Kitabı oku: «Heaven: A Traveller’s Guide to the Undiscovered Country», sayfa 2
Heaven as a compensation for all you have missed on earth has always been an attractive gospel. In Renaissance times, theologians joined with humanists and artists in humanising heaven. Borrowing from the Golden Age and the Isles of the Blest (an alternative form for the Elysian Fields) of classical mythology, they fashioned a ‘forever environment’ where men and women met, played, kissed and caressed against a pastoral backdrop. Often God would be removed from direct participation in this pleasure garden and heaven would be given two or even three tiers, the furthest away being the domain of the exclusively spiritual, characterised solely in terms of intensity of light.
More recently in the eighteenth century, the influential, though much-neglected writings of the Swedish scientist-turned-religious-guru Emanuel Swedenborg gave the earth-linked heaven a romantic edge. He is one of the architects of the modern heaven. His Heaven and Hell, part of a body of works known as Arcana Coelestia, which were much-read and remarked upon by the remarkable William Blake among others, describes the author’s encounter with angels as he moves between the spirit world and the material world. It was an image to inspire both popular nineteenth-century authors and twentieth-century film-makers who turned heaven into a cosy, twee copy of the earth, where love and good will conquer all.
There has always, it should be noted, been traffic between the different positions on heaven. Usually it has ended up in the fudge of the third way. Some of those who once preached of a God-centred heaven changed their mind in later life when it seemed they were about to test the validity of their theories. Augustine, in old age, began describing an afterlife where God was very important but where there was time too for long lunches with old friends and enjoyment of physical beauty, but without, of course, his bête noire, sex.
The rise of Christian fundamentalism has added a new twist to the eternal three-way split. For many born-again Christians have embraced a concept known as rapture, which represents a new departure in thinking about heaven. It has grown out of a very particular reading of St Paul’s prediction that when God descends in judgement ‘those who have died in Christ will be the first to rise and then those of us who are still alive will be taken up in the clouds, together with them, to meet the Lord in the air’ (I Thess 4:14–17). This meeting will, the new breed of fundamentalists believe, be shortlived; a refuge in the time of trial predicted by Revelation before Christ instigates a millennium of direct rule on earth and the visitors to heaven return to take their rightful place at his side. The concept that heaven can be a temporary haven, almost a holiday destination, goes against every other Christian tenet. Yet it is disarmingly popular. A key exponent of rapture, the former Mississippi tug-boat captain turned Christian fundamentalist, Hal Lindsey, has seen his book, The Late Great Planet Earth, sell thirty-five million copies worldwide.
Such a reappraisal illustrates, in one sense, how flexible the idea of heaven (and indeed the New Testament) can be in the hands of believers. Something that can only live in the imagination is, by its very nature, almost impossible to control. Yet for many of us who have some kind of faith, it can be, for much of our lives, almost an irrelevancy. Until very recently, on the rare occasions that I plucked up the courage to look my post-mortem fate straight in the eye, my instinct had always been to postpone thinking about heaven. Focusing on the next world, it seemed to me, was a cop-out.
Heaven, I therefore know from experience, can very easily be left to one side as one of those tricky parts of the total religious package, accepted implicitly but without thought, something to think about on a rainy day. It largely depends on what stage of life you’re at. If the subject did come up in my teenage years at my Catholic school, it was as the flip side of hell, an altogether more worrying entity in those angst-ridden years. Heaven was certainly too much to contemplate in my fallen adolescent state. In my twenties, I lacked the romantic spirit of Keats who, at the age of twenty-five, when passion for life is at its peak (and also just a year before his death), wrote in Ode to a Nightingale:
Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
But in my late thirties, the recent experience of losing one of my parents and then a much-loved mother-in-law has led me, if not to welcome death as a form of release like Keats, then to consider both it and heaven as never before. As I drove behind the hearse carrying my mother’s coffin to the church for her funeral, I thought of all the hundreds of times I had seen other sombre processions pass and scarcely paused in the business of living, let alone said a prayer. Belief, A. A. Gill once wrote, is like holding on to the end of a piece of string that disappears into the sky. Sometimes that string is yanked and it forces you to think.
Having had my string pulled, this book is, at least in part, my own traveller’s tale of searching for some sort of answer via a journey, real and imaginative, to the place where the Catholic Church of my upbringing tells me my mother has gone. The notion of a metaphorical or spiritual journey to heaven is a tried, tested and often fruitful one. In both the apocryphal writings of the first centuries AD and in the visionary ecstasies of the medieval age those who told of heaven spoke in terms of having travelled there. Most of the lasting accounts of paradise have effectively been travel books. It is in this spirit that I have included in this account of my own journey brief extracts from the tales told by contemporary travellers who have attempted to go one step beyond, and also, at various key moments in the history of heaven, excerpts from the travel journal I kept when I visited particular places which seemed to offer the possibility of a glimpse of the transcendent.
In the interests of completeness I have tried to keep an open mind and see beyond the more standard tenets of my Christian start in life. Most faiths have some sort of belief in another life but some schedule the route as a domestic departure – i.e. as all about transcending this life. This then remains a book written primarily for a Western audience with a Judeo-Christian heritage, but written in the knowledge that such a heritage cannot be understood or evaluated with looking carefully at the alternatives.
Such a broad scope has the advantage of carrying with it the potential to quell my own greatest anxiety at the start of this journey, namely that there may be nothing at its end, that I may be going nowhere (now or ever), and that heaven is religion’s biggest con-trick, its way of ensuring that churches, synagogues and mosques will remain full and flourishing. If I reach such a conclusion, I comfort myself now, at least I can then fall back on the Buddhist position of seeking enlightenment in this life by way of consolation.
A Gallup Poll in the early 1980s suggested that in the West, at least, the majority of voters still place their trust in heaven, even if its manifesto is no longer very precise. The 71 per cent who signed up for it were only one point down on the number in a similar survey in 1952. As long as there are men and women afraid of death and anxious to believe that it is not the end, there is a ready audience, happy to take the anaesthetic to life’s worries that heaven provides. But perhaps oblivion shouldn’t be an anxiety for any of us. Nothing may be better than the torment which the old-style Catholicism of the Penny Catechism promised in purgatory, limbo or, worst of all, hell. If you put your faith in heaven, then you had to be prepared for the dreadful consequences of not getting your grades.
Today, of course, it is arguably easier. There is no mention of hell from the pulpits of the mainstream churches. Purgatory and limbo have been put to grass, and the assumption in most religious circles is that we are all bound for some sort of heaven, even if that isn’t stated categorically too often. When set against the secular alternative, this pared-down, consumer-driven religion should be more enticing. Yet the pews are emptying at a ferocious rate in the developed world. Why isn’t heaven still working its magic?
Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that we live in an age when the whole thrust of contemporary attitudes is not to think about death. If it comes knocking at our door – if a close friend or relative dies – then we are encouraged to forget it as quickly as possible. The secular answer to the mystery of death is effectively to deny death an airing. We freely admit our inability even to contemplate the scale or the individual significance of the global deaths we cause and have the potential to cause with our nuclear weapons, our environmental destruction and our indifference to the north-south divide. And when we face death in our own backyard, as it were, amongst our family and friends, we sweep it under the carpet and instead grow ever more obsessed with our living bodies – new diets, health regimes and endless work-outs – in the hope that somehow we can arrest the march of time. Death has become a kind of failure – a failure to eat the right food, or exercise, or avoid the sun. Death has become each individual’s responsibility, not humanity’s destiny.
For those who are left behind by the death of a loved one, the message is clear: you’ve got to put it behind you, as I was told, countless times, by well-meaning souls in the weeks and months after my mother’s death. The subtext, I see now, was ‘for God’s sake don’t make us think about death’. Any suggestion that I didn’t want to rush to forget was taken as a sign of morbidity of Queen Victoria-like proportions and eventually prompted a referral to an analyst. Mourning is now considered perverse if it lasts more than a week. Twenty years ago we would not, for instance, go out to the cinema or the theatre or dinner if a close relative had just died. Today we are cajoled into outings on the grounds that they will be a comfort. Some comfort.
A hundred years ago we had great public funerals and private sex – one to do with the cult of death, the other with, inter alia, the hope of life. Now we have the opposite. And so with death, even among the rituals of a Christian funeral, we refrain from pressing our noses against the smell of our own physical corruption, from seeing, touching or holding a dead body. We rely on undertakers and hospices to maintain a cordon around the unpalatable reality and save our most flamboyant grieving for those we know only through the media and therefore can’t touch: for the British it was the Princess of Wales, for the Americans, John Kennedy Junior, when he dropped out of the sky.
Yet I sense a welcome reaction against this sanitisation of death, another Gothic revival. The literature of AIDS, as the historian Jonathan Dollimore has noted in his study Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, has brought us back into touch with the trauma of death, questioning what happens next for so many promising lives which have ended prematurely. In Jim Crace’s Booker-shortlisted novel Being Dead, the intimate link between the physical horror of violence, sexuality and death dominates the narrative.
I hope that this very personal quest for some sort of heaven, wherever it may be, marrying the religious and the secular, the real and imaginary, will in its own way add some small momentum to this movement to reconnect us with death. If we ignore the pain and gloss over death, then we will spend correspondingly little time on heaven. To live fully we have to think about death when we are fully alive.
My atheist and scientist friends tell me that the notion of an immortal soul is absurd. What I’m really talking about, they say, is the mind and the personality, which are located in the brain. When the brain dies, they perish; nothing is left. When I tell them about the thoughts that cross my mind as I sit, cradling my daughter, the most they will concede is that a predisposition can be passed down from one generation to another. Mozart was good at music because it ran in the family. He might have been good even if it hadn’t, but they will accept that his genius might be down to more than nurture or chance.
When I try out this theory, as I lie half awake in the morning with my baby daughter and my dreams of reincarnation, I see it as a starting point, somewhere science and religion, psychology and faith, all touch. So though I make no promise at the outset of reaching my destination, there is, I venture, a glimmer of hope.
PART ONE
Knowledge of Angels
CHAPTER ONE Dust to Dust
Christianity, the arch-promoter of heaven, is the second-hand rose of world religions. Nearly every item in its bulging wardrobe has been begged, borrowed or stolen from a previous owner, be it from the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans or various Near Eastern belief systems. What enabled Christianity to flourish in the West was a combination of inspired leadership, the tremendous passion it managed to generate, and, most of all, its unique synthesis of time-honoured ideas into a code that had both a universal resonance and a simplicity. In its early days, Christianity was happy to acknowledge its debts. Newness and originality were not regarded as a plus in religious terms at the time. Continuity was more important. Radical departures were regarded as impious, while the cloak of antiquity conferred many advantages. It was only much later, when at the height of its powers, that Christianity began to rewrite its past and edit out those who had influenced it.
This wider pattern is clearly seen in the development of the idea of heaven. The Christians were by no means the first travellers to hit on paradise as a destination where all the stresses and strains of this world would waft gently away amid clouds, soothing music and the omnipresence of the ultimate guide. Nevertheless, they realised to the full the potential appeal of such a place as an antidote to what for most was a miserable life on earth, and so promoted it with a vigour hitherto unseen. It proved an effective way of wooing waverers into their fold and, when heaven was twinned with hell as a carrot and stick, keeping them there. However, the origins of this paradise in the sky predate the birth of Jesus by many centuries.
From earliest times, there had been an interest in the concept of a destination to which the dead travelled. For many, this was a collective experience and involved no system of judgement. The Dieri of southeastern Australia are an aboriginal people whose customs have not changed since the Neolithic age. They envisage the dead as going to what they call the River of the Sky, located in the stars of the Milky Way. Although they have a fine time there, they do continue to communicate with those left behind and occasionally return as spirits to haunt their relatives’ sleep.
Others, however, evolved more complex and judgemental systems. In Egypt, the civilisation that thrived along the Nile and its delta from the fourth millennium BC until the time of classical Greece and Rome, had unusually well-refined notions of an afterlife, even if religion was not organised in any institutional form. They were an integral part of Egyptian life, as much taken for granted as the ebb and flow of the Nile. The Egyptians searched in their religion for something collective beyond the cycles of everyday existence, for a timeless, unchanging cosmos. The afterlife was part of that search, as the mummies and artefacts in the death chambers of the pyramids make abundantly clear.
They believed that a part of the body, thought to be either the heart or the stomach, and roughly equivalent to what we now call the soul, left the body at death and remained active on earth. It was often depicted as a human-headed bird, the ba, and was acknowledged to have physical needs, occasionally returning to the corpse. Hence the advanced art of mummification, so that the body would not rot, and the supplies of food that were left in the grave, along with a route out of the burial chamber or pyramid. The Egyptians also believed in the ka – the intellect and spirit of the person. This in turn had two parts – one which was effectively the body’s double and which stayed with the corpse in the tomb, and another which was the part that soared to a new world.
The Egyptians labelled this place the kingdom of the god Osiris, the lord of the dead and the judge of souls in afterlife. Osiris was based on a historical figure, the first pharaoh, who, after his own death, became ruler of the world beyond. The ka would be ushered into Osiris’s court by Anubis, a jackal-headed god. The candidate would then be put on one side of a set of scales. On the other was an ostrich feather. Since goodness was deemed to be very light, if he or she had been good they would not tip the balance and would be welcomed in to an eternal pleasure dome of banquets, contests, dancing and fun, where there was no illness, hunger, sorrow or pain. If they tipped the scales, they were consigned to an ill-defined underworld of monsters. The verdict was recorded in a court record by Thoth, Osiris’s son.
Thoth was credited with producing the illustrated Book of the Dead (c. 1580–1090 BC). As well as frightening depictions of the ghouls of the underworld and recreations of the court-room weigh-ins, it also contained hints on how you could ensure that the verdict went your way once you came before Osiris. At different stages of the pharaohs’ rule, the qualities necessary to achieve that ultimate lightness were different. In one age it would be courage in battle, in another loyal service to the ruler, in another great wisdom or moral strength. The admission criteria for the Egyptian heaven were set according to the needs of the present. As the practice became more popular, the scroll would also include a map of the land beyond this life – with its seven gates, rivers and valleys of the sky and potential traps – and was routinely placed alongside the bodies of kings when they were buried.
The influence of such ideas on the heaven that Christianity promoted so assiduously is, however, remote. A much more immediate embarkation point is Judaism, in effect Christianity’s elder sibling. Unlike the Egyptians, it initially had little interest in an afterlife. This is the view that dominates the opening sections of the Old Testament or Hebrew scriptures and which prevailed while the Israelites established themselves in the Holy Land from around 1200 BC onwards. In addition to the here and now, these Jews believed there were two other worlds – one above and unobtainable, heaven, the abode of the gods which was ruled over by Yahweh (who was not yet regarded as the only God), and one below and inevitable, subterranean sheol – a word borrowed from Semite faiths in the region – to which were consigned all the dead, regardless of the merits or faults of their earthly lives. There was no suggestion that virtuous mortals might aspire to take the ‘up-lift’ to the heavens when they died. Entry was strictly restricted to a named and heroic handful – for example, the prophet Elijah. His journey to the skies – after his historic victory over the pagan monarchs Ahab and Jezebel and their deity Baal – is the only such voyage detailed in the Old Testament: ‘Now as they [Elijah and his pupil Elisha] walked on, talking as they went, a chariot of fire appeared and horses of fire, coming between the two of them; and Elijah went up to heaven in the whirlwind.’ (2 Kings: 2:11–12) Another similarly honoured was Enoch, a devoted servant of Yahweh, who is described in the Book of Genesis as ‘walking with God’ during his lifetime (365 years, according to Genesis, a figure dwarfed by his son Methu-saleh’s 969 years) and then rather vaguely as ‘vanishing because God took him’ (5:24).
Since almost no-one went there, Judaism wasted no time trying to map out the realm of the gods. There was also little interest in sheol. Tradition taught that it was a dark, silent mausoleum, separated from this life, but the sort of questions we now ask about personal immortality would have been met with blank stares by Jews of the period. The lines of communication between sheol, heaven and earth as the three sides of a triangle were, however, well-established. In the First Book of Samuel (Chapter 28), King Saul prepares for a battle by donning a disguise and consulting a necromancer at Endor. The ghost that she conjures up ‘rises from the earth’. It is Samuel himself, and Saul wants his dead ancestor, called reluctantly from slumber in sheol, to intervene in heaven with Yahweh, who he believes has abandoned the Israelites. Samuel accurately predicts that Saul will die. But Saul’s interest was not in his own personal immortality, his own fate after death; rather, he had a broader political concern. This is the key theme in the great prophets. Their teachings were bound up with this world and the problems affecting Israel, principally its survival.
Lack of interest in heaven continued unchallenged until the eighth century BC, when the Jews found themselves increasingly under threat from their mighty Assyrian neighbours to the north and east. In extremis, the people were encouraged to change tack and focus their faith on Yahweh, cutting down on intermediaries or other spirits and gods. Practices of ancestor worship, it was said, distracted from Yahweh, disappointed Him, and therefore had brought about military defeats. So, the souls of the faithful and unfaithful departed were, at a stroke, cast into outer darkness. King Josiah (640–609 BC), for instance, introduced new legal taboos on the disposal of corpses in an effort to stamp out remaining tendencies towards veneration of the dead. They were to be buried swiftly and then forgotten, he decreed, while necromancers and wizards were outlawed. As with all such official sanctions in matters of faith and morals, the Jews did not wipe out the practice of ancestor worship altogether, but they certainly marginalised it.
The living and the dead henceforth were eternally separated. The dead had no knowledge of the living and therefore could not distract from events on earth. The Book of Ecclesiasticus describes the dead, in the Lord’s eyes, as ‘those who do not exist’ (17:28) and, a few verses further on, drives home the point when it says of Yahweh: ‘He surveys the armies of the lofty sky, while all men are no more than dust and ashes.’ (17:32) Historical and archaeological records show that here was a religion which did not attempt to buttress its position on earth by the promise of an eternal reward. Rather, and bravely by our own standards, it stood or fell on its earthly merits. Yahweh was understood in terms of what He could do for the Israelites in this life. So any suggestion of a bonus for good service to their God was couched in terms either of national victory over Israel’s oppressors, or, as in the case of Job once he had suffered endless adversity as part of a debate on the nature of human goodness between Yahweh and Satan, in purely material terms.
Heaven, or any effort to describe or plot the afterlife, remained of almost no concern until 586 BC, when Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem and destroyed its holiest of holies, the Temple. The Jews began the trauma of fifty years of exile in Babylon. One consequence of adjusting to the enormity of this defeat was the birth of a school of thought that dreamed and planned of a new Israel that would rise from the ashes. This was in part simply a nationalistic movement, inspired by the image of a free homeland, a restored Temple and a liberated Jerusalem. But it was also about something more, because it had a strong religious and spiritual dimension. ‘About Zion I will not be silent,’ it was written in Isaiah at this time, ‘about Jerusalem, I will not grow weary, until her integrity shines out like the dawn and her salvation flames like a torch.’ (Is 62:1–2). These words refer to more than the building blocks of a city, though that extra something could simply be attributed to the exuberant imagery of the prophet. However, four chapters further on, there can be no mistake: ‘For as the new heavens and the new earth I shall make will endure before me – it is Yahweh who speaks – so will your race and name endure.’ (Is 66:22–23).
The new Israel with the new Jerusalem was not simply an independent earthly kingdom, but a quasi-mystical place, halfway between heaven and earth, where the living and their dead ancestors would mix and co-exist under the benign gaze of Yahweh. It is one of the most powerful and enduring images of afterlife in the Bible. In wanting to cloak themselves with both the protection of Yahweh and the aura of their illustrious ancestors, the exiled Israelites had introduced two vital ingredients into the story of heaven. The first was the notion that there could be some higher sphere here on earth, a renewed and perfected place where death no longer separated those who had loyally followed Yahweh from the living. Rather than the old horizontal division with a remote heaven at the top, earth in between and a catch-all sheol at the bottom, this new scheme preferred vertical lines that linked both living and dead with the Lord on the basis of their faith.
The second idea, closely associated with the first, was that of bodily resurrection – that the dead could literally rise from their graves to be with their descendants and their Lord. It seems likely that the Jews borrowed this concept from their captors in Babylon, many of whom embraced Zoroastrianism, the major belief system in the Middle East before Islam. Details of Zoroaster are few and far between, but he is believed to have lived around 1200 BC in Bactria, the area known today as Iran. He broke with the tradition, near-universal at the time, of invoking a pantheon of gods, and taught instead that there were only two gods, one good and one bad, who were locked in a cosmic battle with earthlings their cannon fodder. When Ahura Mazda, the good god, finally triumphed over his opponent, the fiendish Ahriman or Angro Mainyush, the dead would be summoned for a Last Judgement. The righteous would be restored in body and spirit and returned to a cleansed earthly paradise – the word comes from pairidaeza in old Persian, meaning the enclosed garden of the Persian king – the true and eternal kingdom of Ahura Mazda where everyone would live for ever.
Though the Babylonian exile occurred during the key period of the Axial Age, Zoroastrianism was not essentially an Axial religion, but, rather, a transitional faith between ancient pantheistic creeds and modern monotheism. One of the things that distinguished it from other Axial religions, such as Buddhism or Hinduism, was its emphasis on eschatology – and in the battle between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman this was a very violent eschatology. By contrast to such bloody fights at the end of time, Buddhism and Hinduism promoted a more compassionate ethic. Yet it was Zoroastrianism that the Jewish exiles imbibed, and so the post-exile prophets of the Old Testament began, for the first time, to talk of a new heaven and a new earth. Moreover, these post-exile prophecies were later inserted into the oracles associated with earlier prophets to give the semblance of continuity. History was being rewritten.
Zoroastra’s influence on Jewish thinking about afterlife is seen most clearly in the Book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel was a priest and visionary who was active among the exiles in Babylon between 593 and 571 BC. He writes of seeing a valley full of dried bones. Yahweh breathes new life into them and raises them from the dead. ‘I mean to raise you from your graves, my people,’ is the message He gives to Ezekiel, ‘and lead you back to the soil of Israel.’ (Ez: 37:1–14) Leaving dead bodies to rot above the ground – as in Ezekiel’s vision – was a religious practice of the Zoroastrians, but not of the Jews who preferred to bury them. The concept of bodily resurrection after death – in this case as a way of participating in a magnificent new era for Israel – had entered the mainstream of Judaism.
As a result of the Babylonian exile, the psychology of this shift in attitudes ran deep. For the Israelites, it had been all very well leaving heaven a remote place, accessed only by a chosen few, when Yahweh had been helping them slug it out with the various other tribes of the Near East. However, as their horizons broadened and they faced other opponents, the Israelites had begun to move towards monotheism, belief in a single God, focusing on Yahweh as more than simply a national mascot. When they were defeated and carted off into exile in Babylon, this process accelerated. Yahweh had to acquire bigger dimensions. He had to be Lord not just of their tribe, but of a wider universe if He was to help the Jews to be free once more. This is a theme developed in the second and third sections of the Book of Isaiah, written during the exile, where monotheism is embraced clearly and unequivocally, and Yahweh is painted as not just the God of Israel, but the God of all, even if the others don’t yet recognise Him as such.
Ücretsiz ön izlemeyi tamamladınız.
