Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West (review)

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1 Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West (review) Gregory D. Alles Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume 74, Number 1, March 2006, pp (Review) Published by Oxford University Press For additional information about this article Accessed 10 Apr :48 GMT

2 Book Reviews 235 complex body of material and engages the reader in the process of intellectual editing and position taking. doi: /jaarel/lfj039 Advance Access publication January 10, 2006 Howayda Al-Harithy American University of Beirut Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in the Religions of the West. By Alan F. Segal. Doubleday, pages. $ The ambition of this book is breathtaking, and on first sight its length is more than a little daunting. It is, therefore, a tribute to Alan Segal s accomplishment that, on finishing the book, the reader wishes for more. Segal s basic premise seems to be that afterlife beliefs are not universal but in fact correlate with the worlds in which those who hold them live. Most scholars of religions will not find this to be a very remarkable claim, but to judge from the writing style, Segal aims at a wider public. That audience may find the premise startling, even unsettling. Furthermore, Segal sets afterlife beliefs in a much wider context. As a result, the book can provide general readers with a wonderfully thorough education. It may provide scholars with an opportunity to reconsider a broad range of material. The subtitle is a little misleading. The book does not provide a history of western ideas of the afterlife. It concentrates on the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean region. Segal actually begins before the beginning with a brief mention of Neanderthal evidence. Then he gives much fuller treatment to beliefs about the afterlife in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Canaan, First Temple Judaism, Zoroastrianism, ancient Greece, Second Temple Judaism, apocalyptic texts, sectarian groups during New Testament times, Paul, the Gospels, the Pseudepigrapha, the Church Fathers, the early Rabbis, and nascent Islam. Given such an expansive range one hardly expects the treatment always to sparkle with new insight. The view that the respective environments of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia conditioned their religious beliefs is at least as old as The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Henri Frankfort, H. A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, and Thorkild Jacobsen, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1946). But Segal has not been afraid to take positions, even minority positions, on controversial matters. That, to my mind, is a distinctive plus. Along the way, he makes some intriguing suggestions. For example, he attributes the general absence of afterlife beliefs in the texts of First Temple Judaism not to a general absence of such beliefs in early Israel and Judah but to the presence of beliefs that the writers and redactors wanted to suppress. Another example is the distinction between belief in an immortal soul and belief in bodily resurrection, which forms something of a leitmotif. As Segal notes, in the United States these two beliefs correlate strongly with liberal and conservative religiosity. He derives the notion of bodily resurrection from apocalyptic movements in the late Second Temple Period, when it provided compensation for martyrdom. Belief in an

3 236 Journal of the American Academy of Religion immortal soul, by contrast, was taken up by privileged, educated Jews, who used Platonism to formulate their Judaism and communicate it to Gentiles. It must seem almost perverse, after more than 700 pages of text, to wish for more, but I do. Why stop with early Islam? To be sure, the terms of succeeding discussions of the afterlife have been set, and Segal directs his readers to books that take up where he leaves off. But while everyone deserves a rest, there is something to be said for finishing the tour with the same guide. And then there are topics left on the sidelines. For example, Segal tells us a great deal about the views of the Tannaim and the Amoraim. What did other Jews at the time think about the afterlife, not only men, but especially women? Perhaps there is not much evidence for their beliefs, but I, at least, would like to know what evidence there is. Furthermore, Segal occasionally ventures broad generalizations. These make for fascinating reading, but how general does he intend them to be? For example, he writes, Usually cultures that practice inhumation tend to depict the dead as going underground.... They usually retain an image of the body when they imagine the posthumous self. The cultures that practice cremation seem to prefer the notion that the dead go to the sky. They may or may not retain a notion of the image of the body of the individual (p. 188). What then are we to make of people who do both? Hindus come readily to mind. They bury people not thought to need purification in the fires of cremation, most notably at samadhi shrines. Does this practice fit the pattern or necessitate its modification? Hindus would certainly constitute a large number of people to exclude simply as unusual, that is, outside the bounds of the generalization. If I find myself wishing for more, it is perhaps inevitable in such a long book that I find myself wishing for less, too. For example, I wonder whether the treatment of biblical texts is not too intense. It creates an imbalance between the cursory consideration of some cultures, such as ancient Greece, and the extremely thorough treatment book by book, pericope by pericope of biblical material. More importantly, I found myself wondering what possible relevance some discussions had to beliefs in the afterlife, whether the depth of treatment did not at times obscure rather than elucidate Segal s points, and occasionally whether I had not in fact already read the same assertions (e.g., the last two paragraphs on p. 589). Particularly unhelpful are Segal s discussions of millenarianism and altered states of consciousness in chapters seven and eight. In chapter seven Segal commits himself to deprivation as a major cause of millenarian movements, then seems to bend over backward arguing that what does not look like deprivation actually is. I began to wonder whether the word had not lost all of its explanatory power when I read that one could hardly call [wealthy Romans] materially deprived in any normal sense, but... (p. 319). Even cognitive dissonance turns out to be another kind of deprivation (p. 320). In chapter eight Segal introduces various altered states of consciousness and applies them in interesting ways to Jewish mysticism, but his treatment is puzzling. For the possible neurological bases of such experiences (pp ) he relies on Why God Won t Go Away (Andrew Newberg, Eugene d Aquili, and Vince Rause, Ballantine Books, New York, 2001). Why? That book reads like a

4 Book Reviews 237 pop-journalistic rewrite (Vince Rause writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer), and not a very good one, of D Aquili and Newberg s more substantive The Mystical Mind (Fortress Press, 1999). When even Segal acknowledges that much of the chapter is a digression (p. 341), one wonders if it belongs in the book. One last aspect about which I found myself wishing for less is the frame. I wanted less of both its normative recommendations and its American parochialism. Segal concedes There are many law-abiding members of society everywhere who consider themselves fundamentalist (p. 683), but shortly thereafter he writes Religious faith... includes doubt while fundamentalism... is merely fanaticism (p. 695). He proceeds to laud those Americans who have given up belief in hell and opened the gates of heaven to all, regardless of religious persuasion. Then he propounds a two-fold strategy for dealing with religious plurality: limiting conversion to members of one s own religion and imagining oneself globally as the member of a minority (p. 695). Later he avers that the notion of an immortal soul is the belief most suited to the modern democratic West (p. 714). (Personally, I find the word soul meaningless.) The final heading makes an astounding claim: Since [religion] is fiction, we may safely believe it (p. 724). I would not want that standard applied to Nazi ideology. Segal cannot derive these views from the history that he narrates. He could argue for them better in separate publications. Here they clearly get in the way, especially in the chapter on Islam. That chapter begins not in the ancient world but in New York City on September 11, 2001 (p. 639). For roughly half of the chapter (pp ) we are mostly back in a narrative of ancient history. Then we leapfrog to Osama bin Laden and suicide bombers (pp ). Although Segal wants to teach his readers to avoid the prejudices of seeing Islam from the perspective of its extremists (p. 639), devoting so much of the chapter on Islam and the Afterlife to extremists has the opposite effect. A related problem is an American parochialism absent from most of the text, but strongly present in the Introduction, the Afterword, and much of the chapter on Islam. Perhaps Doubleday has determined that patriotism sells and has no ambitions to market the book outside the United States. Perhaps Segal added the frame in reaction to the attack on the World Trade Center. (He seems to have finished the book just prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003; see p. 690.) Perhaps neither could have envisioned a reviewer, especially one writing for the American Academy of Religion, reading and writing (temporarily) in Europe. Nevertheless, it is difficult in fact, embarrassing to read about the distinctively American hereafter which validates quintessentially American values in this life (p. 715). There is nothing distinctively American about the views of the afterlife that Segal discusses. On the one hand, they derive from thinkers who lived around the Mediterranean in antiquity; on the other, they exclude many Americans, not only fundamentalists but also recent Asian immigrants, from being essentially American. Here Segal simply advances a triumphalistic Jewish and Christian liberalism. Nor does the United States have a distinctive claim on values which are widely shared by people on many continents. Either Segal has not recognized what it means to imagin[e] oneself globally as the member of a minority, in this case an American, or the possibility that members of a minority

5 238 Journal of the American Academy of Religion might be parochial and self-righteous means that such imagining does not foster pluralism as much as Segal thinks. It is a shame that Segal framed the book as he did. It is a thorough and thought-provoking study that stands well on its own. doi: /jaarel/lfj040 Advance Access publication January 10, 2006 Gregory D. Alles McDaniel College The Lion and the Lamb: Evangelicals and Catholics in America. By William M. Shea. Oxford University Press, pages. $35.00 The divide between Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants in America surprises nobody. Imagining each other as demonic and politically subversive, the two communities have generated animosities that are well known and well researched. Surely, it seems, these two shall never meet peacefully until the Last Judgment clarifies precisely which side God favors. William Shea (Center for Religion, Ethics and Politics, College of the Holy Cross) contributes another study of this dichotomy and its conflicts. While this is familiar territory in American religious studies, Shea s approach and conclusions prevent this work from being a rehash of the usual suspects. Shea juggles both historical and theological arguments, so the book offers neither a straight historical account nor solely theological reflection. He attempts an honest historical-theological study wherein the historical reconstruction of the past proceeds uninhibited and then yields its fruits for quite specific theological speculation. For him the two disciplines are simultaneously independent and intertwined. This methodological through media alone makes the book unique. Shea also asserts that the positive contributions each side makes to the broader Christian community suffer needlessly from the constant fixation on the opponent s diabolical otherness. So, far from being mortal enemies, Catholics and Evangelicals might benefit from listening to, not attacking, each other. Additionally, Shea asserts the necessity of considering the modern perspectives inspired by the Enlightenment since both Christian groups responded to its presence. Shea considers these three tribes inspired by mythological understandings of their own past. He launches his inquiry with reflection on the 1993 meeting Evangelicals and Catholics Together. The event s participants willingness to look beyond the history of mutual condemnations inspired Shea to review that very past. Both made absolute claims about Christian truth, its sources, and the true community confessing it. Both sides rejected modernity for its corrosive attitude toward revealed truth: evangelicals enthusiastically supported the prosecution in the Scopes Trial, and the Catholic Church weeded out modernist clerics until the 1950s. Shea notes some differences, but concludes both reactions were mistaken. Instead, he thinks, the best instinct of Catholicism and American evangelical Protestantism has been to embrace, support, expand on,