Adelphiasophism
Fr Barrett on the Evolution of the Afterlife
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Monday, November 20, 2000
Gladiator
One of Hollywood’s most graphic reflexions on the afterlife is Ridley Scott’s epic, “Gladiator.” The hero, Maximus, the best general of the noble Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, offends Commodus, the emperor’s worthless son and murderer, and ends up as a gladiator. The story has little in the way of the conventional love angle but instead is punctuated with glimpses of the hero at prayer. His veneration of images of his “paterfamilias,” the ancestors of his family, his earnest appeal to his “Blessed Father,” to vindicate him, his devotion to the hope of meeting his crucified family in the afterlife, make this a sympathetic portrayal of the Pagan age. The audience gets an idea of the noble virtue Romans called “pietas.” In this sense, the film goes some way to correcting the monstrous Christian propaganda that the Pagan age and beliefs were wholely savage.
Ultimately we are led to the Colosseum with its confident motto: “Ut Roma cadit ita orbis terrae”—”For Rome to die, so must the whole world.” Within 200 years Pagan piety was replaced by Christianity and a hundred years later Rome had indeed died. Yet the apparent Pagan disregard for life was less that than an utter disregard for death. The gladiators seemed to have no fear of death, greeting the crowds with “moraturi vos salutant”—”Those about to die salute you.” As Maximus dies in the arena, the camera cuts to his dying visions of his wife and son, crucified by Commodus’s soldiers, but awaiting him in the ripe summer corn of Elysium’s fields. Fr Richard Barrett, writing in the “Catholic Herald,” admits that the simplicity and sincerity of his faith, that he is returning to them again, and that death holds no fears, is so sad and moving it “cannot fail to touch the average agnostic.” But not the average Christian?
The image perfectly captures the relationship between the old rural corn deities promising renewal each spring, and their metamorphosis into the promise of immortality for sophisticated urbanites who live a noble life, and die nobly. The “Roman Mass of the Dead” can offer no more than this simple, if erroneous, belief. The parting words of the film are: “I will see you again—but not yet.”
God’s Secret
Fr Barrett is supposedly answering a reader who wondered why God seemed to keep the promise of an afterlife until the “New Testament.” The “Old Testament,” has no promise of a life after death more joyful than this on earth. Its vision of the afterlife is a gloomy half-life of an empty amnesia in Sheol.
In Sheol, there is no memory of thee.
While Vedic poets were hailing the dawn as the flag of immortality, and Zarathustra was declaring that people with good thoughts and of good deeds would dwell in the “Throne of Song” with God in eternal peace, the Israelites, according to their holy scriptures, were lamenting:
I said in the noontide of my days I must depart, for I am consigned to the gates of Sheol (Isa 38:10).
Then the Persians conquered and the bards of the religion they introduced to replace the ancient religion of the Israelites could write:
The eternal God is my refuge. The arms are everlasting that embrace me.
There is no way that the two different concepts can be married. The second replaced the first because a new religion had been introduced. All Fr Barrett’s preliminary flannel, interesting though it is, seems intended to distract the reader from the original question. Its answer is simply that religious ideas like all ideas evolve—they are not implanted by God, another figment that evolved just in the same way! The influence of Persian and Greek thought after the “return” created the desire for, and belief in, an afterlife or Elysium (the place of the blessed spirits).
Immortality or Resurrection?
It gets expressed in “Job,” a later book of the Jewish scriptures, as the hope of the Israelites, as we have it in Handel’s “Messiah,” the original in “Job” being unintelligible:
I know my Redeemer liveth and in my flesh I shall see God.
This implies resurrection not immortality. Greek speaking Jews begin to express their hope in the “Septuagint,” perhaps for the first time in the “Book of Wisdom” (c l00 BC). Even in the lifetime of Jesus, belief in the afterlife or immortality was still being argued among the Jews, paradoxically because the Greeks were even more sophisticated and had largely dropped the idea. This explains Jesus’s encounter with the Sadducees. The Pharisees accepted it from their faith in Persian religion. The Greek-influenced Sadducees, modernists, found the idea distasteful. Jesus corrected them when he was asked to respond to their question on the resurrection of the dead. His response must have been devastating at the time, apparently agreeing with them at first—God is a God of the living not of the dead—but seemingly explained as meaning that righteous people did not die at all but merely “slept” until the day of resurrection.
The doctrine of the immortality of the soul seems to have taken time to reach maturity in synagogue Judaism. The “Book of Maccabees” is remarkable for making this belief clear. Judas the Maccabean, a noble hero like Maximus, sends monies to the Temple for holocausts to be offered by the priests for the souls of the troops who fell in battle.
This was an altogether fine and noble action which took full account of the resurrection… For if he had not expected the fallen to rise again it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead, whereas if he had in view the splendid recompense reserved for those who make a pious end, the thought was holy and devout. (2 Macc 12:43, 45).
Nevertheless, this is not an afterlife as Maximus and modern Christians have it, but a “resurrection.” Maccabees shows that the Jews 200 years before the crucifixion had some expectation that noble lives would result in a resurrection—but a resurrection is in this world, not in heaven!
Exploiting Fears of Death
The “Meditations of Marcus Aurelius” are a testament to a Pagan tradition that provided most of Christian morality. Marcus Aurelius bequeaths us his thoughts and aims to help others achieve the noble world he envisaged. Maximus describes it in “Gladiator:”
I have seen many places and everywhere is darkness and cruelty—Rome is the light.
The Roman “light” was the law which the legions imposed wherever they marched, the “ius gentium,” the people’s authority. As we saw, it was not to have a long life. The Greek and Roman converts saw Christianity as the answer to their prayer for unending life. Marcus Aurelius and the Pagan world faltered through their theological toleration, and an altogether less tolerant religion claimed the attention of the gens. A simple faith that death was not fearful was replaced by a wholesale exploitation of people’s fears of it unless the pain is mediated by the caste of charlatans whose real power is bogus. Better be obedient or the “Last Rites” might be withheld from you—and then no Elysian Fields for you!
