Note 14 — Chapter V · THE ASCENSION.

The first impression from this narrative is clearly this: that it is intended as a description of a miraculous event, an actual exaltation of Jesus into heaven, as the dwelling-place of God, and an attestation of this by angels; as orthodox theologians, both ancient and modern, correctly maintain. The only question is, whether they can also help us to surmount the difficulties which stand in our way when we attempt to form a conception of such an event? One main difficulty is this: how can a palpable body, which has still flesh and bones, and eats material food, be qualified for a celestial abode? how can it so far liberate itself from the laws of gravity, as to be capable of an ascent through the air? and how can it be conceived that God gave so preternatural a capability to Jesus by a miracle?14 The only possible reply to these questions is, that the grosser elements which the body of Jesus still retained after the resurrection, were removed before the ascension, and only the finest essence of his corporeality, as the integument of the soul, was taken by him into heaven.15 But as the disciples who were present at the ascension observed no residuum of his body which he had left behind, this leads either to the above mentioned absurdity of an evaporation of the body of Jesus, or to Olshausen’s process of subtilization which, still incomplete even after the resurrection, was not perfected until the moment of the ascension; a process which must have been conducted with singularly rapid retrograde transitions in these last days, if the body of Jesus, when penetrating into the closed room where the disciples were assembled, is to be supposed immaterial; immediately after when Thomas touched him, material; and lastly, in the ascension, again immaterial. The other difficulty lies in the consideration, that according to a just idea of the world, the seat of God and of the blessed, to which Jesus is supposed to have been exalted, is not to be sought for in the upper regions of the air, nor, in general, in any determinate place;—such a locality could only be assigned to it in the childish, limited conceptions of antiquity. We are well aware that he who would attain to God and the circle of the blessed would make a superfluous circuit, if he thought it necessary for this purpose to soar aloft into the higher regions of the firmament; and the more intimately Jesus was acquainted with God and divine things, the farther certainly would he be from making such a circuit, or from being caused to make it by God.16 Thus there would be no other resource than to suppose a divine accommodation to the idea of the world in that age, and to say: God in order to convince the disciples of the return of Jesus into the higher world, although this world is in reality by no means to be sought for in the upper air, nevertheless prepared the spectacle of such an exaltation.17 But this is to represent God as theatrically arranging an illusion.