338. Degrees in Heaven
338. DEGREES IN HEAVEN
Won’t Heaven be perfect equality rather than a hierarchy? Won’t everyone’s happiness be total, and therefore the same?
The more one will be united to God, the happier will one be. Now the measure of charity is the measure of one’s union with God. Therefore the diversity of beatitude will be according to the difference of charity. . . .
For our actions are meritorious not by the very substance of the action but only by the habit of virtue with which they are informed. Now every virtue obtains its meritorious efficacy from charity, which has the end itself for its object. Hence the diversity of merit is all traced to the diversity of charity. . . (S93,3).
What St. Thomas says about Heaven is also true of this life: the more charity you have, the more you have of union with God, likeness to God, and appreciation of God. And since God is the source of all happiness, joy, and beatitude, the more charity you have the happier you will be. Charity to neighbor opens the eye of the soul to see God more clearly. And seeing God is our ultimate happiness. Therefore charity is the cause of our happiness.
This is testable very simply. Live for one day, or one hour, with more charity. You will experience more happiness. Live for one day, or one hour, with less charity. You will experience less happiness. It is amazing that in light of this repeated experiment and experience, in light of the fact that the results are always the same, we nevertheless choose to live with less charity, knowing by experience that its results will be less happiness.
The obverse of this truth is that when we are unhappy there is one infallible antidote: forget yourself and live for others. It will always take you out of yourself and out of your unhappiness.
We know this, yet we do not do it. We are not just fools, we are idiots. That is the surest proof of Original Sin and our fallenness. We all know that love is the key to happiness, and we all want more happiness rather than less, yet we love less rather than more.
In Heaven we will have no doubts, no forgetfulness, and no ignorance. We will see God clearly, and we will see sin clearly, and we will have no temptation to choose what we clearly see is misery over what we clearly see is joy. Only because we are ignorant, do we sin. Plato was right in that: all evil is due to ignorance. What he failed to see is that this ignorance is also due to evil, that we not only choose wrongly because we see wrongly but also that we see wrongly because we choose wrongly. Our selfishness blinds us.
St. Thomas, like Christ and unlike the Pharisees, is not a legalist. Our actions and choices merit rewards (in the form of happiness) not by their external physical activity as such, like magic or technology, but by their internal motivations and the habits of character they form. (See the first sentence of St. Thomas’ last paragraph.) This is why we do not receive instant feelings of happiness as soon as we perform an external act of charity, but we do experience deep and lasting happiness in proportion as our hearts become like the hearts of the saints in charity.
There will be differences, and inequality, and hierarchy, in Heaven because there are natural differences, and hierarchy, on earth, and Heaven perfects whatever is natural on earth. But this will not be the visible, worldly, always-somewhat-unjust hierarchies that we know now. “But many that are first will be last, and the last first” (Mt 19:30). It will all be perfectly just and necessary and natural. And therefore no one will protest it or hate it. No one will be foolish enough in Heaven to commit the stupidest and saddest sin of all, the sin of envy.