite, so that there is infinite knowledge and Wisdom to ponder in Him, and So no philosopher will, in all eternity, ever finish this contemplation. But neither will he ever grow tired (physically or mentally, nor weary of the activity of pondering) as Saint Thomas apparently did, because in heaven he will be perfected, immortal (and I think therefore inexhaustible). He will be free of the distractions to this contemplation which we have in this life--Socrates' greatest dream realized!--and so will be able to contemplate this wisdom for all of eternity: and always able to contemplate some new facet or aspect of it, since this Wisdom is infinite.
Of course, not everybody is a philosopher, and so perhaps not everybody would find this kind of contemplation to be a good thing. But God is the Source of all goodness--He is Goodness itself!--so the joys of the beatific vision are not limited only to the contemplation of wisdom and knowledge. Tolkien, for example, portrayed creation in The Silmarillion as occurring through a divine symphony (or chorus), which may itself continue ever new for eternity. Indeed, after the Last Judgment and the Resurrection, there is to be a New Heaven and a New Earth--meaning, perhaps, a new and perfected universe which may be explored. I cannot, obviously, list everything which we will experience in Heaven, though I do not believe that boredom will exist there as it does here. We will be in the presence of (and united to) the Source of Happiness--God Himself. But, as if that is not enough, we may well discover that there are adventures to be had there, and greater ones than here; things to discover and do and experience and contemplate. As Shakespeare remarks through Hamlet, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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This post was
originally published on my
Equus Nom Veritas blog.
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If you enjoyed this post, here are some other related posts:
What Happens to Non-Christians When They Die: A Speculative Reflection Christ's Return: The Parousian Sense Of Infants and Salvation (Nicene Guys) Homogeneity in Heaven and Hell?
Tags: Contemplata-Tra Dere Eschatology Saints Speculation Story-Time Question
