t, in fact,
thinkable to us except under the same forms as those of this earthly and
transitory life. Nor is the mystery at all clarified by that metaphor of
the grain and the wheat that it bears, with which Paul answers the
question, "How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?"
(1 Cor. xv. 35).

How can a human soul live and enjoy God eternally without losing its
individual personality--that is to say, without losing itself? What is
it to enjoy God? What is eternity as opposed to time? Does the soul
change or does it not change in the other life? If it does not change,
how does it live? And if it changes, how does it preserve its
individuality through so vast a period of time? For though the other
life may exclude space, it cannot exclude time, as Cournot observes in
the work quoted above.

If there is life in heaven there is change. Swedenborg remarked that the
angels change, because the delight of the celestial life would gradually
lose its value if they always enjoyed it in its fullness, and because
angels, like men, love themselves, and he who loves himself experiences
changes of state; and he adds further that at times the angels are sad,
and that he, Swedenborg, discoursed with some when they were sad (_De
Caelo et Inferno_, Sec.Sec. 158, 160). In any case, it is impossible for us to
conceive life without change, change of growth or of diminution, of
sadness or of joy, of love or of hate.

In effect, an eternal life is unthinkable and an eternal life of
absolute felicity, of beatific vision, is more unthinkable still.

And what precisely is this beatific vision? We observe in the first
place that it is called vision and not action, something passive being
therefore presupposed. And does not this beatific vision suppose loss of
personal consciousness? A saint in heaven, says Bossuet, is a being who
is scarcely sensible of himself, so completely is he possessed by God
and immerged in His glory.... Our attention cannot stay on the saint,
because one finds him outside of himself, and subject by an unchangeable
love to the source of his being and his happiness (_Du culte qui est du
a Dieu_). And these are the words of Bossuet, the antiquietist. This
loving vision of God supposes an absorption in Him. He who in a state of
blessedness enjoys God in His fullness must perforce neither think of
himself, nor remember himself, nor have any consciousness of himself,
but be in perpetual ecstasy (_ekstasis