Heaven: A Traveller’s Guide to the Undiscovered Country. Peter Stanford
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is simpler: children and/or a belief in the afterlife are our antidotes to death, the best way of cheating what scientists in a secular age tell us is the unavoidable fact of oblivion. Children can, of course, let us down as they grow up – run away from home, never darken our doorstep, and, God forbid, even predecease us – but afterlife never will. Potentially, it is the ultimate happy ending. As, it would seem, we cannot try it out and report back any feelings of disappointment, it remains nothing more than a glorious but untried promise, utterly open to the wiles of our imagination.
Yet it is a promise that is so finely attuned to our own needs and desires that it has been with humankind from the start, predating written language and philosophy and organised religion. From the time when the first Neanderthal sat next to the lump of dead protein that had been his or her mate and realised that something had to be done about the smell, we have wondered what, if anything, comes next. People have generally assumed that there should be something. When that body was put in a cave or a ditch or on to a fire or pushed over a ledge into a ravine, the one left behind looked into the void that was left and felt an emptiness and abandonment. So arose the myths, traditions and literature, the shamans and soothsayers, the priests and popes, and the poets, writers and dramatists who would attempt to provide the answer.
And so arose, too, that intimate connection between belief in a God and the hope of reward with Him or Her in life everlasting. In many faiths – particularly Western – the two are synonymous, and the link therefore goes unquestioned, but not all the world’s great religions have signed up for the two-for-the-price-of-one package deal. Buddhism has its deity, but though highly ambiguous and elusive it is basically indifferent to the notion of afterlife, which it regards as a red herring, and as something that makes religion other-worldly, irrelevant and even pessimistic. To treat nirvana as heaven would distract one from the pursuit of enlightenment in this life. Buddhism advocates the reaching of a higher state in this life rather than letting one’s dreams of a better time to come after death take hold. So Buddhism challenges its adherents to do the right thing now, for its own sake, rather than have half an eye on what might happen after death, thereby preventing any possibility of opting out of this world, standing aloof from it as certain religious groups have done down the ages, or even, as in the case of the various gnostic sects, rejecting this world as irredeemably evil. When there is nothing to work with other than the now, you have to get on with it, engage at every level. Buddhists believe one’s fate in both the present life and forever is bound up in this engagement. Most importantly, Buddhists must work to make the earth a place of justice rather than rely on inequalities being sorted out posthumously by the deity. There is no excuse for accepting the status quo.
Put briefly and in such terms, it sounds so attractive that it suddenly becomes hard to understand why the notion of heaven ever put down such deep roots. And this conviction strengthens when Buddhism’s rejection of a theology which places a greater premium on the afterlife than it does on this life is seen in the context of similar creeds which arose in the same period, roughly from 700 BC to 200 BC, known to historians as the Axial Age. Hinduism in India and Confucianism and Taoism in the Far East all stress the importance of practical compassion and concentrate on the here and now.
Yet not all faiths at this transition point in the history of religions took the particular route that excluded any great concentration on heaven. Judaism, and thereafter by association its younger sister, Christianity, was the main exception to the Axial Age trend. Infected by Zoroastrianism during the Babylonian exile (586–536 BC), Judaism has lived ever after with a highly developed eschatology (the doctrine of the last things which revolves around death, judgement and afterlife). This eschatology came as part of a parcel of beliefs. Judaism, which had hitherto flirted with other deities, also adopted a strictly monotheistic approach from Zoroastrianism. Unusually for its time, it taught of a single, good god – Ahura Mazda, the god of light – rather than a pantheon of gods and ancestor or nature spirits. Christianity and then Islam were later to join the ranks of the monotheistic faiths and also have a strong concept of heaven.
There is then a link between extolling the virtue of a single God, responsible for everything on this earth, and belief in an afterlife. If you centre your hopes, prayers and expectations on just one God, you inevitably concentrate on the ‘personality’ of that God, so much more than you would if you have tens or hundreds of gods to choose from, and, as a consequence, you nurture a hope of making contact with that God face-to-face.
This narrow focus takes its tolls on imaginations, or at least channels them in a particular direction, and often makes for a palpable sense that God must be near at hand. This in its turn leads to an exaggerated interest in the place where God lives and to where the faithful might one day travel. But the chain of connections between monotheism and heaven goes deeper. The omnipotent God upheld by monotheistic faiths embodies good and evil in a single source, as opposed to parcelling both out across a whole range of spirits, some of them two-faced. Christianity may itself have diluted this by invoking the devil in practice at least, if not in theory, as an equal and opposing force to God, but that should not distract from the fact that the creation of such a powerful, unified divine principle inevitably brings with it a sense of humankind’s smallness and impotence before their God, and also, therefore, a turning away from each person’s individual resources (as preached in Eastern faiths) towards a greater public search for oneness with the divine which necessitates a public arena – i.e. heaven – for fulfilment.
The tension between the two radically different emphases – on this life and on the next life – is, in effect, both the argument for and against heaven. Both have their strengths. The first places great and potentially empowering emphasis on each person to cultivate an internalising spirituality. For some this burden is too much of a challenge. Putting it all off until after death with the promise of a heaven – especially one where, as in the Christian New Testament, God will roll out the red carpet for the workers who only spend the last hour of the day in His vineyard as readily as He will for those who have toiled since sun-up – is much more palatable. Death-bed repentance, in theory at least, allows for brinkmanship – a life of wonderful hedonism followed by a last minute change of heart, half an hour of piety and remorse and then a heavenly hereafter.
For some, the ‘jam tomorrow’ approach of monotheism belongs in the nursery, but to its adherents, in more mature vein, it offers consolation in the face of the inevitability and finality of death. It also requires a moral framework which can be carefully calibrated (often by clerical hierarchies) as a step-by-step guide to achieving a good afterlife. Immanuel Kant, the eighteenth-century German philosopher and religious sceptic, once remarked that without heaven no system that sought to teach, preach or impart morality could survive.
How to decide between the Eastern and the Western approach? Conventional wisdom – shared for once by scientists and clerics – is that there can be no verifiable communication with the other side as a way of assessing which has most merit. Central to Eastern ideas of rebirth is forgetting all that has gone before. There have always been, however, unconventional individuals able to service those who are too restless to wait and see. The Victorians went to spiritualists and mediums; we, in our turn, devour the literature of near-death experiences to satisfy our hankering to know if there is anything more to come. The American bestseller, Hello from Heaven (edited by Bill and Judy Guggenheim), was a collection of 353 accounts of communications from beyond the grave.
To accept absolute oblivion after death, a brain that stops functioning and a body that rots, would be to accept the polar opposite of heaven. It is increasingly popular as an option. There is even some scriptural foundation for such a stance: in the Old Testament, Job suffers endless adversity as part of a debate between Yahweh and Satan on the nature of human goodness. When he survives the ordeal, his reward is to have ‘twice as much as he had before’ in this life. There is no suggestion that there is any other.
Most of us, however, find the idea that death is the end unappealing, unthinkable or untenable – or a combination of all three. We cling fearfully and in hope to the notion, common in monotheistic religions, of the soul, that invisible but integral part of us that is above the messy business of physical death. Yet despite its enduring popularity, a heavenly hereafter for the souls of the faithful departed has been officially declared by the mainstream churches as being beyond our imagination.
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