Myths that explain the origin of death have been found among many cultures. Clearly, reflection on death and on life after death belongs to the oldest layers of religion. Yet because of the oral nature of these myths, their approach to the problem of death is relatively unsophisticated. A steady progress became possible only after the Greek invention of simplified writing. This process has continued through the twentieth century, and philosophy and theology, directly or indirectly, have exerted the most important influences on religious thinking about life after death. The terms soul and otherworld have not always carried the same meanings during the course of history. "Primitive" conceptions of the soul were usually of two types: the so-called free-soul, which represents the individual personality but which becomes inactive when the body is active, and thus represents the person after death; and the body-soul, which endows the body with life and consciousness, and which perishes with the body. This dualistic conception of the soul changes when small "primitive" peoples become more differentiated. In these cases, the free-soul starts to acquire the qualities of the body-soul. The process is well documented in ancient Greece, where, after Homer, the free-soul (psyche ), started to incorporate the thymos, the most important of these body-souls. As for the underworld, modern people are so used to thinking in terms of heaven and hell that they must be careful not to retroject them into earlier civilizations. Like ideas about the soul, conceptions of life after death have a history too.
Early Christian ideas regarding life after death received great stimulus through the Roman persecutions. Whereas the New Testament had been reticent about the actual nature of the afterlife, it now became necessary to develop a picture that would help martyrs persist in their faith. Reports of executions of Christians during this time show the gradual appearance of new views of the afterlife, not surprisingly beginning in North Africa where funerary attention was more prominent than elsewhere in the Roman empire. Inspired by the Jewish idea of paradise as the place for the deceased, as well as by the great parks of contemporary local grandees, there arises an idea of heaven as an attractive landscape with a mild climate and plenty of light, where the deceased walk around in the body. Their main activity consists in praising God. This theocentric view of heaven would dominate until the Enlightenment. Hell, on the other hand, is little mentioned in the Christian literature of the first centuries c.e. Early Christian theologians were primarily interested in salvation, not damnation. At the same time, the Jewish heritage of Christianity meant that a marked body-soul opposition was introduced relatively late in the second century by Christian intellectuals, such as Justin (c. 100 – 165) and Tatian (late second century), who were heavily influenced by Greek philosophy. They tapped Greek concepts of the immortal soul in order to bolster their arguments for the resurrection, albeit with a number of modifications, such as different fates for sinners and saved. Speculation about the soul, fed by Stoic and Aristotelian views, occasionally appears in the writings of later Church fathers like Origen (c. 185 – 254) or Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430), but they did not much influence ideas about life after death. It is only in the early Middle Ages that a major change in attitude towards the afterlife appears. Christianity's growth from a minority into a majority, coupled with Augustine's stress on sin, led to an emphasis on hell rather than heaven in medieval views of life after death. Whereas Origen had argued for the temporary nature of hell, theologians like Augustine and Gregory the Great (c. 540 – 604) started to paint the penalties of hell in the most shrill of colors. The latter was more concrete than the former and thought that the penalties of hell started immediately after death, unlike Augustine and the early Church Fathers, who most often let them begin after the Last Judgment. In the twelfth century, ideas about life after death became more differentiated. The Church introduced Purgatory as a third place for the dead, where they could be purified from their sins before they go to heaven. Strangely enough, the intellectual milieu where Purgatory was invented is still uncertain, but there are indications of a Cistercian origin, fueled by the need to counter the eschatology of the Cathars who had made salvation much easier than normative Christianity. Although the tripartite division of life after death was never accepted by Greek-Orthodox Christianity, it was promoted by scholastic theologians like Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225 – 1274). They did not agreed on all details, and disagreed in particular on the moment when the elect would attain full beatitude and the precise relationship between body and soul. Nonetheless, this general picture of the afterlife did not change significantly until the Reformation.
With the arrival of Martin Luther (1483 – 1546) and John Calvin (1509 – 1564) on the theological scene in the sixteenth century, God returned to center stage. The Reformation rejected Purgatory and, like post-Tridentine Catholic theologians, concentrated on the encounter with God in the hereafter. Until the eighteenth century, Western Christianity was united in seeing heaven as the place for the elect, where life was perfected by existing with God, without decay, but also without everything that characterizes human life, such as sex, illness, and family. The idea of hell, on the other hand, was increasingly questioned, especially after the reprinting of Origen's works during the Renaissance and after a rise in sensitivity towards the suffering of others. During the Enlightenment, both Christians and adherents of natural religion could still agree on the idea of the immortal soul, but for the first time in Western history materialists and atheists could publicly, if guardedly, pronounce their views. They went too far for the majority, but in varying ways philosophers like Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679), John Locke (1637 – 1704), Denis Diderot (1713 – 1787), and Voltaire (1694 – 1778) now openly brought belief in eternal punishment into discredit. David Hume (1711 – 1776) could even claim, not without exaggeration, that the damnation of one man was an infinitely greater evil than the subversion of millions of kingdoms. It seems safe to say that ever since this time the traditional picture of hell has remained unacceptable to enlightened classes. The picture of a static, theocentric heaven could also no longer satisfy an age more interested in man than God. Starting with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646 – 1716), but especially in the work of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 – 1772), ideas about life in heaven became adapted to the anthropocentric needs of the time. Swedenborg promoted a view of heaven that was not so different from life on Earth. According to Swedenborg, the souls of the deceased entered a spirit world where human frailties were clearly visible. Only after perfecting their spiritual outlook could souls move on to heaven, where they became angels. Here, life on Earth was continued but in a more attractive setting of parks and palaces. Eating, drinking, and sexuality remained vital needs, friends and family could be met, and progress meant that men and women became more and more like "noble savages." Condemnations to eternal torment or a Last Judgement had no place in this vision. Such a stress on heaven in the era of the Enlightenment may be surprising, but in fact in Germany in the 1750s alone more than fifty treatises appeared discussing the problem of immortality. Evidently, growing scepticism led to deepened interest in defending immortality.
Swedenborg's view coincided, and was probably part of, the Romantic interest in love between man and wife, and this interest was shared by Protestants and Catholics alike. Although Swedenborg was viciously attacked, even by Immanual Kant (1724 – 1804), he was triumphant, especially in America. The Transcendentalists became much enamored of Swedenborg's thought, and their influence was felt in America and Europe. The Unitarians in England, in particular, embraced the new insights against the more traditional views of the established churches. They began stressing that heaven consisted in "enjoying God through accordance with his attributes, multiplying its bounds and sympathies with excellent beings, putting forth noble powers and ministering, in union with the enlightened and holy, to the happiness and virtue of the universe" (Channing, pp. 225 – 226). Moreover, after Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882), this enjoyment was seen as the end of a long evolution. Immortality became a possibility rather than a reality. Similar conceptions of the afterlife were widely promoted in Germany as well. Naturally, even heaven could not escape the lure of Victorian "Muscular Christianity": "Want and pain, toil and trial, cannot be wholely banished out of my Heaven," wrote the brother of Cardinal Newman (Newman, p 34). The heyday of Unitarian theology coexisted with the birth of spiritualism (1848). This movement would be the last attempt at proving scientifically the existence of the hereafter by means of controlled experiments. Yet the success of spiritualism would be short – lived; it was soon discredited by the frauds of its adherents and the trivialities of its results. Still, during its heyday, especially in America and England, its picture of heaven conformed closely to that developed by Swedenborg. Moreover, its rejection of hell, sin, and guilt was widely shared by liberal theologians everywhere. By the end of the nineteenth century, the general picture of life after death had assumed the contours of what would be the rule for most of the twentieth century. Hell was no longer the subject of serious theological discussion and eventually disappeared even from folk belief, except perhaps for that of the most conservative Christians. In the wake of its demise and with the rise of a more materialistic view of the person, the idea of an immortal soul lost wide acceptance. Many people still believe in heaven, but it is no longer the subject of serious intellectual debate. Leading theologians, such as Reinhold Niebuhr (1892 – 1971) and Paul Tillich (1886 – 1965), even pronounced their hesitations about eternal life. Admittedly, systematic theologians have not given up presenting new eschatological designs, but none has found success in the last decades of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, mainline churches have stopped worrying about the afterlife, since their members are too much concerned with this life. It seems that the world of theology, of rational reflection on life after death, is no longer influential among common believers. Relection on life after death has not broken down completely, however. Among adherents of the so-called New Age there is a new interest in the soul, which is considered to be a part of the Higher Self, the New Age notion of an interface between the Universal Mind, or God, and the individual personality. It is the soul that continuously creates new lives and chooses its present incarnation. In other words, there no longer is a definite "Beyond" as the final resting point, but the soul is perpetually en route towards its spiritual perfection via reincarnation. Finally, life after death has come once again to the fore in discussions of so-called near-death experiences, as first collected in the 1970s by Raymond Moody, an American philosopher turned psychiatrist. In these experiences, which relate a visit to the hereafter, the idea of a life after death seems to reflect widely ruling modern ideas: the dead go to heaven, but God is no longer there; the soul is not mentioned, and neither is hell or judgement. Scholarly discussions concentrate on the nature of these experiences, the age of those who have these visions, and the medical circumstances allowing such visions. Yet serious scholars no longer discuss these visions as testimonies of a postmortem existence. It seems that after a 2,500-year discussion, the problem of life after death has largely been abandoned.
See also Darwin, Charles; Hume, David; Reincarnation; Soul; Thomas Aquinas; Transmigration