333. The new world
333. THE NEW WORLD
Scripture tells us there will not only be Heaven but also “new heavens and a new earth”. What is that?
It is written (Is 65:17): Behold I create new heavens and a new earth, and the former things shall not be in remembrance; and (Rev 21:1): I saw a hew heaven and a new earth. For the first heaven and the first earth was gone.
Further, the dwelling should befit the dweller. But the world was made to be man’s dwelling. Therefore it should befit man. Now man will be renewed. Therefore the world will likewise. . . .
We believe all corporeal things to have been made for man’s sake, wherefore all things are stated to be subject to him (Ps 8:5). Now they serve man in two ways: first as sustenance to his bodily life; secondly, as helping him to know God, inasmuch as man sees the invisible things of God by the things that are made (Rom 1:20). . . .[G]lorified man will nowise need creatures to render him the first of these services, since his body will be altogether incorruptible. . . . [M]an will not need the second service . . . since . . . he will see God immediately in His essence. The carnal eye, however, will be unable to attain to this vision of the essence; wherefore, that it may be fittingly comforted in the vision of God, it will see the Godhead in its corporeal effects, wherein manifest proofs of the divine majesty will appear. . . .
Although properly speaking, insensible bodies will not have merited this glory, yet man merited that this glory should be bestowed on the whole universe in so far as this conduces to man’s increase of glory.
This disposition of newness will be neither natural nor contrary to nature, but above nature, just as grace and glory are above the nature of the soul; and it will proceed from an everlasting agent which will preserve it for ever (S91,1).
“Heavens” in the plural, in Scripture, means simply what is above the sky, i.e., the rest of the created universe outside the earth. “Heaven” (singular) is the realm of God. As God “bilocates” and is both in Heaven and on earth, because He is everywhere (“omnipresence”), in an analogous way we will also ‘bilocate’ in that we will be with Him in Heaven and also live in a real material universe, a “new heavens and a new earth” that He will create.
Man is not fully man without a body. And a body needs a world. God would not give us a new body without a new world for it. For “all corporeal things were made for man’s sake.” Man is the center of the universe. Pre-Copernican astronomy was right symbolically and spiritually, though not physically. The universe is for man. God does not care about gases and galaxies for their own sake; they are only part of the cosmic womb designed to birth the only creature created in His image, “the only creature God loved for his own sake” (Vatican II). This is the true and truly radical “humanism”.
Science, of course, knows nothing of this. How would the goldfish know what is outside its bowl, or the intentions of the one who set it up? How would we know what is outside our universe?
As the first universe was our nursing mother, supplying physical needs, the new one will be our art museum, supplying spiritual needs. We will not need food or air or reproductive organs; these will be for beauty and glory. Both universes are works of God and therefore aids to seeing Him in His reflections as in a mirror; but while this one is dark (“through a glass, darkly”) the other will be bright.
Animals, plants, and minerals cannot merit eternal life, but man, as the priest of all creation, merits this for them “insofar as this conduces to man’s increase of glory”. We are creation’s priests.
This new world will be neither natural (part of this nature, or caused by it) nor unnatural, but supernatural. It will be not just more than nature but more “natural” than nature.