Heaven

Heaven is one the cardinal representations of life after death. Even outside conventional religious circles, the image of the dead sojourning in heaven is popular. Generally speaking, heaven is a metaphor for another world distinct from the here and now. It is a transcendent sphere beyond the immanent world, yet observable from the here and now. Among the connotations of heaven, the first to be discussed is a cosmological meaning of heaven. Second, there is the religious meaning of heaven; Heaven in the sense of a divine world and the place where the dead dwell. Connected to this, there is hell, being the antipode of heaven. Besides this religious meaning, heaven symbolizes the consummation of the world at the end of time. Finally, in modern thinking, we find a new, more immanent meaning assigned to heaven.

The Cosmological Meaning of Heaven

Heaven has a cosmological meaning. It is part of the cosmos in which human life is conducted. It is the uppermost part of the cosmos and, in addition to its natural meaning, may have a religious or spiritual connotation. People on earth have always raised their eyes heavenward and sought to understand what they saw. In the past, heaven was regarded as the upper limit of the world. At a certain point vision ends, and this limit was interpreted as heaven. An example is the ancient Eastern worldview. In this view, the world was perceived in three parts. At the bottom was the primeval flood, representing chaos; in the middle was earth, where people lived; and finally, heaven was located at the top, above the earth. In the observable space where life took place, according to this worldview, heaven constituted the visible, spatial boundary of earth.

Modern scientific development changed this perception of heaven. People could travel to heaven, discover stars and planets, and literally come to grasp that the cosmos is vaster than what is visible from earth. This new human ability to explore the cosmos altered the meaning of heaven as a limit. In fact, the focus was now on the boundlessness of the heavens. This shows how dependent people's image of heaven is on their cultural context and worldview.

Besides this spatial meaning of heaven as part of the cosmos, it can have a spiritual meaning as well. This often relates to the stars. By ascribing certain spiritual forces to the stars, heaven's cosmological reality influences life on earth. There is a link between heaven and earth. Here, the relation between astronomy and astrology is pertinent. Astronomy is the science that seeks to improve observation of the heavens and the study of stars. Astrology, on the other hand, is a system of meanings attributed to the stars and the heavens. In this perspective, life on earth is directed from the heavens. In these two areas, we find, on one hand, scientific insight into the stars, and on the other, mythological interpretive patterns such as constellations that can be used to understand individual human lives. In both perspectives the stars exercise a powerful fascination. The part of the cosmos that lies beyond the human life world signifies transcendence of the life world. It also permits people to interpret death: Cosmologically heaven symbolizes human life as part of a larger whole in both an observable and a mythological sense. This may be associated with the notion that death is not the final limit of human existence.

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