Catholic-ometer: 4.5 of 5
Enjoyability: 3.5 of 5
I started reading this book because of the good review it was given by Saint Therese of Lisieux. A lot of good books have been written by the saints, and I generally prefer to trust their opinions. However, Saint Therese said that reading this book was one of the greatest graces of her life. I'm sure it was, for her.
I must respectfully disagree with her as to the quality of this book. I found it enlightening at certain points, genuinely helpful at others, but certainly far from perfect.
Father Arminjon starts out with the premise of trying to explore the eschaton; or the "four last things;" death, judgment, Heaven and Hell. Regrettably, he begins by straying a bit from those four things, and into the domain of the end times and the antichrist.
I say this is regrettable, not because I find the subject uninteresting, but because it's one of those subjects that needs to be treated with care. You see, it's a teaching of Jesus that we can't know the day or the hour of his return, so following from that, all attempts to pin down or forsee the time or era of his arrival must be viewed with a grain of salt.
This wouldn't be so jarring, but Father Arminjon more than once refers to China as a likely place for the antichrist, or one of his predecessors to arise, and even claims that "any serious student of history will admit that this is obvious."
In philosophy, this is called an "ad hominem" argument; attacking a person instead of their argument. I was very displeased with this when I read it, and it took effort to continue reading past it. He does this twice; both pertaining to guesses about the time and place of the antichrist. You know, maybe he's right. Or, maybe he's not, but to say that people who disagree with you aren't serious scholars is poor form at best.
On the whole, this is all that really bothered me until the chapter on Purgatory. Now, it's a time-honored teaching of the church that only one thing obstructs our ability to crave and unite our wills to God; sin. I'm afraid I may be a bit fuzzy on some particular definitions with respect to what makes a sin a sin, but I'm certain that sins are always acts of the will, and always related to a failure to exercise virtue. These virtues are chastity, charity, self-control, diligence, patience, kindness and humility. Some lists of virtues contain others, but most of them are just other words for these seven. Still, one can decide to do something that won't increase their diligence over something that will, and that doesn't neccesarily make it a sin. I've never seen a document that outlined the precise difference between legitimate choices and venial sins, and if the subject were truly so earth-shaking as Father Arminjon makes it out to be, I would expect to hear about it at least once; at least in a papal encyclical written sometime during the last century. His point seems to be that it is "faults and imperfections," rather than venial sins that need to be paid for in Purgatory, which, as far as I know, is a claim found in no genuine doctrines of the church.
He goes into great detail about the suffering in Purgatory, and how much sacrifice is required to redeem a soul in torment there, but he fails to mention the amazing power, which the living possess, which allows their prayers, fastings and sacrifices to count for so much in this respect. I take some offense at this, though it's probably a minor fault.
The last problem I saw with respect to his treatment of divine punishment was that he seemed to imply that temporary punishments are never sufficient to deter people from sin, and on this, I must heartily disagree with him.
Apart from this, he lists two large contradictions in his descriptions of Heaven.
I admit to having never been to Heaven, but it makes a religion look silly when its best descriptions of its own afterlife contradict one another. It makes a writer look silly when he professes those contradictions together on the same page, insisting that both are true, but offering no explanation of how the apparent contradictions can be reconciled. This, I feel, deserves to be addressed.
Heaven Contradiction 1: Father Arminjon claims that with respect to rewards, punishments and feelings, many things in Heaven will be the opposite of what they were on Earth. However, he also overtly says that in Heaven, people will shun tangible things, pursuing only God. The contradiction is this; if the situation is reversed, then wouldn't pursuit of God alone bring -less- joy, rather than more?
Heaven Contradiction 2: This is to do with the nature of eternity. He makes the claim that Heaven is a constant, contiual, infinite increase in the delights experienced through God. He also claims that Heaven is a single moment. But no single moment can ever experience continual increase; hence the contradiction.
I hope you see the problem with writing like this. It feels as though the good father had a lot of excellent sources to draw from, but failed to understand some of them, or to criticize his own work after he was done quoting the saints. Maybe he was motivated by a pious refusal to critique the writings of the saints. If so, I feel he made a mistake. The objective here shouldn't be just to support people who were holy, but to present the strongest, united proof of Christ that we can, and faithfully representing the views of holy people in a way that makes them seem to contradict doesn't do that.
There are, of course, multiple explanations for each of these "contradictions," but the father includes none of them. However, I will include one for each, if only to make it easier to come away from this book feeling justified, instead of confused.
Solution to Contradiction 1: God has within himself the true fullness of goodness; and thus, pursuing God in Heaven is like pursuing everything we ever pursued here on Earth, and a great deal more besides. The "reversal" is only a reversal insofar as this pursuit on Earth leads one into sin, while in Heaven, it leads one deeper into righteousness.
Solution to Contradiction 2: We often make the mistake of thinking that eternity must be either -entirely- unlike time in any sense, or -entirely- identical to it; just longer. It is much more likely that eternity has aspects of time, but does not impose those aspects on the blessed by force. Thus, succession can exist, even in eternity, by the will of the blessed, to enable them to progress further and further into the infinite mysteries of the divine. As for the "one moment" thing, eternity is not one moment, though intelligent beings moved into eternity experience a "constancy of nature," which makes it impossible for them to turn to good, if evil, or to evil, if they're good. We know this because of the way the angels behave. The good angels never do evil, nor do the evil angels do good, yet they can do different things from one moment to the next, depending on the circumstances. Eternity is the same.
As you can see, these are things that really aren't so difficult to work out, and I'm a bit disappointed that these flaws exist in a book with such a good reputation.
All that having been said, it really was a very good book for the most part, though not to be used if one is already very strong in the faith, or if one is looking for complete arguments to convince them that their atheist friends are wrong. It's a sort of a "back to basics" book in a lot of ways, though in my opinion, the good father should have been a bit more careful of the sources he pulled from, and how he pulled from them.
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