Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [297]
The predisposition of apocalyptic literature to imagine in horribly literal terms the just deserts of the sinners and enemies of the group compensates for the injustice on earth. But history tells us that life became easier for Christians as they progressed up the social ladder of the Roman Empire. Why then did they design even more ferocious punishments against the sinners?
It was the delay of the parousia. The more time that passed without the good being rewarded by the end of the world, the more vindictive the faithful became against the sinners. With no quickly arriving apocalypse, there would be no reason to convert to Christianity except to avoid more and more horrendous punishments for sinning. Hell was a convenient stick with which to whip the sinner and a great cautionary tale to encourage the faithful.9 Under such circumstances, the details of hell depended on the writer’s inventiveness against the persecutors of the faithful.
Yet there is one more, even stronger reason why hell became so important in apocalyptic literature. It is deeply connected to the process of synthesizing resurrection of the dead with immortality of the soul: The more clear the depiction of the immortal soul, the more terrible hell had to be. An immortal soul is not destructible at death. Once the soul’s immortality is admitted (and therefore its universal and natural eternity acknowledged, as Plato taught), the more horrible must be the punishments for the badly behaved souls in hell. In the Daniel vision, the great sinners were resurrected for punishment. Most persons just remain dead, along with the ordinary righteous. But once the soul was immortal and all souls survived forever, then punishment had to be eternal as well, otherwise sinners would appear to get away with their dastardly deeds.
We already know that apocalyptic communities defined themselves (to a greater or lesser degree) as self-imposed pariahs, to avoid contamination ritually and morally from the surrounding society. They maintained their own ritual and moral purity, to their own specific and sectarian definition, and thus they constantly reminded themselves of their elect status: They will be the only persons to inherit God’s coming kingdom. There was an inherent social dimension to resurrection of the body, a polemic against those who would not get it and a very clear definition of the saved. When the notion of resurrection was combined with immortality of the soul in a Jewish or Christian context, a number of adjustments needed to be made, one of which was that the role of hell had to be more fully emphasized; and the other is that the judgment needed logically to be relocated to the time of death so that the final disposition of the immortal soul could be made clear. The third is that compensatory doctrines like Original Sin would become more explicit to enforce the dualism.
Souls in the Apocalyptic End
SOULS IN an apocalyptic work might mean only the “personality” of the departed and not precisely what the Greek “immortal soul” implied. After all, nefesh was available as a word for “soul” from Genesis onwards. It is very hard to know when the implications of the Platonic notion began to be felt. Especially when there is a resurrection at the end of time, the issue is moot because the end settles all the scores. When souls achieve an intermediate state, it is only until the resurrection at the end of time when the virtuous regain the earth in one form or another. This is a stable feature of Christian understanding of the end-of-time. Yet, at a certain point, we note that no one expected the end immediately, so that the immortal soul began to have a place in thinking about the afterlife. Life in heaven became more than an intermediary state. Logically, this happened as apocalyptic notions diminished but the soul’s intermediate state became more clearly defined. In other words, when the apocalyptic end receded, the intermediate state