Immortality (21 page)

This communication has since become the basis of the Christian experience. But it is worth dwelling for a moment on the extent of the self-importance implicit in this view: once the gods were remote and capricious, only to be reached through complex rituals. Now suddenly the one true God is always on call; on the one hand, he is the Creator of the Universe, the lord of all, omnipotent and omniscient, he who sent the great flood to destroy a sinful humanity. Yet on the other hand, he wants to hear your every wish, regret and foible; all you have to do is think it, and he is there, all ears. The most
powerful being there ever could be, dwarfing kings, presidents and prime ministers, is apparently interested in
you
.

Ernest Becker described this as “the most remarkable achievement of the Christian world picture: that it could take slaves, cripples, imbeciles, the simple and the mighty, and make them all secure heroes, simply by taking a step back from the world into another dimension of things, the dimension called heaven.” From this new perspective, every man, woman and child, each one of the billions, is special and important, with a role to play in God’s great drama and loved by him personally and individually.

The extraordinary claim that the creator of the universe knows and cares for each one of us has over the past two millennia become commonplace, almost a truism of the religious worldview. It is not unique to Christianity but has become a central feature of all the Abrahamic religions, especially Islam. In the places where religious conversions are still common—for example, prisons or programs for alcoholics and drug addicts—these narratives successfully offer to the convert a cosmic significance otherwise unattainable in a life regarded socially as a failure.

This is a radical departure from older worldviews that make mortals the playthings of a pitiless fate. In the polytheistic preChristian religions of Greece, Rome and the Middle East, the gods were indifferent at best, cruel, abusive and deceitful at worst. Cosmic significance could only be attained through the heroic deeds of men like Achilles and Odysseus, or through mastering the elaborate rites of the mysteries. But such worldviews offered only partial satisfaction of our will to immortality; little surprise, then, that they gave way to that version of the Soul Narrative that makes eternity our birthright.

T
HIS
narrative has proved irresistible, even to those who do not accept its religious framework, and it has so suffused the modern—particularly Western—worldview that we can hardly imagine an
alternative. This influence is the principle of individualism—the primary worth of each and every individual—which has come to be the supreme value throughout large parts of the world.

The full consequences took time to emerge: as the influential French anthropologist Louis Dumont wrote, it was “a transformation so radical and so complex that it took at least seventeen centuries of Christian history to be completed.” Scholarly consensus is that this transformation arose from the unique combination of Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian religion. Dumont’s account of this development runs like this: initially, spiritually minded people discover their individual self by turning away from the collective that is society and defining themselves solely in relation to the divine. This can be seen in the spiritual traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, and also in early Christianity: Jesus of Nazareth basically taught that we should leave our families and societies and wait humbly for the coming apocalypse. Outside of the distractions of society, a Christian could realize himself or herself as an “individual-in-relation-to-God.”

Christianity’s otherworldliness, however, began to be challenged when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Although in the form of the monasteries it maintained a tradition of those who spurned mainstream society, increasingly it was forced to find a way of permitting the millions of people who were suddenly within its purview some way of being both Christians and ordinary citizens. Dumont records two leaps forward in this reconciliation: in the eighth century, when the church accepted its active role in the political sphere, and then in the Reformation, when the individual believer powerfully reasserted his or her direct relationship to God.

It was Martin Luther, of course, in the early sixteenth century who initiated this second revolution, though it had been simmering for centuries. Each of us has an immortal soul with a direct line to God, he argued, and therefore each of us is a sovereign moral agent who must freely choose whether or not to put his or her faith in
Christ. This was a call for religious freedom, but Christianity was too embedded in the surrounding culture for its effects to remain contained in the spiritual realm. The assertion that each individual was equal before God quickly led to demands for economic and politic al liberties, causing revolutions both in thought and on the streets. In Dumont’s terms, the individual
as opposed to
society had become the individual
within
society.

Individualism, with its belief in the absolute value and autonomy of the person, is therefore the political expression of the Soul Narrative. All ethical and political systems are grounded in some conception of what it is to be human. The claim of the Soul Narrative that each of us is a spark of the divine, and therefore sovereign unto him or herself, was a radical view of human nature that, once allowed to permeate social and political thinking, had far-reaching and dramatic implications. We were not merely one of the tribe, not merely Olaf-the-ax-maker, son of Olaf-the-ax-maker and latest in a long line of Olaf-the-ax-makers, not merely a weak body fated to briefly flourish and die like a spring flower. We were individuals, and as such deserved rights, equality, freedom and democracy.

The ethics of the soul reached its finest expression in the famous words of the American Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” To most people in history, these truths would have been anything but self-evident. Indeed, to an ancient Roman patrician, a medieval serf, or an Indian “untouchable,” they would have seemed self-evidently false—as they would have to the slaves kept by those free citizens of the new America. But once the view that each human being has a unique, immortal essence is brought into the social realm, then all the rest—eventually—follows.

After spreading beyond its religious origins this view acquired a secular vocabulary: the word “self” has now taken over from “soul,”
but it expresses the same essential idea that each of us has an irreducible core that makes us unique and special. Although this claim has been under steady assault for a century—from psychoanalysts and deconstructionists, behaviorists and neuroscientists—it continues to be the dominant philosophy of our age. Capitalism and consumerism, with their emphasis on economic autonomy, are dependent upon it, as are the political ideologies of human rights and liberal democracy, not to mention the modern cults of self-actualization and self-discovery.

The Soul Narrative, which is so successful at satisfying the will to immortality, has therefore provided the principal values of our civilization—even for those who long since abandoned its more mystical overtones. Ernest Becker, following the psychoanalyst Otto Rank, recognized that individualism and the aggrandizement of the self are not only products of this narrative but a continuation of the same quest for immortality. Whether or not we literally believe we have a soul that will go to heaven, the cosmic significance we ascribe to ourselves as unique individuals reassures us that we transcend mere biology. It convinces us that we are each special, possessing “infinite worth” as Dumont put it—not like the anonymous animals that live and die in their millions around us. In pursuing the cult of the self—building careers, actualizing our potential and acquiring ever more things—we are creating a myth of immunity to extinction.

D
ANTE
had little reason to doubt either his own cosmic significance or that of mankind as the primary actors in God’s great plan. He was convinced that the earth was at the center of the universal order and that heaven awaited the virtuous. Indeed, he claimed to have been there.

Dante boldly claimed that his epic was reportage—that his
descriptions were not merely a product of his judgment or imagination but what he had actually seen. Many seem to have believed him: his fellow poet and admirer Giovanni Boccaccio reported that those who passed Dante in the street would marvel at how his beard seemed charred and skin darkened from his adventures in the fiery realms of hell. Even those who may have regarded his account as more like a religious vision than a report of a physical journey found it so persuasive that they believed that, like the Bible, it must at the least have been divinely inspired.

His masterpiece opens on the day before Good Friday in the year 1300, with Dante lost in a forest and being harassed by wild beasts. He is rescued by the soul of the Roman poet Virgil, who offers to guide him out—albeit via the spirit world. His guide then takes Dante through hell, where the souls are “in such pain / That every one of them calls out for a second death”; up to purgatory, where the souls “though in the fire, / Are happy because they hope … to join the blessed”; and thence to the very edge of heaven, but as a pagan, Virgil can go no farther. He therefore hands his charge over to none other than the beloved Beatrice to act as guide through the celestial realm, where, in Dante’s view, she clearly warrants a place.

Dante gives us a perfect picture of the medieval geography of the afterlife, complete with maps: Hell, following convention, is in the bowels of the earth. Its nine circles go deeper and deeper toward the core, with ever-more-terrible punishments being meted out on increasingly wicked sinners. In the lowest pit of the lowest circle, Satan is entombed to the waist in ice, futilely beating his monstrous wings. As Dante, like most educated people of his time, believed the earth to be a globe, he and Virgil are able to pass by Satan and go farther through the earth’s core, at which point they begin ascending up toward the surface of the Southern Hemisphere. Emerging, they find Mount Purgatory, an island mountain with seven terraces whose summit, high in the sky, is the Garden of Eden. From here, heaven is within reach.

Dante’s portrayal of heaven itself reflects the conflation of cosmology and religion that was normal at the time. In the Hebrew and Greek of the Bible—as still in many modern languages—the term “heaven” refers to both the sky and the abode of God. This for Dante and his contemporaries was a literal truth. They believed that the earth was at the center of the universe, and around this center turned layers of “celestial spheres” that held the heavenly bodies. These spheres
were
heaven, home of the souls of the righteous: the first sphere both held the moon and was the abode of those souls who had been virtuous but inconstant; the fourth sphere, for example, held the sun and was the residence of the souls of the wise, such as Thomas Aquinas. Then came various planets, until the eighth sphere, which held the fixed stars along with the saints and the Virgin Mary.

Beyond that was the “primum mobile”—the “first moved” sphere whose motion was controlled directly by God. It was the realm of the angels, and beyond it, in the empyrean, which transcended physical space, dwelled God himself. This was in keeping with Christian tradition: when the disciples watched while Jesus, forty days after his resurrection, “was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” (Acts 1:9), they would have understood this to be a literal ascension into heaven, physically situated beyond the sky. Dante claimed to have been there, and his fellow medieval Christians on reading his travelogue could look up into the clouds and dream that their souls might one day follow in his footsteps.

T
HE
discovery a few centuries later that the earth was not the center of the cosmos—or even of our little solar system—came therefore as something of a shock. This view took more than a century to become accepted after Nicolaus Copernicus published his arguments in 1543 and was fought by the Catholic Church at every step. In the trial of Galileo, who provided further evidence for the Copernican
view, it was condemned as “heretical, for being explicitly contrary to Holy Scripture.” When the monk and astronomer Giordano Bruno added that the sun was just one of many stars in a potentially infinite universe, he was burned at the stake.

The Copernican view was a major blow to humanity’s cosmic significance. In Dante’s universe, we are at the center of creation, with God and his angels all around us. This is the reassuring image that Dante and his contemporaries would have had as they stared up at the stars. But in the Copernican universe, we are adrift on one of many planets, revolving around one of many stars in an enormity of cold, dark space. As C. S. Lewis observed, when we moderns now look up to the stars, it is not to the firmament of angels looking kindly back, but out—endlessly out—into the lonely void.

As telescopes grew more powerful and knowledge of cosmology improved, the prospect of finding the heavenly host receded. No matter how hard the astronomers looked, no angels could be seen plucking harps amid the stars. The advent of human space travel dispelled the illusion once and for all. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, is reported to have commented, “I don’t see any god up here.” The American astronauts who landed on the moon, though fond of quoting Scripture, did not meet the souls of the “virtuous but inconstant” promised by Dante. We humans currently wandering the surface of planet Earth appear, as far as we can see, to be alone.

Some biblical literalists continue to believe that heaven is physically located in the distant realms of space, but the evidence of science makes this view nothing more than a curiosity. Most believers have instead taken refuge in the slippery language of “another realm,” “other dimensions” or “alternate universes.” Although these words are also used in science, the claim that heaven resides in such spaces is not based on scientific evidence or even compatible with it. The hypothesis about the nature of the universe called “string theory,” for
example, posits some number of extra dimensions beyond the usual four—a fact that has given hope to some of the faithful. But these dimensions are not alternate realities where paradise might be hiding; they are part of this universe and are (if they exist) very, very small—meaning many orders of magnitude smaller than an atom. Unlikely, therefore, to contain the New Jerusalem.