We continue our deep dive into THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.
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Last time, we touched on the strange New Testament vision of warfare in heaven. Let me give you some biblical passages to give you an idea of what I mean:
For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:38-39)
For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Eph 6:12)
He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. (Col 1:15-16)
He disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in him. (Col 2:15)
To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all men see what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things; that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places. (Eph 3:8-10)
What’s striking about all this, of course, is that even after we have distinguished between Heaven-as-Sky and Heaven-as-Spiritual-Reality, Paul does not seem to share our modern day image of heaven or perhaps more precisely “the heavenlies” as a particularly tranquil place. Nor does John, in his turbulent Revelation, which seems to summarize the early Christian picture of things by declaring flatly “war arose in heaven” (Revelation 12:7). In short, the biblical vision of a heaven ruled by the Lord of Hosts suggests that our modern picture of puffy clouds and nothing but peace is rather inadequate and that this may contribute mightily to our wrong notions of the life of prayer and phrases like “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
For prayer is a great struggle, not a retreat into Nirvana. What the Tradition has always maintained is that the reason for the struggle is threefold: the world, the flesh, and the devil. Different strains of modernity have different objections to this proposition. Many, conditioned to think only in terms of the visible universe and the utterly unconditioned reality of God in eternity, find it incredible to believe that reality might have more than two floors. So they are startled by scripture’s “primitive” vision of a heavenly realm in which there is warfare and battle between the Lord of Hosts and the “principalities and powers in the heavenly places” that Paul speaks of. Such folk are often also inclined to reject the notion of the only really trustworthy conspiracy theory in the world: namely, Paul’s description of the “principalities and powers, the world rulers of this present darkness, and the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” For similar reasons, they don’t know what to make of notions like the “prince of the power of the air” (Eph 2:2) or of Paul’s strange remarks about being caught up to the “third heaven” (2 Cor 12:2). It has not occurred to most modern believers that there can be anything besides our physical universe, which is what “earth” refers to theologically, and “heaven” meaning “total union with God in Christ.”
But, in fact, scripture gives us every reason to think that “heaven” has another, unsuspected-by-moderns, meaning in the minds of the biblical authors: namely, that instead of a simple two-storey structure of earth below and heaven above, there is instead a sort of skyscraper of created orders and beings which, while “supernatural” to us are still creatures and infinitely inferior to God. And not all these created spiritual beings are friendly to us or to God, judging from Paul’s remarks. That, at the very minimum, appears to be a pretty constant message from the story of the Fall (where Something was here before us to tempt us) to the Exodus (where God is making war on the gods of Egypt and those gods try to fight back) to the contests of the Old Testament (where the prophets likewise make war on spiritual beings who aren’t so much non-existent as “not God” (cf 1 King 18)) to the gospels (where Jesus is in open warfare with spiritual beings who can possess and inflict sundry harms on human beings cf. Mark 1:21-27) to Paul (who takes it for granted that the gods of the pagans are demons (1 Corinthians 10:20-21)).
The medieval period, taking this cue from scripture’s cryptic remarks, had great fun elaborating an angelology (and demonology) that one need not be persuaded is especially sound. At the same time, this habit of mind preserved something which modernity could really stand to recover: the recognition that prayer is a battle and that we really are involved with a creation that is much much bigger than we realize: one that really does include powers, principalities, and sundry spiritual beings, both good and evil, beyond this visible creation. Moreover, it reinforces for us a realistic sense of our position in the world as creatures who are, by nature, lower than angels and yet, by grace, lifted far above them. That’s the point of Paul’s startling remark that “through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 3:10-11) and Peter’s comment that even angels long to look into the mysteries which God is revealing through the Church (cf. 1 Peter 1:12).
This is not to say we are any great shakes, of course. Rather it is to say that God has chosen to work out his purposes through the lowest and most undeserving of his creatures so that no creature can boast—even the mighty thrones, dominations, principalities and powers whom he has fashioned to serve him (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:18-31).
St. Augustine tells us:
It would not be inconsistent with the truth to understand the words, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven,” to mean: “in the Church as in our Lord Jesus Christ himself”; or “in the Bride who has been betrothed, just as in the Bridegroom who has accomplished the will of the Father.”[1]
In short, Jesus, not some place in the clouds, is heaven. If you want to see how God’s will is fulfilled “in heaven” so that you can imitate it here on earth, then don’t wait around for a vision of angels in realms of glory and try to imitate that. Instead, look at Jesus. He is heaven on earth and we must imitate him in the battle of prayer and obedience. In the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, heaven joins earth to himself and brings the battle to the foe. He literally does the will of God on earth as it is in heaven because he is heaven come to earth.
In so doing, he prepares the way for That Day when not just earth, but even heaven will be freed from its wars and strife and be joined with the Blessed Trinity, not merely in a New Earth, but a New Heaven as well (Rev 21:1).
[1] St. Augustine, De serm. Dom. 2,6,24:PL 34,1279
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