Evidence of things not seen

“After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory” by John Casey (Oxford University Press, 2009, $35.00)

BY WALT CHURA, SFO

We are not often reminded that what we call "history" is not history per se, but the product of gathering, examining and interpreting evidence.

I venture into historiography because some readers of John Casey's intriguing "After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell and Purgatory" may be upset by a number of Casey's assertions about the history and proper interpretation of magisterial teachings on the afterlife, and by his interpretation of certain passages of Scripture concerned with the Four Last Things: death, judgment, heaven and hell.

Casey, a Fellow of Caius College, Cambridge University, is not a theologian. He is, however, as he tells us, Irish and was raised in the stern Catholicism so brutally displayed in the late Frank McCourt's memoir, "Angela's Ashes."

Casey begins his book with a prologue rehearsing the sermon on the Four Last Things from James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," the autobiographical novel describing Joyce's loss of his Catholic faith. Casey assures us that he was taught the same horrific "truths" about the consequences of sin detailed in the sermon.

The author acknowledges that a sea change has occurred, to the horror of a minority, in Catholic thought on these matters since his youth: "For although [the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s] did not formally change any articles of faith, it produced a climate in which some central doctrines seemed to lose their purchase on the Catholic imagination, shaped as it had been by the Counter-Reformation."

"After Lives" is essentially literary, not religious, history. He begins with a brief glance at the evidence that our prehistoric ancestors may have had "intimations of immortality" and describes and interprets Egyptian and Mesopotamian burial practices for clues to their beliefs regarding the time after life here on earth.

He explains the shadowy Sheol of the early Israelites as the abode of the dead and the very late appearance in the Jewish Bible of the concepts of post-mortem judgment and resurrection.

It will surprise and perhaps annoy some that Casey demonstrates the relatively vague, rather scanty and often clearly metaphorical nature of what the New Testament has to say about the afterlife.

Then comes what will be a revelation to many: Casey's evidence for the development of some of our most cherished images of hell, purgatory and heaven from Greco-Roman, patristic and even apocryphal, non-canonical apocalyptic Christian texts, from literary rather than theological sources, especially Dante and other Renaissance and Reformation material, through to the musings of 19th- and 20th-century spiritualists.

One of the most helpful chapters for Catholics may be Casey's discussion of purgatory and indulgences. Serious Catholics should struggle with the paucity and suppleness of scriptural evidence for the doctrine of purgatory as Casey presents it, though readers might be grateful to him for titling that chapter, "Rome's Happiest Inspiration."

His discussion of indulgences is helpful for clearing up the various misunderstandings that many harbor concerning the historical origin, nature and provocative misuse of them in the 16th century.

Casey's treatment of the afterlife in Islam is salutary for appreciating our neighbors' faith.

Casey's copious end notes and ex-tensive bibliography evidence the summarizing and interpreting of abundant secondary sources, for which readers owe him gratitude, but not credulity.

He has not written "the last word" on the subject of the afterlife. But those words he has written deserve a careful reading and serious appreciation - afflict the comfortable though they may.

(Walt Chura is a local writer, lecturer and retreat director who attends St. Luke's parish in Schenectady.)

(11-26-09)