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Reviews
- Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion, by Alan F. Segal ’67
- Sense and Nonsensibility: Lampoons of Learning and Literature, by Lawrence Douglas and Alexander George
Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion. By Alan F. Segal ’67. New York: Doubleday, 2004. 866 pp. $37.50 hardcover.
Alan Segal, professor of religion and Ingeborg Rennert Professor of Jewish Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, has given us a book breathtaking in scope, sophisticated in methodology and relevant for today’s international conflict.
Just running through the areas covered in the book is enough to make one dizzy. Segal starts with the texts and rituals of ancient Egypt, moves on to Mesopotamia and Babylon, and then discusses the texts for the First Temple period in Israel. This is just Part One. The second section combines analysis of Iranian religion, classical Greek notions of the afterlife, and texts from Second Temple Judaism. Thirdly, he places Jesus within the context of works written in the aftermath of the persecution of Jews in the second century B.C.E. and of the various groups operating in Judea in the first century C.E. With this overview as background, he then plunges into the most fascinating area of early Christian writings.
As one would expect from the author of Paul the Convert, Segal provides an illuminating treatment of the apostle Paul, showing how Paul’s ambiguous vision of the afterlife was in contrast to that of the later canonical gospels and yet developed in a more radical fashion by, for example, the Gospel of Thomas. And as one would also expect from the author of Rebecca’s Children, Segal compares and contrasts the developments among the Christian fathers and the early rabbis. He finishes his work with an analysis of the afterlife in Islam, particularly the influence of martyrdom beliefs on Islam.
However, Segal is not content simply to provide an overview of the relevant texts and rituals from these varied traditions. Using a methodology that I suspect he first encountered at Amherst with John Pemberton III, the Stanley Warfield Crosby Professor of Religion, Emeritus, Segal asks what the social, economic and even environmental factors were that led to the formation of these different views of an afterlife. He is very definite that “our religious truths come to us in a particular society, fitted to them and fitting for them.” One of the major dichotomies that he sees emerging in the pre-Christian period and continuing after is between the idea that the afterlife involves the immortality of the soul and the idea that it involves the resurrection of the body. He suggests that oppressed people developed the notion of the resurrection of the body in response to the taunts and tortures of their oppressors: God will restore and renew the bodies afflicted and tortured in this life. In contrast to this, Segal locates the vision of the afterlife as the immortality of the soul among aristocratic elites, which would include the scribal and intellectual classes within Judaism and later Christianity. Alongside this attempt to situate religious traditions in real life, Segal also provides a thorough and fascinating discussion of what he terms “religiously interpreted states of consciousness.” Here he refers to dreams, visions and narratives of mystical ascent to heaven (and later to hell), as well as the techniques for achieving them. He also explores the neurological and physiological bases for these phenomena. I look forward to hearing reactions to this element of his work.
At the end of this mammoth journey, Segal begins to explore how notions of the afterlife might inform the actions of suicide bombers and the perpetrators of the attack on Sept. 11, 2001. He is well aware of factors arising from social and economic conditions, but he also maintains, rightly I believe, that an important factor is belief in afterlife, inaugurated by long-ago martyrs, with its emphasis on entering a better world where kinship ties are still intact. We do well not to ignore the religious dimensions of the conflict. Segal ends with the plea that everyone should imagine himself or herself as the member of a minority, so that one could have a world in which “everyone acknowledges each other’s rights as a way of safeguarding one’s own.”
I congratulate Alan Segal on having written such a fine book. It is not a work to be taken up lightly, but rather to be slowly imbibed.
—Robert Doran
The reviewer is the Samuel Williston Professor of Greek and Hebrew at Amherst College.
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