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_) outside of himself, in a
condition of alienation. And the ecstasy that the mystics describe is a
prelude of this vision.
He who sees God shall die, say the Scriptures (Judg. xiii. 22); and may
it not be that the eternal vision of God is an eternal death, a swooning
away of the personality? But St.
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