Heaven: A Traveller’s Guide to the Undiscovered Country. Peter Stanford
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Christianity was later to cast heaven in the likeness of the Garden of Eden. Heaven was both a recreation of a past perfect life and the antithesis of what people were actually enduring on earth.
Virgil’s was not a lone voice. Cicero (106–43 BC) and Plato (428–348 BC) had both already described a place above the stars where the souls of the righteous could thrive, though civic achievement was the cardinal virtue for Cicero in Scipio’s Dream, written in 52 BC. These souls would be freed of the shackles of an earthly body. The Greeks, unlike the Jews after the exile, had little time for the idea of a bodily resurrection. For Plato in his dialogue Phaedo the psyche or life force was immortal along with the nous or mind. The body was by contrast dispensable:
It has been proved to us by experience that if we would have true knowledge of anything, we must be quit of the body – the soul in herself must behold things in themselves: and then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire, and of which we say we are lovers; not while we live, but after death; for if while in company with the body the soul cannot have pure knowledge, knowledge must be attained after death, if at all. And thus having got rid of the foolishness of the body we shall be pure and have converse with the pure, and know of ourselves the clear light everywhere, which is no other than the light of truth. For the impure are not permitted to approach the pure … and what is purification but the separation of the soul from the body?
From this position, Plato then argued that since knowledge was all, we have ideas that cannot be derived from experience. Thus the soul must have existed before birth as well as after it. Of the domain beyond earth where the soul begins and ends its journey, Plato wrote that it was:
a region of purity, and eternity, and immortality, and unchangeableness, which are her [the soul’s] kindred and with them she ever lives, when she is by herself, and is not let or hindered; then she ceases from her erring ways, and being in communion with the unchanging is unchanging.
Plato’s heaven encompassed the gods, but he paid them scant regard. Its most important qualities were mental and intellectual, not physical. It was the place of philosophers, somewhere they could continue arguing pure principle for ever.
An exact interchange of ideas between the Jews and the Greeks before the time of St Paul is difficult to pin down, but there is sufficient evidence of overlap in the writings of Philo of Alexandria (20 BC–45 AD), the Jewish philosopher who made an extensive study of Greek ideas at the same time as upholding the spirit of the Hebrew scriptures. He wrote, borrowing from the Greek heroic tradition (but also with echoes of Elijah), of souls being transported up to heaven in chariots to join the angels. He even imagined specific and distinct destinations within heaven for philosophers, for angels, and for the gods, but stressed that all shared an existence that was blessed, eternal, incorporeal and asexual.
The final noteworthy shift in Jewish thinking on heaven came between 250 BC and AD 200, sometimes called the ‘inter-testamental period’ because it falls roughly between the youngest book of the Old Testament and the oldest of the New. It is also known as the apocalyptic period (from the word apokalypsis, meaning revelation) – a reference to its chosen literary style, seen in a plethora of texts which claimed to be accounts of visions from some of the great figures of the Old Testament. These apocalyptic documents fall into two main categories – the Old Testament Apocrypha, books that were at one time accepted as holy scripture but which later were denied admission to the authorised version, and the Pseudepigrapha, those which were never accepted by either Jewish or Christian authorities and which relied most heavily on the revelatory dreams featuring dead prophets. Almost all assumed that the end of the world was imminent – spurred on by the continued political subjugation of Israel first by the Syrians, ended by a revolt of the Maccabees in 161 BC, and then by the Romans, who in AD 70 destroyed the Second Temple. These reverses prompted a spirit of despair and bitter internal divisions amongst the Jews. The texts responded by projecting themselves forward into the next world, returning to the theme of a new Israel and a new Jerusalem, where Yahweh would come to defeat Israel’s enemies and reign for ever in peace and harmony. Some writers endorsed the existing idea of a bodily resurrection, but others suggested the risen body would be transformed into something as perfect and celestial as an angel.
The Book of Enoch is one of the best preserved of these texts. It was composed by several different authors, writing between 250 BC and 50 BC, and claimed to convey what Enoch – who, as we have seen, was one of the few in early Judaism to have his name on the electoral roll of heaven – had witnessed on high. Enoch’s paradise was a two-tier one – another new and subsequently important development. The righteous lived in what was a transformed earth, a literal heaven, while God, the saints and assorted luminaries inhabited a higher, less recognisable and hence largely inaccessible plain – the spiritual heaven:
In the vision the winds were causing me to fly and rushing me high up into heaven. And I kept coming until I approached a wall which was built of white marble and surrounded by tongues of fire … And I came into the tongues of fire and drew near to a great house which was built of white marble, and the inner wall were [sic] like mosaics of white marble, the floor of crystal, the ceiling like the path of the stars and lightnings between which [were] fiery cherubim, and their heaven of water, and flaming fire surrounded the wall, and its gates were burning with fire. And I entered into the house, which was hot like fire and cold like ice, and there was nothing inside it; fear covered me and trembling seized me. And as I shook and trembled, I fell upon my face and saw a vision. And behold there was an opening before me [and] a second house, which is greater than the former, and everything was built with tongues of fire … It is impossible for me to recount to you concerning its glory and greatness. As for its floor, it was of fire and above it was lightning and the path of the stars; and as for the ceiling, it was flaming fire. And I observed and saw inside it a lofty throne – its appearance was like crystal and its wheels like the shining sun; and I [heard] the voice of the cherubim; and from beneath the throne were issuing streams of flaming fire. It was difficult to look at it. And the Great Glory was sitting upon it – as for His gown, which was shining more brightly than the sun, it was whiter than any snow … The flaming fire was round about him, and a great fire stood before Him.
(Book of Enoch 1:20–21, 49–50)
The authors of Enoch provide further details: there is an alabaster mountain, topped by sapphire, which is the throne of God and a sweet-smelling tree-of-life (like the Hesperides Tree of Greek mythology), which will be enjoyed in the north-east of heaven by the meek and the just for eternity. Moreover, they echo the Book of Daniel (it is unclear which text came first) in employing one of the most enduring descriptions of heavenly figures. In his dream about heaven, Daniel sees the ‘Ancient of Days’. ‘His robe was white as snow, the hair on his head as pure as wool.’ (Dn 7:9–10) Enoch speaks of the same figure, protected by the wings of the Lord of the Spirits, with hair as white as wool.
These first detailed descriptions of the shadowy domain of heaven reflected a substantial body of disillusioned opinion within Judaism in the first century AD which was turning its gaze skywards in despair at what was happening on earth. As such, it had a direct influence on the new Jesus cult that arose at this time and was to become Christianity. The ruling group of Sadducees, a priestly caste based on the Temple, may have had little time for talk of resurrection and so dismissed texts such as Enoch as a distraction from the central need to police ritual purity in the here and now, but their rivals, the Pharisees, and the rebel group of Essenes, best known now through the Dead Sea Scrolls, embraced the apocalyptic thinking behind such books. The Pharisees for their part dreamed of a renewed Judaism that would rise, in the terms of the Book of Daniel, from the dry bones of a conquered Israel. The Essenes were more otherworldly, removing themselves to the desert at Qumran near the Dead Sea, rejecting politics and national concerns, and anticipating the imminent dawn of a new, mystical Jewish state under the leadership of a messiah. Their fervent belief in the End of Days focused their attention ever more closely on what was to come in the new life. Their one aim was to get as close to Yahweh as possible in this life in preparation for the next. They wanted to blur the boundaries. So, as well as their taste for apocryphal literature, they tried to prepare themselves physically by leading an austere existence. They were mainly celibate, their food was frugal and monotonous and they always bathed in cold water. Only in the white garments