by Brian Griffith.
According to one version of my family’s mythology, my grandmother believed she was inevitably bound for hell. She was an Irish Catholic girl who ran off and married a Protestant, and she believed this was a mortal sin. She also believed that divorce was a mortal sin, so that left her no escape from eternal damnation. Maybe she just believed these things when she was young, and later realized that those ideas about church doctrine were outdated. But clearly her husband thought it was all garbage. He was a disenchanted WWI veteran who was “Protestant” only in an ethnic sense. Actually he was a total atheist, devoted to the notion of liberating mankind from oppressive superstition. One day a parish priest came visiting to speak with my grandmother about the state of her soul, and whether her two boys were saved. When he got to discussing tithes for the church, grandpa barged into the room, picked the priest up, and threw him headfirst off the doorstep into a snowbank. Apparently he viewed this as a blow for enlightened rationality, however much it resembled typical Protestant bigotry toward the Catholic church.
That sort of in-family division over religion continued for generations. My mother was a sentimental Christian and my father an agnostic socialist. Their children became 1) a Buddhist, 2) a total atheist, and 3) me, who joined an idealistic Christian organization for over a decade, quit, and later married a Muslim woman. If I’m pressed to say what box I’m in, I can’t. Maybe I’d just mention the Hindu idea that life has many possible goals, with many helpful or unhelpful ways of reaching them.
It may sound superstitious, but lately I’ve grown more curious about life after death. Having turned 70, I suppose that’s an excuse. But since I don’t have convictions about it, I’m somehow less concerned about my prospects than interested in how our beliefs about death have evolved over time. I want to learn and write about that, mainly because such beliefs (or “non-beliefs”) influence what we live for. In considering how to approach this, I like how Catherine Wolff explains that her book Beyond: How Humankind Thinks About Heaven, “is a history of hope, not an account of the afterlife itself.”
So while I was growing up, it seemed obvious that religion was about how to get to heaven. The word “salvation” meant gaining eternal life in paradise, as opposed to a fate far worse than just death. Of course Christians are also concerned with living well in this world, and for that they often put a heavy emphasis on forgiveness. Forgiveness is another basic need that people come to church for—as Kate Murphy observed at the Basilica of Our Lady of San Juan del Valle, in San Juan, Texas. There, long lines of people were waiting to confess their sins, with six priests at a time to hear them. Father Jorge Gomez explained, “When people come here, it’s like they are going to a field hospital. They so badly need to be heard, it’s like a wound; they are in a critical state.”
We might assume that such emotional suffering is a common affliction to be treated with affirmative mental health therapy. It’s obviously possible for people to heal the pain of guilt, shame, or regret, and it helps if they can forgive each other. Many modernistic, secularized Christians feel that this is the main point of their religion, not superstitious beliefs about pie in the sky when you die. But in traditional Christianity, gaining absolution from guilt was viewed as the main requirement for salvation from eternal damnation. I suppose that “salvation” can also mean “escape from anything we fear,” and some churches claim to offer deliverance from many other feared things, including sickness, misfortune, poverty, or demonic forces. But in most churches (and mosques or synagogues) that I know about, salvation means deliverance from death, to a life that lasts forever.
So I’ve been interested to learn that many ancient religions, such as the early forms of Judaism and Confucianism, were almost entirely concerned with the quality of life in this world. For Hebrew prophets like Moses or Amos, or axial-age philosophers such as Socrates or Confucius, the main goal in life was finding the best way to live, or at least a better way. And according to whatever they felt was “best,” their answers stressed the benefits of moral principles, heroic deeds, self-mastery, or mindfulness of life’s brevity. Ancient people typically judged such answers in a sort of “by their fruits you will know them” way, according to their apparent results. And they generally expected those results to happen during their lives. If they believed their actions were pleasing or offensive to a deity, then they usually expected the blessings or punishments to happen here on earth. In that sort of common sense, the main blessings of living “rightly” were land, progeny, friends, wealth, and long life. As the righteous Job was told, “your descendants will be many, and your offspring like grass, thick upon the earth. You will come in sturdy old age to the grave” (5:24–25).
As for the afterlife, ancient people commonly assumed that all “mortals” faced the same fate after death no matter what. In the Mediterranean world’s “classical times,” people typically believed that the dead descended to a dark underworld of “Hades” or “Sheol.” There, the shades of the deceased resided in a kind of never-ending nothingness:
Like sheep they are appointed for Sheol;
Death shall be their shepherd;
Straight to the grave they descend. …
Sheol shall be their home. (Psalms 49:14)
Dead spirits like those of Achilles or the prophet Samuel were pictured as still “existing,” but in a state that was definitely “non-life.” According to the Roman satirist Lucian of Samosata, “they have a discernable outline and form, but no more than this.” They were “shades” with no capacity to do anything save exist in the darkness, without pleasure or purpose. This was the final fate of all flesh, and to hasten that fate was the ultimate punishment, as when rebels against Moses were reportedly swallowed up by the earth and taken down to Sheol. Homer had the shade of Achilles report, “By god, I’d rather be a slave on earth for another man—some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive—than rule down here over all the breathless dead” (Odyssey, 11, 556–558). The playwright Aristophenes made a joke of it, explaining in The Frogs that Hades was a “Great Muck Marsh and the Eternal River of Dung” with lots of “pretty unsavory characters floundering about.”
Many people assumed that Hades was a real place, while critical thinkers doubted its existence. As Lucian of Samosata complained, “the general herd … [who] trust Homer and … other myth makers … take their poetry as a law unto themselves. So they suppose that there is a place deep under the earth called Hades, which is large, and roomy, and murky and sunless.” Lucian also wrote a kind of novel called “A True Story” about an after-death journey to the “Isle of the Blessed,” which he began by informing the readers that “I’ve told all sorts of lies with an absolutely straight face.”
Another common view was that the dead completely “passed away,” and that was it: “We must all die; we are like water spilled on the ground, which cannot be gathered up” (2 Samuel 14:14). “When you take away their breath, they are as dust in the wind” (Psalms 104:29); “The living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost” (Ecclesiastes 9:5). Epicureans believed that the dead dissolved into atoms, their spirits dissipating in the air, and they found this prospect of total nothingness somewhat appealing. Many Roman graves bore the inscription “n.f.f.n.s.n.c.,” which stood for (in Latin) “I was not. I was. I am not. I care not.” Concerning the earliest religious beliefs in cultures around the world, E.O. James observed that “for the vast majority of mankind, the idea that the soul gains by passing out of this world is very rare indeed.”
In that old understanding of life and death, the best that mortals could hope for after dying was to be remembered well. If people achieved something in life that helped or inspired future generations, they might gain a sort of immortal fame in the minds of the living. Or maybe their spirits would still exist so long as living people remembered them. According to an Egyptian saying, “One lives if his name is mentioned.” That’s roughly how people imagine it in modern Mexico, where the deceased are said to visit those who remember them on the “Days of the Dead.” Those visiting souls are said to finally disappear only if nobody on earth remembers them any longer.
The North American Halloween festival has similar roots, but with a pre-Christian European twist, where children play the roles of returning spirits or ghouls. That tradition recalls the old pagan notion that children were the returning dead, which suggests a belief in immortality (with reincarnation of souls), which seems quite opposite to belief in the finality of death. But there’s one important difference between that view of immortality and the idea of an eternal afterlife in heaven or hell. The notion of reincarnation suggests that souls are inevitably immortal. That’s an idea of cosmic (rather than personal) immortality. But the cosmology of modern monotheistic religions generally focuses on personal immortality, and views that as conditional on meeting certain requirements. Eternal life is considered a possibility for those who qualify for it. Some people meet the requirements and gain life everlasting, and the others “forever die,” or spend eternity in some kind of Hades, which is portrayed as a realm of punishment rather than just nothingness. In that case, instead of treating life as an ongoing experiment to find what works for improving people’s lives, many religious leaders have viewed life as a kind of testing ground, which exists for the sake of determining people’s fates in another, eternal world.
I don’t mean to debate the truth of these various ideas about mortality or immortality as if I happen to know what it is. I’m just curious about how changes in religious goals have altered people’s lives. And clearly it was a big change when much of ancient society moved from viewing immortality as basically impossible, to viewing it as possible for anyone who qualifies to receive it.
For people who viewed mortality as an inescapable reality, the religious challenge was to make “the best” of their short lives, and maybe make a difference in the world. But when the goal was gaining personal immortality (be it in the spirit or the resurrected flesh), how did that affect people’s priorities? When religious leaders taught that people must meet certain requirements to qualify for eternal life (and as those requirements changed over time), how did that shape what people valued?
My proposed book’s rather ridiculous title, “How to Qualify for Immortality,” suggests a look at history’s “gatekeepers” to eternal life—what they have promised, threatened, or sought to require, and how their rules of the game have shaped who we are. The title also suggests questions about the benefits of aspiration to everlasting life. If we look over the historical record, does it seem like the hope of gaining immortality has been a spiritually uplifting thing? Or has it been a dangerous delusion, conducive to egomania, spiritual escapism, and demonization of other people? Is it a faithful, positive thing to hope for eternal life, or is it a fear-driven attempt to escape mortality and “make ourselves like God”? I note that in my sister’s Buddhist tradition, the concept of “self” is an illusion, as all things change into other things. You can feel that you’re part of eternity right now, but nothing lasts forever. Carol Zaleski listed potential problems with the quest for immortality: “Immortality is criticized on moral grounds as self-aggrandizing, on psychological grounds as self-deceiving, and on philosophical grounds as dualistic. Concern for the soul is faulted for making us disregard the body, neglect our responsibility on earth, and deny our kinship with other animals.” But then she argued that it’s important to seek something of transcendent value in ourselves. If there’s something about ourselves that we wish to universalize and eternalize, what is it?