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
