The Beatific Vision in Sunshine

This week I watched the movie Sunshine, a science fiction film in which the sun is slowly dying and, consequently, the earth is cooling down. To save all life on earth, humanity sends a spaceship toward the sun with a massive payload of “all the fissile material left on the planet” in order to jump start the sun. As the crew of the ship, aptly christened Icarus, approaches the sun, some members of the ship's crew become entranced with the giant ball of fire lies directly ahead of them. The Icarus's doctor spends his off-hours staring into the sun on the observation deck, mesmerized with its beauty and power. He keeps lowering the polarization on the filter through which he has to look, increasing the intensity of the sun's rays to the point that he risks permanent eye damage.

The culmination of the film's consideration of the sun's immense beauty (before the movie descended into the lower genre of space-horror) came as two crew members were spacewalking outside of the ship to repair its heat shield. At a critical point in the repairs, Icarus has to turn it shield back toward the sun to avoid damage, threatening to expose the crew outside the ship to the direct rays of the sun. While one of the crew escapes and returns to safety behind the ship's heat shield, the ship's captain stays in an attempt to complete the repairs. When the captain completes his work, he has the option of turning back toward the heat shield and making a dash to safety. But he does not retreat. Instead, he turns toward the sun and stares into its dawning light. There he stays, mesmerized by the sheer intensity of the sun's unmediated brilliance. As the captain begins to be consumed by the sun's rays, the ship's doctor screams through the radio, “What do you see, Captain, what do you see?”

It is written that the Lord our God is a consuming fire. No one can see him and live. At the same time, he exists as beauty itself. Therein lies a paradox. To look upon God is to die, but it is also to see his beauty directly. There is something in all of us that longs for this Beatific Vision, but we know that we cannot experience it and live. Bonaventure responds to this paradox in his Journey of the Mind to God. In this short book, Bonaventure takes his readers on an ascension toward God, up seven steps to God himself. Here is the final passage of the book, inspired by Exodus 33, as the reader completes the final steps of his journey to God. He speaks of the consuming fire:

This fire is God, and the furnace of this fire leadeth to Jerusalem; and Christ the man kindles it in the fervor of His burning Passion, which he alone truly perceives, who says, "My soul rather chooseth hanging and my bones death". He who chooses this death can see God because this is indubitably true: "Man shall not see me and live".

Let us then die and pass over into darkness; let us impose silence on cares, concupiscence, and phantasms; let us pass over with the crucified Christ from this world to the Father, so that when the Father is shown to us we may say with Philip, "It is enough for us"; let us hear with Paul, "My grace is sufficient for thee"; let us exult with David, saying, "For Thee my flesh and my heart hath fainted away; Thou art the God of my heart, and the God that is my portion forever. . . . Blessed be the Lord God of Israel from everlasting to everlasting; and let all the people say: So be it, so be it". AMEN.

It is a beautiful thing to be consumed.