The Ascension

 “Though we cannot say with certitude where this place is to be found, or what its relation is to the whole universe, revelation does not allow us to doubt of its existence.” - Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange

The oddity of the ascension is apparent.  Does it betray a naive view of the universe, with heaven “up there”?  Is heaven reachable by a spaceship?  Is Jesus living on some faraway luxury planet? 

I think it’s important to stress that Jesus was and remains an embodied person.  His resurrection body still exists, and is still a body.  He did not transform into a spirit.  Yet he surely isn’t reachable by space ship.  It isn’t as if we could find Jesus’s body hiding out somewhere in the universe.

So there’s two constraints, I think, on what occurred in the ascension:  (1) Jesus remains embodied and (2) We cannot reach him by mere spatial travel.

This seems to commit the Christian to unreachable alternate space-times.  That seems fine, for science has been suspecting something like this for a while now.

Thomists have speculated that Jesus’ body now occupies an “uncontained place.”  It’s hard to figure out exactly what this means, but I’ve seen one Thomists explain it as Jesus occupying a universe that’s constituted by just his body.

But I don’t think that sounds right. Jesus tells us what he’ll be doing while he’s away - he’s preparing a place for us.  I think this implies that he’s occupying something more far reaching than some weird world-isolate containing just his body.  He’s interacting with other things, I think.

WLC has an alternative proposal:  While Christ retains his human nature after the ascension, he thinks that he loses his body.  He’s no longer embodied.  When the human nature of Jesus exits our space-time, no longer manifesting in it, then it will lack a body.  But when he re-enters it, his human nature will remanifest as a body.  I’m not sure how I feel about this proposal:  If our embodiedness is a perfection of our nature, and Jesus possesses the glorified state of human nature, then it seems like he’s going to be embodied currently.  But this is all very tentative to me, and this option remains on the table.

Still, whether WLC’s view or the earlier view I sketched is correct–if Jesus is not ascending so as to literally occupy some place “up there,” then what’s the point of ascending in the first place?  As Eric Manning points out, the unique and spectacular act of ascending into the air would serve to highlight the finality of this meeting to the apostles. Remember, Jesus had been meeting with them over the course of 40 days prior to this, conversing and popping out on occasion.  So as to signal that this would no longer be the case, that he would be leaving for an indeterminate amount of time, he chooses a spectacular way to vividly illustrate the finality of his leaving.  Given the association of heaven with “up there,” he seems to have chosen a good means to illustrate where he was going, too.