DO PEOPLE REALLY WANT TO LIVE FOREVER?
DO HEAVEN AND HELL EXIST, AND WHAT ARE THEY LIKE?
By Piotr Bienkowski author of Where airy voices lead
The best book currently available on the meaning of immortality and its interpreters through the ages. Learned, wide-ranging and wise, this is essential reading for the Hamlets among us! Geoffrey Scarre, Professor of Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, Durham University
As an archaeologist, it seems to me that immortality – like food, shelter and sex – is one of the core elements of every human life and of every culture. I honestly don’t know of any culture, past or present, which has not expressed, in some way or other, a fascination for the idea of living forever and tried to achieve it in some way. And while some people might say that they don’t believe in any sort of immortality, and don’t even care about it, my suspicion is that everyone has at least thought about it at some point. It is something that links us to every other human being, past, present and future.
The world’s oldest epic is, tellingly, about the search for immortality. The hero Gilgamesh, who was considered in Babylonian tradition to be a real king, fails to find real immortality, and concludes that the only route to immortality is through fame and children. ‘I will establish for ever a name eternal!’, he announces. His memorial and legacy are the city walls of Uruk, the greatest city of its day, and his name has been linked with them ever since.
My book Where Airy Voices Lead is a global history of immortality, from the ancient Near East to the present. It looks at the origins and development of all the different beliefs in how to achieve immortality: resurrection, reincarnation and other types of transformation, the immortal soul, and extending life indefinitely. And if none of these routes to immortality is attainable, symbolic immortality through fame was a favoured alternative of heroes and emperors, who employed scribes to magnify (or even invent) and memorialise their achievements.
Many – or perhaps most – of the major religions try to ease the fear of death by offering some sort of afterlife, usually in return for adhering to a set of principles and actions that are deemed ‘good’. If there is an afterlife, where do we end up: do heaven and hell exist?
Many people today believe in an eternal heaven and hell. A 2014 Pew survey found that 72 per cent of US adults believe in heaven and 58 per cent in hell. Yet there are no single agreed descriptions of heaven and hell. Just the Christian view of heaven alone has been endlessly imagined over two thousand years with little consensus: as a heavenly Jerusalem; a garden paradise; a place where angels sing eternal praises to God; where we meet our loved ones and remember everything; a place with hierarchies and grades of reward, where our bodies are perfected and purified and we have no desires; or as a state of perfection and love outside time and space, which is not a ‘place’ at all – and sometimes a mix of these.
Different religions, cultures and individuals have imagined myriad possible heavens and hells, although there are overlaps and common motifs. For example, heaven as a temple or palace, a heavenly city or a garden paradise have become traditional motifs, especially within Christianity (but also Islam). Some of these motifs originated in early Jewish writings in the third and second centuries BCE, when the concepts of heaven and hell were developed for the first time as places of reward and punishment by persecuted Jewish sects who believed their reward would come in the afterlife, as recompense for their earthly sufferings.
Other traditions adapted motifs originally encountered even earlier, in ancient Greece, for example the idea of Elysium, which is first mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey, an idyllic place where ‘there is no snow, no heavy storms or rain, but Ocean always sends up gentle breezes’. This itself was possibly borrowed from descriptions of the ancient Egyptian afterlife, already about two thousand years old by the time Homer was writing.
Similarly, the first description of a recognisably modern hell – a combination of fire with punishment for the wicked – is found in Virgil’s Aeneid, written in the first century BCE as a commission for the emperor Augustus. Virgil describes Tartarus, the place of punishment for the wicked, where souls are judged after death, as having wide battlements, a triple wall and a huge gate, encircled by a river of red-hot flames. But Virgil himself may well have borrowed the idea of a fiery underworld from slightly earlier Jewish writings about tours of hell, which mention a fiery abyss. This abyss, the Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, became the Jewish hell, and was adopted by Islam in its Arabic form Jahannam.
Cultural borrowing permeates ideas about the afterlife, and it can be difficult to untangle which idea came first. The word ‘paradise’ itself comes from the Greek paradeisos, used in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, for the Garden of Eden, and the Greek word in its turn was borrowed from Old Persian pairadaeza, which means ‘enclosure’, ‘park’ or ‘garden’. The shift to the meaning of paradise as a heavenly pleasure garden, or heaven itself, and the abode of the righteous dead in the afterlife, was secondary, possibly inspired by the Greek idea of Elysium, at a time when Greek ideas were influential on early Jewish and Christian thought.
One pattern stands out over the millennia: the idea of what heaven is, and who it is for, has been completely flipped around. In our earliest records, from the ancient Near East, heaven was reserved for the gods: humans might visit temporarily, but they cannot stay there. In modern times, it seems it is mostly for humans, and the fulfilment of individual human desires, with the gods (or God) much less apparent.
But alongside the many different types of afterlife over the centuries, legends, myths and stories consider the awful prospect that hard-won immortality might turn out to be a curse rather than a blessing because it could become tedious or unfulfilling, or be too high a price to pay for the individual or society. In these, the immortals often end up craving death.
People sometimes ask: will heaven be boring? Many discussions of whether or not immortality is worth achieving have suggested that being in heaven for all eternity might become dreary and monotonous. But there are so many different descriptions of heaven that, in order to specify whether or not they might be tedious, we have to specify which heaven we are referring to. Medieval visions of heaven were about the Beatific Vision, a face-to-face relationship with God for all eternity, a passive experience which perhaps does not sound attractive to modern ears. The heaven imagined by Emanuel Swedenborg in the eighteenth century, which became immensely popular among later Christians, was a continuation of life on earth, with friends, family, marriage, weddings and sex (but no pregnancies or babies), and opportunities for individual and social progress and development.
The sensual and luxurious heaven of Islam, with its pleasure garden motif derived from classical Elysium, remains a key part of contemporary Muslim belief. It is also a very potent symbol and an important part of the appeal of Islam to certain groups. Far from being boring, it has a reality through the promise of heavenly rewards for martyrdom which address economic and social hardship in this life.
In Where Airy Voices Lead, I explore this problem of living forever further, as covered from classical myths to modern fiction and philosophy, including Gulliver’s Travels and Henry Rider Haggard’s great adventure of immortality, She. The earliest and greatest classical myth about the downside of immortality is the story of Tithonus, written in the seventh or sixth century BCE. Eos, goddess of the dawn, falls in love with the mortal Tithonus. She asks Zeus to make Tithonus immortal, but forgets to ask for eternal youth. So while Eos remains unchanged, Tithonus grows older until she loses interest in him sexually. Once he can no longer move or lift his limbs, she locks him in a room, where he ‘babbles endlessly’. The moral of this ancient story is that there is no remedy for old age. In Tennyson’s poem, written 26 centuries later, the aged, frail Tithonus yearns for death and questions why a man should wish to avoid it.
So perhaps not everyone, once they have reflected on it, wishes to live forever.
READ WHERE AIRY VOICES LEAD TODAY!
Where Airy Voices Lead is impressively global in scope, yet exceedingly nuanced in its appraisal and strikingly dispassionate in tone. Bienkowski’s history demonstrates that any culture’s afterlife beliefs reflect the values of that society. He challenges the reader by arguing that, although none of these types of immortality can be proved, equally none can be dismissed and are deserving of respect and investigation. He concludes that our attitude toward immortality is an ethical choice.
Brian Schmidt, Professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Mediterranean West Asian Cultures, The University of Michigan, author of Israel's Beneficent Dead
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