Vigils Reading – Office for the Dead

ETERNAL LIFE

AND ITS DIFFERENCE

From a sermon by Monsignor Ronald Knox

◊◊◊

The mistake we are tempted to make, do make in our moments of idle

thinking, is to suppose that eternal life merely means going on living. That,

naturally enough, was what the pagans thought, when they dreamed that there

was some possibility of a life after death. There is an epigram in the Greek

Anthology, often quoted for its beauty, in which the poet says to his dead friend,

“Once, a morning star, you shone among the living; now you shine, an evening

star, among the dead.”… So, in Virgil’s Aeneid, the heroes of Elysium are found

looking after their horses and chariots: “The same grateful task that was ever

theirs, to feed their sleek horses, is theirs still, now that earth has covered them.”

Do we, children of a later age, look forward to an eternity spent in washing down

the car? But it is the same mistake we are making, if we think of eternal life as

the mere continuation of living.

We unconsciously compare the experience of a future life to that of

waking up after an operation; waking up to breakfast and the morning paper.

And, of course, if we think of survival after death in those terms, it becomes an

open question for some of us whether we want to survive or not. The unpleasant

thing is the experience of dying; if we could avoid that, many of us would be

content to go on living, even in an atomic age. But when we have once been put

to all this inconvenience, would we be sure that we wanted to come back again

and go on living, more or less as before?…

Eternal life is not that sort of thing at all. When our Lord said he had come

that we might have life, and might have it more abundantly, he clearly did not

mean that he was going to introduce, into our humdrum, day-to-day existence,

more joie de vivre. The “life” which he came to bring – we have to call it “life”,

because that is the nearest thing to it we know – belongs to a different order of

existence. It has its own avenues of experience, its own range of faculties, its

own proper activities. And it will find its true medium only in heaven. True,

that life is in us now, implanted by baptism. But we are not yet in a position to

enjoy it, in the sense of savouring its possibilities. We are, if I may put it so,

embryonic citizens of heaven, borne at present in the womb of matter and of

time. And that is why we are foolish if we try to project our present experience

into a future life… To wake up after death is not like waking up, after an

operation, from the life of today to the life of tomorrow. It is like waking up from

a dream world into a world, hitherto unexperienced, of realities.