Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [359]
Augustine is the primary supporter and essayist of a new inner relationship between God and the soul. He even creates a series of writings, which he calls the Soliloquies. Some of them sound remarkably like the Poimandres, though they are more self-consciously an internal dialogue, and the narrator is not just a Platonist but also a Christian. Augustine professes ignorance about whether the dialogue is with his own self or with an outside voice. The dialogue of God and the soul is the basic internal dialogue over which the Christian life takes shape. Augustine’s is a virtuoso synthesis; he powers his way through the various issues, protected by his powers as a bishop and the growing power of the church to enforce its dictates.
The Social Meaning of Resurrection, Martyrdom, and Asceticism
IMAGES OF THE afterlife-resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul-had enormous consequences within the thought world of early Christianity. They began by defining pagan as against Christian. But they did so much more: Over time, the symbols mediate gender, identity and gender identity. They help distinguish between those who are willing to endure martyrdom and those who feel avoiding martyrdom is better. They help assess those loyal to establishment virtues and those who will rebel against them. They mediate asceticism of various kinds; if one factors in Judaism, they even mediate asceticism over against sexual fulfillment. They help discuss how much Christians have in common with the other humans on the planet.
Uncoding this language has been been going on for centuries but cracking the social message is largely due to scholarship in the last few decades, captained by such people as Elaine Pagels, John Gager, and Elizabeth Clark.103 As Caroline Bynum characterizes the scholarship: “This interpretation recognizes that figures such as Augustine and Jerome were profoundly uneasy with the culture of upper-class pagans; nonetheless, it sees them rejecting and inverting worldly distinctions of class and gender only to inscribe another version in an ascetic or ecclesiastical hierarchy on earth that carries over, in its every detail, into heaven.”104
The work of Caroline Bynum and Peter Brown, in some way, stands over against this synthesis, suggesting that the relationships are too complex for easy or predictable results. Bynum suggests, for example, that although Gregory’s solution to the resurrection body problem may have been more satisfactory intellectually, the notion that the body was reassembled, which Augustine among others championed, actually helped the founding of the martyr cults, which were so important to the Middle Ages.105 The proliferation of the cults depended on the theory that a piece of the martyr’s body had the same efficacy as the whole body.
What we have seen throughout the history of the afterlife is that issues like the identity of the self in the afterlife may not be universal symbols but are historically significant because of the history of the terms and events in a specific culture. Once the code is established, social discourse develops. The symbols definitiely have consequences for how the self is construed within this life at a particular time and place. None of the formulations of self in the ancient world, including Jewish, Christian, or, pagan, or even the Church Father’s extended discussion would pass modern philosophical criteria for cogency. The importance lies in the ways each of the formulations can be made to carry a social message, which the individual church father was promulgating. To study the conflict is to study a society in dialogue and polemic with itself.
Universalism and Posthumous Baptism of the Dead
PAUL SAYS CLEARLY: “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body” (2 Cor 5:10). Such a perception appears to preclude any generations previous to Jesus from achieving