• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2468 0

I will rely on their conclusions with a reference. What I propose to do is sign on for “the long voyage,” just as a ship’s crew did in Shakespeare’s “Age of Discovery,” to penetrate the darkness of death and map the new day of the afterlife as it is depicted in western culture. I want to show the connection between visions of the afterlife and the early scriptural communities who produced them. I want to study the early, traditional maps of the afterlife that we find in our foundational Western religious texts and the territory they inscribe in the religious life of the vibrant societies that produced them. I want to not only ask what was believed, but to ask why people wanted an afterlife of a particular kind and how those beliefs changed over time. It will be a long and arduous trip, mostly through strange, half familiar, and fascinating landscapes. We will return with treasure, knowledge, and understanding of beliefs quite different from our own, yet reassurance that religious visions are not inexplicably beyond our abilities to mediate or change. This book is the logbook of that voyage.

We can easily answer the question of why Shakespeare used an explorer’s metaphor to describe the afterlife: The discovery of the Americas was the great news of his day. But, why did the Egyptians insist on an afterlife in heaven while the body was embalmed in a pyramid on earth? Why did the Babylonians view the dead as living underground in a prison? Why did the Hebrews refuse to talk about the afterlife in First Temple times (1000-586 BCE) and then begin to do so in Second Temple times (539 BCE-70 CE)? Why did the Persians envision the afterlife as bodily resurrection while many Greeks narrated the flight of a soul back to heaven? How can a single culture contain different and conflicting views of the afterlife at the same time? Since all these cultures told stories of people who went to heaven, what did people find when they went there while yet alive, and why was it important to make the journey? These questions are much more complicated and more interesting than understanding the use of a casual metaphor, even by an author as gifted as Shakespeare. However, they can be investigated in the same way, through the study of texts and contexts as well as the religions and societies that produced them.

Intimations of Immortality

WE SURELY KNOW instinctively that every religious tradition uses the afterlife to speak of the ultimate reward of the good, just as we instinctively know that stories of “heaven” will describe the most wonderful perfections imaginable in any one time and place, even as stories of “hell” will describe the most terrible and fearful punishments imaginable. A book that catalogues the history of surfeit in each culture would be an interesting cultural history in itself, but it would avoid the hard questions.

Jerry L. Walls begins his serious and quite sophisticated inquiry into heaven in Heaven: The Logic of Eternal Joy3 with a crucial incident in the life of St. Augustine, as narrated in his Confessions. Augustine is with his famous mother, Monica, who is but a few days from her death. She has just convinced Augustine to be baptized as a Christian. At this tender and intimate moment, the two have a conversation that leads to the conclusion that no bodily pleasure can compare with the happiness of the martyred saints in heaven. For a moment, they feel that heaven is so close to them in life that they can almost touch it. Walls uses this scene as the starting point for his philosophical inquiry into the validity of notions of heaven. I would ask, instead, how the martyrs came to be envisioned as living eternally in heaven, why this discourse was so closely associated with the nearing death of Monica, and how closely it cohered with Christian doctrines of proselytization and mission. For Walls, it is the beginning of a description of what awaits us; for me, it is an example of how we as humans symbolize what of us is stronger than death in ways that are congruent with our lives in culture and society. The hardest