long for after death is to go on living this life, this
same mortal life, but without its ills, without its tedium, and without
death. Seneca, the Spaniard, gave expression to this in his _Consolatio
ad Marciam_ (xxvi.); what he desired was to live this life again: _ista
moliri_. And what Job asked for (xix. 25-7) was to see God in the flesh,
not in the spirit. And what but that is the meaning of that comic
conception of _eternal recurrence_ which issued from the tragic soul of
poor Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality?

And this beatific vision which is the primary Catholic solution of the
problem, how can it be realized, I ask again, without obliteration of
the consciousness of self? Will it not be like a sleep in which we
dream without knowing what we dream? Who would wish for an eternal life
like that? To think without knowing that we think is not to be sensible
of ourselves, it is not to be ourselves. And is not eternal life perhaps
eternal consciousness, not only seeing God, but seeing that we see Him,
seeing ourselves at the same time and ourselves as distinct from Him? He
who sleeps lives, but he has no consciousness of himself; and would
anyone wish for an eternal sleep? When Circe advised Ulysses to descend
to the abode of the dead in order to consult the soothsayer Teiresias,
she told him that Teiresias alone among the shades of the dead was
possessed of understanding, for all the others flitted about like
shadows (_Odyssey_, x., 487-495). And can it be said that the others,
apart from Teiresias, had really overcome death? Is it to overcome death
to flit about like shadows without understanding?

And on the other hand, may we not imagine that possibly this earthly
life of ours is to the other life what sleep is to waking? May not all
our life be a dream and death an awakening? But an awakening to what?
And supposing that everything is but the dream of God and that God one
day will awaken? Will He remember His dream?

Aristotle, the rationalist, tells in his _Ethics_ of the superior
happiness of the contemplative life, _bios theoretikos_; and all
rationalists are wont to place happiness in knowledge. And the
conception of eternal happiness, of the enjoyment of God, as a beatific
vision, as knowledge and comprehension of God, is a thing of rationalist
origin, it is the kind of happiness that corresponds with the God-Idea
of Aristotelianism. But the truth is that, in addition to vision,