Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [438]
Modern America, Christian or not, has ineluctably retreated to the position of the pagan philosophers of late antiquity: Our souls are immortal by nature; all will be saved, it just may take some souls longer to figure out that altruism and moral behavior are what guarantees salvation-or, alternatively, that it is really self-realization that guarantees our salvation. Either seems acceptable as a statement of the distinctively American hereafter because each validates quintessentially American values in this life.
Consciousness and Soul
CONSCIOUSNESS is the truly mysterious obsession of modern Western philosophical inquiry. Technical progress has not brought us much closer to understanding it, though research into the physical action of the brain has dethroned our surety of the self’s importance. Although the history of philosophy for centuries has been devoted to a description of the soul and the self, both in the West and the East, it still remains the perennial subject of philosophy, religion, and poetry all over the world, with little hope of achieving a consensus soon. Nor have I proposed here to resolve any of the difficult problems on describing consciousness, much less defining it. But I am stating that the afterlife is a mirror for what each society feels is transcendent in its individuals’ lives. In the modern period, the self has come more and more to be identified with the immortal soul. Personal consciousness is transcendent in our society because we value it as divine.
Afterlife as the Articulation of the Transcendent
THE NOTION OF the afterlife is an appropriate concern for faith and also for understanding society. Carol Zaleski, in her fascinating book, Other-world Journeys, is critical of easy acceptance of any mind / body dualism or any easy demonstration of literal truth outside of socially promoted symbols.10 Our religious truths come to us in a particular society, fitted to them and fitting for them. As we have seen together, ascension narratives are closely associated with conversion accounts because both are meant to serve as a guide for the pilgrimage of life. As Zaleski says as her conclusion:
Whatever the study of near-death visions might reveal about the experience of death, it teaches us just as much about ourselves as image-making and image-bound beings. To admit this is no concession to the debunkers; on the contrary, by recognizing the imaginative character of otherworld visions, we move beyond the merely defensive posture of arguing against reductionism. Within the limits here discussed we are able to grant the validity of near-death experience as one way in which the religious imagination mediates the search for ultimate truth.11
These are not easy sentences to come to terms with. I am, as well, particularly struck with the contribution that imagination makes to our religious life, the way in which our religious lives, our cultural lives, and our aesthetic lives interact. To explicate Zaleski’s perceptions, I propose to turn Plato’s thinking on its head. Instead of spending any more time analyzing Plato’s argument that the soul was immortal, we should investigate the consequences: It was Plato’s doctrine of the immortality of the soul that allowed us to focus on our conscious experiences, that valorized those experiences and eventually made the “self” the center of philosophical interest in the West, that made the “self” as well as God, a transcendent value in Western thought.
For the ancient Hebrew only God was immortal, but we think we share that immortality with God. Perhaps Plato’s notion of the immortal soul did not do all these things single-handedly. But it certainly provided us with the necesssary focus to make all that possible. Samuel Johnson’s famous quip that the prospect of death concentrates the mind is true in several ways at once. Death not only concentrates the mind, it concentrates us on our minds. It was the notion of the immortal soul that allowed us to focus on our own minds as