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Heaven-Earth Dilemmas and the Great Both/And

February 1, 2025

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Man is a divided animal. Division, of course, has always been with us. But the speed, frequency, and intensity with which we can now share ideas has brought us to a crisis of polarization—one that more and more threatens the future of civilization. Whether it’s religion, philosophy, culture, politics, or art, we find ourselves in a fiercely divided world: divided countries, divided states, divided communities, divided families, divided minds. The variety of ideas on a given subject always seems to boil down to some overarching dichotomy, some inevitable showdown. “The world is broken, sundered, busted down the middle, self ripped from self.”1

Polarization requires the choice between two poles, and behind all of our divisions, we find dilemmas. Do we believe in the conservative or the liberal cause? Tradition or progress? High culture or pop culture? Religion or science? Is man a soul or a body? Is the good life in discipline or passion? Should we be religious or spiritual? Is reality spiritual or material? Should we follow the light of faith or reason? Are we saved by faith or works? Everywhere we turn, we’re tempted into an either/or, our vision split in two like the double-faced Roman god Janus. We can’t bear the tension, and inevitably we choose one way at the expense of the other, narrowing our eyes at those who chose the opposite way. 

How we make the choice, of course, varies: sometimes we go to war with the opposing element, and sometimes we deny that it exists at all; sometimes we keep a respectful distance from it, and sometimes we absorb it; sometimes we push it down, and sometimes we rise up to take its place. But we choose—and the stakes are high. Seizing one element at the expense of the other tends toward extremes, and these extremes—whether by common cause or opposite charge—tend to attract one another. In fact, in the ultimate punishment, one extreme often leads right into the clutches of its direct opposite. This is what Carl Jung, borrowing from Heraclitus, called “enantiodromia” (in the Greek, an “opposite-running”). When one side of a dilemma dominates our thinking, the other side will eventually build up, explode through our conscious control, and wreak new havoc. 

Social media—so carefully engineered to affirm what we choose, and to addict us to that affirmation—has clearly contributed to this crisis of division and extremism. But the dilemmas behind it have always been with us, and the digital revolution has at least forced us to face them all at once. Can we overcome them before they overcome us? Can we even understand them at all? 

When we look at our great dilemmas in the light of the Way, they become false dilemmas.

This book finds new hope in a forgotten Way. It hinges on three closely related ideas. The first is this: Our greatest dilemmas are heaven-earth dilemmas. But what does “heaven and earth” mean? There are layers of meaning to these terms, which come down to the West through the Bible. The surface layer is the things of heaven and earth: the guiding metaphor of the sky above and the ground below. But these surface meanings orient us to four deeper meanings of the terms. The first two look at the big picture: the people of heaven and earth (God and man) and the places of heaven and earth (God’s place and man’s place). The second two zoom in on the earth side, where the heavenly and earthly intersect: man’s place (the spiritual and the physical) and man himself (the spirit and the flesh). 

The great dilemmas in the history of ideas in the West are heaven-earth dilemmas. The most prominent are these four ultimate dilemmas of life, which all extend out of “heaven or earth”: God or man, God’s place or man’s place, the spiritual or the physical, and the spirit or the flesh. Surrounding these are the great dilemmas of philosophy and theology, which extend out of these same four pairs. And each dilemma that we encounter plays out the same dynamics: on one side, we find a heavenward way that chooses the heavenly element at the expense of the earthly; on the other side, we find an earthward way that chooses the earthly element at the expense of the heavenly. Man is a creature “pulled two ways like between two teams of horses,”2 and these two ways are heaven and earth. We find ourselves falling into this same pattern time and time again. Heaven and earth crack the code of our deepest divisions.

This leads to a second idea: Our heaven-earth dilemmas are only resolved in Christ, the Way of heaven and earth. From the beginning of Genesis to the end of Revelation, “heaven and earth” is the great mantra of the Bible. And heaven and earth—in all four meanings of those terms—reach their fulfillment in Jesus of Nazareth. He is the Way in person; in him, “the sky did really come down and join the earth,”3 and his spired churches all over the world reach up into the heavens. He says as much, calling himself “the way” (John 14:6)—and not as a road to some other place, but as both the journey and the destination. In Christ, heaven and earth are contrasted; heaven is higher than the earth and has the primacy. Yet they’re also connected; heaven has come down to the earth, drawing the two together in an intimate union. In a word, heaven and earth are in communion (together-as-one) in Jesus. God gathers “all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth,” “to reconcile to himself all things” (Eph. 1:10; Col. 1:20). In Christ, both heaven and earth are full of God’s glory (Isa. 6:3). 

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When we look at our great dilemmas in the light of the Way, they become false dilemmas. Christ frees us from having to choose between heaven and earth, and offers safe passage between the Scylla and Charybdis of each without the other. But this is no mere intellectual or spiritual program; the more we open ourselves to the truth of Christ, the more we’re drawn into his life. We don’t claim the Way; the Way claims us. And from within it, we find again and again that the heavenward and earthward each get something right, but that neither gets the whole picture; that the Wayward hold together what the wayward separate or confuse. 

This leads to the third and final idea: The fullness of the Way is in the Catholic Church, which is defined by the principle of “both/and.” Early Christians took Jesus at his word, often describing their newfound faith as “the Way” (Acts 9:2; 19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:14, 22)—a participation, soul and mind and body, in the life of Jesus. Most Christians walk together on the first stretch of his Way—a “mere Christianity”—but the Catholic Church has the temerity to see it all the way through to the end. This is the “Catholic both/and.”

This phrase has been popularized today through the evangelical work of Bishop Robert Barron, and in the twentieth century, was a preoccupation of various theologians of the Society of Jesus, including Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, and many others. But this et-et (and-and) theme stretches back through the whole of Catholic literature—from Flannery O’Connor and G.K. Chesterton, back through Aquinas and Augustine, all the way to Irenaeus of Lyons and Ignatius of Antioch—and into the Sacred Scriptures. The Church’s dogmas, doctrines, and condemnations, its sacraments, saints, and social teachings—all of it comes back to the both/and. 

What is it? It’s simply an insistence on the Way—an instinct for seeing it and choosing it, for inhabiting the creative tension of paradoxes rather than falling into simplistic solutions. Like the young girl in the Old El Paso commercial about the choice between hard or soft taco shells, now made famous by a meme, it’s a knack for responding, “¿Por qué no los dos?” Why not both? It seeks dualities without dualism, binaries without bifurcation, dyads without dichotomy. Like some of the saints, it bilocates. Catholics use various images for this both/and: harmony, marriage, sanity, tension, balance, fullness, wholeness (“catholic” meaning kata holos, according to the whole). And they frame it using various principles: analogical, sacramental, dialectical, incarnational. But ultimately, the great image and principle is Christ himself. The both/and is just Christocentric: it centers on the Way incarnate. Like the mandorla, it sees the spheres of heaven and earth intersecting and integrating. Like the Mandalorian, it declares, “This is the Way.”

But isn’t there a fatal flaw in this whole project? Doesn’t the Bible also talk, time and time again, about the dangers of the earthly? Aren’t the great enemies of the soul, as Christian tradition has it, “the world, the flesh, and the devil”? If so, how can we talk of a “Way of heaven and earth”? 

The Way comes with principles, but not with a script; it requires careful discernment and constant prudence.

Here, we have to make a key distinction between two very different meanings of the earthly. The first, which we might call “the true earth,” is the earthly insofar as it exists. But the second, which we might call “the false earth,” is the earthly insofar as it’s evil. Earth in the first sense—the body, the human being, God’s “very good” creation (Gen. 1:31)—is the opposite pole of heaven, and these opposites come together on the Way. But earth in the second sense—St. Paul’s “works of the flesh” (Gal. 5:19–21), St. Augustine’s “City of Man,” St. John’s “the world” (1 John 2:15–17)—isn’t the opposite pole of heaven. In fact, it isn’t even a pole at all: evil is an absence, a privation, a lacuna—a sinking downward into nothingness. In the topographical poetry of the Bible, it leads to Sheol, which is under the earth, and Gehenna, a cavernous valley; it’s the way not to life but to everlasting death. Thus, this false earth has no place on the Way of heaven and earth; on the contrary, it’s what stirs up all our divisions between them. God is the great gatherer; the devil (diabolos, from dia-ballein, “to scatter”) is the great divider. Where there is holiness, there is wholeness—two words that share the same etymological root; by contrast, “where there are sins, there is multiplicity, there are schisms, there are heresies, there are dissensions.”4 C.S. Lewis rightly saw a spiritual darkness behind our collapses into extremes and enantiodromias: “all extremes, except extreme devotion,” are playthings of the devil, who “always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites,” and “relies on your extra dislike of one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.”5

The Church doesn’t say “both/and” to good and evil—only to good. It also doesn’t say “both/and” to truth and falsehood—only to truth. It doesn’t even properly say “both/and” to the countless pairs of arbitrarily or closely related things—beautiful as they might be. Instead—with eyes fixed on Christ, who is goodness, truth, and beauty itself—its “both/and” is to heaven and earth, that radiant unity-in-difference that molds and moves its people.

Of course, none of this is to say that the Way is tidy or easy. It’s neither. The Way comes with principles, but not with a script; it requires careful discernment and constant prudence. Those who walk it bring a great variety of gifts—temperaments, experiences, insights—and tend to stress one element in a given dilemma, even as all those gifts are drawn together in the unity of the Church, where “iron sharpens iron” (Prov. 27:17). The Catholic both/and doesn’t shut down conversation; on the contrary, it’s where things really get interesting. It’s a path of tension and drama, of self-assessment and self-correction, of fine-tuning and hair-splitting—one that always makes the oversimplifications of the either/or look so tempting. Indeed, while the “either/or” is often associated with Protestant thought, the debates of the Reformation are just one chapter—in this book, the last chapter—in a broader story, one that very much involves Catholic history.

You will, I hope, see your own journey and the journeys of those you know all over these case studies of heavenward and earthward ways, just as I have, even though so many of them are from long ago. “There is nothing new under the sun”—nothing but the Way “making all things new” (Eccles. 1:9; Rev. 21:5). And the methodical yet brisk approach will hopefully keep the journey from being either too cursory or too cumbersome. It will involve passing through old and difficult arguments, but not for long—because the argument of this book is the arguments themselves. 

But my greatest hope is that this book will bring the reader closer to answering that greatest question: What does it mean to be human? All of our questions, even that of God, pivot off this question, because even our search for God is inescapably a human search. Man himself is the question. Nothing is as common, familiar, or obvious, yet as precious, distant, or mysterious. And whether we succeed or fail in our attempt at an answer, Joseph Ratzinger was right: “There is no escape from the dilemma of being a man.”6


1  Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins (Picador, 1971), 382–383.
2  William Faulkner, “Barn Burning,” in Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner (Modern Library, 2012), 18.
3 C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Scholastic, 1987), 214.
4 Origen, Homilies 1–14 on Ezekiel, trans. Thomas P. Scheck (Newman, 2010), 117.
5  C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity, in the Signature Classics (HarperOne, 2002), 204, 150.
6  Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 2nd ed., trans. J.R. Foster (Ignatius, 2004), 45.

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