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 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland 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