What is eternal life?

So far, we have talked about faith and hope in the New Testament and the beginnings of Christianity. However, it was still clear that we were not just talking about the past. The whole consideration concerns the life and death of a person in general and thus interests us here and now. Therefore, we must now explicitly ask: Is the Christian faith still hope for us today that transforms and sustains our lives? Is it “performative” for us – is it a message that reshapes life in a new way? Or is it just “information” that we have put aside in the meantime and seems to us to be surpassed by more current information? In searching for an answer, I would like to start with the classical form of dialogue, which was used in the baptism ceremony to express the acceptance of the newborn into the community of believers and his rebirth in Christ. First, the priest asked what name the parents had chosen for the child, and then he continued with the question: “What do you ask from the Church?” Answer: “Faith.” “What does faith give you?” – “Eternal life.” In this dialogue, the parents sought for the child access to faith and fellowship with believers because they saw in faith the key to “eternal life.” Today, as yesterday, this is precisely what baptism is about, by which we become Christians: it is not only an act of socialization within the community, not only by being accepted into the Church. Parents expect something more from a child receiving baptism: they expect that faith, which also includes the materiality of the Church and its sacraments, will give him life, eternal life. Faith is the essence of hope. But here the question arises: Do we want it – to live forever? Today, perhaps many reject faith simply because they do not desire eternal life. They do not wish for eternal life but present life, and the belief in eternal life appears to them rather as an obstacle to this goal. To go on living forever—without end—seems more like a condemnation than a gift. Of course, death should be delayed as much as possible. But to live all the time, without end, can only be boring, even unbearable. This is exactly what Ambrose, one of the church fathers, says in his funeral speech for his late brother Satyr: “Indeed, death was not a part of nature, but it became a natural reality. For God did not establish death from the beginning, but gave a remedy for it (…) As a result of guilt, people’s lives began to be miserable amid daily toils and unbearable crying. Evil had to be put to an end, so death had to make up for what life had lost. Immortality is a burden rather than an advantage unless it is enlightened by grace.” 6 Even earlier, Ambrose said: “We should not weep over death, because it is the cause of salvation…

 Whatever exactly St. Ambrose meant by these words, the truth is that death’s elimination, or almost indefinite delay, would throw the earth and humanity into an intolerable situation and would bring no benefit to the individual himself. Of course, there is a contradiction in our attitude, which points to the inner contradiction of our very existence. On the one hand, we don’t want to die, especially the one who loves us doesn’t want us to die. On the other hand, however, we do not desire to continue life indefinitely, even if the earth was not created with this perspective in mind. So what do we want? This paradox of our attitude raises a deeper question: What, in essence, is “life”? And what does “eternity” actually mean? There are moments when we suddenly realize: Yes, it should be exactly like this, real life should be exactly like this.

On the contrary, what we call “life” in everyday life is not life. In his long letter on prayer, addressed to Probe, a well-to-do Roman widow and mother of three consuls, Augustine once wrote: We want only one thing – a “blessed life,” a life that is simply life, simply “happiness.” And after all, we do not ask for anything else, not even in prayer. We are not moving towards anything else and are only concerned with this. But then Augustín adds: When we look closer, we don’t know what we desire or want. We do not see this fact, and even when we think we are touching it, we are not reaching it. ” We don’t even know what to pray for, ” he confesses in the words of St. Paul (Rom, 8,26). All we know is that it’s not that. Yet, in our ignorance, we know that this fact must exist. “There is, so to speak, learned ignorance ( docta ignorantia ) in us,” he writes. We don’t know what we want. We do not know this “true life,” yet we know that there must be something we do not know, yet we are drawn to it.

I think that Augustine here very precisely and always validly describes the basic situation of man, the situation from which all his contradictions and hopes come. In some way, we long for life itself, for that right which even death cannot touch; at the same time, we do not know what we feel attracted to. We cannot stop moving towards it, yet we know that everything we can experience or realize is not what we desire. This unknown “thing” is the true “hope” that prompts us, and the very fact that it is unknown is simultaneously the cause of all disappointments and positive or destructive stimuli about the authentic world and authentic man. The expression “eternal life” tries to name this known-unknown fact. It is necessarily an inadequate term that causes confusion. “Eternal” evokes the idea of ​​”never-ending,” which makes us afraid. The word “life” leads us to think of the kind of life we ​​now know, love, and don’t want to lose, which is nevertheless often more of a struggle than satisfaction, and so while we long for it on the one hand, we don’t want it on the other. We can only try to get out of the temporality to which we are prisoners with our thinking and somehow experience a foretaste of the fact that eternity is not an endless succession of days on the calendar but something like a moment of satisfaction in which the totality of being embraces us and we embrace it. This means immersing yourself in an ocean of infinite love, in which time – understood as “before and after” – no longer exists. We can do our best to think that this moment is life to the fullest, an ever-new plunge into the breadth of being, while we are simply permeated with joy. This is how Jesus expresses it in the Gospel of John: ” But I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice.” And no one will take away your joy ” ( 16,22 ). We must think in this direction to understand where Christian hope is headed, what we expect from faith, and our being with Christ.