Religion: The Rise & Fall of Heaven

Perhaps a man’s faith in the afterlife necessarily falters the moment he starts seriously to probe the origins of the concept among the primitive men of 30,000 years ago, who provided their corpses with weapons to see them through death’s terrors. Obviously the idea of heaven had a rise in evolution’s slow periods—and, battered by the investigative fervor of science, has it not had a fall too? In a new book that attempts to survey the history of man’s conception of destiny, a British cleric and scholar raises this question, and ends with an answer trembling on his tongue. The answer seems to be yes.

Samuel George Frederick Brandon, 54, author of Man and His Destiny in the Great Religions, is the son of a Devonshire sailor; he was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1932, earned his doctorate in divinity while campaigning with Britain’s First Army in North Africa during World War II. In 1951, he gave up a career as an army officer to accept his present post as professor of comparative religion at the University of Manchester, and presented a concise version of Man and His Destiny in the Wilde Lectures on Natural and Comparative Religion at Oxford between 1954 and 1957.

Dreams of Paradise. Brandon starts his story in the Upper Paleolithic Age, when bodies were tinted red ocher before burial —an attempt to replace through magic the blood that seemed to be missing.

Then, in rich chapters, he describes the virtually inexhaustible variety of answers that man has proposed to the question of what follows death. Islam preached an afterlife of sensual pleasure for the true believer; some Hellenic religions gloomily warned of a dark, shadowy Hades. The Sumerian faith of ancient Babylon and the primitive Yahwist faith of Israel also preached an afterlife of agony rather than ecstasy—which was still apparently preferable to believing that death was merely obliteration.

One of man’s most amenable interpretations of death and destiny emerged from the rich civilization of later Egypt. Bodies were mummified; food, clothing and jewelry were stored in crypts; slaves were slaughtered to serve their dead masters in the new world. By “ritual assimilation” with the god Osiris, it was believed that the dead could share in his resurrection and live happily ever after. Judging by the drawings found in pyramids, the Egyptian vision of Osiris’ kingdom was as sensuous as Mohammed’s fleshly dream of a Paradise filled with soft-eyed houris, serving exquisite wines to the eminently deserving servants of Allah.

Accident of History. An expert in the history of the early church, Brandon has some iconoclastic ideas about the evolution of the Christian understanding of destiny. In effect, he argues that the form in which that understanding came down to the present day is largely the result of an accident of history—the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. The Christian teaching that a Saviour God redeemed sinful man by his death on the Cross and will return at the end of history to judge the world, he points out, contains echoes of Greek, Jewish and Egyptian teaching. So elaborate a doctrine must have emerged only after decades of theological argument. To most Christian laymen, the story of this development is disguised by the seemingly natural arrangement of the New Testament: the life of Jesus in the Gospels is followed, in Acts, by an account of the early church, then by an elaborate theological explanation of the Christian message in Paul’s Epistles.

In reality, as Brandon and others before him point out, the earliest New Testament documents are the Pauline Epistles, written before A.D. 68. In these letters to young churches, Paul is defending his interpretation of Christ from attacks by unnamed enemies. These opponents, too powerful for him to criticize openly, were almost certainly the Apostles James and Peter, who governed the mother church of Christianity in Jerusalem. Brandon argues that these first disciples thought of Jesus exclusively within the context of Jewish history. To them, the Messiah was simply a national hero, who would bring Israel to glory at the imminently awaited Parousia (second coming); his message was meant primarily for the Jews. But Paul, a Roman citizen and a cosmopolite familiar with Greek learning, reinterpreted Jesus, on the authority of his own private revelations from God, as the Saviour of all mankind.

The Jerusalem church censured Paul in A.D. 56 for the heresy of believing that gentiles could be saved. But 14 years later, Roman troops destroyed the city and dispersed its inhabitants. Since the church of Jesus’ own disciples was so fortuitously wiped out, Paul’s interpretation of Jesus gradually was accepted by other congregations as the authentic teaching.

The Gospels, which were all written after the fall of Jerusalem, reflect this Pauline view of Jesus as Lord of History, rather than the original apostolic understanding of him as Jewish hero.

Science’s Effect. In the writings of Augustine, Aquinas and other church fathers, Pauline Christianity flowered into what Brandon feels was man’s most completely satisfying attempt to explain the nature of man, the world and divine judgment.

Now that flower is sadly wilted. Brandon blames that old devil science. Christianity taught that man was saved in a universe where God’s grace was present. Yet science explains the world “as the field of the interplay of impersonal forces, where man and his needs and aspirations appear completely irrelevant.” Brandon sees the intense interest in the works of thinkers like Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as an indication of Christian man’s need to escape from his present cultural schizophrenia by finding a viable explanation of the teleological character of the universe.

Every eschatology, Brandon concludes, is an effort by man to provide himself with “spiritual security” against the passage of time. Unlike the lower animals, which live only in the present moment, man is conscious of time, and thus of death. Stoicism and Epicureanism—faiths for the Greco-Roman intellectual elite—accepted death as the final end to life with equanimity. But man generally has rebelled against this kind of blunt pragmatism, instinctively seeking “some state in which he will be secure from the everlasting menace of time’s destructive logic.” Brandon tacitly admits that he has some trouble juggling his Christian faith and his academic findings. “My findings as a professor lead me to recognize certain things,” he says, “and if these clash with my views as an Anglican then I must not panic but evaluate them properly, balancing one side against the other. I believe we have inherited a form of Christianity which one may well question as to whether it was original, and whether it has developed on the right lines.”