The idea that eternity will be a culture and a civilization, not a disembodied never-never land, is perhaps the most powerful takeaway from Fr. William J. Slattery’s book, and I assume it will be news to many people. It opens up a vast field of wonder and possibility, to put it mildly.
Enchanted by Eternity: Recapturing the Wonder of the Catholic Worldview, by William J. Slattery (276 pages, Our Sunday Visitor, 2025)
In a previous essay, I mentioned a remarkable new book by Fr. William J. Slattery, Enchanted by Eternity: Recapturing the Wonder of the Catholic Worldview. The book is so rich, so thought-provoking, and so significant that it deserves a fuller discussion. The significance of the book, I believe, is twofold. Fr. Slattery, a professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville, treats the Catholic and Christian faith as a worldview, not merely as a set of propositions or rules. His tone throughout is upbeat and positive, with a joyful and wonder-filled enthusiasm that is infectious. In a word, Fr. Slattery’s book is a breath of fresh air. If you are looking for a view of religion that is not merely moralism, a humanistic perspective that synthesizes the best of art, science, and culture, that is exactly what you will find here.
But Fr. Slattery’s book is not only an apologetic or a motivational text to strengthen believers’ faith. It is also in some measure a treatise about eschatology, or the shape of God’s future. This is sorely needed, as eschatology is a topic little known and often misunderstood by believers. Yet there can hardly be a more important topic, and Fr. Slattery connects the dots by showing how the themes of the Catholic worldview relate to the “things to come.”
If secular skeptics have dismissed religious faith as a mass of “fairy tales,” this is in part because Christian believers themselves have not understood and articulated the connections between heaven and earth, expressed most powerfully in the mysteries of the Incarnation and Resurrection. Too often we give way to the modern tendency to compartmentalize our thinking, treating “religion” as a private set of beliefs with little bearing on life as a whole. Fr. Slattery makes a convincing case that “religion” is, at best, a term of convenience, and one that would not have been recognized by the first Christians, who thought not in terms of religion but in terms of reality.
Fr. Slattery lends his aid in healing this split between religion and reality. Understood in its fullest sense, our faith is not milk and water; it is robust, richly embodied, and tremendously real. This should be apparent in how we regard the afterlife, which I prefer to refer to as the future life and which Fr. Slattery calls the “forever life”—the eschatological goal toward which history is leading. Fr. Slattery shows that the disembodied way we typically regard the future life—one taking place in a “purely spiritual” heaven—is simply wrong. It goes against the early Christian witness and the most orthodox teaching as found in the New Testament and the Catechism. The Christian faith is not about flying away to a Platonic heaven; rather it is about God’s grace and truth gradually impregnating the world that we know: the world of space, time, and matter; the world of art, science, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, ecology, ethics, and everything else you can imagine. Fr. Slattery has set himself the task of showing that the faith, instead of being cordoned off into a little private chapel called “religion,” has everything to do with the “real world.”
Fr. Slattery takes up the challenge posed by St. John in the book of Revelation, where he describes the future world as “new heavens and a new earth” and as the heavenly Jerusalem. We should not understand these as metaphors, but as literal realities. The whole message of the resurrection is that all of creation, including its material aspects, will be rescued and elevated. That means, not least, that the resurrection will involve our bodies. At the end of time all of the righteous will receive glorified resurrection bodies, of which Christ’s resurrected body is the model or prototype.
Thus, God’s future world will be a civilization, and it will take place on earth, but a transfigured earth—a “heavenized earth.” In other words, the purely spiritual heaven, where the souls of the blessed rest with God after death, is only a temporary stopping place. God’s final goal will consist of a union of heaven and earth, the divine and human realms—the world of the Eternal Forms (to speak in Platonic terms) and the world of space, time, and matter. Even now we can sense “the present invaded by the future,” a new reality formed by the impact of the Incarnation and Resurrection.
We do not believe (or we should not believe) that God will destroy the material universe so that we can all float around as disembodied souls. God does not destroy what he has created, but rescues and redeems it. That includes our bodies and all the material creation, including the plants and animals. Remember that Christ’s ministry on earth was in part devoted to healing the body—a pre-annunciation of God’s eventual total healing of both the material and moral aspects of the universe. In the forever life, agriculture and animals will assuredly be present; Isaiah’s line about the lion lying down with the lamb is not merely a pretty metaphor in Fr. Slattery’s reading. And it will be a “green” world characterized by both urban and pastoral elements:
All of nature is now joined harmoniously to all of human, artistic, scientific, and technological genius in a civilization that resembles a picturesque hamlet amid a nature preserve. […] the “New Jerusalem” is a “Garden City.”
The idea that eternity will be a culture and a civilization, not a disembodied never-never land, is perhaps the book’s most powerful takeaway, and I assume it will be news to many people. It opens up a vast field of wonder and possibility, to put it mildly. According to Fr. Slattery, the forever life will be “the great unending adventure, going from wonder to wonder, beauty to beauty, love to love, in a forever crescendo of thrilling excitement, joy, and fulfillment.”
And this unending life will take place in a resurrected body. Here is Fr. Slattery on what the moment of our resurrection will feel like:
What will you feel that first moment as you become aware that your body—with all its joints and arteries, with its skin, hair, muscles, legs, hands, feet, eyes—is all yours once again? What will it feel like to rub your eyes and rediscover yourself as not merely a soul, a ghostlike reality, but a complete body
You feel your bones and muscles; you touch the skin on your face; you experience your body pulsating with life. Stunned, you detect an energy and dynamism throbbing inside you that you never experienced during your mortal life […] What will it be like to become aware of having an intelligence vibrating with intensity, intuitiveness, and speed of reasoning? Of having a startling energy for action? And then to be struck with the awareness that you are going to live for unending years in a crescendo of vitality?
I find all this wonderfully inspiring, and for a number of reasons. Much religious writing takes on a moralistic cast, with a one-sided emphasis on sin and penance. But such an approach is not always sufficient to inspire. Repentance and regeneration of the soul, in the light of becoming “perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect,” are necessary for all of us; it was part of the core of Christ’s message, as of John the Baptist’s before him. But these concepts are to be seen in the larger context of God’s good creation and its renewal and redemption. That is why we repent, after all: because God is coming to judge the earth.
There are countless believers today who are not necessarily great sinners but need meaning and spiritual enrichment in their lives. They need an imaginative religion which fosters an imaginative life. Just maybe they feel that many of the polemics commonly engaged in (like the interminable disputes about the Second Vatican Council) are stale and uninteresting. They want less “culture war” and more culture. Not generalized conversations about something called “the culture,” but actual, genuine culture—art, philosophy, literature, the works. Fr. Slattery provides a blueprint for such a spiritual life in his book.
What is needed is an apostolate of culture, and Fr. Slattery discusses the role of culture and beauty in the New Creation. He is convinced that the evolution of modern thought and culture, including the breakthroughs in modern science, have led us to a place where accepting theism, faith, and the worldview that is ultimately Catholic Christianity is inevitable. As believers, we must respond to this with an embrace of the faith that is “ultramodern.” Fr. Slattery uses this term not in the sense of “very modern” but in the sense of “going beyond the modern” (from the Latin ultrā meaning beyond or farther). To be ultramodern Catholics is to close the gaps, heal the breaches, and break down the walls created by modern thought.
Getting down to specifics, the ultramodern worldview recognizes (in distinction to what we are calling the modern worldview) the relational and holistic nature of reality. We are coming to recognize that the mechanistic view of reality, the habit of treating people like machines and life as endless drudgery without any meaning or purpose, is soul-crushing and absurd. This is having repercussions in medicine, in work, in society, and in any other sectors of life. Whereas modern thought tends to dissect and analyze, the Judeo-Christian worldview is good at putting things back together, at seeing life in relational terms. Just like the ancient Jewish culture from which Jesus sprang, we are to view each other as parts instead of wholes, as persons and not merely as matter in motion. We are bodyminds, in Fr. Slattery’s happy phrase, and medicine is discovering the holistic nature of our organisms: thus, nature-based remedies are replacing powders and pills. And much of modern scientific research, beyond medicine, has come to the conclusion that there is far more to reality than a closed system of causes and effects and physical processes.
There is a strongly scientific component to Fr. Slattery’s book, which I confess is very much above me; I was unfortunately not gifted for a mind for science or math. But Fr. Slattery clearly knows whereof he speaks and he opens up amazing vistas in the fields of quantum physics, new math, and other fields in which discoveries seem to be leading back in the direction of faith in God and a divine order.
I keep using the word “wonderful” to describe this book. It is a word often diluted of its meaning, but here it is absolutely appropriate. Fr. Slattery’s approach to the faith is wondrous.
Questions and Reservations
Let me now signal that the book did leave me with some questions (perhaps the definition of an important book). One burning question I have is this: Where do the darker aspects of the End Times fit into Fr. Slattery’s scheme? On Fr. Slattery’s account, one would think the transition to the New Creation will be utterly seamless. But our tradition holds that there will be a catastrophe, a final clash of good and evil, the spirit of Christ and the spirit of antichrist, before Christ returns and brings about the full realization of the kingdom. Have these darker episodes already come about, are they happening now, or are they going to happen in the future? Fr. Slattery does not talk about any of this, perhaps because his theology here is one of positivity and hope, but we cannot help speculating on how these darker aspects may relate to the glorious future Fr. Slattery describes.
Secondly, how precisely is God’s future shaping up, and can we see any advance signs on the horizon? What evidence do we have that it is actually happening? It is one thing to hope that it is happening, it is one thing to rally the cause with the goal of making it happen, and it is another to state empirically that it is happening.
There is an acute feeling in some of us that modern life and culture have simply become too chaotic to deal with, that “the center cannot hold.” For as long as I can remember, life has seemed vaguely unreal—as if I were living, not in an “era,” but in the strange twilight zone before the end of all things. Is my intuition wrong? Have I been missing something? And if I am correct, where does that leave us? If an “end” of some kind takes place, how will that relate to the eventual future life that God will bring out? These are big questions to which we cannot give definitive answers at present, since we are living in the middle of the story.
I am also led to wonder what role there might be for those of us who, for want of a better description, prefer to “live in the past.” Is it time for us to draw the shades and go to bed, or is there something for us to do in this new world?
I think Josef Pieper might be of help here. In his book The End of Time, Pieper wrote that the End Times will consist in the “transposition of time into eternity.” Now, I want my readers to look carefully at their lives and the world around them and see if they can discern any signs that this is already taking shape. Is the future life coming about, not all at once, but gradually through blurred transitions, which seems to be the way God has worked in the past?
Consider: Could it be that the increased longevity, the prolongation of life that we see around us is a sign pointing to eternity—an advance signal of immortality, of the resurrection of the body, of the eventual conquering of sickness and death? Could the fact that we seem to have reached the end of cultural history (as seen, for example, in artistic repetition and the archival recapitulation of all of the artistic production of the past) be seen as a possible opening out into a new life in which all things, past, present, and future will coexist in an eternal now?
In this future world, our lives might well be described as being devoted to culture rather than survival. All the stories we have told will survive for reflection; we will be sustained and borne up by the immediate vision of God even as our relationships flourish and new discoveries of truth will lead us on to ever greater wonder.
This, I think, is what Aquinas and the great theologians were getting at with their idea of the Beatific Vision. It will be a life of contemplation, and also a vivid vitality and action—but a life finally free of sin, disease, change, and death. Life will be a grand sacra conversazione in which past and present, all generations and experiences will intermingle and speak to each other. Perhaps we will attend seminars in which Christ himself will recount the deeds of his life in full-color replay.
If I might venture an analogy, perhaps this life will be something like the state of mind of Americans after the Second World War, having won the battle against dehumanizing evil, and now enjoying peace and prosperity. Yes, that’s right: The forever life is going to be an eternal 1950s (minus the Cold War); you heard it here first.
I am being lighthearted, but only a little. Remember Jesus after his resurrection, showing his crucifixion wounds to Thomas and the other apostles. Those battle scars remain for eternity, but now transformed paradoxically into something beautiful and glorious, like scarlet badges. Signs of suffering are transfigured, lifted up into a new reality of contemplation, wisdom, and rejoicing.
Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, for the former things have passed away (Revelation 21: 4).
Some Thoughts on “Worldview”
Since Fr. Slattery emphasizes the idea of “worldview,” let us pause a bit on this concept. We use the word constantly, but few of us are aware of its origins, which are found in 19th-century German Idealism (Kant was the first to use Weltanschauung).
Fr. Slattery speaks throughout the book of the worldview of Catholicism. Let me only point out that, like the word “worldview,” the word “Catholicism” is of fairly recent origin; my etymological dictionary dates it to c. 1609 (i.e., after the Protestant Reformation). It seems fair to assume that Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas had no notion of anything called “Catholicism” but instead thought in terms of the Church or Christendom. This suggests that conceiving of the Catholic faith as an “ism” and as a closely integrated “worldview” is itself a product of modern thought, even of “modernity.” Perhaps “worldview” is a concept that only comes about in a world in which there are different and competing “worldviews.”
Now, could it be that postmodernity, and our “ultramodern” Christian response to it as described by Fr. Slattery, is the first step to the opening out into eternity and the forever life? Could it be that our need to position ourselves vis-à-vis modernity (either for or against) that has characterized our Christian experience in recent centuries is slowly dissolving, replaced by an “ultramodern” reality that is the prelude to the ultimate fullfilment of God’s future?
To define our ultramodern worldview more precisely, perhaps we could call it an Aristotelian-Thomistic worldview, which celebrates the fullness of God’s creation, including the personhood of humanity which is at the pinnacle of creation. But that is only a beginning of a fuller definition that could well include other philosophical perspectives and ideas.
Before I conclude this review, there is one area in which I am not completely in tune with the author. There is a “call to action” aspect to his appeal, particularly in the Introduction, with which I by nature and temperament am not comfortable. I am a contemplative, not a man of action, and never a joiner, so such appeals are lost on me, though I appreciate that others may be inspired by them.
The future life will be a culture and a civilization; Fr. Slattery has convinced me of this. But I am not so convinced that this future life will come about through strenuous human effort. Rather, I think it will come about through God’s gracious intervention—with our fervent cooperation, of course. An emphasis on energetic civilization-building can turn prideful and hubristic in short order. “We proclaim your death, O Lord, and we profess your resurrection until you come again.” This, to me, sums up the entirety of life. We must proclaim and profess while we wait in joyful expectation. That is all. The future that comes about will truly be God’s future, and in trusting him will be the only sure way to bring it about.
Our work is merely cooperation with what God has already started. We are to heavenize the earth in every way we can: medicine, music, architecture, business, engineering, gardening, teaching, cuisine, and all the other occupations. But God is the one who sets everything in motion and really brings the new life about. I suppose this is a difference of emphasis more than anything else.
Though it may be carping, I wasn’t fond of the author’s use of the term “the masses” (I would have preferred “the common people,” “ordinary folks,” or “the man on the street”), and he misidentifies the famous geneticist Francis Collins as a Catholic (he is an evangelical Protestant). Further, the book should by rights have had an index.
But these are minor points. The major point is that Enchanted by Eternity needs to be read by anyone who is interested in life, which I suppose takes in most of us. It is eye-opening, it is eloquent, and it is essential. It will raise important questions and just might change your way of thinking and living as we look forward in expectation to the new world that God is creating.
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