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Chelsea Fringe

Gardeners' Question Time Eric Robson chairs this special edition of GQT with members of the Chelsea Fringe, London.

Image for Heaven

Play now 45 mins

Heaven

Duration:
45 minutes
First broadcast:
Thursday 22 December 2005

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss ideas of heaven and the afterlife. The great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote 'that in the end language can only be related to what is experienced here, and given that the hereafter is not here, we can only infer'. Aquinas encapsulated a great human conundrum that has preoccupied writers and thinkers since ancient times: what might heaven be like. And although human language is constrained by experience, this has not stopped an outpouring of artistic, theological and literary representations of heaven.

In the early Middle Ages men ascended up a ladder to heaven. In his Divine Comedy, Dante divided heaven into ten layers encompassing the planets and the stars. And the 17th century writer John Bunyan saw the journey of the soul to heaven as a spiritual struggle in his autobiography, The Pilgrim's Progress.

But what exactly is heaven and where is it? How does the Protestant conception of the afterlife differ from the Catholic conception? How does one achieve salvation and what do the saved do when they get there? And, if heaven is so interesting, why has western culture been so spellbound by hell?

With Valery Rees, Renaissance scholar and senior member of the Language Department at the School of Economic Science; Martin Palmer, Theologian and Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture; John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Oxford University.

  • Further Reading

    The Book of Heaven: An Anthology of Writings from Ancient to Modern Times, ed. by Carol and Philip Zaleski (Oxford University Press, 2000)

    Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History (Yale University Press, 2nd Edition, 2001)

    Peter Stanford, Heaven: A Traveller's Guide to the Undiscovered Country (HarperCollins, 2003)

    Dante, The Divine Comedy (Oxford World Classics, 1998)

    The Faber Book of Utopias, ed. by John Carey (Faber and Faber, 2000)

    John Donne: The Major Works (Oxford, 2000)

    John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. by Alistair Fowler (Longman, 1998)

    John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress (Oxford, 2003)

    Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies (Wordsworth Editions Ltd, 1994)

    The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, ed. by Thomas Moore and Noel Cobb (Lindisfarne Press, 1990)

    Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's 'Symposium', Trans. by Sears Jayne (Spring Publications, 1983)

    The Bible

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