Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [15]
But wherever the truth lies-if indeed, it can be put into the simple sentences that journalists require-the story is a clear example of both our collective need for surety where none obtains and for individuals’ ability to hold a series of conflicting ideas simultaneously. Let’s be frank: Both the faithful and disbelieving rightfully have doubts and should have them. Faith without doubt is merely intolerance, ultimately fanaticism. Without doubt, faith turns to rabid zealotry and inspires tragedies such as the World Trade Center attack. Death anxiety is a strong and important reality with important adaptive uses in human life. Doubt is the one thing that helps keep faith from becoming fanaticism.
Death Anxiety
SHAKESPEARE himself portrays death anxiety in Measure for Measure:
’Tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
(Measure for Measure, Act 3, Scene 1, lines 127-131)
Poor Claudio says these abject lines in the same scene that he begins with heroic words about sacrificing himself to save his sister’s honor: “If I must die, / I will encounter darkness as a bride, And hug it in mine arms” (lines 81-83). In this briefest moment, Shakespeare risks our respect by portraying his character suddenly turn cowardly in contemplating the horrors of death and hell. The greater risk provides us with a deeper truth about our humanity.
Modern idiom is much poorer than Shakespeare’s. He shows us that death anxiety infects everything we do as humans, even when we are trying to be brave. It is part of the human condition; indeed it seems a consequence of self-consciousness itself. It is a price we pay for being aware of ourselves as beings. Whether it is better to face this cold end without the benefit of religious understanding or to adopt religious views of the afterlife is still very much an open question, which is where Shakespeare leaves it. Which is the true denial of death? This book will attempt to answer that question by looking at the development of our notions of the afterlife. We shall also see that notions of life after death are themselves important and helpful tools in the development of our self-consciousness.
An Outline of the Study
FIRST, WE WILL look at the concept of afterlife in Egypt, a considerable amount of data. We can use the opportunity of studying a culture with such elaborate notions of the afterlife and heavy use of social resources to defend them to ask some general questions about human notions of the afterlife.
Then we will research the notions of Mesopotamia and Canaan, more and more important respectively for the study of Israel. In contrast to Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Egypt, the Hebrew Bible is almost entirely silent about life after death. This silence is in pointed opposition to the rich description of the afterlife of Egypt and the surrounding cultures. Israelite First Temple religion, which is highly independent and highly polemical against these three cultures in the form we have in the Bible, is also deeply dependent upon them for its more basic concepts. We shall have to ask how characteristic of Israelite culture is the Bible’s perspective. Is it the dominant ancient position or a small minority imposing a “YHWH only” perspective on the culture?
We then turn to ancient Iran, Persia, which is crucially important for the rise of notions of bodily resurrection in Second Temple Judaism but next to impossible at this juncture to evaluate historically. Then, we will look at Greek culture, whose notion of the immortality of the soul was also to change Israelite culture and Western notions of afterlife forever. We will next look at the Biblical literary productions of the Persian and Hellenistic periods, ending with the book of Daniel, in which resurrection is predicted for the first time unambiguously and the equally important Greek notion of immortality of the soul, which enters Judaism by another means and with another social background.