HEAVEN.

— In general, the word heaven designates the indefinite space that surrounds the Earth, and more particularly the part that is above our horizon. It comes from the Latin cœlum, formed from the Greek coïlos, concave, because the heaven seems an immense concavity.

The ancients believed in the existence of many superimposed heavens, of solid and transparent matter, forming concentric spheres and having the Earth as center. As these spheres revolved around the Earth, they carried with them the heavenly bodies that lay within their circuit.

This idea, arising from the deficiency of astronomical knowledge, was that of all the theogonies, which made of the heavens, thus tiered, the various degrees of blessedness: the last of them was the refuge of supreme happiness.

According to the most common opinion, there were seven heavens, and hence the expression — to be in the seventh heaven — to express perfect happiness.

The Muslims admit nine heavens, in each of which the happiness of believers increases.

The astronomer Ptolemy n counted eleven and named the last the Empyrean n because of the brilliant light that reigns within it. This is still today the poetic name given to the place of eternal glory.

Christian theology recognizes three heavens: the first is that of the region of air and clouds; the second, the space in which the heavenly bodies revolve; and the third, beyond this, is the abode of the Most High, the dwelling of those who contemplate Him face to face. It is in accordance with this belief that it is said that St. Paul was raised to the third heaven.

— The different doctrines concerning paradise all rest on the twofold error of considering the Earth the center of the Universe, and the region of the heavenly bodies as limited.

It is beyond this imaginary limit that all have placed the fortunate residence and the abode of the Almighty.

A singular anomaly that places the Author of all things, He who governs them all, at the confines of creation, instead of at the center, whence His thought could, radiant, embrace everything!

— Science, with the inexorable logic of observation and of facts, carried its torch into the depths of Space and showed the nullity of all these theories.

The Earth is no longer the axis of the Universe but one of the smallest of the heavenly bodies that roll through immensity; the Sun itself is nothing more than the center of a planetary whirlwind; the stars are so many and innumerable suns, around which circle countless worlds, separated by distances accessible only to thought, although they appear to us to touch one another.

In this grandiose ensemble governed by eternal laws — revealers of the wisdom and omnipotence of the Creator — the Earth is no more than an imperceptible point and one of the least favored planets as regards habitability.

And, this being so, it is permissible to ask why God would make the Earth the sole seat of life and exile His preferred creatures to it? But, on the contrary, everything announces life everywhere, and Humanity is infinite like the Universe.

Science revealing to us worlds similar to ours, God could not have created them without purpose; rather He must have peopled them with beings capable of governing them.

— Man's ideas are in proportion to what he knows; like all important discoveries, that of the constitution of the worlds was bound to give them another course; under the influence of these new pieces of knowledge, beliefs were modified; Heaven was displaced, and the stellar region, being unlimited, can no longer serve it.

Where is it, then? And before this question all religions fall silent.

Spiritism comes to resolve them by demonstrating the true destiny of man. Taking as a basis the nature of the latter and the divine attributes, one arrives at a conclusion; that is to say that, starting from the known, one reaches the unknown by a logical deduction, not to speak of the direct observations that Spiritism affords.

— Man is composed of body and Spirit: the Spirit is the principal being, rational, intelligent; the body is the material envelope that clothes the Spirit temporarily, for the fulfillment of its mission on Earth and the execution of the work necessary to its advancement.

The body, worn out, is destroyed, and the Spirit survives its destruction. Deprived of the Spirit, the body is merely inert matter, like an instrument deprived of the mainspring of function; 3 without the body, the Spirit is everything: life, intelligence. Upon leaving the body, it returns to the spiritual world, where it dwells, in order later to reincarnate.

There exist, therefore, two worlds: the corporeal, composed of incarnate Spirits; and the spiritual, formed of disincarnate Spirits.

The beings of the corporeal world, owing precisely to the materiality of their envelope, are bound to the Earth or to some globe; 6 the spiritual world displays itself everywhere, around us as in Space, without any designated limit.

By reason precisely of the fluidic nature of their envelope, the beings that compose it, instead of moving laboriously over the ground, traverse distances with the rapidity of thought.

The death of the body is no more than the rupture of the bonds that held them captive.

— Spirits are created simple and ignorant, but endowed with aptitudes to know everything and to progress, by virtue of their free will.

Through progress they acquire new knowledge, new faculties, new perceptions and, consequently, new joys unknown to inferior Spirits; they see, hear, feel and understand what backward Spirits cannot see, feel, hear or understand.

Happiness is in direct proportion to the progress accomplished, so that, of two Spirits, one may not be as happy as the other, solely because he does not possess the same intellectual and moral advancement, without their needing on that account to be, each one, in a distinct place.

Even though together, one may be in darkness, while everything shines for the other, just as a blind man and a sighted one who hold hands: the latter perceives the light of which the former receives not the least impression.

The happiness of Spirits being inherent in their qualities, they draw it everywhere they find themselves, whether at the surface of the Earth, in the midst of the incarnate, or in Space.

A common comparison will make this situation better understood. If there are at a concert two men, one a good musician, with a trained ear, and the other ignorant of music, with a sense of hearing little refined, the first will experience a sensation of happiness, while the second will remain insensible, because one understands and perceives what produces no impression on the other. So it happens with regard to all the joys of Spirits, which are in proportion to their sensibility.

The spiritual world has splendors everywhere, harmonies and sensations that inferior Spirits, subjected to the influence of matter, do not even glimpse, and which are accessible only to purified Spirits.

— Progress in Spirits is the fruit of their own labor; but, since they are free, they labor at their advancement with greater or lesser activity, with more or less negligence, according to their will, accelerating or retarding the progress and, consequently, their own happiness.

While some advance rapidly, others grow torpid, like sluggards, in the inferior ranks. They are therefore the authors themselves of their situation, happy or unhappy, in accordance with this phrase of Christ: — “To each one according to his works.”

Every Spirit that lags behind can complain of none but himself, just as the one who advances will have the exclusive merit of his effort, thereby setting greater value on the happiness conquered.

Supreme happiness is shared only by perfect Spirits, or, in other words, by pure Spirits, who attain it only after having progressed in intelligence and morality.

Intellectual progress and moral progress rarely march together, but what the Spirit does not achieve at a given time, he attains at another, so that the two kinds of progress end up reaching the same level.

This is why one often sees intelligent and instructed men little advanced morally, and vice versa.

— Incarnation is necessary to the twofold moral and intellectual progress of the Spirit: to intellectual progress through the obligatory activity of labor; to moral progress through the reciprocal need of men for one another.

Social life is the touchstone of good or bad qualities.

Goodness, wickedness, gentleness, violence, benevolence, charity, egoism, avarice, pride, humility, sincerity, frankness, loyalty, bad faith, hypocrisy, in a word, all that constitutes the man of good or the perverse one has for its motive, for its aim and for its stimulus the relations of man with his fellows; 4 for the man who lived isolated there would be neither vices nor virtues: preserving himself from evil through isolation, the good itself would be nullified.

— A single corporeal existence is manifestly insufficient for the Spirit to acquire all the good it lacks and to eliminate the evil it has in excess.

How could the savage, for example, in a single incarnation place himself morally and intellectually on a level with the most advanced European? It is materially impossible.

Must he, then, remain eternally in ignorance and barbarism, deprived of the joys that only the development of the faculties can afford him? Simple good sense rejects such a supposition, which would be not only the negation of divine justice and goodness, but of the very evolutive and progressive laws of Nature.

But God, who is sovereignly just and good, grants the Spirit as many incarnations as are necessary to attain its objective — perfection.

For each new existence in the midst of matter, the Spirit enters with the wealth acquired in the previous ones, in aptitudes, intuitive knowledge, intelligence and morality. Each existence is thus a step forward on the road of progress. n

Incarnation is inherent in the inferiority of Spirits, ceasing to be necessary as soon as these, transcending its limits, become apt to progress in the spiritual state, or in the corporeal existences of superior worlds, which have nothing of terrestrial materiality.

On the part of these, incarnation is voluntary, having for its purpose to exercise upon the incarnate a more direct action tending to the fulfillment of the mission that belongs to them among them. In this way they accept with abnegation the vicissitudes and sufferings of incarnation.

— In the interval of corporeal existences the Spirit re-enters the spiritual world, where it is happy or unhappy according to the good or the evil it has done.

Since the spiritual state is the definitive state of the Spirit and the spiritual body does not die, this must also be its normal state.

The corporeal state is transitory and fleeting.

It is in the spiritual state above all that the Spirit gathers the fruits of the progress accomplished by the work of incarnation; 5 it is also in that state that it prepares itself for new struggles and takes the resolutions that it is to put into practice on its return to Humanity.

The Spirit progresses equally in erraticity, acquiring special knowledge that it could not obtain on Earth, and modifying its ideas.

The corporeal and the spiritual states constitute the source of two kinds of progress, through which the Spirit has to pass alternately, in the existences peculiar to each of the two worlds.

— Reincarnation can take place on the Earth or on other worlds.

There are among the worlds some more advanced where existence is carried on in conditions less painful than on the Earth, physically and morally, but where also only Spirits arrived at a degree of perfection relative to the state of those worlds are admitted.

Life in the superior worlds is already a reward, since there we find ourselves exempt from terrestrial evils and vicissitudes. Where the bodies, less material, almost fluidic, are no longer subject to ailments, to infirmities, and neither have the same needs. The wicked Spirits being excluded, men enjoy full peace, with no other preoccupation than that of advancement through intellectual labor.

There reigns there the true fraternity, because there is no egoism; the true equality, because there is no pride; and the true liberty, because there are no disorders to repress, nor ambitious persons who seek to oppress the weak.

Compared to the Earth, these worlds are true paradises, like resting places along the road of progress leading to the definitive state.

The Earth being an inferior world destined to the purification of imperfect Spirits, therein lies the reason for the evil that predominates there, until it pleases God to make of it the abode of more advanced Spirits.

Thus it is that the Spirit, progressing gradually as it develops, reaches the apogee of happiness; but, before having attained the culmination of perfection, it enjoys a happiness relative to its progress.

The child also enjoys the pleasures of infancy, later those of youth, and finally the more solid ones of maturity.

— The happiness of the blessed Spirits does not consist in contemplative idleness, which would be, as we have said many times, an eternal and tedious uselessness.

Spiritual life in all its degrees is, on the contrary, a constant activity, but an activity free of fatigue.

Supreme happiness consists in the enjoyment of all the splendors of Creation, which no human language could ever describe, which the most fecund imagination could not conceive.

It also consists in the penetration of all things, 5 in the absence of physical and moral sufferings, 6 in an intimate satisfaction, in an imperturbable serenity of soul, 7 in the love that envelops all beings, because of the absence of friction from contact with the wicked, 8 and, above all, in the contemplation of God and in the understanding of His mysteries revealed to the most worthy.

Happiness also exists in the tasks the charge of which makes us happy.

The pure Spirits are the Messiahs or messengers of God for the transmission and execution of His wills. They fulfill the great missions, they preside over the formation of the worlds and over the general harmony of the Universe, a glorious task that is reached only through perfection. Those of the most elevated order are the only ones to possess the secrets of God, drawing inspiration from His thought, of which they are direct representatives.

— The attributions of Spirits are proportioned to their progress, to the lights they possess, to their capacities, experience and degree of confidence inspired in the sovereign Lord.

Neither favors nor privileges that are not the reward of merit; everything is measured and weighed in the balance of strict justice.

The most important missions are confided only to those whom God judges capable of fulfilling them and incapable of failing or compromising themselves.

And while the most worthy compose the supreme council, under the eyes of God, to superior chiefs is committed the direction of planetary whirlwinds, and to others is conferred that of special worlds.

There come next, in the order of advancement and hierarchical subordination, the more restricted attributions of those appointed to the progress of peoples, to the protection of families and individuals, to the impulse of each branch of progress, the various operations of Nature down to the most minute details of Creation.

In this vast and harmonious ensemble there are occupations for all capacities, aptitudes and efforts; occupations accepted with joy, solicited with ardor, because they are a means of advancement for the Spirits who aspire to progress.

— Alongside the great missions confided to superior Spirits, there are others of relative importance in all degrees, granted to Spirits of all categories, it being possible to affirm that each incarnate being has his own, that is, duties to fulfill for the good of his fellows, from the head of the family, to whom falls the progress of the children, to the man of genius who casts into societies new seeds of progress.

It is in these secondary missions that there occur failures, prevarications and renunciations that harm the individual without affecting the whole.

— All intelligences contribute, then, to the general work, whatever the degree attained, and each in the measure of its strength, whether in the state of incarnation or in the spiritual.

Everywhere activity, from the base to the apex of the scale, instructing itself, assisting itself in mutual support, joining hands to reach the zenith.

Thus is established the solidarity between the spiritual world and the corporeal, or, in other terms, between men and Spirits, between the freed Spirits and the captive ones.

Thus are perpetuated and consolidated, through purification and the continuity of relations, the true sympathies and noble affections.

Everywhere, life and movement: no corner of the infinite unpeopled, no region that is not incessantly traversed by innumerable legions of radiant Spirits, invisible to the gross senses of the incarnate, but the sight of whom dazzles with joy and admiration the souls freed from matter.

Everywhere, in short, there is a happiness relative to all the progress, to all the duties fulfilled, each one bringing with himself the elements of his happiness, deriving from the category in which he places himself by his advancement.

On the qualities of the individual depends his happiness, and not on the material state of the milieu in which he finds himself, 8 happiness being able, therefore, to exist in any place where there are Spirits capable of enjoying it. No place is circumscribed and assigned to it in the Universe.

Wherever they find themselves, Spirits can contemplate the divine majesty, because God is everywhere.

— Nevertheless, happiness is not personal: If we possessed it only within ourselves, without being able to share it with another, it would be sadly egoistic.

We also find it in the communion of ideas that unites sympathetic beings.

The happy Spirits, attracting one another by the similitude of tastes and sentiments, form vast groupings or homogeneous families, in the bosom of which each individuality radiates its own qualities and is saturated with the serene and beneficial effluvia emanated from the whole.

The members of this, now disperse to give themselves to their mission, now reunite at a given point of Space in order to render an account of the work accomplished, now congregate around a more elevated Spirit to receive instructions and counsel.

— Although Spirits are everywhere, the worlds are by preference their centers of attraction, by virtue of the analogy existing between them and those who inhabit them.

Around the advanced worlds superior Spirits abound, as around the backward ones inferior Spirits swarm.

Each globe has, in some manner, its own population of incarnate and disincarnate Spirits, fed for the most part by the incarnation and disincarnation of the same.

This population is more stable in the inferior worlds, by reason of their attachment to matter, and more fluctuating in the superior ones.

From the latter, however, true focuses of light and happiness, Spirits detach themselves toward inferior worlds in order to sow in them the seeds of progress, to bring them consolation and hope, to raise the spirits cast down by the trials of life. At times they also incarnate in order to fulfill more efficaciously their mission.

— In that unlimited immensity, where is Heaven? Everywhere. No outline traces its limits.

The advanced worlds are the last stations of its road, which the virtues throw open and the vices forbid.

Before this grandiose picture that peoples the Universe, that gives to all the things of Creation an end and a reason for being, how small and mean is the doctrine that circumscribes Humanity to an imperceptible point of Space, that shows it to us beginning at a given instant in order to end equally with the world that contains it, spanning no more than a minute in Eternity!

How sad, cold, glacial is that doctrine when it shows us the rest of the Universe, during and after terrestrial Humanity, without life or movement, like a vast desert immersed in profound silence!

How despairing is the prospect of the elect devoted to perpetual contemplation, while the majority of creatures suffer endless torments!

How it lacerates sensitive hearts, the idea of that barrier between the dead and the living! The blissful souls, they say, think only of their happiness, as the wretched ones think of their pains.

Is it any wonder that egoism reigns over the Earth when they show it to us in Heaven?

Oh! how mean appears to us that idea of the grandeur, of the power and of the goodness of God! How sublime is the idea we form of Him through Spiritism! How much its doctrine aggrandizes the ideas and amplifies thought!

But who says that it is true? Reason first, Revelation next, and, finally, its concordance with the progress of Science.

Between two doctrines, of which one belittles and the other exalts the attributes of God; of which one alone is in disagreement and the other in harmony with progress; of which one stays behind in the rear while the other walks forward, good sense says on which side the truth lies.

Let each one, comparing them, consult his conscience, and an intimate voice will speak to him for it. Well then, these intimate aspirations are the voice of God, who cannot deceive men.

— But, it will be said, why did God not reveal to them from the start the whole truth? For the same reason that one does not teach to infancy what is taught to those of mature age.

The limited revelation was sufficient for a certain period of Humanity, and God proportions it gradually to the progress and to the strength of the Spirit.

Those who receive today a more complete revelation are the same Spirits who had a particle of it in other times and who from then on grew greater in intelligence.

Before Science had revealed to men the living forces of Nature, the constitution of the heavenly bodies, the true role of the Earth and its formation, could they understand the immensity of Space and the plurality of worlds?

Before Geology proved the formation of the Earth, could men draw out from its bowels the hell and understand the allegorical sense of the six days of Creation?

Before Astronomy discovered the laws that govern the Universe, could they understand that there is neither up nor down in Space, that heaven is not above the clouds nor limited by the stars?

Could they identify themselves with the spiritual life before the progress of psychological science?

Conceive after death a happy or unhappy life, except in a circumscribed place and under a material form? No; understanding more through the senses than through thought, the Universe was too vast for their conception; it was necessary to restrict it to their point of view in order to enlarge it later.

A partial revelation had its utility, and, though wise until then, it would not satisfy today.

The absurdity comes from those who claim to be able to govern men of thought, without taking account of the progress of ideas, as if they were children.

(See The Gospel According to Spiritism, chapter III.)

[1] Ptolemy lived in Alexandria, Egypt, in the second century of the Christian era.

[2] From the Greek, pur or pyr, fire.

[3] See note chapter 1, Item 3, note 1.