Life Hereafter

The Rise and Decline of a Tradition

Paul Crittenden

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030542795
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In this book, Paul Crittenden offers a critical guide to the problematic origins of biblical teaching about the afterlife and the way in which it was subsequently developed by Church authorities and theologians—Origen, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas in particular. In the post–Reformation era the focus falls on the challenges set by modern secularism. The tradition encompasses a body of interconnected themes: an apocalyptic war in which the Kingdom of God triumphs over Satan's powers of darkness; salvation in Christ; the immortality of the soul; and finally the resurrection of the dead and the last judgment, ratifying an afterlife of eternal bliss for the morally good and punishment in hell for wrongdoers. The critique questions these beliefs on evidential, ethical, and philosophical grounds. The argument overall is that what lies beyond death is beyond knowledge. The one fundamental truth that can be distilled from the once compelling body of Christian eschatological belief—for believers and unbelievers alike—is the importance of living ethically.

© The Author(s) 2021

P. CrittendenLife Hereafterhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54279-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Paul Crittenden¹

(1)

School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney, Camperdown, NSW, Australia

Keywords

JudgementSelf-judgementMoral virtueEschatological overview

End Abstract

In his study After Lives, John Casey notes that the once vibrant Christian belief in the afterlife declined rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly among members of the Catholic Church:

The Roman Catholic Church preserved the orthodox teaching on heaven and hell with energy and rigor until the Second Vatican Council (1962–65), after which the deliquescence of serious belief in damnation (heaven remained an attractive, if vague, possibility) was astonishingly rapid. Although the doctrines remained officially in place, they were played down and lost most of the resonance they used to have with the faithful. (John Casey, After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 1).

This reflection is linked with a discussion of the most famous modern evocation of hell in Father Arnall’s sermon in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Joyce’s treatment of the topic, Casey observes, is an exercise in irony. The declamation of the traditional belief in all its lurid detail works its effect on the young Stephen Dedalus. But Joyce transforms its significance by portraying the experience as an epiphanic moment to be lived through and outgrown in Stephen’s journey towards becoming a creative writer. In Casey’s words, ‘a sense of the infinite significance of choice that life imposes upon one has been transformed into creative literature from a religious tradition that continues to feed Joyce’s imagination’ (Casey , 10). What remains once the religious belief is set aside—or transcended—is the importance of self-judgement in human life.

The task of choosing a way of life consists fundamentally in an overall moral commitment.¹ That consists in getting clear about the standards by which one thinks and acts especially in relation to others. Belief in the afterlife once served as the primary focus for that choice—as in the New Testament teaching about the folly of seeking to gain the whole world only to forfeit one’s life (Matthew 16:26). The awesome prospect of judgement following one’s death and the general judgement of mankind at ‘the end of the world’ was once a common theme at parish missions or school retreats. The custom, as depicted at Joyce’s Belvedere College, has largely disappeared, no more than the relic of a past age. Self-judgement in respect of moral virtue nonetheless remains significant in human life. Towards the end of his trial, Socrates gave voice to this in declaring that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’.² For this one needs to have a sense of what moral virtue involves, but no less importantly, to care for it. With religious belief or without it, self-judgement—the practice of living thoughtfully, examining one’s life—is a fundamental dimension of living well in a moral sense.

In the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the focus of my study, the idea of the afterlife emerged in connection with belief in God and the necessity of living a morally good life in obedience to his commandments. This was grounded especially in the conception of God’s power as creator and giver of life, his providence, holiness, and moral goodness. My consideration will begin therefore with an account of the conception of God and his special relationship to human beings as envisaged in the Hebrew Bible and subsequently in the New Testament (Chap. 2).

The idea of the afterlife turns on the possibility that the whole person or some significant element of human existence—in the form of some level of consciousness—survives bodily death. This is the topic for consideration in Chap. 3. For the greater part of the Hebrew Bible, the afterlife is associated with Sheol, a place of shadowy, futile existence in the underworld, to which the soul as breath or spirit departs following death. Subsequently, in the second century BCE, in a time of oppression, the Book of Daniel and related apocalyptic writings proclaimed a new vision of life beyond death. The Maccabean-led war against the rule of King Antiochus IV yielded the prospect of cosmic upheaval and a day of reckoning for the oppressors of God’s faithful people. On that day of judgement, God would restore the righteous dead to new life and punish, once and for all, the enemies of his people. The idea of the resurrection of the dead took definite shape in Judaism in this way, becoming in time a foundational belief of Christianity.

The Devil Satan, so central to the New Testament and Christian teaching, is a figure strangely absent from the Hebrew Bible, although the term ‘satan’ appears there mainly in the generic sense of ‘adversary’ or ‘accuser’. The transformation of this idea into the Devil appeared originally in non-biblical apocalyptic texts, again from around the mid-second century BCE. By New Testament times, the Devil and fellow demons constitute the Kingdom of Darkness, locked in battle with God’s Kingdom of Light, exercising power for a time, but doomed to ultimate defeat. This great struggle constitutes the basic framework of the Gospels and the consuming focus of the Book of Revelation. The fundamental teaching in this setting, expressed first in the letters of Paul, is that Jesus Christ, by his death and resurrection, has redeemed humanity from the power of Satan and opened the door to eternal life. The vision is of wars in heaven and on earth, the defeat of Satan and his armies, the second coming of Christ, the resurrection of the dead, and the final judgement in which the just inherit heaven and evildoers are cast forever ‘into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels’ (Matt 25:41).³

Christianity emerged in a world shaped by Hellenic thought and culture with its long tradition of poets and philosophers going back to Homer and Hesiod (around the eighth century BCE). Chapter 4 will be concerned with early Greek thought about the origin of the world, the gods, and human destiny as conceived originally by the poets and subsequently by a line of early philosophers, leading in the fifth and fourth centuries to the towering figures of Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s account of the creation of the world, his reflections on the immortality of the soul, and his exploration of the themes of reward and punishment in the afterlife were particularly influential in the first centuries of Christianity. Aristotle’s major influence came later with the re-discovery of his writings just as universities came to birth in the Middle Ages.

Christian conceptions of the afterlife were linked from the beginning with debates about salvation and damnation in relation to divine predestination and grace. These will be topics for consideration in Chap. 5, especially in the works of Augustine of Hippo. Origen of Alexandria, a major third-century theologian, maintained that all sinners, the fallen angels included, would eventually be saved following a process of purification in the afterlife. His view was roundly rejected, however, especially in the West, with Augustine its chief critic. Augustine’s very different views of who could be saved and his account of the sufferings of the damned are set out at length in his monumental work The City of God. Discussion otherwise relates to his controversial views on original sin, free will, grace, and predestination in response to the more liberal views of the Pelagians.

The focus moves in Chap. 6 from Augustine at the end of the classical era to Thomas Aquinas, renowned philosopher–theologian in the mid-thirteenth century. The first major topic concerns his complex arguments, philosophical but to a theological end, in defence of the subsistence of the soul and its immortality. But he then seeks to combine this Platonist standpoint with an Aristotelian-based account of the unity of body and soul. I will argue that these several arguments are all problematic. Notwithstanding criticism by Duns Scotus and others, his account gained official Church approval in the course of time, especially at the fifth Lateran Council in 1513 just before the Reformation changed the face of Western Christianity.

Aquinas’ account of the soul in the afterlife , the happiness of the blessed in the vision of God, and the suffering and misery of the damned in hell are topics for consideration in Chap. 7. In his treatise on the last things, he analysed in detail the apocalyptic depictions of the New Testament—prophecies of upheaval, the resurrection of the dead, Christ’s return in glory, the last judgement, and the definitive renewal of creation. In examining his account, I will be particularly concerned to assess his argument that the eternal punishment of the damned is consistent with God’s justice and mercy. Aquinas’ theology of the afterlife stands as a comprehensive structured account of how Christian belief about ‘the last things’ had developed over the centuries (including the medieval belief in purgatory). From an early point, his eschatology served as the approved version of Catholic teaching, a standing it retained until the second half of the twentieth century.

My concern in Chap. 8 is to trace the status of belief in the afterlife in the centuries after Aquinas fro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. God, Creation, and the Biblical Moral Order
• 3. From Sheol to the Resurrection of the Dead
• 4. Greek Themes: From Homer to Plato and Aristotle
• 5. Salvation or Damnation: From Paul to Augustine
• 6. Thomas Aquinas: Body and Soul
• 7. Thomas Aquinas: Life in the World to Come
• 8. Eschatology: From Dante to the Secular Age
• 9. Eschatology Now: The Catholic Case
• 10. Last Things
• Back Matter