HEAVEN

A TRAVELLER’S GUIDE TO

THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

PETER STANFORD

DEDICATION

To my mother, Mary Catherine Stanford (1921–1998), in the hope that the very best of what follows may now be true for her

and

To my mother-in-law, Emily Celine Cross (1934–2001), who inspired me with her trust in God to believe that it could be.

EPIGRAPH

‘The undiscovered country, from whose bourn No traveller returns …’

SHAKESPEARE: Hamlet (Act III, Scene 1)

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

List of Illustrations

Introduction

PART ONE Knowledge of Angels

1 Dust to Dust

Traveller’s Tales: 1

2 Come Back and Finish What You Started

3 But Not Life as We Know it

4 The Compensation Culture

5 Fly Me to the Moon

PART TWO And the Soul Goes Marching On

6 Safe in My Garden

Traveller’s Tales: 2

7 Space Oddity

8 Star-Man

9 Tomorrow’s World

10 If Paradise Was Half as Nice

Traveller’s Tales: 3

11 A Delectable Death

12 Reach for the Sky

PART THREE Above Us, Only Sky

13 The Borderlands

Traveller’s Tales: 4

14 I Hear You Knocking

15 Speaking Words of Wisdom?

16 Man is What He Eats

17 The Sound of Silence

18 Through the Keyhole

19 An Indian Summer

20 A Village in Heaven

Traveller’s Tales: 5

21 But I’ve Never Been to Me

Source Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Ascent of the Prophet Muhammad to Heaven by Aqa Mirak, 16th century.

© British Library/Bridgeman Art Library

Saint Augustine of Hippo. © Mary Evans Picture Library

Saint Hildegard. © Mary Evans Picture Library

Thomas Aquinas. © Mary Evans Picture Library

Chartres Cathedral, West side. © The Bridgeman Art Library

Land of Cockaigne by Pieter Brueghel. Alte Pinakothek, Munich. © The Bridgeman Art Library

Detail from The Damned by Luca Signorelli. © Scala

Dante portrait. © Scala

Ascent into the Empyrean by Hieronymus Bosch. Palazzo Ducale, Venice. © The Bridgeman Art Library

Dante and Beatrice, from Dante’s Divine Comedy, 1480, by Sandro Botticelli. © Bibliotheque Nationale/The Bridgeman Art Library

Emmanuel Swedenborg. © Mary Evans Picture Library

Cities in the Spirit World, 18th century by Emmanuel Swedenborg. Reproduced courtesy of The Swedenborg Society

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, As a New Heaven is Begun, c. 1790, by William Blake. © The Bridgeman Art Library

Last Judgement by William Blake. © A.C. Cooper/The National Trust Photographic Library

The Gates Ajar

Spiritualism photo

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Houdini. © Mary Evans Picture Library

The Resurrection: Cookham, 1924–7 by Sir Stanley Spencer. © Tate, London 2002

Illustration from The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis. © Pauline Baynes

Buddhist temple. © Ian Cumming/Tibet Images

INTRODUCTION

It is five in the morning and my five-month-old baby daughter, already settled into a pattern as an inveterate dawn riser, is shifting around in my arms, her eyes wide open, her back arching, and looking every inch a miniature version of my own mother. It is not so much the composition and arrangement of her features that bridges the generations, as a particular grimace of steely resolution that she makes, and the look she sometimes gives, with eyes guarded and slightly nervous, as she weighs you up before volunteering a broad but bashful smile. In these moments, the coincidence of her birth and my mother’s death within twelve months of each other makes me believe, without a shadow of a doubt, in reincarnation.

Bleary-eyed through lack of sleep, I see such a familiar expression that unthinkingly I latch on to it. For an instant I am as true a believer in reincarnation as if I were kneeling in saffron-coloured robes in a temple in the East: for, despite however many rules of science it violates, it seems so obvious that some essence of the life that is now over has been reborn in the new life in front of me. I even convince myself that it’s more than just the looks: they seem to share the same spirit – determined, unswerving, but cautious. As I slip back into a half-slumber, my daughter is distracted by an old watch strap, which she sucks and stretches. I add a few Christian ingredients to my Buddhist brew and fondly conjure up a scene in that mythical white tunnel which, in the standard church imagery of heaven, links this world to the next. There is, I imagine, a halfway point where those going back to the pavilion pass those going out to the crease. My mother and my daughter are both there, frozen in time, suddenly alone and utterly absorbed in each other. In my dream both can walk, though for the last twenty-five years of her life my mother was a wheelchair user. They embrace, and, as they take their leave to go in opposite directions, my mother kisses my daughter gently and hands over a parcel of her own characteristics, her legacy to the grand-daughter whom she will never know in straightforward earthly terms.

At this point in the dream my wife wakens me, and suddenly our daughter, who is still doggedly playing with the watch strap, appears in an entirely different light – her own mother’s double. As swiftly as I signed up to my own hybrid version of afterlife, I now see its absurdity. My certainty dispels so quickly that I cannot even get a grip on what it was that had, only seconds before, seemed so cosy and real. Any assurance I had is gone.

Of course, when my mind is more alert and my thoughts more earthbound, I realise that the popularly understood concept of reincarnation is the ultimate comfort-blanket with which our age soothes away all the traumas and difficult questions of life. Reincarnation focuses on this life, which we know, rather than on some other life which we can only dream of. Thus it works in the short-term to assuage any anxiety about mortality, and can even take the edge off grieving. As a long-term prospect, though, it has its drawbacks. In the sixth century BC Buddha developed the already existing idea of samsara, constant rebirth, and regarded reincarnation as something negative. He wanted to liberate his followers from the cycle of dying and being born since, far from welcoming the prospect of having another go at life, many of them were terrified by the prospect of death after death. If they had had hospices and morphine perhaps they would have thought differently, but at that time it was considered bad enough to have to go through all those final agonies once, without having to do it ad infinitum. Buddha taught of nirvana, not as a physical place akin to heaven where one might get off the treadmill, but as a psychological state of release, separate from death, that could be achieved in this life.

There is an enormous contrast, then, between the reality of Buddha’s teachings and my half-awake efforts at toying with reincarnation as something to keep grief and loss at bay when cold reason offers no relief. As a simple answer to the eternal dilemma of suffering, Buddha realised, reincarnation only works in parts. It introduces a tangible degree of justice into each individual death to replace the injustices of each individual life by teaching that sinners will return humbled and the righteous will enjoy greater favour in their next incarnation, but fundamentally it embraces earthly suffering as each individual goes on and on and on trying to achieve enlightenment.

There is another drawback, even to the caricature of reincarnation that is now embraced by many in the West as a way of avoiding their own mortality. Such a scheme of things can only reassure those who have a high opinion of their own merits. My mother, who suffered the ravages of multiple sclerosis for forty years with exemplary steadfastness, once admitted to me, devout Catholic though she was, that she had tried to imagine reincarnation, albeit distorted through the filter of Catholic guilt, but had decided that rather than get an upgrade she would come back as a cow and have to endure what for her was unendurable – flies constantly landing on her face and her having no way of shooing them away.

Flirting with reincarnation appeals only to that arrogant, selfish, self-absorbed part of us all that cannot quite believe that our own death will be the end. This is the eternal attraction of every other form of belief in an afterlife. We may act every day as though we disbelieve the inevitability of death – driving too fast along a rain-soaked motorway, hanging on to the tail lights of the car in front, popping pills which will give us a high but which may also kill us – but in the midst of our oddly ambiguous relationship with mortality, there is always the abiding thought that, even if the inevitable happens, our unique being, shaped so laboriously, must live on in some form. Surely we cannot just vanish in a split second.

Sometimes I sit at traffic lights, my foot twitching on the accelerator of the car, and try to contemplate what would happen if I shot out into the line of oncoming traffic. More specifically, what would happen if I killed myself doing it? Would it all go blank at once, as doctors tell grieving relatives, reassuring them that their loved one wouldn’t have felt a thing at the moment of death? Or would I, in best Hollywood tradition, float up out of my body and look down on the crumpled tangle of cars I had left in my wake? And, if there is an afterlife, at what stage does it kick in? Straight away, after the funeral when I have the Church’s blessing, or after a sojourn in purgatory when I have waited in a queue for a few months (or years) and people on earth have prayed for the repose of my soul? I’ve never been good at queuing, and even if I managed to stick it out, what would I get to at the end? Would I even recognise it as having any connection with what went before? Would it be a physical landscape, or an illusory one? Would it exist outside my imagination, or would it even exist at all? Would others be there too? Would they recognise me? Suddenly oblivion seems so much more straightforward. As the lights turn to green and I cautiously set off on my way, I realise that these seemingly overwhelming questions are so earthbound as to be trivial compared with what I am contemplating.

Yet what is absolutely true is that we fear death because we fear the unknown: the rich build monuments to earn immortality, the wordy write books which will sit in library catalogues forever after, and the competitive strain to get their names engraved on cups and shields and prizes. All offer a kind of life after death. For the majority, however, the choice 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.

The fact that it is unimaginable but nonetheless officially there is, however, just another aspect of heaven’s appeal. We can sign up for it without having to think too hard about what that means. It’s like taking out an insurance policy without ever having to study the small print.

When in 1999 Pope John Paul II pronounced that heaven was a ‘blessed community’ which was ‘neither abstraction nor physical place’, he was following the recent tendency to underplay what could be regarded as the Churches’ trump card. Clerics are curiously nervous of mentioning heaven, despite its potential as a crowd puller, especially with the elderly. When a senior English archbishop gave an address at a Roman synod the same year, in which he blandly mentioned heaven in passing, I wrote to him to ask if we might meet so he could develop what seemed an intriguing theme. He wrote back by return saying that he was busy for the foreseeable future and couldn’t really add to the words he had offered already. Yet he had said nothing.

One might almost conclude that the Western churches are, behind the scenes, realising that their Buddhist and Hindu confrères in the East have hit upon something in their lack of interest in the afterlife and so are gently repositioning their doctrines as a result. But that would be to ignore the lesson of history. For the Pope’s almost embarrassed talk of heaven is part of a long Christian tradition. There are mentions of heaven aplenty in the New Testament. Some Christian fundamentalists believe that the Book of Revelation goes so far as to provide a street plan. Saint Augustine, arguably the most influential writer and thinker in Christian history, would, however, be pleased to hear the modern-day Vatican trying to quell speculation on the hereafter. In the fifth century he insisted that heaven was ‘ineffable’ – beyond words. It was indeed Augustine who established the term ineffabilis in theology as a way of summing up one of his favourite maxims – that it is easier to say what God is not than to say what He is.

Augustine’s word, rather like John Paul II’s, has not always been law in this, nor in other matters. Sketching out their own imaginary topography of Christian heaven has been a long line of theologians, mystics, artists, writers and the builders of the great Gothic cathedrals, whose spires reached to the skies. Usually starting with Revelation, which pictured paradise as a cleaned-up version of Jerusalem without its Temple, these seers have constructed the pearly gates and enlisted harps (first heard in the New Testament Apocrypha – the early Church texts considered too unorthodox to make it into the Holy Bible).

Outside the cloister, Dante mapped out his Paradiso of the skies in the fourteenth century with Renaissance precision and with every bit the same authority as he had invested in his Inferno in the bowels of the earth, though by a quirk of human nature it is the latter that has continued to fascinate us more. The same, incidentally, is true of John Milton in the seventeenth century. His Paradise Lost has been vastly influential in shaping modern thinking on the Devil and his hellish lair, but those sections of the text which describe heaven are overlooked. Perhaps it is a desire amongst readers not to appear presumptuous as to their final destination that has traditionally allowed hell to eclipse heaven in terms of the popular imagination. Or perhaps it is just the dominance of fear in our emotional range. More practically, it may be art for once imitating the attitudes of those in power. The post-Reformation churches of Milton’s time were much keener on frightening people in to the pews with talk of hell than in enticing them with pictures of heaven.

Despite its unfathomable promise, heaven has eternally been the poor relation of hell; the quieter, paler sibling, the bland-looking friend that some attractive men and women take round with them so as to make themselves shine ever more brightly in comparison. George Bernard Shaw waspishly remarked in Man and Superman (1903): ‘Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable, that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.’ Shaw may have correctly identified early the relative silence on heaven that took hold in the twentieth century, but he was, of course, exaggerating for effect. Down the ages, when heaven has occasionally managed to raise its subtly attractive head above the flames of the hell fires, it has gripped imaginations and produced some memorable and influential images. This is the world of Fra Angelico’s Last Judgement, Luca Signorelli’s Coronation of the Elect, William Blake’s The Meeting of a Family in Heaven and Stanley Spencer’s Resurrection: Cookham, a place of music, dancing, good health, sex, self-congratulation and plenty. It is the Elysian Fields, an image shamelessly borrowed from Virgil by the early Christians and entered symbolically through a gate, where, according to the Aeneid, those amongst the dead chosen for their heroic virtues ‘train on grassy rings, others compete in field games, others grapple on the sand; feet moving to a rhythmic beat, the dancers move in formation as they sing’. Heaven is where, according to Dante, the ‘Great Light shines in three circles’, where, the Revd Charles Kingsley wrote to his beloved wife, Fanny, ‘marital love will be without oscillation, even at the same glorious full tide of delight’, and where, in Steven Spielberg’s Always, Audrey Hepburn presides in a green glade.

Despite official urgings to the contrary, theologians, artists and writers have kept up a lively debate about the nature of heaven. There are three basic views. The first has appealed most to theologians and mystics – somewhere we spend eternal solitude with God alone. Here the traveller is in an unknown territory without landmarks, somewhere imaginable only in moments of intense prayer or spiritual introspection. All earthly relationships – spouses, parents, children – are as nothing in this place, and the body and bodily pleasures are exchanged for a vaguely defined inner peace. The imagination, a key component in any approach to heaven, is directed solely to God Himself and the backdrop is irrelevant. For the medieval mystics, God was so much the centre of their reveries that heaven was sexual fulfilment with Christ the Bridegroom.

The second view is much more tangible, familiar and easy to plot. It allows for some overlap between heaven and earth, and hence relationships outside the central bond with God. The necessary inspiration is all at hand. In the one and only conversation I ever had with my mother about death, on the occasion of my grandmother’s death, she told me that her own image of heaven was of a welcoming committee of my great aunts greeting their sister with, ‘Well, Annie, what took you so long?’ This is the flip side of Jean-Paul Sartre’s remark in Huis Clos that ‘hell is other people’. The same may be said, in more upbeat mood, of heaven.

The hopes of being reunited in death were never more poetically expressed than in the seventeenth century by Henry King, Bishop of Chichester, in his celebrated An Exequy, written in 1657 after the death of his wife, Anne:

Sleep on (my Love!) in thy cold bed

Never to be disquieted.

My last Good-night! Thou wilt not wake

Till I thy fate shall overtake;

Till age, or grief, or sickness must

Marry my body to that dust

It so much loves; and fill the room

My heart keeps empty in thy tomb.

But hark! My pulse, like a soft drum

Beats my approach, tells thee I come;

And, slow howe’er my marches be,

I shall at last sit down by thee.

The thought of this bids me go on,

And wait my dissolution

With hope and comfort.

The third and commonest approach historically is a hybrid of the first two – somewhere to be with God alone, yet also a place where the imagination inevitably wanders into providing some shape and form, usually a garden, and to other relationships which may continue from earth.

All three approaches have their appeal depending on whether it is comfort, freedom from fear, or the search for another dimension beyond the banalities of earthly life that is prompting the seeker. Opinion has vacillated between this trinity – one theocentric (or based on God), another anthropocentric (focused on the human) and the third without a grand tag, but fundamentally a cocktail of the other two. Often all three have been promoted by different groups at the same time and the Churches, for their part, have never quite made up their minds.

The New Testament, for example, talks of heavenly liturgies, bodies that are but spirit and an angelic, celibate lifestyle in the hereafter. In the same theocentric vein, St Augustine spoke of death as the ‘flight in solitude of the Solitary’. The Protestant reformers, the Puritans and the Jansenists embraced the God-centred view of heaven. Yet alongside this trend, there has been a parallel one which insists on creating heaven in the image of a spruced-up earth. In the second century, Irenaeus of Lyons, taking his lead from Revelation, held that the chosen would, for a thousand years after their death, inhabit what was in effect a renewed earth. In this plan whatever you had been denied the first time round, you received in abundance in the rerun.

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.

With such a conclusion, then, Yahweh couldn’t be restricted to one part of the earth, or carried around in the Ark of the Covenant. Equally, when the Israelites’ oppressors were so awful – in this case destroying the Temple – that no earthly punishment would be good enough for them, and no earthly restoration sufficient to avenge the insult to Yahweh, the notion of heaven as a court of final and absolute justice over and above the whole earth had great appeal. Monotheism almost inevitably brought heaven in its wake.

This link between heaven and judgement was strengthened when Jewish thought shifted decisively again, some three hundred years later. An echo of Ezekiel’s vision is found in the Book of Daniel, one of the last additions to the Old Testament, thought to have been written between 167 and 164 BC. Here Daniel writes ‘of those who lie sleeping in the dust of the earth’, i.e. on its surface. Yet he goes further: they will awake, he writes, ‘some to everlasting life, some to shame and everlasting disgrace’ (Dn 12:2). He was describing what later became a standard feature of the Christian heaven – the process by which each and every aspirant for entry is judged on the basis of how they have lived their earthly lives.

The Book of Daniel is illustrative of an emerging trend in Judaism that placed emphasis on individual vice or virtue rather than on the national fate, as the Babylonian exiles had. Personal immortality was now an issue. Sheol as a catch-all for the dead was becoming discredited. It was being remodelled into two alternatives – heaven for the blessed and hell for the damned, though not quite so explicitly as yet. The basic justice in the construct had been emerging for some time and is seen in documents older than Daniel. Psalm 73, for instance, questions the traditional Jewish view that the wicked do well in this world and suffer no eternal punishment for their sins on earth. The psalmist claims that he or she has ‘pierced the mystery’ by invoking God’s judgement in death. The righteous who lead good lives will go to God – ‘I look to no-one else in heaven, I delight in nothing else on earth’ – while the evil-doers are punished: ‘Those who abandon you are doomed, you destroy the adulterous deserter.’ (v. 27). The emphasis is on personal, not collective, wrong-doing. The message is also found in Psalm 49. Those who embrace worldly goods and power without a thought for God will end up in sheol, while the upright will enjoy God’s favour:

Like sheep to be penned in sheol

death will herd them to pasture

and the upright will have the better of them.

Dawn will come and then the show they made will

disappear,

sheol the home for them!

But God will redeem my life

from the grasp of sheol, and will receive me.

If hitherto Judaism had portrayed a place at God’s right hand as beyond the reach and indeed desire of all but a tiny number of prophets, here now was a suggestion that everyone could go there as well, albeit departing only after a final day of judgement. In theory, people would be taken up from the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, where Jews had long been taught to expect the coming of the Messiah, and so this became – and remains in Judaism even for such sinners as the late Robert Maxwell – the favoured place for burial. Key doctrinal pronouncements, however, such as that endorsing the concept of bodily resurrection made at the Council of Jamnia as late as AD 90, emphasised that the metaphorical meaning of the Mount could embrace Jews buried anywhere.

If Judaism took its notions of bodily resurrection from Zoroastrianism, then it subsequently borrowed the parallel concept of an immortal soul from the Greco-Roman tradition. In the end it was Christianity that effectively fused the two hitherto mutually exclusive ideas into one. Greco-Roman writers in this period were revising the standard definitions of afterlife as the dim and undifferentiated nether world favoured by Greek epic poets such as Homer. The shadowy and insubstantial Hades he wrote about around the ninth century BC was akin to the traditional Jewish sheol, but the Roman writer Virgil (70–19 BC) described instead a paradise of Elysian Fields and Isles of the Blest (an image that appeared in Homer) in his Aeneid. If Hades was comprehensive in its intake, Virgil’s paradise was avowedly selective. Entered symbolically through a gate (again later an essential part of the heavenly hardware), the dead who sought admission had to pass an examination in heroic virtue.

Virgil’s paradise is recognisable geographically as an idealisation of the Italian countryside which he knew and loved; the plains covered with wheat, the vineyards heavy with grapes, and nature’s rich crop everywhere in evidence. This romantic, pastoral vision was a powerful one that has always retained an appeal for Western civilisation, as evident in examples such as the Champs Elysées in Paris, or the Elysian Fields that were part of such classic and celebrated eighteenth-century English gardens as that built at Painshill Park in Surrey by Charles Hamilton.

The point of all this agrarian and horticultural imagery for the Greco-Romans of the first century BC was that paradise recaptured a mythical golden age of simplicity and comfort, when people were unsullied by war, untroubled by famine and oblivious to political machinations. The same thought process in 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 that they wore at communal gatherings was there a hint that the heaven they were trying to anticipate in their lifestyle would, in its detail, be in any way celebratory.

Traveller’s Tales: 1

Just a year before his death in 1989, at the age of seventy-eight, the celebrated British philosopher A. J. ‘Freddie’ Ayer choked on a piece of smoked salmon while in hospital being treated for pneumonia. He passed out and then, technically, he died. His heart stopped for four minutes before medical staff were able to revive him. A convinced atheist and rationalist, Ayer subsequently spoke to friends of his vivid experience on the other side. His biographer, Ben Rogers, writes:

He had been confronted by a bright red light, painful even when he turned away from it, which he understood was responsible for the government of the universe. ‘Among its ministers were two creatures who had been put in charge of space. These ministers periodically inspected space and had recently carried out such an inspection. They had, however, failed to do their work properly, with the result that space, like a badly fitting jigsaw, was slightly out of joint.’ Ayer could not find any of the ‘ministers’ responsible for space, but he realised that ministers who had been given charge of time were in his neighbourhood and remembering that, according to Einstein, space and time were one, he tried but failed to signal to them by walking up and down and waving the watch and chain he had inherited from his grandfather. Ayer became ‘more and more desperate’ as his efforts elicited no response. At this point his memory of the experience stopped, although when he regained consciousness, he woke talking about a river – presumably the River Styx – which he claimed to have crossed.

(from A. J. Ayer: A Life, Ben Rogers)

In subsequent interviews, Ayer admitted that the experience had made him ‘wobbly’ about the possibility of an afterlife, but soon reverted to type and labelled himself a ‘born-again atheist’. His mind and brain had continued working when his heart had stopped, he explained, and he had had a bad dream. His wife Dee told friends that ‘Freddie had got so much nicer since he died.’

CHAPTER TWO Come Back and Finish What You Started

Judaism moved forward from the Axial Age by developing the idea of a personal God whose ways soared above those of humanity as the heavens tower above the earth. Other contemporaries, though, travelled in the opposite direction. They rejected the single, personal God as too limiting, prone to become a projection of our own fears, needs and desires. They opted instead for an impersonal and opaque deity which was less constrained, less clearly defined, less of an encouragement to complacency within a system of rewards and punishments, and more of a challenge to individuals to journey beyond language, dogma and earth-bound imagery in order to explore the transcendent within.

On the Indian subcontinent, there is some surviving evidence that the reincarnation-based belief system later encapsulated in Hinduism had in fact existed since prehistoric times. On the basis of archaeological findings, for instance, scholars believe that faith in reincarnation existed in the Dravidian people of southern India and northern Sri Lanka. However, in the Vedas – the first sacred texts of Indian civilisation, composed in the second millennium BC – there is the conviction of a life after death but no details about how it is achieved. It is merely a land of shadows akin to the oldest Jewish beliefs.

The Axial Age saw the emergence of both Hinduism and Buddhism. The stance they took on afterlife was radically different from that taken first by Judaism, under the influence of Zoroastrianism, and later by Christianity and Islam. Between 600 and 300 BC, some of the key documents of Hinduism, the Upanishads, were written down by scholars and philosophers of the highly developed civilisation which was based on the River Indus. The Upanishads, while paying homage to the Vedas, substantially developed their ideas on what happened after death by teaching something called samsara – literally a chain of embodiments – whereby individuals died and were reborn according to how they had lived their previous life, i.e. by what ‘karma’ they had achieved.

In places the Upanishads were very specific. If you had stolen grain in one life, you would become a rat in the next. If you killed a priest, you would be reborn as a pig. By twinning reincarnation and karma, the principle that you reap what you sow was set in stone. The Upanishads made it plain that there was not one, single journey upwards. Rather, there would be many twists and turns in an individual’s spiritual journey, because that was how the principle of karma operated. It was a gradual process of education, seeking after moksha – the liberation of the soul from the oppression of the body. Part of the learning curve was to see the self in the wider context. The atman – or ‘individual soul part’ – of the Brahman-Atman – or ‘world soul’ – gave people a seed of the divine which had to be cultivated and, ultimately, liberated.

The process of death and rebirth, therefore, was not envisaged as an endless one. The goal was to continue learning and growing until you had reached such a high level of karma that you could relinquish any sense of yourself and be absorbed into the divine, for at the end of the line stood the gods. It was all about self-learning, self-improvement and self-control. When you reached the highest point, the Upanishads said, you were realising your own destiny. Instead of heaven then, one attained a state of mind or of being, described in one passage in the Upanishads as self-abandonment. The way you lived your life could block your ascent: self-centredness, for instance, was deemed to hinder your absorption into what was called the ‘Great Self. ‘Little Self was egotism; ‘Great Self was understanding your place in the divine plan.

In the Kausitaki Upanishad there is a description, using familiar imagery of place and landscape, to convey the idea of union with the infinite spirit or brahman, but there is little sense of the reader being invited to take what he or she reads literally. It seems instead an effort to put into words what is in fact beyond words. When people depart this world, it states, they go to the moon, which is both the doorway to new life – rebirth on earth – and to the final destination. When they get to the moon, most become rain and are rained down on to the earth, where they are reborn. (Later Hindu belief allowed for a place of temporary respite, called Priti Loka, where one could recharge one’s batteries before returning to earth.) A small number of people, however, are allowed to pass into the inner sanctum where a long, winding path, lined by solicitous angel-like nymphs, leads to the world of brahman:

He first arrives at the lake Ara. He crosses it with his mind, but those who go into it without complete knowledge drown in it. Then he arrives near the watchmen, Muhurta, but they flee from him. Then he arrives at the river Vijara, which he crosses with just his mind. There he shakes off his good and bad deeds, which fall upon his relatives – the good deeds upon the ones he likes and the bad deeds upon the ones he dislikes. It is like this – as a man driving a chariot would look down and observe the two wheels of his chariot, so he looks down and observes the days and nights, the good and bad deeds, and all the pairs of opposites. Freed from his good and bad deeds, this man, who has knowledge of brahman, goes on to brahman.

(Upanishads, translated by Patrick Olivelle)

Brahman, the divine soul anthropomorphised and sitting on a couch that is described as ‘life breath’, with one leg each for past, present, prosperity and nourishment, asks the new arrival to identify him or herself:

I am the season. I am the offspring of the season. I was born from the womb of space as the semen for the wife, as the radiance of the year, as the self [atman] of every being. You are the self of every being. I am who you are … the real.

The system of reincarnation and karma was closely linked in the Upanishads with earthly developments, notably the institutionalisation of the caste system in around 500 BC. Your karma was measurable by what class you belonged to on earth. It was difficult, therefore, within any one life-time to rise through the ranks. Hence the Brahmins (or priestly caste) were acknowledged as enjoying good karma accumulated in previous lives, while the Shudras (or servant caste) were suffering as a result of past bad karma. Ultimately, it made for an enclosed and hopeless world-view, effectively shutting off the possibility of developing and growing within a life and rising above your circumstances.

In so far as they were seen to buttress the existing political order by giving it a divine stamp of approval, the Upanishads came under attack. Moreover, because they taught that reaching the point of absorption into the Great Self was extremely rare, and that, even when achieved, it was a divine status that could easily be lost, with the consequent return to death and rebirth, their core message became, for many, a depressing and pessimistic one. Samara was part of an eternal grind of Sisyphean proportions.

Two movements arose simultaneously to challenge this bleak prospect. Mahavira (c. 540–468 BC), the most revered figure among the Jains, and Siddhartha Gautama Buddha (c. 563-c. 483) both suggested that karma should be seen as an exclusively spiritual quality which could not be directed to the practical end of propping up the caste system: no matter what level of society you were born into, you could still be a good spirit and grow and develop towards the ultimate within yourself inside that one lifetime. Mahavira advocated an asceticism, which included veganism, nudity and celibacy, and nonviolence towards all living creatures as the key to salvation from the cycles of reincarnation. His was a rigorous self-help credo, placing as a realisable goal liberation from the flesh and the world into a realm of mental and spiritual bliss called Isatpragbhara or Kevala at the top of the universe.

Jainism was a fundamentalist version of mainstream Hinduism and continues to thrive today with around two million adherents. Much more widespread, however, are the 350 million Buddhists worldwide (though very few are now in India itself). Buddhism took a gentler, less extreme course. Siddhartha Gautama was born in the sixth century BC, the son of a king in the foothills of the Himalayas in the north of India. His legend tells that when he was a young man he married, but he was afflicted by a strange malaise. He abandoned his prosperous family and his life of pleasure and indulgence, embarking instead on fasting, asceticism and meditation on sacred texts, finally achieving release from earthly desires and suffering under a Bodhi tree in his Great Enlightenment. Life on earth could be miserable, he taught, and each must seek liberation in this life, not by the self-denial of the Jains, or the resignation of the Upanishads, but rather by searching after knowledge of spiritual truths. There were, he said, Four Noble Truths which demonstrated that misery was caused by craving which in its turn could be cured by means of the Noble Eightfold Path. This led to the breaking of samsara and, ultimately, to nirvana – a mental state of blessedness. The eight steps on the path concerned growing in understanding and spiritual wisdom, living a moral life, and cultivating the mental discipline to prepare for nirvana. In Sanskrit, the word nirvana means ‘extinguished’ and for Buddha – the ‘enlightened one’ – it was a place for the extinguishing of human misery and cravings by self-knowledge.

While Buddha accepted the cycle of reincarnation and karma taught by the Upanishads, he offered as a release from samsara an achievable nirvana. Part of that nirvana was the knowledge of a deity, but, unlike Judaism, Buddha focused not on a personal god but on individual and internal enlightenment. This could, Buddha warned, be a long time coming. One of the most popular books in Buddhism is the Jatakas – birth-stories – which contains some 550 accounts of previous births of the Buddha in various human and animal forms.

Nirvana was not supernatural. ‘He did not rely,’ writes his biographer, the distinguished religious historian, Karen Armstrong, ‘on divine aid from another world, but was convinced that nirvana was a state that was entirely natural to human beings and could be experienced by any genuine seeker. Gautama believed that he could find the freedom he sought right in the midst of this imperfect world. Instead of waiting for a message from the gods, he would search within himself for the answer, explore the furthest reaches of his mind and exploit all his physical resources.’

From the third century BC, Buddhism began to spread, notably to China. Legend tells that in the first century BC a Han emperor sent envoys along the Silk Route to India. They returned with written versions of Siddhartha Gautama’s teachings which so impressed their readers that Buddhism immediately took root in China. The truth is more complex. Whereas in other parts of southeast Asia Buddhism had quickly and easily assimilated with existing beliefs, in China it stood in stark contrast to the two dominant ideologies, Confucianism and Taoism, both much more perfunctory in their attitude to the afterlife and transcendence. There was, therefore, a clear choice and a long period of conflict and competition.

Confucianism was a decidedly worldly creed which discouraged any great emphasis on either the hereafter or the mystical, and promoted instead practical imperatives on social responsibility, collective action, family values and hard work. Confucius (551–479 BC) was the codifier of an existing but ill-defined system of natural justice, someone who took received wisdom and moulded it in a robust package of beliefs. He was notably inhospitable to any supernatural concepts, but he did appeal to the individual to develop their intellectual powers and to act fairly in terms of following ‘the way of heaven’. This led all, whether high-born or low-born, ultimately to the reward of Tian, a paradise for virtuous souls governed by a ‘supreme spiritual presence’. This supreme being was later to be confused by Confucians with the person of the Emperor of China, in an effort to shore up political authority, but it was an understandable mistake for Confucius had great respect for the instruments of government (though he did not regard rulers as divine per se). The supreme spiritual being was ill-defined and vague, certainly not a Western-style god of judgement, and a force seldom active on earth.

Tian was not, characteristically, an original idea of Confucius’s. Meaning ‘sky’ it had been a part of Chinese thought for several thousand years before the philosopher annexed it to his code of ethics as a reward for good behaviour. Traditionally, Tian was ruled over by the god Tianshen and those who joined him there after death would be nobles or kings. Some Chinese tombs discovered by archaeologists, thought to belong to rulers dating back to before 1000 BC, include the remains of dogs, horses and servants, all apparently sacrificed so as to assist their master on his passage to Tian.

For the lowly-born, the only chance of entry was as a vassal or a scribe, keeping records by which Tianshen could judge the lives of those who came before him. Confucius, however, rejected such a system and attempted instead to make Tian a more democratic place, open to all on the basis of their earthly virtue and industry rather than rank and the arbitrary judgement of a deity. He was also less enthusiastic about the ancient Chinese practice of ancestor worship, believing it a distraction from current needs, but, again, his teachings have evolved down the years and have been interpreted as making a clear connection between heaven and earth. Hence sacrifices were offered in his name to dead emperors, various nature gods and even to Confucius himself.

Taoism, founded by Lao-tzu in the fifth century BC, was more open than Confucianism to supernatural ideas, but was still fundamentally wary of them. It was a much less worldly credo, rejecting institutions and politics and advocating instead a return to simplicity and harmony with nature in line with Tao – the hidden principle of the universe. The ideal was ‘wu wei’, non-doing or non-action, and in this passive belief system the notion of working to earn some sort of reward in an afterlife was anathema. With such an essentially blank canvas, as the historian Geddes Macgregor writes in Images of Afterlife, Taoism was ‘as much directed towards the this-worldly as has been the philosophy of Confucius. True, as Taoism grew into a popular religion that accommodated all sorts of emotional influences, it became capable of hospitality to almost any sort of practice, including magical techniques for the attainment of immortality, but such developments have tended to be peripheral to the mainstream from the Chinese outlook.’

Taoism is, by its very passivity, something of a jumble of ideas which has been imposed on the vague and amorphous founding principle over the centuries, and therefore at different stages has embraced both a deity – a holy trinity of Three Pure Ones, including Lao-tzu – and an approach to paradise, Mount K’unlun. This nine-level hill leads up through various disciplines to the gateway to eternal bliss which stands at the summit. Those who enter come under the protection of Hsi Wang Mu, a queen with power over the mortality and destiny not only of the dead but also of the living. Her powers are so great that one Tao legend teaches she can dispense a magic potion to her favourites which allows them to experience eternal bliss without having to die first – similar to the dream-like journeys of apocalyptic literature. The focus in the Taoist legend, though, is not so much on what is seen but on plots to steal the potion. Immortality, and the key to it, is more important than the actual nature of life after death.

Set against such worldly belief systems, Buddhism had a strong mystical appeal when it first came to China. Its doctrines of individual liberation stood in contradiction to the more corporatist leanings of Confucianism and Taoism. There has never been one, single form of Chinese Buddhism, but a whole variety of alternatives, some developing highly disciplined monastic schools – for example in Tibet – others straying into magic and sorcery.

Two of these are of particular interest because they developed more explicit ideas of paradise than those of Buddha himself: Ching-tu or ‘Pure Land’ Buddhism was formulated in China by T’an-luan (AD 476–542). Devotees believe that they reach an equivalent to nirvana not only through their own powers and their own interior journey towards transcendence but also through devotion to and dependence upon a later incarnation of the Buddha, Amida Buddha, ‘the Lord of Light’ who presides over a pure land or land of bliss. The modification to encompass a more defined and judgemental deity means that paradise, as that deity’s court, also is necessarily more precise, as set out in the Sukhavativyuha Sutra:

Breezes blow spontaneously, gently moving these bells [that hang from trees in the four corners of the land], which swing gracefully. The breezes blow in perfect harmony. They are neither hot nor cold. They are at the same time calm and fresh, sweet and soft. They are neither fast nor slow. When they blow on the nets and the many kinds of jewels, the trees emit the innumerable sounds of the subtle and sublime Dharma [the principles behind the law] and spread myriad sweet and fine perfumes. Those who hear these sounds spontaneously cease to raise the dust of tribulation and impurity. When the breezes touch their bodies, they all attain a bliss comparable to that accompanying a monk’s attainment of the samadhi of extinction.

Moreover, when they blow, these breezes scatter flowers all over, filling this buddha-field. These flowers fall into patterns, according to their colours, without ever being mixed up. They have delicate hues and strong fragrance. When one steps on these petals, the feet sink four inches. When one lifts the foot, the petals return to their original shape and position.

(from Land of Bliss, Luis Gomez)

This Pure Land is thought to exist in a particular place – beyond the sunset in the West – but it still remains, for all the detail, at heart a state of mind, the end point in the cycle of reincarnation achieved by those who raise themselves mentally and spiritually above day-to-day existence. There may be more of a focus on Ching-tu than on other forms of Buddhism, but still there is none of the resurrection hope that fuels monotheistic heavenly visions.

Tibet was slower than China to develop an interest in Buddhism. Its ancient creed, Bon, was an earthbound spirituality, with deities who were attuned to the landscape. The god Za, for instance, produced hailstones and lightning to damage the crops. This magical link between land and the gods was a practical support for a farming people, and they saw no need to replace it. Buddhism, when it came, had to be imposed on them by their rulers. In the eighth century King Trisongdetsen hoped that Buddhism would be a way of encouraging a higher, more sophisticated and more philosophical culture among his people. When it eventually took root, Tibetan Buddhism held fast to the essential beliefs of Buddha, though it modified them, resorting, for instance, to Vajrayana, a form of meditation undertaken by students and teachers which has the power to bring the enlightened state into everyday life.

Tibetan Buddhism, more so than its near relatives, has traditionally had a strong sense of the closeness of death. The Indian master Padmasambhava, ‘the Lotus-Born’, is credited as the founder of Tibetan Buddhism (though some doubt he ever existed), and he is said to have abandoned palaces to live on the charnel ground, a cemetery where dead bodies were traditionally left to rot as a reminder to the faithful of the unimportance of the human form and also because of a lack of fuel with which to burn corpses. Padmasambhava found the charnel ground an excellent place for meditation on the importance of letting go of your ego and your attachment to this life. It provided, he believed, the impetus to see beyond life and death to ultimate enlightenment.

Tibetan Buddhism followed his emphasis on death. In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, much is made of bardo, or the often frightening gap that opens up when you lose touch with life. It is a transitional state, but covers both the approach of physical death and the preface to enlightenment which can happen while you are alive. The two are seen as one. Bardo is dominated by a brilliant light which allows the true nature of the mind to be seen in all its glory. For those who can take this vision, liberation from the cycle of death and rebirth is at that moment possible, but the Book of the Dead teaches that most people in this transitory state are too confused and so are swept along, via a path of sometimes terrifying, sometimes peaceful, visions to new birth.

Even they offer you a chance to gain understanding, as long as you remain vigilant and alert. A few days after death, there suddenly emerges a subtle illusory dream-body also known as the ‘mental body’. It is impregnated with the after-effects of your past desires, endowed with all sense-faculties, and has the power of unimpeded motion. It can go through rocks, hills, boulders and walls, and in an instant it can traverse any distance. Even after the physical sense-organs are dissolved, sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touches will be perceived, and ideas will be formed. These are the result of energy still residing in the six kinds of consciousness, the after-effects of what you did with your body and mind in the past. But you must know that all you perceive is a mere vision, a mere illusion, and does not reflect any really existing objects.

(Buddhist Scriptures, translated by Edward Conze)

This is followed by visions, by being confronted by a deity with the ‘shining mirror’ of karma, and by the dawning of ‘the six places of rebirth’. Setting out, dazed and desirous on a walk across deserts of burning sands, tormented by beasts who are half human, half animal and by hurricanes, you head for a place of refuge.

Everywhere around you, you will see animals and humans in the act of sexual intercourse. You envy them, and the sight attracts you. If your karmic coefficients destine you to become a male, you feel attracted to females and you hate the males you see. If you are destined to become a female, you will feel love for the males and hatred for the females you see. Do not go near the couples you see, do not try to interpose yourself between them, do not try to take the place of one of them. The feeling which you would then experience would make you faint away, just at the moment when egg and sperm are about to unite. And afterwards you will find that you have been conceived as a human being or as an animal.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead symbolises the penultimate one of the five alternative explanations of what happens after death. Complete oblivion was to be posited later, with the advance of science and reason, and so, long before the birth of Christianity, a choice of four beliefs existed with a shadowy afterlife in the earliest civilisations; immortality of the soul as preached by the Greeks; resurrection of body and soul, increasingly popular within Judaism; and reincarnation, the evolution to a higher form of life in this life and the constant cycle of death and rebirth found in most Eastern traditions.

CHAPTER THREE But Not Life as We Know it

There is a school of thought which claims Jesus was an Essene, and that he is the ‘righteous teacher’ referred to in the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, the case remains unproven and is scorned by many eminent religious historians. What is true is that in Jesus’ pronouncements on heaven and afterlife recorded in the Gospels, he shows more than a touch of Essene influence. Generally, early Christian ideas about heaven broadly mirror the contemplative Essenes in that they are little concerned with the fate of Israel, or indeed with anything to do with this world, being almost exclusively focused on a personal experience of the divine be it compensation for whatever ills have befallen individuals in their earthly lives, or, more simply, anticipation of the promised all-consuming experience in death which will wipe out all that has gone before.

Christianity distanced itself from its Jewish inheritance, in that heaven was seen as being exclusively with God in the hereafter, with no ongoing ties to this world. Gradually, over the centuries, the new religion moved to rejecting the idea of a heaven on earth. God’s kingdom, as far as Christianity was concerned, was elsewhere. The Gospels and epistles offer little by way of brochure details for those contemplating travel to this faraway heaven. In this they mirror their Jewish roots. What they do say is confused, woolly and sometimes downright contradictory. No iconic picture emerges. You take your pick of the options on offer – as indeed Christians have done ever after.

The New Testament gives the overall impression of regarding this particular aspect of eternal life as of little more than academic importance. Certainly there are few echoes of the detail-encrusted dreams of Enoch. Yet at the same time, Jesus and his followers operated within a society where the popularity of inter-testamental literature demonstrates a healthy appetite for speculation about what life after death would be like. The Gospels report that Jesus was occasionally drawn into debates about the nature of heaven. Even in these, though, there is a vagueness, especially around the use of the phrases ‘the kingdom of God’ and ‘the kingdom of heaven’. While the former carries with it the sense of an alternative to secular and prevailing attitudes, and hence could exist on earth, it is also often used interchangeably with ‘the kingdom of heaven’ as a description of a better and separate place ruled over by God.

The confusion seems to revolve around two issues – first fudging the Jewish idea of a renewed earth under direct rule by God so as to embrace it in an all-inclusive picture of heaven; and second the fervent expectation of the second coming and how the early Christians dealt with the disappointment of those hopes. In Mark’s Gospel, written supposedly by St Peter’s interpreter and dated around AD 64, Jesus refers continually to the kingdom of God rather than of heaven. Yet fifteen years later, in Matthew’s writing, when there still had been no second coming and the leaders of the fledgling Christian community were starting to scratch around for ways of explaining this away, there is a higher incidence of the expression ‘the kingdom of heaven’. It postponed the day when Christianity’s claims would be put to a public test.

In both Matthew and Mark there is an account of a discussion Jesus had with a group of Sadducees about the potential fate of a much-married widow in heaven. However, Luke’s later account, said to be written around the same time as Matthew, is the fullest and most intriguing:

Some Sadducees – those who say that there is no resurrection – approached him [Jesus] and they put this question to him, ‘Master, we have it from Moses in writing that if a man’s married brother dies childless, the man must marry the widow to raise up children for his brother. Well then, there were seven brothers; the first, having married a wife, died childless. The second and then the third married the widow. And the same with all seven, they died leaving no children. Finally the woman herself died. Now, at the resurrection, to which of them will she be wife since she had been married to all seven?’

Jesus replied, ‘The children of this world take wives and husbands, but those who are judged worthy of a place in the other world and in the resurrection from the dead do not marry because they can no longer die, for they are the same as angels, and being children of the resurrection they are sons of God. And Moses himself implies that the dead rise again, in the passage about the bush where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is God, not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all men are in fact alive.’ (Luke 20:27–38)

By rejecting the Sadducees’ question – which was clearly a carefully baited trap – Jesus directly questioned a whole barrowload of Jewish notions about the afterlife. If the hereafter has no place for the recreation of earthly relationships, then the time-honoured link with ancestors (implicit in the command to raise your dead brother’s children and much treasured by the Sadducees) is of no importance. Moreover, the breaking of that bond only serves to emphasise Jesus’ description of heaven as somewhere entirely other – not of this world, not concerned with this world, and certainly not a recreation, however cleaned up and diamond-clad; the standard view of the apocalyptic writers. In effect he was saying, yes, there was life after death, but not life as we know it.

By including that striking final sentence about the God of the living, Jesus was moreover making an intriguing proposal. Jewish theology assumed that, save for a tiny number of favoured individuals, all others would have to wait until the day of final judgement to get their exam results and find out if they had gained their place with God in heaven. Yet Jesus seemed to be saying that no such delay was necessary. The three patriarchs he quoted were not kicking their heels in sheol but were already with God in heaven. If God is the God of the living, not the dead, then the righteous dead will have already risen to be fully alive with him. However, it would be dangerous to push this too far – for, given the confusion over the kingdom of God and the kingdom of heaven, it may simply be that Jesus was talking about those who followed God’s commands while on earth being with him already in spirit. In this hint of separating heaven from the day of judgement, and allowing for a fast track for entrants, rather than admission at one fell swoop come the last day, Jesus was creating a picture of heaven coexisting with earthly life that had hitherto been little known in Judaism.

Jesus’ questioning of conventional wisdom on the afterlife was taken a step further by another passage in Luke’s Gospel which contrasted the fate of a rich man and Lazarus, the beggar at his gates. Lazarus, covered with sores that dogs licked, was taken up to heaven by the Old Testament figure of Abraham. The rich man by contrast went to hell from where he looked up, saw Lazarus, and begged him to dip his finger in water to cool his tongue:

‘My son,’ Abraham replied, ‘remember that during your life good things came your way, just as bad things came the way of Lazarus. Now he is being comforted here while you are in agony. But that is not all: between us and you a great gulf has been fixed, to stop anyone, if he wanted to, crossing from our side to yours, and to stop any crossing from your side to ours.’

The rich man replied, ‘Father, I beg you then to send Lazarus to my father’s house since I have five brothers, to give them warning so that they do not come to this place of torment too.’

‘They have Moses and the prophets,’ said Abraham, ‘let them listen to them.’ (Luke 16:19–31)

This was another unambiguous rejection of any notion that the dead could communicate with the living, but in this story the reports of Jesus added more detail about heaven. Once you’re in, you’re in for ever, Abraham says. By the same token, once you’re consigned to hell, there’s no way back into God’s favour. It’s all very final: there are two tracks for immortality and you can’t switch midstream. Though the idea of judgement on the basis of what you have done in life was already well-established in Judaism, here Jesus was refining the criteria by which those judgements would be made. The poor, it seems, would enjoy positive discrimination while the rich would have to work doubly hard to earn their passage. Heaven’s standards would not be, he was saying, the same as earth’s.

Taken together, the two passages debunked another long-standing concept – that only a select few could attain heaven. Lazarus was there, along with the oft-married widow and her various spouses. At his crucifixion, Jesus also promised the thief who died next to him: ‘Today you will be with me in paradise.’ (Luke 23:43) Clearly this would be no exclusive club for the great and good with lesser mortals blackballed – quite the opposite, in fact. Whether it would take a literal, physical shape, however, Jesus didn’t specify. In these accounts, he demonstrated almost no interest in the question of bodily resurrection – though his comments about heaven being entirely separate from this world would seem to show a coolness on the subject. Heaven for Jesus was only one thing – oneness with God. That oneness might be spiritual, mental, physical, or all three. He offered few clues, save in the vaguest of terms. According to John’s Gospel, at the Last Supper Jesus promised his apostles life everlasting with the words ‘there are many rooms in my father’s house’. (John 14:2)

In reading the Gospels, it is tempting to see Jesus self-consciously setting out to influence and recast the Jewish canon on the afterlife. This may indeed have been the case, for he was certainly an iconoclast, but these accounts cannot be taken too literally. Jesus certainly did not write them. As documentation on his words and actions, they are at best second-hand. They may reflect the kernel of a central argument Jesus made, but more likely than not they give more of an insight into the particular preoccupations of individuals who were offering their own interpretation of what he reportedly said. The Gospels are, crudely put, not to be taken as gospel, but rather as evidence of a heated, ongoing debate within the leadership of the early church as it separated from Judaism. With regard to the afterlife, the last judgement, the immortal soul and the question of bodily resurrection, there were many conflicting threads to this debate – all of them owing something to Judaism and all of them presenting the next generation of Christians with a hazy, confused picture of heaven.

Alongside the words ascribed to Jesus must be considered those of St Paul. In his biography of Paul (Paul: The Mind of the Apostle), the historian and polemicist A. N. Wilson holds that it is impossible to underestimate the importance of this saint in shaping Christian thought. Jesus was, Wilson states bluntly, a minor ‘Galilean exorcist’ interested in Jewish matters and one of many messiahs who two thousand years ago attracted the attention of a people desperate for divine assistance in overthrowing their Roman overlords. The tiny cult that surrounded him after his death would, he says, have petered out like all the rest had it not attracted the attention of Paul of Tarsus who is, for Wilson, ‘a richly imaginative but confused religious genius who was able to draw out a mythological and archetypical significance from the death of a Jewish hero’.

Wilson is certainly right to note how little Paul’s writings owe to any recorded words or deeds of Jesus, save for the overriding inspiration of the image of the crucified Christ. Paul, a Greek-speaker, borrowed as liberally from Greco-Roman culture as from Judaism and as a missionary was always alert in fashioning his teachings to the need to create something that would have resonance in the Gentile world rather than simply satisfy an already fragmented Israel. In this sense, today’s Christians are not Christians at all, but Paulians.

Another important factor in weighing Paul’s writings is that most of them predate the Gospel accounts. His are the earliest records of the Jesus cult. Rather than see Paul as refining Jesus’ message and words, as set out in the Gospels, it is more accurate to see the Gospel accounts as offering another take on stories that may have been in the oral tradition, and that may have been adopted as a counterpoint to Paul within the disharmonious and scattered early Church.

Paul differed from Jesus on several points about afterlife. Certainly there was nothing in Paul’s writings that suggested that the dead would rise again with God before the last judgement, though Paul fervently believed that this event was near at hand. His view on resurrection came, as with all else in his writing, from the symbol of the risen Christ.

We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and that it will be the same for those who have died in Jesus: God will bring them with him. We can tell you this from the Lord’s own teaching, that any of us who are left alive until the Lord’s coming will not have any advantage over those who have died. At the trumpet of God, the voice of the archangel will call out the command and the Lord himself will come down from heaven; 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. So we shall stay with the Lord for ever. (I Thess 4:14–17)

With no precise location of this heaven ‘in the air’ and ‘in the clouds’ mentioned elsewhere, Paul might well have been speaking metaphorically, but both the apostle and Jesus were utterly at one in emphasising the central importance of being with God in heaven and in dismissing Jewish hopes for an earthly messianic kingdom. From the perspective of earth, Paul wrote in one of his best-known phrases that we can only imagine meeting God as ‘we see through a glass, darkly’. However, he gave the theocentric line an imaginative new gloss: God’s kingdom, he argued, was already here in one form because Christ was everywhere where people worshipped him and praised him. (This interpretation may indeed be what the author of Luke is driving at when he has Jesus speak of the ‘God of the living’.) Heaven, by contrast, would bear little resemblance to this life because, according to Paul, our resurrected bodies would not be our earthly ones.

For we know that when the tent that we live in on earth is folded up, there is a house built by God for us, an everlasting home not made by human hands, in the heavens. In this present state, it is true, we groan as we wait with longing to put on our heavenly home over the other; we should like to be found wearing clothes and not be without them. Yes, we groan and find it a burden being still in this tent, not that we want to strip it off, but to put on the second garment over it and to have what must die taken up into life … we remember that to live in the body means to be exiled from the Lord. (2 Cor 5:1–7)

The Acts of the Apostles tells us that Paul was a tent-maker by trade, so the metaphor he uses is apt. The separation of body and soul was, as we have already seen, a distinctly Greek idea, especially in the hands of Plato, and Paul knew Greek as well as any of the early Christian leaders. His talk, of a ‘spiritual body’, however, was never precise or well-defined. And his insistence that ‘flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom’ (1 Cor 15:50) was strangely at odds with his focus on the image of the risen Christ – who ascended to heaven body and soul.

Indeed there is a good deal of confusion in Paul’s writings, for two verses further on, he states that the dead would be raised ‘imperishable … because our present perishable nature must put on imperishability’. This sounds suspiciously like bodily resurrection. Paul may have spoken Greek, have read Plato, and been influenced by him on the separation of body and soul, but he was also a Jew and Jews did not split up humanity in this fashion. Some argue that the distinction he was making was between ‘flesh’ (sarx), by which he meant the whole human being, body and soul, turned away from God, and ‘spirit’ (pneuma) the whole human being, body and soul, turned towards God.

‘Conceivably, had Paul known about atoms and molecules,’ writes E. P. Sanders, the American religious historian and admirer of Paul, ‘he would have put all this in different terms. What he is affirming and denying is clear: resurrection means transformed body, not walking corpse or disembodied spirit. We can hardly criticise him for not being able to define “spiritual body” more clearly. His information on the topic was almost certainly derived entirely from his experience of encountering the risen Lord.’

In spiritual man, then, Paul could have been suggesting an entirely new kind of human being, for whom there were no adequate words, essentially a transcendent being. Such a radical thought could then be placed alongside Paul’s habit of invoking other notions similarly revolutionary (for his time) – namely that there were no divisions between men and women, slave or freeman, Jew or Gentile.

The same might be said about the passage in his Second Letter to the Corinthians which links in closely with this line of thought. Here Paul wrote of a man (taken by many to be a thinly veiled reference to Paul himself) who ‘was caught up into paradise’ where he ‘heard things which must not and cannot be put into human language’ and therefore about which he refused to speak when he returned to earth. One approach would be to deduce that here Paul was offering an early hint of what came to be called ‘Jewish Throne Mysticism’. This entailed an inward trip, rather like the Buddhist search for nirvana, but done in the form of a symbolic ascent to a place of greater knowledge undertaken within this life. Paul was then encountering heaven, or salvation, but doing so within himself in a mystical form, a theory not wholly inconsistent with the ideas found in the Paulian writing we have already looked at.

Mysticism has traditionally been a difficult concept for the monotheistic creeds to cope with because it cuts against their practical, naturalistic, action-reward philosophies and their taste for the literal. Yet it is ever-present in the history of heaven down the ages. Derived from the Greek verb musteion, meaning to close the eyes or mouth, mysticism generally refers to an experience of darkness or silence. It has been one of the main ways in which various religious traditions have attempted to explain the inner world of the psyche and the imagination in relation to a deity, and it has obvious parallels with modern-day psychoanalysis.

In the second and third centuries Judaism developed a strong and well-recorded mystical bent as a way of turning away from external realities of political persecution towards a more powerful internalised divine realm. This may already have been around in Paul’s time. The throne of God in this strand of theology was approached via an often terrifying but explicitly imaginary, inward journey through seven heavens. Throne Mysticism thrived within Judaism and even inside the great rabbinic academies until it was overtaken by a new form of mysticism, Kabbalah, in the twelfth century. Karen Armstrong places it in a wider context which links Judaism with other belief systems.

The visions are not ends in themselves, but means to an ineffable religious experience that exceeds normal concepts. They will be conditioned by the particular religious tradition of the mystic. A Jewish visionary will see visions of the seven heavens because his religious imagination is stocked with these particular symbols. Buddhists see various images of Buddhas … Christians visualise the Virgin Mary. It is a mistake for the visionary to see these mental apparitions as objective or as anything more than a symbol of transcendence. Since hallucination is often a pathological state, considerable skill and mental balance is required to handle and interpret the symbols that emerge during the course of concentrated meditation and inner reflection.

(from A History of God)

Hence, arguably, St Paul’s reticence and refusal to go into detail. His experience had frightened him. However, the episode potentially offers a bridge between Judeo-Christian images of heaven and Eastern concepts of nirvana. Moreover, it brings monotheism and pantheism closer together. Islam too, as we shall see, had a similar tradition with Muhammad ascending symbolically to heaven where he saw and yet did not see the divine presence. That final lack of precision is key to identifying Throne Mysticism. The author must struggle but fail to find the right words, whether it be because they are unsure about what exactly they are seeing, or whether, like St Paul, they simply refuse to go into detail.

On another level, Jewish Throne Mysticism links the outward search for a blueprint of heaven with an acknowledgement that afterlife can only ever, for the living, be an imaginary thing, a type of contemplative experience. This is an important thought to keep in mind when examining the final book of the Bible, Revelation. The traditional view is that Revelation was written by the apostle John in the closing years of the first century, when he had been exiled to the Greek island of Patmos. As a source of inspiration to a Christian church then being persecuted by the Romans, he sent out a vision of the final victory of God to the seven churches of Asia. The basis of this judgement is not obvious from the text, religious scholars point out, and the only consensus is that the author was a person called John who considered himself called to be a prophet. Arguably the Bible’s only thorough-going apocalyptic text, Revelation postdated both Paul and the Gospels, and its picture of heaven is clearly governed more by political realities of the time than by any pure or philosophical vision of paradise. Heaven is described in such a way as to cast a poor light on the fate of the late first-century Israel and to mark a stark contrast with the Roman world. If it was composed, as has been suggested, during the persecution of Domitian (AD 51–96), then the terrible fate of the damned towards the end of the book could be read as a quite unholy fantasy about what Christians would like to do to their persecutors if they ever got the chance.

The author of The Revelation to John recounts in classic apocalyptic style how a door was opened in heaven and an angel took him up to watch a heavenly liturgy. The spectacle is something of a cross between a tacky musical extravaganza, a freak show and a zoo, but it remains the most detailed – and the most quoted – of the Bible’s very few descriptions of the place of eternal rest for the faithful. God presides at the centre of events in human form, seated on a throne:

Round the throne in a circle were twenty four thrones, and on them I saw twenty-four elders sitting, dressed in white robes with golden crowns on their heads. Flashes of lightning were coming from the throne and the sound of peals of thunder, and in front of the throne were seven flaming lamps burning, the seven spirits of God. Between the throne and myself was a sea that seemed to be made of glass, like crystal. In the centre, grouped around the throne itself, were four animals with many eyes in front and behind. The first animal was like a lion, the second like a bull, the third animal had a human face and the fourth animal was like a flying eagle. Each of the four animals had six wings and had eyes all the way round as well as inside; and day and night they never stopped singing. (Rev 4:1–8)

As part of the liturgy, the four horsemen of the apocalypse appeared and were sent to earth to wreak God’s vengeance and dispense His judgement. There were, the author reported, a huge number of people in front of the throne who had been persecuted for faith. ‘The one who sits on the throne will spread His tent over them,’ the author writes, in what must be a direct reference to Paul. They would never go hungry or thirsty again. There would be no sun or wind to plague them because the Lamb who was at the throne would be their shepherd and lead them to the springs of living water where God would wipe away their tears.

The combination of the rituals of a secular court and a Christian liturgy is emphasised later in Revelation when the exact lay-out of heaven is given, based on a Jewish synagogue and the Temple itself. This new Jerusalem would be surrounded by high walls, with twelve gates, each watched over by a designated angel. It would be square in shape – 12,000 furlongs (1500 miles) long and 12,000 furlongs wide. The walls would be of diamonds (echoes of Enoch), and the city itself of pure gold that would have the appearance of polished glass. There would be no day or night – God would provide the light.

Any ambiguity about the new Jerusalem being real and concrete is abandoned by Revelation. It is self-consciously a work of imagination and dazzling imagery. Though it appears superficially to be endorsing the hopes of the Babylonian exiles in the Book of Isaiah, it is reinterpreting them, detaching heaven from this world and relocating it in the cosmos, albeit maintaining a symbolic link. So when the author writes of Jesus returning to earth, banishing Satan and initiating one thousand years of messianic rule (the biblical millennium which got fundamentalist Christians over-excited in 2000), he should not be taken too literally. After this one thousand years Satan’s power would be much reduced but he would still harry and mislead humankind. Finally, he would begin a final futile attack by besieging ‘the camp of the saints which is the city that God loves. But fire will come down on them from heaven and consume them’. In the moment of God’s ultimate triumph, the Book of Life would be opened. Those named in it would be saved and ascend to heaven, those not would be consigned to the depths with Satan.

Frustratingly, once again this heaven of the clouds is only partly described:

Then the angel showed me the river of life, rising from the throne of God and of the Lamb and flowing crystal clear down the middle of the city street. On either side of the river were the trees of life, which bear twelve crops of fruit in a year, one in each month and the leaves of which are the cure for all nations. (Rev 22:1–3)

The references to the throne at the centre of events suggests another possible reading – in line with Jewish Throne Mysticism – that would make Revelation a very dramatic vision of transcendence which exists behind outwardly recognisable phenomena and which may break out at the end of time. The author, in this scenario, was trying to envisage poetically, with equal measures of ecstasy and awfulness, the Second Coming and the presence of God on earth.

Despite its drama, end-of-time flavour and position as the eye-catching final act of the Bible cycle, Revelation can in no way be counted as resolving all remaining unanswered questions, least of all those about a mental, imaginary or physical heaven. Despite the lack of a clear vision for Christianity on the subject throughout the New Testament, at least the parameters of the debate had been established. By taking bodily resurrection from Judaism and the immortal soul from the Greco-Roman tradition, Christianity had the makings of a distinctive position. As yet that paradise was overshadowed by the anticipation of an actual Second Coming. When this failed to materialise, and as the early Christians suffered persecution and death for their new-found faith at the hands of the Roman Empire and its pagan citizenry, the issue of eternal fate gradually came more and more to the fore in the debate and divisions of the early Church Fathers.

CHAPTER FOUR The Compensation Culture

In its first half-millennium, Christianity grew from being a fringe cult in Galilee to multinational status as the official religion of the Roman Empire. If its rise was meteoric, it certainly wasn’t smooth. There were periods of intense persecution by the authorities, and even after the Church had seemingly reached a safe harbour by joining forces with the Roman establishment in AD 381, its problems were not all solved, for by AD 410 Rome itself was sacked by the Goths and the empire crumbled in the West, posing the challenge of a period of instability, decline and lawlessness.

Within the burgeoning Church community were many rows and splits. Once the hope of an imminent Second Coming, so tangible in the New Testament, had passed, the leadership began to adjust to working with, and explaining God’s role in, an imperfect world. They had to build a comprehensive theology to unite and bring order to their Church, based on ideas, which were often confused, passed down by the first generations of Christians. What ultimately emerged was certainly more systematic, more enforceable, though often no more coherent. In the case of heaven, this was the period in which the three distinct positions – theocentric, anthropocentric and a combination of both – emerged.

The names of three ‘early Church Fathers’ in particular dominate this era of consolidation, and they can mark for us the boundaries of the debate on the nature of heaven. These Church Fathers were not, as their designation suggests, a static group of theologians stooped endlessly over their Bibles. Indeed, there was as yet no Bible as we now know it (this was completed by Jerome, in c. AD 404). They were not only theologians, but administrators, builders, guides, preachers and proselytisers. The first of these remarkable men is Irenaeus of Lyons (c. AD 130–c. 202), who, as a youth in Smyrna in Asia Minor, trained under Bishop Polycarp. Irenaeus later claimed that his mentor had ‘known John and others who had seen the Lord’. Details of Polycarp’s martyrdom are amongst the earliest recorded to have survived, and they give an insight into the persecution that the early Church routinely endured. Challenged by the Roman pro-consul in Smyrna to disown Christ, he refused and was burnt alive in 155. ‘The flames made a sort of arch, like a ship’s sail filled with wind, and they were like a wall around the martyr’s body; and he looked, not like burning flesh, but like bread in the oven or gold and silver being refined in the furnace.’ (Ancient Christian Writers Series, Vol. 6)

Martyrdom was a recurring theme of Irenaeus’s life. After escaping the persecution in Smyrna by travelling to Rome, he later pitched up in Lyons, then a major trading station, second in size in the West only to the imperial capital itself. Its mixed community had sporadic bursts of intolerance, and in a series of flare-ups between 175 and 177 local Christians were targeted and killed by the mob, with the connivance of the local Roman governor. Irenaeus survived, succeeding the murdered Bishop Pothinus as Christian leader in the city. Pothinus’s sufferings are recorded in Eusebius’s early fourth-century History of the Church and clearly illustrate the trials the early Christians faced and the pressing need Irenaeus consequently felt to console his congregation with the hope of eternal life with God.

Blessed Pothinus was over ninety years of age and physically very weak. He could scarcely breathe because of his chronic physical weakness, but was strengthened by spiritual enthusiasm because of his pressing desire for martyrdom. Even when he was dragged before the tribunal … and the whole populace shouted and jeered at him … he bore the noble witness. When the governor asked him ‘Who is the Christians’ God?’, he replied: ‘If you were a fit person, you shall know.’ Thereupon he was mercilessly dragged along beneath a rain of blows, those close by assailing him viciously with hands and feet, and those at a distance hurling at him whatever came to hand, and all thinking it a shocking neglect of their duty to be behind-hand in savagery towards him, for they imagined that in this way they would avenge their gods. Scarcely breathing, he was flung into prison, and two days later he passed away.

(Eusebius: History of the Church, edited by Andrew Louth)

Pothinus was one of the earliest saints of the church. His feast day, 2 June, marks the day not of his birth but of his death – for that, it was believed, was the time of his birth in heaven. This gives us an insight into how the first Christians regarded death at the hands of their tormentors, and the particular appeal it must have had for some as a sure-fire ticket to eternal life with God. Martyrdom was seen as a magnificent catapult to a heavenly place. Moreover, it was believed that the sacrifice of the martyrs would hasten the Second Coming, for their enemies were seen in these apocalyptic times not just as lions and gladiators, but as embodiments of the Devil. The corollary of doing battle with Satan was safe passage to heaven, as can be seen in The Passion of Perpetua, reputedly the autobiography of a young mother torn limb from limb by wild beasts in Carthage in 203 on account of her faith. While still in prison awaiting her fate, Perpetua dreamt of fighting Satan – in the form of ‘an evil-looking Egyptian’. She also ascended in her imagination to heaven on a golden ladder.

I saw a garden of immense extent in the midst of which was sitting a white-haired man dressed as a shepherd; he was tall, and he was milking sheep. And he raised his head and looked at me and said ‘Welcome, child.’ And he called me and gave me a mouthful of cheese from the sheep he was milking; and I took it with my hands and ate of it, and all those who were standing about said ‘Amen.’ And then I woke up.

(translated by J. Armitage Robinson)

This is classic vision-literature and the symbolism of the eternal reward should outweigh any temptation to draw a literal interpretation, but Perpetua’s account, as well as highlighting the attraction of martyrdom, also demonstrates the ongoing and widening (in terms of the details summoned up) tendency to imaginatively explore the landscape of heaven.

Back in Lyons, there were more practical problems confronting Irenaeus. Christians there had been burnt alive by their persecutors who then threw their ashes into the Rhone in a calculated riposte to what they clearly saw as the foolish and even dangerous idea of bodily resurrection. As a gesture, it had great impact. The destruction of the body by flames and the scattering of mortal remains prompted fears amongst the survivors that such treatment left their loved ones with no hope of heaven come judgement day. (Catholicism for this very reason remained opposed to cremation until the late twentieth century.) Irenaeus’s response was to calm such fears and, in the process, fashion a theology of heaven which presented it explicitly as the reward for indignities suffered in God’s name on this earth. A decent reward, if it was to have the desired effect, needed to be specific, so Irenaeus spoke not in vague, imaginary tones but in tangible terms of a cleaned-up version of this life.

In making an explicit link between martyrdom and a well-defined reward in heaven, Irenaeus may have taken his cue from the many pagan religions which were still strong throughout northern Europe in this period. If the martyrs were seen as warriors for the Christian cause, then there was a clear parallel with the warriors of the Teutonic mythological system, which continued to dominate on the German plane and in Scandinavia. It taught that those who lost their lives in battle for their gods would enjoy eternal life in Valhalla, a great palace presided over by Odin, the god of war and wisdom. Valhalla was a martial heaven, its rafters made of spears and its roof of polished shields. It had 540 doors, each wide enough to accommodate 800 warriors marching abreast into battle with the devil-like Fenrir and the powers of the underworld. When they were not fighting, the warriors were singing battle songs, recalling great generals, feasting on a magic boar, Saehrimnir, and drinking the mead of the she-goat, Heidrum, served to them by valkyries, armour-clad maidens who were at their disposal. Physically far removed from any Christian notion of heaven, Valhalla’s importance was more psychological than physical, an example to Irenaeus with a proven track record of how to use a tangible afterlife to inspire his troops in what was, in these times of persecution, a fight to the death for their faith.

The world itself was not flawed, Irenaeus taught. It had been, and remained, God’s creation. The problem was the Romans. His road map of heaven removed them from the picture, along with all other tormentors and sources of grief, but left the basic terrain as it was on earth. Often described as the greatest theologian of the second century, Irenaeus decanted much of his thinking into Against Heresies which survives complete in a Latin translation. It details a three-stage plan of eternal life, one following the other: the here and now, the Kingdom of the Messiah, and the Kingdom of God the Father.

In the present, there was persecution, brutality and a time of trial, but that was created by man and not by God. Principally, it was the Romans and their pagan allies who were at fault, but on a more philosophical level, Irenaeus identified original sin, the betrayal of God’s creation by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, as having left all of humankind with an openness to choose evil over good in this life.

As a counterbalance to this persecution, Irenaeus then allowed for a world stripped of such negative influences – the Kingdom of the Messiah. This was the equivalent of the thousand-year rule of the Messiah over the earth predicted in Revelation – which historians suggest was a Christian text far more important to apocalyptic minds in the second century than the Gospels – and Irenaeus was again keen to stress to his readers that such passages should be taken literally, not as some sort of metaphor. In his reading of Revelation, Irenaeus found an explanation for the delay in the Second Coming. For first, the book predicted, there must be a battle between good and evil on earth. The struggle of the Christians with their Roman persecutors was, for Irenaeus, just that. The many martyrs were therefore the preface to a second coming and the establishment of a messianic kingdom. ‘For it is just,’he wrote in Against Heresies, ‘that in the very creation in which they toiled or were afflicted, being proved in every way of suffering, they should receive the reward of their suffering. In the creation in which they were slain because of their love of God, in that they should be revived again.’

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