Do our souls leave time when we die and go to be with God in heaven? God is outside of time, right? So do we go outside of time, too?
And—if we are outside of time—are we already saints in heaven, right now? Could you even ask yourself for your intercession?
And what about angels? Are they timeless, too?
Prepare for some surprises!
Two Types of Eternity
A key word in our discussion is eternal, and this word has two meanings.
First, something can be eternal if it lasts through all time. You can picture it as a ray that starts at a particular moment and then proceeds forward through all future moments—like an arrow pointing into the future. There are other ways you could imagine this arrow. It might point backward into the past, or it might point both forward and backward.
But the key thing is that it represents an endless stretch of time, one moment after another, going on infinitely. When you have an unending sequence of time like that, people sometimes say it is eternal. It goes on for eternity. They also sometimes say that it is everlasting.
But there is an even greater type of eternity, which is not being part of time at all.
You could picture this as a single point next to a line or arrow that represents time. Each point on the line is a different moment in time, but there’s also a point that is not part of the line, that is by itself. This moment is also said to be eternal because it is not part of time. It’s non-temporal or atemporal.
We’ll call this Type 1 eternity because it’s the greatest form of eternity—not being part of time at all. And we’ll call the other Type 2 eternity because it’s a lesser form—just an endless stretch of time. Both Type 1 and Type 2 eternity will play a role in our discussion.
God’s Eternity
In the early Church there was a philosopher and martyr named Boethius (c. 480-524). He denounced corruption among political officials in the Ostrogothic Kingdom, which got him locked up, tortured, and eventually martyred.
While he was in jail, he wrote a book called The Consolation of Philosophy, which gave Christian circles the classic definition of eternity as it applies to God. Boethius wrote:
Eternity is a simultaneously total and perfect possession of an interminable life (Consolation of Philosophy 5:6).
One of the things you’ll note about this definition is that it involves the possession of an interminable or endless life. That sounds like Type 2 eternity, which involves an endless stretch of time or life.
But there’s something else in Boethius’ definition. He says eternity is not just the possession of limitless life, it’s the simultaneous possession of it. In other words, there is no succession from one moment to another. It’s all happening at once. It’s simultaneous.
Another translation of Boethius puts it this way:
Eternity is the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment (Consolation of Philosophy 5:6).
This makes it clear that we’re not talking about Type 2 eternity, which is like a line. Instead, we’re talking about Type 1 eternity, which is like a point.
God thus lives in an “eternal now,” where time does not pass from moment to moment. If you think about that eternal now as a point, it is not on the line of time at all.
But our mental pictures can be a little misleading. If you imagine a point sitting next to a line, the point is still closer to one part of the line than others. You might think that the part of the line that is closest to the point is the present, while those that are father away are the past and the future.
This is not how it works for God. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:
To God, all moments of time are present in their immediacy (CCC 600).
So the past, the present, and the future are all equally real—and equally close—to God. You might think about this as God existing at his single point of the eternal now, with time bending around that point like a circle, so that past, present, and future are all equally close to him.
Of course, the future is infinite, and we can’t really draw an infinite circle around a point, but it’s a helpful image. In fact, Boethius pictured time as a circle that had God and his eternity as its center (Consolation of Philosophy 4:6).
In any event, Boethius understood God’s eternity to be Type 1—as a point that’s not on the line of time.
Church Teaching on God’s Eternity
It’s not just Boethius who held this; it’s also the Church. Boethius’s definition of eternity became the standard one in Christian circles. Therefore, this was what it meant when in 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council stated that
We firmly believe and confess without reservation that there is only one true God, eternal, infinite, and unchangeable (DS 800, CCC 202).
So—reading the council in terms of what the word meant at the time—it confessed that God had Type 1 eternity. He’s fundamentally outside of time.
And that’s the understanding of the Church today. In 1985, Pope John Paul II taught:
Because [God] cannot not be, he cannot have beginning or end nor a succession of moments in the only and infinite act of his existence.
Right reason and revelation wonderfully converge on this point.
Being God, absolute fullness of being (ipsum esse subsistens), his eternity “inscribed in the terminology of being” must be understood as the “indivisible, perfect, and simultaneous possession of an unending life,” and therefore as the attribute of being absolutely “beyond time” (General Audience, Sept. 4, 1985).
So “his eternity . . . must be understood as . . . being absolutely ‘beyond time.’”
But what about our eternity?
An Argument for Leaving Time
We’re obviously inside of time now, but do we leave time when we go to be with God?
Some people think that we do. This idea seems to be based on reasoning something like this:
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- God is outside of time.
- God is in heaven.
- When we die, we go into heaven.
- Therefore, when we die, we go outside of time.
But we need to be careful here, because that’s not a formally valid argument. Consider this parallel:
-
- Bob is outside of Scranton.
- Bob is in agony.
- When I stub my toe, I go into agony.
- Therefore, when I stub my toe, I go outside of Scranton.
That doesn’t follow at all. I might stub my toe and go into agony even though I am located in Scranton. So there’s something wrong with this argument. It involves a logical fallacy. The fallacy involves a confusion between Scranton—which is a location—and agony—which is a state of being.
This is also important because being inside or outside of time involves a location, but being in heaven involves a state of being. We may picture heaven as if it is a location—classically, a location up in the clouds. But that’s not really what it is.
Instead, heaven is a state of spiritual union with God. Thus, John Paul II taught:
In the context of revelation, we know that the “heaven” or “happiness” in which we will find ourselves is neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but a living, personal relationship with the Holy Trinity (General Audience, July 21, 1999).
Similarly, the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:
This perfect life with the Most Holy Trinity—this communion of life and love with the Trinity, with the Virgin Mary, the angels, and all the blessed—is called “heaven.” Heaven is the ultimate end and fulfillment of the deepest human longings, the state of supreme, definitive happiness (CCC 1024).
So heaven is “a living, personal relationship with the Holy Trinity” and “the state of supreme, definitive happiness.”
This means that you can be in heaven whether or not you are inside or outside of time. God is outside of time, but he is supremely happy and so is “in” heaven, and when we are in full spiritual union with God, we are “in” heaven even though we remain in time.
That’s why in the book Revelation, John says:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away. . . .
And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (Revelation 21:1-3).
So Revelation depicts mankind as living on the new Earth, the city of New Jerusalem comes down out of heaven to mankind, and we’re told that “the dwelling place of God is with man.” But God doesn’t literally dwell in a physical location, yet he will be in full spiritual union with people as they live on the new Earth.
We Don’t Leave Time
This means that we don’t leave time when we enter full spiritual union with God, and this is something that the Church has been explicit about.
God may have Type 1 eternity, or true timelessness, but we don’t. We have Type 2 eternity or everlastingness. We come into being at a certain point in time, but because we are ultimately immortal, we have no end. Because of death, we may not be in our bodies for a period—of time—but eventually we will be reunited with them and experience the eternal order.
Both Scripture and standard Catholic teaching depict us as undergoing a sequence of states across our existence. First, we come into existence. Then, we live our lives. Then, we die. Then, we are judged at the particular judgment. Then, we are purified in purgatory if we need to be. Then, when our purification is finished, we have the unalloyed happiness of heaven. Then, we are reunited with our bodies. Then, we experience the general judgment, where we are judged in body and soul. Then, we experience the eternal order.
That’s a definite sequence—much of which happens after death, implying a sequentiality that occurs after our deaths. For there to be a sequence, there must be something separating the elements of the sequence–something that keeps them from happening all at once. That means that there is either time or something analogous to time in the afterlife.
That doesn’t mean it works exactly the same way that time works here on Earth. Various Medieval philosophers like St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas speculated that we might experience time differently than the way we experience it now. And they referred to this altered mode of existence as aevum or aeveternity, but it was still a form of time.
More recently, physicists have speculated that there may be more than one dimension of time. We’re used to experiencing one dimension of time that stretches into the future, but we’re also used to experiencing three physical dimensions—height, width, and length—so there is no conceptual reason why there can’t be more than one dimension of time. Maybe there are two or three or more—we just don’t experience them in this life.
But there has to be something separating the different stages of our journey in the afterlife, and so there has to be some form of time. It may be time exactly the way we experience it here; it may be an alternate experience like the medieval idea of aeviternity, or it may be even more complex, as with modern physics. But it has to exist.
Church Teaching on Our Timeliness
What does the Church’s Magisterium have to say on the subject? John Paul II taught:
Eternity [in the sense of being “beyond time”] is here the element which essentially distinguishes God from the world. While the latter is subject to change and passes away, God remains beyond the passing of the world. He is necessary and immutable (General Audience, Sept. 4, 1985).
He also taught that
[God] is Eternity, as the preceding catechesis explained, while all that is created is contingent and subject to time (General Audience, Sept. 11, 1985).
So “all that is created is . . . subject to time.” That means that our souls are subject to time. And this will be the case even after our deaths, since our souls do not cease to be created beings.
The same is true of angels. They are also created beings, and so they also are subject to time—answering that question for us.
The International Theological Commission Agrees
In 1992, the International Theological Commission (ITC) issued a document that bears on our subject in a more explicit way.
The ITC is an advisory body headed by the prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, who at the time was Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict). According to its bylaws, when the head of the ITC authorizes the publication of one of its documents, it signifies that the Magisterium does not have any difficulty with its teaching.
In this case, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger authorized the publication of a document which stated:
[S]ome theologians . . . seek a solution in a so-called atemporalism: They say that after death time can in no way exist and hold that the deaths of people are successive (viewed from the perspective of this world); whereas the resurrection of those people in the life after death, in which there would be no temporal distinctions, is (they think) simultaneous.
But this attempted atemporalism, according to which successive individual deaths would coincide with a simultaneous collective resurrection, implies recourse to a philosophy of time quite foreign to biblical thought.
The New Testament’s way of speaking about the souls of the martyrs does not seem to remove them either from all reality of succession or from all perception of succession (cf. Rev 6:9-11).
Similarly, if time should have no meaning after death, not even in some way merely analogous with its terrestrial meaning, it would be difficult to understand why Paul used formulas referring to the future (anastesontai) in speaking about their resurrection, when responding to the Thessalonians who were asking about the fate of the dead (cf. 1 Thess 4:13-18).
Moreover, a radical denial of any meaning for time in those resurrections, deemed both simultaneous and taking place in the moment of death, does not seem to take sufficiently into account the truly corporeal nature of the resurrection; for a true body cannot be said to exist devoid of all notion of temporality.
Even the souls of the blessed, since they are in communion with the Christ who has been raised in a bodily way, cannot be thought of without any connection with time (Some Current Questions on Eschatology, “The Christian Hope of the Resurrection,” 2.2].
By their nature, the documents of the ITC express the common understanding of Catholic theology in accord with the teaching of the Magisterium, and Cardinal Ratzinger’s authorization of this document signals that the common understanding in Catholic theology is that some form of time “even in some way merely analogous to its terrestrial meaning” continues to apply to us in the afterlife, and that the Magisterium has no difficulty with this.
Joseph Ratzinger said the same in his own writings, such as his book Eschatology, when he was still a theology professor.
Catholic theology thus does not hold that we leave time upon our deaths. In fact, it would be difficult to hold that we do so, given the reasons that the ITC cites.
So while we do indeed have eternal souls, and while God is eternal in the sense of being completely beyond time, the Church does not understand our souls to be eternal or atemporal in the way that God is.
God has Type 1 eternity, and we have Type 2.
Can You Ask for Your Own Intercession?
This gives us a framework for answering our remaining questions, like “Are you currently a saint in heaven?”
Well, your future self may be a saint, but your future is not now. Therefore, on the face of it, you would not be a saint in heaven now.
However, strictly speaking, we don’t know how time works in the afterlife. We know it exists, but we don’t know how it works. It’s possible it might involve more than one temporal dimension, or it might incorporate time travel—which is something Einstein’s field equations say is theoretically possible.
If something like time travel happens in heaven then technically, yes, you could be in heaven “now.” I wouldn’t count on that, though, because the idea of time travel in heaven is totally speculative, and we have no evidence supporting it.
But can you ask your saintly self to pray to God for you?
Here comes a twist, but the answer is yes. And it doesn’t matter whether you are in heaven “now” or not.
In fact, people ask their future selves to pray for them all the time—even in this life. For example, you could leave your future self a note that says, “Don’t forget to pray tonight!” Or you might set an alarm or some other kind of reminder to prompt your future self to pray.
There is thus no reason why you can’t ask your future sainted self to pray for you. All the future, sainted version of you has to do is remember to pray, and I’m pretty sure that in heaven we will have perfect memories.
Also, theologians like Aquinas commonly hold that the way saints know about our prayers is that God tells them—he tells them anything they would want to know about, including our prayer requests. So if Saint You forgets, God can remind you.
And God can respond to your future prayers and help you out right now! Remember: God is outside of time, and the past, present, and future are all equally real to him. So suppose that you’ll be a saint in heaven 100 years from now. That future version of you prays to God and asks him to help you right now—in our present. Well, our present is just as real to God as our future, so God can take your future prayer and apply it to you right now.
In fact, saints like St. Padre Pio have talked about the principle behind this, and I discussed it in Episode 208 of my podcast Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World. You can go to Mysterious.fm/208 if you’d like to learn more.
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God bless you always!
