скачать книгу бесплатно
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 (#ulink_fa9770e0-efbf-5d73-9d2b-27ab77758c04)
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 (#ulink_fada1757-4de3-55d2-8358-94bb8b93601c)
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 (#ulink_83e14eb4-2954-5c6a-b64b-8c3d4ef59247)
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.
