We go to prepare a place for you

"the idea of Jesus being bodily in heaven in complete bodily solitariness is probably not a coherent conception, certainly not fitting; and not present in Scripture.  There is no trace in Scripture of any idea that the Old Testament figures would wait until the last days, along with St. Paul and the other saints, before being taken up into heaven and the very presence of God, there to have the kind of immediacy to the presence of God portrayed in the book of Revelation 21-22--even though before Christ's own Resurrection, the Jewish conception seems to have been only of some kind of earthly paradise.  It is the days of Jesus' ministry with the completion of that ministry in the Passion and the Resurrrection that prophets and kings are portrayed as waiting for (Lk 10:23-4; 1 Pet 1:10ff; Heb 11:39-40) so that those that went before might enter into their inheritance with the Church, Jesus 'going (ahead) to prepare a place for you,' in his 'Father's house' where 'there are many abiding-places.'  In the Eastern Church, amongst the Old Testament figures, the Patriarchs and prophets have always been thought of as amongst the saints as ones who could pray for us, along with the saints, and not only John the Baptist, Mary's spouse Joseph, Joachim and Anne, as in the modern Western rite liturgies.  And, in the iconography of Christ's descent into Hades, he has long been portrayed as triumphantly leading a repentant Adam and Eve as well as a troop of others along with the saintly dead out of Sheol or Hades into heaven with him.
"Christ's bodily ascension to glory gives heaven a bodily aspect making it difficult to suppose that he did not take more than one to be present with him bodily in heaven in the interval before his second coming--for mankind, two does not constitute a complete community."

David Braine, "The Virgin Mary in the Christian faith:  the development of the Church's teaching on the Virgin Mary in modern perspective," Nova et vetera: the English edition of the international theological journal 7, no. 4 (Fall 2009):  924, 927 (877-940).  Nonetheless, the Assumption proper remains "a special privilege of the Virgin Mary," and has "a rationale and role which removes it from any close analogy to the assumptions of Enoch, Moses, and Elijah in earlier Jewish thinking, each thought of as already bodily in paradise, even before the Resurrection, and perhaps also of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob along with them according to the words of Jesus, or even of the saints or holy ones who were raised up and seen in Jerusalem, of whom St. Matthew speaks" (923).

"One by one they were all becoming shades"

"A few lights taps on the pane made him turn to the window.  It had begun to snow again.  He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight.  The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward.  Yes, the newspapers were right:  snow was general all over Ireland.  It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling onto the dark mutinous Shannon waves.  It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.  It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.  His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."

James Joyce, "The Dead," Dubliners (Dubliners:  text, criticism, and notes, ed. Robert Scholes & A. Walton Litz, Viking critical library (New York, NY:  The Viking Press, 1969), 223-224).

Yes, but are those later generations ever the more superficial?

"it is one of the ironies of history that those issues which once seemed so important as to justify their defence with the sacrifice of life itself should in time come to seem to later generations irrelevant."

Maurice Lindsay, History of Scottish literature (London:  Robert Hale, 1977), 128, as quoted by Barton Swaim, "Reasons for Latin," Times literary supplement, 15 January 2010, 24, but verified.  The sentence preceding, the one that opens the chapter, runs as follows:  "The seventeenth century, with its long and bitter periods of religious struggle--family divided against family, maintaining attitudes of bigotry and intolerance--is not an age upon which Scots can reasonably look back with much pride."
Yet in this same issue of the TLS is a review by Jonathan Clark entitled, "Did Butterfield write in vain?"  (Peter Burke, in the new and revised (1988) edition of the Harper dictionary of modern thought, defines the "Whig interpretation of history" identified by Butterfield as "the tendency of historians to see the past as the story of the conflict between progressives and reactionaries, in which the progressives, or Whigs, win and so bring about the modern world.")

"In Heaven There Is No Beer," as sung by Aquinas and Pesch

"The Bavarian has in heaven no beer to expect, the Briton no Guinness, the Frenchman and the Italian and the Rhenish Hessian as well as the Franconian no wine, the Swiss no kirsch, the Pole and the Russian no vodka, the North German no corn schnapps, the Greek no ouzo."

Otto Hermann Pesch, "Das Streben nach der beatitudo bei Thomas von Aquin im Kontext seiner Theologie: historische und systematische Fragen," Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 52, no. 3 (2005):  441.

Pseudo-Melito on the Assumption

"Then the Saviour spake unto them, saying: . . . this woman did I choose out of the tribes of Israel by the commandment of my Father, to dwell in her.  What then will ye that I do with her?  Then said Peter and the other apostles: . . . it hath appeared right to us thy servants that, as thou having overcome death dost reign in glory, so thou shouldest raise up the body of thy mother and take her with thee rejoicing into heaven.
"Then said the Savior:  Be it done according to your will."

 Pseudo-Melito, Latin narrative of the Assumption XVI.2-XVII.1, trans. Montague Rhodes James (The apocryphal New Testament, corr. ed. (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1966 [1953]; cf. http://www.archive.org/download/apocryphalnewtes027548mbp/apocryphalnewtes027548mbp.pdf), 215-216).  I'm not endorsing this (not endorsing this fifth-century document either), just intrigued by the idea of a development of fact and dogma left up to the apostles.  I was put onto this by Fr. Benoît-Dominique de La Soujeole, O.P., Initiation à la théologie mariale:  «tous les âges me diront bienheureuse», Bibliothèque de la Revue thomiste (Paris:  Parole et Silence, 2007), 175.

Colón-Emeric on the Methodist house and the Thomist cathedral

"The Methodist house of religion is no English manor but a simple dwelling with a porch, a door, and an interior.  The porch of this house is repentance; the door to this house is faith; the inside of the house is holiness itself.  When we turned to Aquinas the scene shifted tremendously.  We found ourselves not before a humble if hospitable house, but before a Gothic cathedral that threatened to overwhelm us by its sheer scale.  The interior of this cathedral is cavernous; there are such treasures in this place that centuries of Thomist commentators have not surveyed them all.  Our study amounted to little more than a cursory walk through.

     "Looking at Wesley and Aquinas side by side it is easy to feel dizzied by the differences.  Methodist house and Thomist cathedral, what can these two possibly have in common?  Even when focused on a central doctrine, like perfection, the differences seem to be so great as to render any comparison as fruitless as that of the proverbial apples and oranges.  Yet in the same way that both house and cathedral have generic common features (walls, roofs, doors, etc.) that allow for comparison, so do Aquinas' and Wesley's respective teachings on perfection.  The chief commonality that their teachings share is that they are grounded  in the Scriptural Witness [(the Sermon on the Mount)] as interpreted by the Christian tradition."

     Edgardo A. Colón-Emeric, Wesley, Aquinas, and Christian perfection:  an ecumenical dialogue (Waco, TX:  Baylor University Press, 2009), 125.  I haven't yet read this book, but, in skimming through it, stumbled upon this, which, understandably, caught my eye.  Cf. p. 149 and elsewhere.

Aquinas on the Angst of the philosophers

"Alexander and Averroes laid it down that the final happiness of man is not in such knowledge as is possible to man through the speculative sciences, but in a knowledge gained by conjunction with a separately subsistent intelligence, which conjunction they conceived to be possible to man in this life. But because Aristotle saw that there was no other knowledge for man in this life than that which is through the speculative sciences, he supposed man not to gain perfect happiness, but a limited measure of happiness suited to his state. In which it sufficiently appears how hard pressed on this side and on that these fine geniuses were [(quantam angustiam patiebantur hinc inde eorum praeclara ingenia)]. From [which] stress of difficulty [(angustiis)] we shall find escape in positing, according to the proofs already given, that man can arrive at true happiness after this life, the soul of man being immortal. In this . . . state the soul [(in quo statu anima (no 'disembodied'!))] will understand in the way in which pure spirits [(substantiae separatae)] understand. The final happiness of man then will be in the knowledge of God, which the human soul has after this life according to the manner in which pure spirits [(substantiae separatae)] know Him."

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles III.48.[16], trans. Rickaby (http://www2.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/etext/gc3_48.htm), modifications and underscoring mine.  Latin from Corpus Thomisticum here:  http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/scg3001.html#25987.  angustia Pesch translates as Angst ("Das Streben nach der beatitudo bei Thomas von Aquin im Kontext seiner Theologie: historische und systematische Fragen," Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 52, no. 3 (2005): 431), but "difficulty, distress, [and] perplexity" (Andrews, A copious and critical Latin-English lexicon (1868)) would be a consequence of finding oneself, no matter how brilliant, between a rock and a hard place (angustiam . . . hinc inde) philosophically.  There is no entry for angustia in Schütz's Thomas-Lexikon as reproduced here (http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/tl.html), but "difficulty, distress" are the equivalents given in the Lexicon of Saint Thomas Aquinas by Deferrari and Barry (for what little that may be worth).