After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory
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One of the most profound, deeply affecting questions we face as human beings is the matter of our mortality—and its connection to immorality. Ancient animist ghost cultures, Egyptian mummification, late Jewish hopes of resurrection, Christian eternal salvation, Muslim belief in hell and paradise all spring from a remarkably consistent impulse to tether a triumph over death to our conduct in life.In After Lives, British scholar John Casey provides a rich historical and philosophical exploration of the world beyond, from the ancient Egyptians to St. Thomas Aquinas, from Martin Luther to modern Mormons. In a lively, wide-ranging discussion, he examines such topics as predestination, purgatory, Spiritualism, the Rapture, Armageddon and current Muslim apocalyptics, as well as the impact of such influences as the New Testament, St. Augustine, Dante, and the Second Vatican Council. Ideas of heaven and hell, Casey argues, illuminate how we understand the ultimate nature of sin, justice, punishment, and our moral sense itself. The concepts of eternal bliss and eternal punishment express—and test—our ideas of good and evil. For example, the ancient Egyptians saw the afterlife as flowing from ma'at, a sense of being in harmony with life, a concept that includes truth, order, justice, and the fundamental law of the universe. "It is an optimistic view of life," he writes. "It is an ethic that connects wisdom with moral goodness." Perhaps just as revealing, Casey finds, are modern secular interpretations of heaven and hell, as he probes the place of goodness, virtue, and happiness in the age of psychology and scientific investigation.With elegant writing, a magisterial grasp of a vast literary and religious history, and moments of humor and irony, After Lives sheds new light on the question of life, death, and morality in human culture. Publishers Weekly As Virgil to Dante, Cambridge University scholar and author Casey (Pagan Virtue) is a reader’s guide to views of the afterlife across centuries, cultures and religions. Happily for the scope of his inquiry, the author is immensely well-read and readily shows how powerfully and frequently notions of heaven and hell have inspired and haunted Western writers; the book opens and closes with James Joyce’s artist character Stephen Daedalus, who exemplifies the potent influence of the Catholic Christian view of hell. The book’s most valuable contribution is its attention to the overarching context of non-Christian Western and Middle Eastern cultures. Egyptian, Mesopotamian, ancient Judaic, Greek and Roman conceptions anchor and shape the evolving Christian view. Muslim views of the afterlife are included, though scantily, a commendable attempt at redressing ignorance of a tradition in which the afterlife plays a significant theological role. This is a smart and comprehensive survey, though a general educated reader will need patience with citations in the original languages (which are translated immediately after). (Nov.)
Prologue: Stephen Dedalus's Hell 1Pt. I Dark Futures1 After Lives 132 Egypt 233 Mesopotamia and Israel 434 Greece and Rome 655 The Christian Beginnings 1036 Dante: Inferno 1477 Predestination: Augustine to Calvin and Beyond 1678 The Decline of Hell 193Pt. II Purgatory9 Rome's Happiest Inspiration? 225Pt. III Heaven10 Heaven: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel 24511 Bodies Fleshly and Spiritual 26912 Dante: Paradiso 28113 Celestial Pleasures: Renaissance and Reformation Heavens 29314 Heavenly Speculations 32115 Heaven Seen and Heard: Swedenborg 33716 With Easy Intercourse Pass To and Fro 35717 Scoring in Heaven 381Epilogue 401Notes 405Bibliography 441Index 452\\
