Life Hereafter: The Rise and Decline of a Tradition

311 Pages·2020·2.453 MB·English

by  Paul Crittenden

Life Hereafter

The Rise and Decline of a Tradition
Paul Crittenden
Life Hereafter
Paul Crittenden
Life Hereafter
The Rise and Decline of a Tradition
Paul Crittenden
School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry
University of Sydney
Camperdown, NSW, Australia
ISBN 978-3-030-54278-8 ISBN 978-3-030-54279-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54279-5
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The Christian … often refrains from thinking about his destiny after death,
because he is beginning to encounter questions in his mind to which he is
afraid of having to reply, questions such as: “Is there really anything after
death? Does anything remain of us after we die? Is it nothingness that is
before us?”
From Letter on Certain Questions concerning Eschatology, Sacred
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 17 May 1979 (Rome)
C
ontents
1 Introduction 1
References 7
2 God, Creation, and the Biblical Moral Order 9
Creation and Covenants 9
From the Patriarchs of Israel to the Fathers of the Church 17
References 25
3 From Sheol to the Resurrection of the Dead 27
The Afterlife: From Genesis to the New Testament 27
The Invention of Satan and His Kingdom of Darkness 40
References 54
4 Greek Themes: From Homer to Plato and Aristotle 57
Poets and Presocratics 57
Plato and Aristotle: A Dispute About Body and Soul 67
References 84
5 Salvation or Damnation: From Paul to Augustine 85
Origen: Universal Salvation 88
Augustine: Freedom, Original Sin, Predestination, and
Pelagianism 92
References 115
vii
viii CONTENTS
6 Thomas Aquinas: Body and Soul 117
Platonism: The Soul as Subsistent, Immortal, Created by God 119
Aristotelianism: The Soul as Form of the Body 131
References 143
7 Thomas Aquinas: Life in the World to Come 145
The Salvation of Souls 147
Bodily Resurrection and Judgement: Reward and Punishment 154
References 180
8 Eschatology: From Dante to the Secular Age 181
The Reformation Era: Disputed Authority 183
Ethics, Religion, and Practical Reason in Modernity 188
References 211
9 Eschatology Now: The Catholic Case 215
A Crisis in Eschatology 219
A Traditional Church Response 236
References 264
10 Last Things 267
Biblical Testimony and Philosophical Queries 267
Faith and the Limits of Knowledge: Kierkegaard and Socrates 273
References 283
Bibliography 285
Index 297
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
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 epiph-
anic moment to be lived through and outgrown in Stephen’s journey
towards becoming a creative writer. In Casey’s words, ‘a sense of the infi-
nite 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
© The Author(s) 2021 1
P. Crittenden, Life Hereafter,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54279-5_1
2 P. CRITTENDEN
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 liv-
ing 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 consider-
ation 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 under-
world, 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 reckon-
ing 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
1 INTRODUCTION 3
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 founda-
tional belief of Christianity.
The Devil Satan, so central to the New Testament and Christian teach-
ing, 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 consum-
ing 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 cul-
ture with its long tradition of poets and philosophers going back to Homer
and Hesiod (around the eighth century BCE). Chapter 4 will be con-
cerned 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 explo-
ration of the themes of reward and punishment in the afterlife were par-
ticularly influential in the first centuries of Christianity. Aristotle’s major
influence came later with the re-discovery of his writings just as universi-
ties 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 predesti-
nation and grace. These will be topics for consideration in Chap. 5, espe-
cially 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