Let’s begin by admitting that we don’t know. Christians have, in fact, been told that we can’t know; that what we’ve been told about whatever places or conditions our Scriptures call Heaven and Hell is metaphoric.
My purpose here is not to argue for or against the idea that we can expect some sort of judgment after death. It seems fairly obvious that we can. Even if the judgment is merely subjective and passed on us by our own minds, as some of my regular readers believe...when faced with the choice of whether to depart this world in a joyous rush into the arms of people we have loved and admired, or a miserable banishment to some form of eternal penance, do we even care whether the experience is empirically verifiable or not? Maybe what remains of us has an ongoing consciousness that can interact with all the people we've known and wanted to know; maybe it has that dream for the eternal moment that's all that remains. Maybe Abraham's eternal reward includes the minor punishment of having to go and watch his erring descendants burn; maybe that was just a dream the rich man had; maybe there was a real rich man who had really reported that dream to Jesus's audience. My purpose here is to consider some of the places people think they, or we, are going to spend eternity.
One popular belief is that we’re going to come back in some other form...whatever form may be most appropriate for the universe to reward or punish us in. If we’ve demonstrated contempt for people who have less than we have, we’ll spend at least one lifetime as beggars. If we’ve shown due reverence for life and a noble disdain for our own material gain, we might come back as rich people. Very wicked people may be sent back, according to some belief systems, in the form of vermin that need killing, which is why mosquitoes and cockroaches exist. This school of thought can be very entertaining as we attempt to work out exactly why there are more poor people and more vermin than there used to be. If taken seriously it can also be depressing. If every murderer has to come back as a murder victim, the number of murders in the world can only increase each year, and everyone’s next life, even as a rich and blessed person, is likely to be less fun than the present one has been. And since people tend to develop in ways that reflect their cultural environment, an increasingly violent world is more likely to produce more violent people. And what happens if human life goes extinct? But my purpose here is not to offend people who take the doctrine of reincarnation seriously. Where do they believe they will spend eternity? Perhaps the best summary of their answer might be “In transition.”
Not all of the world’s primitive religions taught reincarnation. Many ancient Pagans believed that they were going to a specific place in some sort of afterlife. Some of these beliefs were remarkably like the classical Christian idea of a final judgment. Hunters and gatherers often imagined “happy hunting grounds” or “gardens of everlasting delight” awaiting good people, and gloomier places for the wicked.
Christian folklore about an eternity of fiery torment for evildoers has been traced to a specific spot in the Middle East called Gehenna in ancient Hebrew, Jahannam in Arabic, or Hinnom in modern Hebrew. In the twentieth century Hinnom was developed into a little park where tourists could enjoy a picnic “in Hell.” It was originally a public garbage dump. Anything considered unworthy of preservation, including the bodies of people whose heirs couldn't afford to bury them or who were generous enough to want to spare their heirs that expense, was brought there and burned. The fires of Gehenna were never put out, but eventually, as people stopped adding fuel, the fires burned themselves out.
When Jesus told the story of the rich man who was hated and sent to Gehenna for not sharing his goods with the leper who begged at his gate, He started a debate that has gone on for almost two thousand years. Exactly what was He telling us to expect? Perhaps some people prefer quibbling about details to grasping Jesus’s point—that we can expect to be judged severely for failing to share what we have with those who have less. Were the characters in the story real people? Why is the beggar in the story given the same name as one of Jesus’ friends? (The Lazarus mentioned as a living man in the New Testament was probably an older gentleman, who never tramped around with Jesus and the Apostles, but maintained a house luxurious enough to lodge and feed them all, when they came through town—he was certainly not a beggar.) Does “Abraham” in the story refer to the ancestor of the Hebrew nation, or did Abraham happen to be the name of another neighbor of the rich man and the beggar? Is “Lazarus” leaning on Abraham’s bosom because he is still crippled by his disease? Is this beggar Lazarus, for that matter, a child being carried on Abraham’s bosom? Why did the rich man think of asking for a little water to cool his tongue, rather than a bucket of water to put out the fire? What suggested to the rich man’s mind to request that this Abraham stop holding this Lazarus up and send Lazarus to carry the water? How literally true is this image of the rich man being thrown on the fire at a garbage dump, along with broken pottery and stable muck and things the dogs wouldn’t eat, and can’t we think of metaphors for an utterly outcast condition that are even worse than that?
Dante had an answer at least for the last of these questions. His answer was “Yes.” He thought of several metaphors for the torture of being cast out of fellowship with God and the saints, each one apparently more repulsive to him than the one before. In Dante’s Inferno, people who hadn’t done anything terrible but hadn’t been very good either had to spend eternity just running around in aimless circles, while really bad people were buried neck-deep in frozen sewage. In Dante’s Paradiso, likewise, good people continued working their way up to higher and higher levels of Heaven, and as friends ascended to the levels where they met each other they looked forward to meeting each other as increasing their joy.
The notion of multiple levels or departments of Hell or Heaven wasn’t new to Dante. Some Asian religions had already numbered and described the levels of both places. Often there was a belief that higher levels of Heaven were for greater saints, and lower levels of Hell were for greater sinners.
But not always. In some primitive religions, different places in the afterlife awaited different kinds of good and bad people. In Norse Pagan lore, everyone has heard that brave warriors, as servants of Odin, went to Valhalla, where they could fight a new battle every day. Not all Norsemen were warriors; each of their other gods presided over a place, apparently regarded as a good place, where his, her, or its faithful servants could hope to go. Some of the descriptions of these places sounded to Christian missionaries more like Hells than like Heavens. Valhalla, with a name that meant “hall,” seemed grim enough. Then there was Niflheim, the resting place of nocturnal creatures and sickly people, which was described as a deep cave and sometimes called Niflhel; this “-hel” was the old root word for “hole” found in all the Germanic languages, but it was the word Christian missionaries adopted for their theological teachings about Hell. As a resting place Niflheim was not to be confused with a place of eternal punishment—the cheerful “god” Baldr was there—but it wasn’t much of a reward either. There were nicer places, like the jewelled palace where loving women went to wait upon the “goddesses” of love and beauty (one source listed sixteen supernatural subordinates to Frigga); these goddesses also took in cats and babies, so we may assume that the Vikings expected their wives to live happily ever after. There was also a wealthy underwater kingdom for sailors and fishermen, and a mountain palace for those who loved the outdoors. What happened at each of these places reflected how worthy the person had been for the company of the immortals—a person might be employed, or even adopted, by the deity the person had served, or might be fed to the deity’s pets. (All Norse deities kept a few predatory animals as pets.) How seriously these stories were believed will never be known.
England was within sailing distance from Denmark, and old English writings reflect a belief, even after contact with Catholic missionaries, that departed souls had to travel around looking for a place in the next world. In one well-known song, good and bad deeds done in this world were believed to help or harm people’s chances in the next world: “If thou gav’st ever hosen and shoon, then sit thee down and put them on; but if hosen and shoon thou ne’er gav’st nane, the whin shall prick thee to the bare bane.” Catholicism brought in the gruesome, but ultimately hopeful, idea of Purgatory, where departed souls could be tortured for a while to expiate their sins, then move up to something that could be called a Heaven. The song continues, “To Purgatory fire thou com’st at last. If thou gav’st ever meat or drink, then the fire shall never make thee shrink,” but it also mentions a “brig o’ dread,” a feature of some Asian beliefs, where past sins may prevent the soul from crossing a treacherous bridge into Heaven and cause it to sink down into Hell.
Not all religions had an official teaching about where departed souls went. Before the Christian period, Irish people seem not to have reached a consensus on this question. Possibly, like their Jewish contemporaries, they had divided into parties that did and did not believe in an afterlife. It’s not clear how literally pre-Christian Irish people, or their Greco-Roman contemporaries, took stories about metamorphosis, which may or may not have reflected a belief in reincarnation. The phrase Tir nan Og meant “place of the young”; when people who had become old were said to have gone there, and the place was further described as a place where good people went and everyone remained young, it seems that some Irish people believed in something like what their Christian descendants called Heaven. There was also a belief that the dead simply ceased to be; and of course there was the belief, which spread throughout the British Isles and into North America, that the dead hover around in this world at least long enough to finish any business they hadn’t finished before going into oblivion. How seriously anybody took these beliefs will never be known.
I believe there are three distinct phenomena people perceive as “ghosts.”
(1) The misty silhouettes, shadows, or breaths of cool air we call “ghostly” are reported in fairly exact proportion to the humidity of the climate; Britain is full of such “ghosts”; Southern California has none; Northern California has several. Nufsed.
(2) Then there are the perceptions, or half-perceptions, of things people vividly remember about the dead. (Or the absent—people half-perceive children who’ve gone to school, or pets they’ve placed in other homes, as if they were still around the house too.) I have never succeeded in remembering a departed friend vividly enough to confuse these perceptions with conscious perceptions of external reality, but I have had memories that were vivid enough, spontaneous enough, and sufficiently adapted to current reality, that I can see how confusion is possible. Widows who had formed the habit of discussing everything with the spouses, and orphans who had formed the habit of discussing things with the parents, they have lost are especially likely to imagine the familiar voices giving them advice or consolation after death.
I have personally had this experience. People who think in pictures might “see” the departed; I think in words, so as I was looking at my late husband’s belongings I would “hear” his voice, not as a hallucination but as a memory, answering each question in my mind. And some of the answers even felt to me like things he, not I, would have said. One rather hysterical personality we knew couldn’t wait a day to inherit some curtains that had belonged to him, but wanted to grab them out of my laundry and hang them right now. My usual reaction to this person was “Why don’t you go back to the mental hospital?” but on this occasion it really felt as if my husband were telling me, “She saw those curtains when you put them in to wash. Why not let her hang them up to dry and save some energy.” That was his kind of patience with such people, not mine. And if all of us managed to internalize the nicest qualities for which we loved the people we’ve loved, even if our minds processed what we’d learned from those people through our sensory memories of those people, it would be a good thing.
Of course, people who have more reason to feel guilty are “haunted” in ways that feel much less pleasant than the memory of a loved one’s friendly greetings or good advice. The value of a good horror story is that it warns us not to do things to other people that we would regret if they died. In the most hair-raising “hauntings” there may well be something going on outside the “haunted” person’s mind—the “haunting” may tap into the person’s knowledge of, or curiosity about, some past event, or living people may be actively participating in the event—but the “haunted” person is basically possessed by guilt. I’ve known siblings, one of whom seemed to be receiving affectionate memories of Daddy watching over them from Heaven, while another seemed to be “haunted”—or even “hunted”—by images of a vindictive Daddy waiting to drag them down to Hell. I am not able to believe that either sibling’s perceptions tell us anything about the present state of Daddy’s soul. They tell us which sibling went to visit Daddy every week while he was alive.
(3) This leaves some “ghost” stories that may, if true as reported, actually involve what the Bible calls “spirits”...the kind from a “spiritual plane” of reality we do not directly perceive, not the kind from a bottle. I have no experience of such an event. The Bible says that these spirits are often “deceiving” and are best left alone.
Are these spirits metaphors for thoughts in people's minds, or do they have some independent existence, and are any of them associated with deceased humans--perhaps able to watch us from Heaven or Hell? I don't claim to know. Some "hauntings" make it hard to say. In a short story I wrote recently, a murderer and his accomplice see the same things during his first haunting, but later the murderer is the only one who can see the victim who promises to spend the rest of his life with him. What that is meant to say about the ghost is that I accept the ambiguity of these things. What the story was written to say is, to the murderer, that he deserves to be haunted by a very, very angry spirit, or conscience, or whatever, for the rest of his days.
Few of us completely, literally believe what we’ve heard about either ghosts or reincarnation or the places departed souls go, as literal places—although, in a world that no longer has unexplored continents, attempts have been made to update the idea of literal places where people may spend eternity. Some people believe that our spirit forms may be able to live on planets that will not sustain physical human life. For much of the twentieth century—before Hawking—there was a serious belief, held by minorities of people in several religious groups, that departed souls moved up to a literal “spiritual” existence in a fourth dimension of space. Some people take science fiction cliches very literally; consider the Heaven's Gate cult.
Perhaps more of us have managed to translate the traditional metaphors for Heaven and Hell into a faith that some sort of afterlife exists, although we are not yet able to perceive or imagine it. Christians have found several ways to interpret the rather cryptic bits of information the Bible provides. While perhaps a majority of Christians have some vague belief that our departed are already in Heaven or Hell, several early Protestants believed, and some Protestants still preach, that the departed are actually resting and waiting for a single Final Judgment.
Before about 1995, the word “millennium” was most often used by Bible scholars in commentaries on a text according to which, at some point, Satan was to be bound on earth for a thousand years. Some commentators thought that the binding of Satan would leave earth a paradise; others thought that the faithful would be taken away from earth, and Satan would be left alone in a desolate wilderness...and if not a thousand, there are at least a few dozen alternative ideas about what anyone who is alive when it begins can expect immediately before, during, and after this prophesied millennium. The study of these prophesies is known as eschatology. Most schools of eschatology teach that, at some point, this world and its creatures will be completely made over. The Final Judgment will occur, and the blessed will be resurrected into eternal life. There is little agreement on any further details, although the bestselling Left Behind books are merely the most successful specimens of a whole genre of speculative fiction that has been written about various lines of eschatological thought.
My mother, who was a devout Seventh-Day Adventist, would have liked to see a recommendation of the eschatological thought of Ellen White, a summary of which can be found toward the end of The Great Controversy. The Great Controversy is in fact a book you can buy from me, or you can buy a brand-new copy from a needy student who may be distributing it to finance some part of an expensive education.
Do I personally believe that Ellen White’s vision was literally true? I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I believe that anything that makes sense to our present mortal minds can be literally true of something that is beyond our imagining. I believe that it’s a viable metaphor for something. I don’t claim to know what. I am just trying to live so as to die in the hope of something good--something better than my current mortal brain would be able to imagine.
No comments:
Post a Comment