Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [448]
Cleopatra gives us another. Shakespeare writes this speech because it perfectly fits Cleopatra’s situation but he is writing it about all of us as well. We ascend, transcend, transform ourselves when we exceed our limitations through our use of intellect and imagination. Even a mind that knows the difference between a religious formulation and its truth, and that is keenly aware of its own limitations, can be guided by religious imagery.
Besides being intellectual adventurers, our ascending souls serving as symbols of our lives’ journey, we are all also martyrs as mortality eventually defeats us. Shakespeare tells us what our religious imagery tells us: the victories of our life outlive its difficulties. The effort to transcend ourselves is all. “The rest is silence.”
Religion’s imagining of our hereafter also seems to say the same-our “immortal longings” are mirrors of what we find of value in our lives. They motivate our moral and artistic lives. Our longing itself deserves a robe and crown, nothing less. If humans can be, in Hamlet’s words, “in apprehension like a god,” do we not deserve his epitaph: “flights of angels sing us to our rest”?
NOTES
Introduction
1. The words of Robert J. Lifton, as reported in the New York Times, 14 January 2003, B: 2. One could certainly think of an exception or two.
2. Lisa Miller’s cover-story in Newsweek of 12 August 2002, p. 44, investigated the bitter ironies of these conflicting religious motivations, pointing out that both the victims and the oppressors expect rewards in heaven for their efforts on behalf of their religion.
3. Walls, Heaven, p. 3
4. De resurrectione carnis, 1.
5. Since the US census is not allowed to ask questions about religion, George Gallup Jr.’s continuing interest in our religious life has provided researchers with major and significant measures of our religiosity. See Gallup and Castelli, The People’s Religion.
6. Ibid.
7. See de Toqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 2, bk. 1, chs. 5-7: “How Religion in the United States Avails Itself of Democratic Tendencies,” “The Progress of Roman Catholicism in the United States,” and “What Causes Democratic Nations to Incline Toward Pantheism.”
8. Lenski, The Religious Factor.
9. Gallup and Castelli, The People’s Religion, p. 54.
10. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief.
11. Neimeyer and Van Brunt, “Death Anxiety,” pp. 64-66.
12. See Greeley and Hout, “Americans Increasing Belief,” p. 813.
13. The title is from Garrett, The Demise of the Devil, which is a very competent analysis of the meaning of magic in Luke-Acts. The title is quite relevant to the American context as well.
14. Gallup, Adventures in Immortality, pp. 55-66.
15. Pace Delbanco, The Death of Satan. Also see Walls, Hell. See La Civilta Catholica (Summer 1999), which endorsed the belief that hell is a place of psychological rather than physical torment; “The Emptiness of Hell,” Macleans 8, September 1999, p. 35; and “Hell Hath No Fury,” U.S. News and World Report, 31 January 2000, pp. 45-50.
16. Quoted from Walls, Hell., p. 1.
17. L. Clark, From Angels to Aliens, pp. 24-45.
18. See the documentary “Hellhouse” directed and produced by George Ratliffe. For an account of the popularity of exorcism in American life, see Cuneo, American Exorcism.
19. Gallup and Castelli, The Peoples Religion, pp. 47-48.
20. We shall return to the meaning of transcendent in the last chapter. For now, it is enough to say that transcendent values are those values to which we give ultimate significance. The theological term originally described God-that he was necessarily greater than the universe,