Replies

MD: Lewis’s evocative language suggests that the passions of the blessed will be overwhelmed. One of his characters says that to think about genital sex in heaven would be like seeing the Niagara Falls and thinking about making a cup of tea.

FK: If Lewis was right, then I wouldn't understand how the departed could be qualified to understand our problems or have compassion about them. They would no longer be able to relate. This description to me would be to lose a substantial amount of our humanity.

Shibumi: Or, perhaps, to realize the fullness of it.

Alex: Yes. Let us not forget: Original Sin made us less human. True humanity is Christ's humanity.

Just want to make sure we're all on the same page. :) Now, if we put all of this together it looks like it comes out that being in Heaven will have us realizing the fullness(es?) of our humanity(ies). That part sounds great. :)

However, I can't buy that the fullness of humanity is passionless. One of the first things we learn about Adam was that he was lonely (did not have a fit helper) and that was not good. So, when Eve arrived Adam's loneliness went away and it was good. At that precise time, before the Fall, we are then told:

Gen. 2:24 : For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

I know we are told later that there won't be sex in Heaven, but for the purposes of talking about passion, are we to assume that before the Fall, the sex between Adam and Eve was passionless? That doesn't sound like the fullness of humanity to me. When we are passionate with our spouses (respectively of course) are we to think it is a gift of God as was in the original model, or a negative result of the Fall? Help me out here. :)

Plus, in response to Alex, Christ's humanity sure seemed to have plenty of passion. :)

I think we are confusing here passion in the sense of a strong feeling oriented to good which we control, and a strong feeling not oriented to anything rational that controls us. The former is virtue. The latter is passion as the biblical authors write about it.

The word “passion” started taking on positive connotation of something good in itself, even if not entirely virtuous, in Romanticism. Schiller, I believe, described Werther with great warmth and sympathy as a man in sensual love that ends up killing him. Eventually, we forgot what the original meaning is altogether. Today we have reels of Disney teenager movies and zaccharine chick flicks for the older audience that selebrate sexual attraction as the sum total of what man is. We now do not want to deprive Christ and Adam of that supposed goodness.