Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [248]
Apocalypticism and Mysticism
APOCALYPTICISM and mysticism have rightly remained separate categories in scholarly parlance because they refer to two different, easily distinguishable types of literature. But they do not appear to be unrelated experiences. Jewish mystical texts are full of apocalypses; early apocalyptic literature is based on ecstatic visions with profound mystical implications. Normally in an apocalyptic text we get a description, often in the first person, of a vision and ascent. In the mysticism of the Rabbinic period we get the same kind of description, in the mouth of a famous Rabbi, equally as pseudonymous, together with some of the preparations necessary to receive the vision. They may just be two different ways of describing the same kind of experiences. This suggests that scholars have without sufficient warrant carried a distinction in literary genre into the realm of experience. It is likewise misleading always to distinguish between ecstatic, out-of-body visions (as found in mysticism) and literal bodily ascensions to heaven (as are more frequently found in apocalypticism).18 They may all be RISCs described in different terms.
In Merkabah Mysticism loosely construed (traceable from composition of Enoch to the rise of Kabbalah in the twelfth century), the mysticism of the early Rabbinic movement which concentrated on ascents to heaven, magical chants and procedures, as well as spells and rituals to remember Torah, the voyager often spoke as though he was actually going from place to place in heaven; yet we know from the frame narratives that the adept’s body was on earth, where his utterances were questioned and written down by a group of disciples.19 Paul spoke at a time before these distinctions were clear or accepted by his community. He was not sure whether the ascent took place in the body or out of it.
We should note that Paul did not utilize the concept of a soul (psyche) to effect this heavenly travel. Not being sure of whether the ascent took place in the body or out of the body is the same as saying that one is not taking account of the Platonic concept of the soul. Had Paul been using the Platonic version, he certainly would have known quite well that the only way to go to heaven, to ascend beyond the sublunar sphere, was by leaving the body behind. Indeed, we shall see several important places, especially 1 Corinthians 15, where Paul’s concept of “soul” was quite limited, unschooled by Platonic ideas of the soul’s immortality.
Rather, as we have just seen, Paul used the term “spirit” (pneuma) more frequently. Paul’s pneumatology derives from the traditional language of Biblical prophecy and it is also the way Paul understood resurrection to arrive. This suggests that Paul may have understood being “in Christ” as a literal exchange of earthly body for a new pneumatic, spiritual one to be shared with the resurrected Jesus at the eschaton, since “spirit” is the source of all Paul’s knowledge gained in visions. For him it was not yet concrete reality because it was not fully present. On the other hand, the spiritual vision was not hallucination either. It was prophecy in process of becoming concrete.
Even if Paul was not sure of how a visionary journey could be taken, we are. The question of whether a heavenly journey could take place in or out of the body may be settled for us only by assuming that this was an ecstatic journey, a RASC. Modern science balks at the notion of physical transport to heaven, except in space ships, whereas a heavenly journey in vision or trance is credible and understandable. This only underlines Paul’s interesting conflation of what to us seems two different categories. So we are not free to ignore that fact when we try to establish what actually happened. When a heavenly journey is described literally, the cause may be literary convention or the belief of the voyager; but when reconstructing the actual experience, only one type can pass modern standards of credibility.
Paul’s confusion as to whether his ecstatic journey to heaven took place in the body