Indeed, early Christianity included more than one version of the afterlife, and not all of them hinged on the heaven and hell dichotomy. While it maintained that the soul traveled to another realm after death, that realm was not necessarily the one envisioned by Plato. Having adopted Plato’s framework of the afterlife, Christianity then filled it with its own ideas. L’Enfer by anonymous master via Wikimedia Commons “We must wholeheartedly desire and love things and place no value on what is earthly and human,” he opined. 354 CE), which were influenced greatly by Platonism. This view is reflected in the writings of Augustine’s (b. For that reason, philosophy is, as Plato puts it, “the practice of death.”Ĭhristianity posits that Earth is small and offers a momentary pitstop on the way to God’s infinite truth, which resides elsewhere. That is, philosophy allows a person to focus on thinking and rationality while alive and thus to draw closer to the truth of the afterlife before death’s arrival. According to classics scholar Deborah Kamen, Nietzsche and others interpreted Plato to mean that life is a sickness death its cure. That is why Socrates, whose death Plato describes in the Phaedo, is content in his final hours. The body, on the other hand, is essentially a prison preventing the soul from accessing that better realm. This celestial realm is a place of pure rationality, where perfect qualities such as equality and beauty-the “essence of true existence”-are located. Plato argued as early as the year 360 BCE in the Phaedo that the soul is immortal, and that upon death, it leaves the body and moves on to another realm, outside the physical one. The Harrowing of Hell by Jacob van Swanenburgh via Wikimedia Commons Within a century after Jesus’s death, this heaven and hell binary became the religion’s dominant paradigm. By the end of the first century most Christians, converted from Greco-Roman paganism, embraced this conception, which the Greek philosopher Plato had delineated before Christianity’s establishment. Though absent from the very early days of Christianity, the understanding that a soul does go somewhere and lives forever became intrinsic to it. As Matthew tells it, offenders are sent to “the outer darkness there men will weep and gnash their teeth,” (25: 30). Jesus will return, everyone will be resurrected, and the evil will be made to suffer. The third conception, drawn from the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke), embraces damnation, and holds within it the seeds of the afterlife we know today. Satan thrown into Hell, last judgement of the dead, from Apocalypsis, 1420 via Wikimedia Commons (While Corinthians, for example, is believed to have been written by Paul who supports annihilation, certain scholars think that some of his verses point to this second conception.) Offenders may suffer some kind of punishment, but God will save sinners and good men alike. This idea appears in Corinthians, Timothy, and Colossians. The second conception delivers universal salvation: all will rise on the day of judgment. The idea here is one of annihilation: one day, the just will be resurrected and received by God. In other words, the dead remain so until the Second Coming. Its idea of what comes after death focuses on a distant future, when those who have perished are reanimated and their dormant souls are reunited with their bodies. The conception of the Christian afterlife underwent fundamental changes over the centuries, and heaven and hell as unique post-mortem destinations were never part of the faith’s origins.ĭating somewhere between the years 50 and 150 CE, the New Testament only includes mention of an afterlife, as we conceive of it today-as happening after the resurrection. These concepts are so ingrained in fact, we tend to think that they’ve always existed. It’s difficult to dispute the simple elegance of such a system. This construct does what this world cannot-it brings about justice. The modern, Christian idea of the afterlife suggests that upon death, a soul travels to either heaven or hell. In 1927, Bertrand Russell, the Nobel Prize–winning philosopher, delivered a lecture entitled “Why I Am Not a Christian.” Later published in essay form, the work asserts something many people prefer not to consider: “ there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying….” Christianity, Russell says, proposes a solution to this problem: the afterlife. The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR.
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