How can a human soul live and enjoy God eternally without losing its individual personality—­that is to say, without losing itself?  What is it to enjoy God?  What is eternity as opposed to time?  Does the soul change or does it not change in the other life?  If it does not change, how does it live?  And if it changes, how does it preserve its individuality through so vast a period of time?  For though the other life may exclude space, it cannot exclude time, as Cournot observes in the work quoted above.

If there is life in heaven there is change.  Swedenborg remarked that the angels change, because the delight of the celestial life would gradually lose its value if they always enjoyed it in its fullness, and because angels, like men, love themselves, and he who loves himself experiences changes of state; and he adds further that at times the angels are sad, and that he, Swedenborg, discoursed with some when they were sad (De Caelo et Inferno, Sec.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. Teresa, in her description of the last state of prayer, the rapture, transport, flight, or ecstasy of the soul, tells us that the soul is borne as upon a cloud or a mighty eagle, “but you see yourself carried away and know not whither,” and it is “with delight,” and “if you do not resist, the senses are not lost, at least I was so much myself as to be able to perceive that I was being lifted up “—­that is to say, without losing consciousness.  And God “appears to be not content with thus attracting the soul to