Finding heaven: life's ultimate goal

Lionel Messi himself (Argentina's superstar against the Socceroos) is a famous pointer-up-to-heaven.

And as I type this on one screen, on another I've one eye on the highly-religious Brazilians, heavenwards gazers all, running rings round the irreligious Koreans.

Lots of these heaven-contacting footballers do it just after they have scored a goal, to thank Almighty God for vouchsafing His special blessing on the scorer and his team.

Faith is vital to these rituals. One persuasive theological explanation of Argentina's victory over Australia is that God favoured a nation of believers (92 per cent of Argentinians identify as Roman Catholics) over secular, agnostic-infested Australia. And who can blame Him?

These player references in Qatar to a heaven up above the bright blue sky, as we used to chirrup in church in the olden days, coincide with the posting online of a heavenly-in-its-way online essay about Heaven. Scholar Stephen Case's Where God Dwelt: For hundreds of years Christians knew exactly where heaven was above us and below the stars, decorates Aeon magazine.

Case argues that the notion of heaven being up where the footballers imagine, is now ye olde and moribund.

The Christian concept of heaven, so familiar today from popular depictions of clouds and haloed angels, was an invention, Case argues.

Christian writers combined Plato's ideas about the soul's ascent to the sky at death with Aristotle's understanding of the structure of the universe then with the ascents, described in the New Testament, of both Jesus and Paul.

READ MORE: IAN WARDEN

By the Middle Ages, anyone who uttered the words "Our Father, who art in heaven" had a clear spatial understanding of where heaven was: God dwelt in the third heaven, above the heaven of the air and the heaven of the stars.

This third heaven became an article of Christian faith - until the new cosmology of Copernicus and Galileo placed the Sun, rather than Earth, in the centre of the universe. This transformation from an Earth-centred to a Sun-centred universe destroyed heaven as a place within the cosmos.

And so, Case continues, if today he asked astronomy students where heaven was located, he would no doubt receive a classroom full of bewildered stares.

They believe, but they don't conceptualise heaven as a location; it is not a part of their spatial understanding of the universe.

But I wonder, observing the upwardly-gazing Christian footballers and of the behaviour of so many Christians with Heavencentric faiths, if heaven is not still thought of as a place, a destination, a resort?

Even though I am a sort of atheist now, I am still very fond of my lapsed Anglicanism. I realise now, reading the professor's essay, that the notion of heaven as a place is a part of the parcel of beliefs stored away (because one never knows when they might come in useful) in the mind's attic.

Of course for art lovers the idea of heaven as a place up there, beyond the bright blue sky, is an idea that gets reinforced in the mind by all those great paintings that illustrate that belief.

Professor Case's piece in Aeon is illustrated by one of them. It is Luis de Morale's 1575 portrait of a necessarily terrestrial, living Saint Stephen being addressed from On High (perhaps from heaven's balcony or deck) by God.

Perhaps, when one ogles enough of these sorts of paintings all similarly emphasising heaven's exact whereabouts, they begin to strike the credulous mind as illustrated reports of the literal truth.

The great poet Emily Dickinson thought heaven wasn't somewhere above but was here below with us. Pay attention, she counsels in one poem, and we may find angels renting the house next door.

Emily is usually right about everything in Life, but the Brazilian footballers disagree with her and who is to say they are wrong, these pious, velvet-footed living saints?

On the screen next to me they are leading hapless Korea 4-0. After each goal, the scorer - not bothered with Galileo and Copernicus or with what's next door - looks and points up, up, up to where he knows God dwells.

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