Where is heaven?

The following is from Fr. Pierre Benoit, Jesus and the Gospel, vol. 1 (1973), translated by Benet Weatherhead, 251-53:

For the Ancients, Greek or Semite, the Universe had the earth for a foundation or a centre, surmounted or surrounded by a whole series of concentric heavens which efforts were made to count. The residence of God was in the highest of these cosmic heavens, separated from the earth by a more or less considerable number of intermediate ones; to get from the earth to God, therefore, it was necessary to ascend and pass through these heavens. It was only a step from this to describing the marvellous heavenly voyages that heroes introduced into the divine world had to make. Ancient religions often did this in their accounts of 'apotheoses', and so did the Christian Apocryphas when they were daring enough to undertake to describe the Ascension of Christ.

However, if we turn to the writings of the canonical tradition [Mark 16:19-20; Luke 24:50-53; Acts 1:6-12], the only ones which have the right to command our faith, we are happily struck by their discretion in this regard. They abstain carefully from compromising their assertion of the transcendent triumph of Christ by the addition of doubtful notions drawn from human science. In order to enunciate the mystery they keep only the minimum of imagery necessary for human language to remain possible. They tell us that Christ ascended into heaven, beside his Father, because there is no other means for our human mind to express the truth that a human being has been taken from our corruptible world and introduced into the world of God. In the measure in which our thought remains subject to our senses and our imagination we continue, and we shall always continue despite all the discoveries of science, to 'feel' that God is 'above' us and call him 'our Father who art in heaven'. This is why it is absolutely legitimate and true to say that the glorified Christ has ascended into heaven.

But, once we have made allowance for the imaginative support which is indispensable to our thinking, we must be well on our guard against going too far and claiming to advance our understanding of the mystery by trying to combine it with speculation about the universe. The discretion of the inspired writings should dissuade us from anything like this. When they speak of Christ 'seated' at the 'right hand' of the Father, they are obviously only using anthropomorphic images which have no value except their symbolic reference. Commentators have always recognized this. (See for example St Thomas, [Summa theologiae,] IIIa, q. 58, a. 1 and the Fathers he quotes.) Similarly, when Scripture shows us Christ exalted above all the heavens (Eph 4:10), it simply means to indicate that he dominates our present Cosmos, and it would be useless to try and define Christ's position in relation to the 'final sphere'. The doctors of scholasticism, still bound to Aristotle's system, could go too far in this direction; yet the greatest of them, a St Thomas for example, were able to keep a wise and prudent reserve on this point. (Cf. St Thomas, [Summa theologiae,] IIIa, q. 57, a. 4. . . .)

The essential teaching of Scripture, which is to be retained by our faith, is that Christ, through his Resurrection and his Ascension, departed from this present world, a world corrupted by sin and destined for destruction, and entered the new world where God reigns as master and where matter is transformed, penetrated and dominated by the Spirit. It is a world that is real with a physical reality, like Christ's body itself, and which therefore occupies a 'place', but a world which exists as yet only as a promise, or rather in its embryo, the single risen body of Christ (to which must now be added that of his Holy Mother, according to the doctrine of the Assumption, defined as of faith [by Pope Pius XII] on the 1st November, 1950), and which will be definitively constituted and revealed only at the end of time, when the 'new heavens' and the 'new earth' are to appear.

While waiting for that day, the glorious body of Christ exists somewhere, real, much more real than our perishable world, because it alone possesses true Life, but it is useless to ask 'where', just as it is mistaken to imagine it 'far away'. This new world, where Christ reigns and awaits us, is not far away, it is not outside our world, it transcends it. It is of another order, is distinguished in terms of quality rather than of quantity, and we have access to it through faith and the sacraments, in a contact which is mysterious but more real and more close than any contact with our present world can be.

When we say and believe with the Church that the glorified Christ has ascended to heaven and is seated beside his Father, we mean by this that he has penetrated for ever into the new, final, spiritual world, of which he is the first cell, a world which is inaccessible to our senses and our imagination, but which is supremely real, much more real than the everyday world about us. And we believe readily, with the mass of the earliest Christian witnesses, that he inaugurated this new world on the day of his Resurrection, when he was rapt from the tomb by the Spirit to be exalted next to the Father.