Afterlife

"The section of the purgatory entry called ‘Proofs’ is interesting because it purports to use a form of logic. Here’s how the argument goes. If the dead went straight to heaven, there’d be no point in our praying for their souls. And we do pray for their souls, don’t we? Therefore it must follow that they don’t go straight to heaven. Therefore there must be purgatory. QED. Are professors of theology really paid to do this kind of thing?"

"(About Wu Daozi) He excelled in every subject: men, gods, devils, Buddhas, birds, beasts, buildings, landscapes—all seemed to come naturally to his exuberant art. He painted with equal skill on silk, paper, and freshly-plastered walls; he made three hundred frescoes for Buddhist edifices, and one of these, containing more than a thousand figures, became as famous in China as “The Last Judgment” or “The Last Supper” in Europe. Ninety-three of his paintings were in the Imperial Gallery in the twelfth century, four hundred years after his death; but none remains anywhere today. His Buddhas, we are told, “fathomed the mysteries of life and death”; his picture of purgatory frightened some of the butchers and fishmongers of China into abandoning their scandalously un-Buddhistic trades; his representation of Ming Huang’s dream convinced the Emperor that Wu had had an identical vision."

"'Tis a petty kind of fame At best, that comes of making violins; And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go To purgatory none the less."

"England is the paradise of women, the purgatory of men, and the hell of horses."

"I've come to the end of von Hügel's voluminous work on Catherine of Genoa. For such outlay in erudition, it's basically an unrewarding book (for me!), but full of interesting side-lights...Curious, for instance, that Catherine, always universally cited as the recognised authority, the most important and competent witness to the nature of Purgatory, should actually never have had a vision of it - neither as shewing nor as visiting in spirit, as other mystics did..Her statements are pure conclusions, analogies, based on her own spiritual experiences of suffering and bliss: "So that's what it must be like in Purgatory!""

"Time is the only true purgatory."

"When God sees the Soul pure as it was in its origins, He tugs at it with a glance, draws it, and binds it to Himself with a fiery love that by itself could annihilate the immortal soul. In so acting, God so transforms the soul in Him that it knows nothing other than God; and He continues to draw it up into His fiery love until He restores it to that pure state from which it first issued. These rays purify and then annihilate. The soul becomes like gold that becomes purer as it is fired, all dross being cast out. Having come to the point of twenty-four carats, gold cannot be purified any further; and this is what happens to the soul in the fire of God’s love."

"In the early Vedic tradition, the death god Yama kept two dogs, Syama the Black and Sabala the Spotted, to bring and hold souls in the Purgatory-like afterlife called Naraka. Even the Norse god Odin kept a pair of wolves, Geri and Freki."

"We know from Blessed Anna Maria Taigi that Napoleon did not go to Hell, but will remain in Purgatory until the end of time. A very heavy punishment, but not eternal damnation. And Sister Elena Aiello, whom I hold in very high esteem, informs us that even Mussolini will remain in Purgatory until the end of the world. As you can see, it is not only Farinacci who needs our prayers."

"I have no sympathy for fascism, I regret the Papal States, the temporal power of the Church, the era of Pope Pius IX."

"The Narakas are the realms of suffering that equate to the Christian hell or, more accurately, to purgatory. If a person is born into one of these realms as a result of bad karma, this is not a permanent punishment - he or she may well be reborn into one of the higher worlds in the next life. Watched over by Yama, judge of the world, the Narakas are not only physical places but also states of consciousness – and symbols of the suffering that can take place during life, as well as after death."

"Happy the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame—to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell!"

"Once a refugee, forever a refugee. Roads back to the lost (or rather no longer existing) home paradise have been all but cut, and all exits from the purgatory of the camp lead to hell... The prospectless succession of empty days inside the perimeter of the camp may be tough to endure, but God forbid that the appointed or voluntary plenipotentiaries of humanity, whose job it is to keep the refugees inside the camp but away from perdition, pull the plug. And yet they do, time and again, whenever the powers-that-be decide that the exiles are no longer refugees, since ostensibly 'it is safe to return' to that homeland that has long ceased to be their homeland and has nothing that could be offered or that is desired."

"Look at those detractors. Look at those dogs. They ridicule us for baptizing infants, praying for the dead, and asking the prayers of the saints. They lose no time in cutting Christ off from all kinds of people to both sexes, young and old, living and dead. They put infants outside the sphere of grace because they are too young to receive it, and those who are full grown because they find difficulty in preserving chastity. They deprive the dead of the help of the living, and rob the living of the prayers of the saints because they have died. God forbid! The Lord will not forsake his people who are as the sands of the sea, nor will he who redeemed all be content with a few, and those heretics...."

"Anchorites used to ill-treat themselves in the way they did, so that the common people would not begrudge them the beatitude they would enjoy in heaven."

"Dante is eminently the poet of beatitude. He has not only no rival, but none second to him. But if we were asked to name the poet who most nearly deserved this inaccessible proxime accessit, I should name Shelley. Indeed, my claim for Shelley might be represented by the proposition that Shelley and Milton are, each, the half of Dante."

"“The essence of happiness consists in an act of the intellect.” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica) … What is implicit in this sentence? This is implicit: the fulfillment of existence takes place in the manner in which we become aware of reality; the whole energy of our being is ultimately directed toward attainment of insight. The perfectly happy person, the one whose thirst has been finally quenched, who has attained beatitude—this person is the one who sees. The happiness, the quenching, the perfection, consists in this seeing."

"Suffering makes us capable of the full force of the Master of Delight; it makes us capable also to bear the utter play of the Master of Power. Pain is the key that opens the gates of strength; it is the high-road that leads to the city of beatitude."

"My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that not enough to fill a man's whole life?"

"The former generations acted under the belief that a shining social prosperity was the beatitude of man, and sacrificed uniformly the citizen to the State. The modern mind believed that the nation existed for the individual, for the guardianship and education of every man. This idea, roughly written in revolutions and national movements, in the mind of the philosopher had far more precision; the individual is the world."

"The indrawing attraction drags us out of ourselves, And calls us to be melted away and naughted in the Unity. And in this indrawing attraction we feel that God wills that we should be His, And for this we must abnegate ourselves and let our beatitude be accomplished in Him. But when He attracts us by flowing out towards us, He gives us over to ourselves and makes us free, And sets us in Time."

"Arise then, O invincible Prince, bring help against the attacks of the lost spirits to the people of God, and give them the victory. They venerate thee as their protector and Patron; in thee holy Church glories as her defense against the malicious power of hell; to thee has God entrusted the souls of men to be established in heavenly beatitude. Oh, pray to the God of peace that He may put Satan under our feet, so far conquered that he may no longer be able to hold men in captivity and harm the Church. Offer our prayers in the sight of the Most High, so that they may quickly conciliate the mercies of the Lord; and beating down the dragon, the ancient serpent, who is the devil and Satan, do thou again make him captive in the abyss, that he may no longer seduce the nations."

"In her later poems, Hadewijch uses striking language and metaphysical themes that were to be further developed by the German mystic Meister Eckhart. She speaks of nakedness and void, of the shedding of the will, of all images and forms in order to attain “pure and naked Nothingness,” so that union with God is no longer experienced as the highest stage of beatitude but as a plunge into boundless unknowing, into the “wild desert” of the Divine Essence. To reach the divine summit, nothing must remain to encumber the spirit: “The circle of things must shrink and be annihilated so that the circle of nakedness can grow and extend in order to embrace the All.” Hadewijch’s language expresses the superabundance of spiritual experience, reflecting her participation in the trinitarian mysteries. She celebrates the divine names: Presence in the Son, Overflow in the Holy Spirit, Totality in the Father. Union with the three persons of the Holy Trinity in active and contemplative life leads to ultimate Unity, to the repose and silence of the soul in the depths of God. There exists an abyss between this experience of spiritual plenitude and her efforts to say something about it Words are utterly insufficient here, yet they must be used to communicate something of the “blessedness of being lost in the fruition of Love” to those who are capable of receiving such a message."

"If, in traditional philosophical thought, it is wisdom – a wisdom built upon knowledge, careful thought, judgment, and so one – that ought to lead to beatitude, then we must recognize that this beatitude has nothing to do with the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. But the banishment of knowledge – any form of knowledge, whether philosophical or scientific, intelligible or sensory – in the process of Christian salvation is not gratuitous but rather is motivated by the very nature of the expected salvation. In order to vanquish the Forgetting that renders the absolute Life Immemorial, the Forgetting in which thought holds Life, we would precisely not ask that of thought. The salvation that consists of rediscovering this absolute Life escapes all orders of knowledge, expertise, and science. It does spring from consciousness as understood by classical or modern thought, as in “consciousness of something.” It is not some “becoming conscious of” that can liberate a person. It is not the consciousness’s progress through various kinds of knowledge that will secure salvation."

"It was truly very good reason that we should be beholden to God only, and to the favour of his grace, for the truth of so noble a belief, since from his sole bounty we receive the fruit of immortality, which consists in the enjoyment of eternal beatitude.... The more we give and confess to owe and render to God, we do it with the greater Christianity."

"When such a spiritual personality passes away, we do not pray for their Satgati (divine beatitude) or Atma Shanti (Supreme Peace). On the contrary, we pray to them for our peace and happiness, for they have attained all that and more even when they are in the physical bodies. Mankind will be ever greatful to Babaji for making their lives more beautiful and worth living. May Babaji's blessing continue to shower on one and all alike!"

"Endowed with a spiritual soul, with intellect and with free will, the human person is from his very conception ordered to God and destined for eternal beatitude."

"Greece had to lose, her pure consciousness had to make our agony only more acute.We needed God loving us in our weakness and not in the glory of beatitude."

"Emil Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born (1973)"

"If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself."

"If man’s beatitude consists in the adhering of the human mind to God, perfect beatitude must require a perfect adhering to God. But the human mind cannot adhere perfectly to God through the medium of any creature, whether by way of knowledge or by way of love. All created forms fall infinitely short of representing the divine essence. Objects pertaining to a higher order of being cannot be known through a form belonging to a lower order. For example, a spiritual substance cannot be known through a body, and a heavenly body cannot be known through one of the elements. Much less can the essence of God be known through any created form. Yet, just as we gain a negative insight into higher bodies from a study of lower bodies, thus learning, for instance, that they are neither heavy nor light, and just as we conceive a negative idea about ange’ls from a consideration of bodies, judging that they are immaterial or incorporeal, so by examining creatures we come to know, not what God is, but rather what He is not. Likewise, any goodness possessed by a creature is a definite minimum in comparison with the divine goodness, which is infinite goodness. Hence the various degrees of goodness emanating from God and discerned in things, which are benefits bestowed by God, fail to raise the mind to a perfect love of God. Therefore true and perfect beatitude cannot consist in the adherence of the mind to God through some alien medium."

"The eternal fears no future, hopes for no future, but love possesses everything without ceasing, and there is no shadow of variation. As soon as he returns to himself, he understands this no more. He understands what bitter experiences have only all too unforgettably inculcated, the self-accusation, if the past has the kind of claim upon his soul that no repentance can entirely redeem, no trusting in God can entirely wipe out, but only God himself in the inexpressible silence of beatitude. The more of the past a person’s soul can still keep when he is left to himself, the more profound he is."

"Among us on the earth there is His memory; but in the Kingdom of heaven His very Presence. That Presence is the joy of those who have already attained to beatitude; the memory is the comfort of us who are still wayfarers, journeying towards the Fatherland."

"Pope Leo XIII, Prayer to Saint Michael (1888)"

"This is the beatitude that the blessed might have, and yet they have it not, except in so far as they are dead to themselves and absorbed in God. They have it not in so far as they remain in themselves and can say: `I am blessed.' Words are wholly inadequate to express my meaning, and I reproach myself for using them. I would that everyone could understand me, and I am sure that if I could breathe on creatures, the fire of love burning within me would inflame them all with divine desire. O thing most marvelous!"

"In God is my being, my me, my strength, my beatitude, my good, and my delight. I say mine at present because it is not possible to speak otherwise, but I do not mean by it any such thing as me or mine, or delight or good, or strength or stability, or beatitude; nor could I possibly turn my eyes to behold such things in heaven or in the earth; and if, notwithstanding, I sometimes use words which may have the likeness of humility and of spirituality, in my interior I do not understand them, I do not feel them. In truth, it astonishes me that I speak at all, or use words so far removed from the truth and from that which I feel. I see clearly that man in this world deceives himself by admiring and esteeming things which are not, and neither sees nor esteems the things which are"

"Beauty is a reflection of divine beatitude; and since God is Truth, the reflection of His beatitude will be that blend of happiness and truth found in all beauty."

"The virtuous are then conveyed to Swarga or Elysium, whilst the wicked are driven to the different regions of Naraka or Tartarus."

"Hic manus, ob patriam pugnando vulnera passi, Quique sacerdotes casti, dum vita manebat, Quique pii vates, et Phoebo digna locuti, Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes, Quique sui memores alios fecere merendo."

"I'll be as patient as a gentle stream And make a pastime of each weary step, Till the last step have brought me to my love; And there I'll rest, as, after much turmoil, A blessed soul doth in Elysium."

"How sweet a thing it is to wear a crown, Within whose circuit is Elysium, And all that poets feign of bliss and joy."

"Some, ’tis whisper’d, down in hell Suffer endless anguish, others in Elysian valleys dwell, Resting weary limbs at last on beds of asphodel."

"Soon as thy son (believe the truths you hear) Shall in Elysium's blissful plains appear... In Hymen's silken chains the hero led, Must share the honours of Medea's bed."

"Who, as they sung, would take the prison'd soul And lap it in Elysium."

"Joy, thou spark from Heav'n immortal, Daughter of Elysium! Drunk with fire, toward Heaven advancing Goddess, to thy shrine we come. Thy sweet magic brings together What stern Custom spreads afar; All men become brothers Where thy happy wing-beats are."

"Devenere locos laetos et amoena vireta Fortunatonun nemorum, sedesque beatas."

"Ye Furies, and dreadful Styx, ye sufferings of the damned, and Chaos for ever eager to destroy the fair harmony of words, and thou, Pluto, condemned to an eternity of ungrateful existence, Hell and Elysium, of which no Thessalian witch shall partake, Prosperine, for ever cut off from thy health-giving mother, and horrid Hecate, Cerberus, cursed with incessant hunger, ye Destinies, and Charon, endlessly murmuring at the task I impose of bringing back the dead again to the land of the living, hear me! -if I call on you with a voice sufficiently impious and abominable, if I have never sung this chant unsated with human gore, if I have frequently laid on your altars the fruit of the pregnant mother, bathing its contents with the reeking brain if I have placed on a dish before you the head and entrails of an infant on the point to be born- I ask not of you a ghost, already a tenant of the Tartarian abodes, and long familiarized to the shades below, but one who has recently quitted the light of day, and who yet hovers over the mouth of hell: let him hear these incantations, and immediately after descent to his destined place! Let him articulate suitable omens to the son of his general, having so late been himself a soldier of the great Pompey! Do this, as you love the very sound and rumour of a civil war!"

"ELYSIUM, n. An imaginary delightful country which the ancients foolishly believed to be inhabited by the spirits of the good. This ridiculous and mischievous fable was swept off the face of the earth by the early Christians -- may their souls be happy in Heaven!"

"But though the Shawnees consider the sun the type, if not the essence, of the Great Spirit, many also believe in an evil genius, who makes all sorts of bad things, to counterbalance those made by the Good Spirit. For instance, when the latter made a sheep, a rose, wholesome herbs, etc., the bad spirit matched them with a wolf, a thorn, poisonous plants, and the like. They also appear to think there is a kind of purgatory in which the spirits of the wicked may be cleansed before entering into their elysium."

"Souls of poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?"