Flesh in the Age of Reason (17 page)

In asserting a
natural
mortality of the soul, Dodwell acceded to the commonsense logic of the mortalists. But his commitment to the vitality of the soul between death and the Last Judgement, buoyed up through God’s spirit, was quite out of step with the politics of the mortalist tradition and reveals (as does his stress upon baptism) his High Church attachment to a visible hierarchy and God’s ubiquitous and unceasing moral government of Creation.

Locke’s fudge of the question of man’s corporeal state in heaven – his preference for some nobler disembodied existence – obviously grieved many honest churchmen, fearful that this would erode proper accountability. But it did promise to solve, reduce or circumvent
other nagging problems posed by the ambiguities of physicality in the afterlife.

The material minutiae of heaven and hell had always been contentious in the very gradual evolution of teachings as to these two locations over the centuries. Calvinist orthodoxy included the expectation – presumably attended with widespread
schadenfreude
– that the hosts of damned would far exceed the saved: ‘many be called, but few chosen’ (Matthew 20: 16) was a favourite text. In
An Enquiry into the Nature and Place of Hell
(1714), Tobias Swinden, a grand master of celestial arithmetic, expressed his outrage at the suggestion of the Continental theologian Drexelius that there would be a mere hundred thousand million lost souls in a hell just one German mile square. ‘It is a poor, mean and narrow Conception,’ he scoffed, ‘both of the Numbers of the Damned, and of the Dimensions of Hell.’ Hell had generally been assumed to be sited at the centre of the earth but, thinking big, Swinden transferred it to the sun, reasoning that terrestrial subterranean regions could not possibly house all the hordes of the reprobate.

Hard-liners had always relished the gory physicality of hell. ‘We have heard… of some who have endured breaking on the Wheel, ripping up of their Bowels, fleaing alive, racking of Joynts, burning of Flesh, pounding in a Mortar, tearing in pieces with Flesh-hooks, boyling in Oyl, roasting on hot fiery Grid-irons, etc.’ – thus John Shower fired up readers’ fantasies in his
Heaven and Hell; or the Unchangeable State of Happiness or Misery for all Mankind in Another World
(1700):

And yet all these, tho’ you should superad thereto all Diseases, such as the Plague, Stone, Gout, Strangury, or whatever else you can name most torturing to the Body… they would all come short… of that Wrath, that Horror, that inconceivable Anguish which the Damned must inevitably suffer every Moment, without any intermission of their pains, in Hellish Flames.

Hell’s terrors could thus be represented as the bodily sufferings experienced this side of the divide writ large. ‘If it be an intolerable thing to suffer the heat of the fire for a year, or a day, or an hour,
what will it be to suffer ten thousand times more for ever?’ demanded the Presbyterian Richard Baxter in
The Saints’ Everlasting Rest
(1650). ‘What if thou wert to suffer Lawrence’s death, to be roasted upon a gridiron… If thou couldst not endure such things as these, how wilt thou endure the eternal flames?’ Among traditionalists, anticipations continued of the future punishments in store for sinners – Englishmen who had stuffed their statute book with hundreds of capital crimes and who religiously turned up to hangings would hardly flinch at an unashamedly punitive (‘vindictive’ was their word) hell. Samuel Johnson’s notion of damnation (‘Sent to Hell, Sir, and punished everlastingly’) is notorious.

What had always excited the most salutary horror was precisely that infinite quality of hell’s torments: ‘the great aggravation of this misery’, gloated Baxter, ‘will be its eternity’. But in the sunnier climate of all-is-for-the-best enlightened optimism, liberal Christians increasingly held that the eternal punishments which had been Christian orthodoxy at least since the Athanasian Creed (late fourth century) were inconsistent with a benevolent Father. Locke, as we have seen, came round to believing in a merciful obliteration for the damned. Archbishop Tillotson himself had been accused of doubting eternal torments. William Whiston, an Arian (disbeliever in the Trinity), Newton’s successor as Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, declared, in
The Eternity of Hell Torments Considered
(1740), that such ‘common but barbarous and savage opinions’ were incompatible with divine love. In
Christianity as Old as the Creation
(1730), Matthew Tindal, a Deist (disbeliever in divine intervention), condemned those who ‘impute such Actions’ to God, for they ‘make him resemble the worst of Beings, and so run into downright Demonism’. Milder expectations were evidently gaining ground among ‘enlightened’ Christians mindful of God’s compassion as well as His power. Boschian evocations of devils roasting the wicked on a spit receded from Anglican pulpit oratory, while the clockwork universe of the new science eroded belief in the mundane powers of Satan and the reality of witchcraft – the Statutes relating to it were repealed in 1736.

Lenient divines thus mitigated hell’s punishments for others; but
for the individual, what truly counted were the expectations held out for the saved in the great habitation in the sky. At this point, Locke’s questions about selfhood were terribly pertinent: in what guise would a person appear at the pearly gates?

Church orthodoxy had penal reasons – utter accountability – for stipulating the resurrected body’s identity with the temporal. But what did that actually mean? Debate over the details of bodily survival had marked the Christian views on reincarnation since earliest times. Such matters as the preservation of hair and nails and many other distinctive physical features had kindled perennial disputes. Shall we have the same height, weight and age as we did at our death? Would diseases, deformities and decay disappear? Writing in 1650, the divine John Seager had stated that resurrected bodies would certainly consist of flesh and bones; yet, he conceded, heavenly eyes and ears, hands and feet would not need to be made of the same substance as our terrestrial torso.

Christian Platonists, for their part, were disposed to envisage the afterlife primarily as a spiritual abode. Holding that ‘there is no
stable Personality
of a man but what is in his Soul’, Henry More downplayed resurrection of the fleshly body, warts and all, in line with his notion of God’s justice: ‘for so shall the Body of an old man be punished for the sins of that Body he had when he was young’. More painted a delightful picture of this immaterial existence amid the heavenly hosts:

they cannot but enravish one anothers Souls, while they are mutual Spectators of the perfect pulchritude of one anothers persons and comely carriage, of their graceful dancing, their melodious singing and playing, with accents so sweet and soft, as if we should imagine the Air here of itself to compose Lessons, and to send for the Musicall sounds without the help of any terrestrial Instrument.

Ralph Cudworth similarly envisaged an essentially ethereal existence, in which heavenly selves would assume an angelic shape, with ‘such a countenance, and so cloathed, as they’. Bathed in God’s glory, the heavenly host, surmised Thomas Burnet, another of that group,
would consist of a celestial gossamer ‘as pure and thin, as the finest Air or Aether’.

In the new eighteenth-century climate which brought the flourishing of material and domestic culture and the cultivation of ‘affective individualism’, it is not surprising that man-centred rather than theocentric ideas of a future state made headway among believers at large. In the
Athenian Gazette
, set up in 1691 by John Dunton as the first ever question-and-answer magazine, in response to a reader’s query: ‘Are there sexes in heaven?’, the columnist – perhaps Dunton himself – held in orthodox manner that all that was imperfect and accidental would be erased; hence sexuality would vanish – saucily adding: ‘we won’t add for another Reason what, as we remember, one of the Fathers has said – That
were there any Women in Heaven, the Angels cou’d not stand long
, but wou’d certainly be seduced from their Innocency, and Fall as
Adam
did.’ This question of heavenly genders was to assume great personal poignancy for Dunton soon afterwards, however, upon the death of his beloved wife. In response, in 1698 he produced
An Essay Proving We shall Know our Friends in Heaven
, which held out the prospect of reunion. ‘Her Death’, he wrote, ‘has made me so very melancholy, that I had pin’d away in a few days, had not the hopes of finding her again in Heaven, given me
some Relief
.’

As envisaged by Dunton, heaven was bound to involve the resumption of worldly familial relations. Epitomizing the new companionate marriage ideal, he maintained that since life in the here-and-now was not agreeable without familiar acquaintance, must that not be true of heaven too? ‘Be assured,’ he wrote, old friends ‘will not be wanting in the Height and Perfection of all Glory, Bliss and Joy.’ Moreover, to ensure personal identity, even
memories
of our own and our nearest and dearest’s former lives would remain intact. Unlike the high-minded Cambridge Platonists on the one hand and such Calvinist killjoys as Baxter on the other, Dunton adjudged that we would know each other in a ‘familiar’ way. Though conjugal relations
per se
between husbands and wives would not be resumed – Jesus had said there would be no marriage in heaven – the distinction of the sexes would remain as before: ‘the Soul… of the one is Resolute
and Constant, that of the other Light, Wavering and Changeable.… The Soul of one takes a pride in being Grave and speaking little; the other talks much, and cannot forbear
twatling upon every thing
.’

This homely heaven was not just a foible of Dunton’s. The fantasy of the New Jerusalem as an improved extension of everyday life became widespread, with all its prospects, pleasures – and puzzles. ‘My Grandmothers were old Women when
I
knew them,’ pondered Samuel Johnson’s friend, Hester Thrale:

to
me
therefore they must at the Day of Judgement
appear
Old; how else shall I know em?… to their Parents & Nurses however they must appear Babies… while to the new-rais’d Eye of Husbands, Lovers, Friends &c. who could recognize no possible Acquaintance either with the Crone or Baby – Lucy Salusbury and Philadelphia Cotton must certainly be seen as they were in Youth, Health, & Maturity.

All this might seem baffling, she mused, but it was in truth ‘most easy when we reflect on the Omnipotence of God’s holy
Word
&
Spirit
’.

Many Georgian visions of heaven were conspicuously modelled on the familiar life of this world. In 1703 William Assheton, the Rector of Beckenham in Kent, wrote a short tract refuting those schoolmen who believed that heavenly life consisted ‘in bare speculation, gazing upon each other, and admiring each other’s perfections’. With typical middle-class enthusiasm, Assheton asserted that there would certainly be action as well as contemplation in heaven. ‘Now we are not in the least to suspect, when such multitudes of active beings are met together,’ he surmised, ‘that they will be idle; but will incessantly be employed.’ Since heaven was God’s kingdom it would moreover have, just like England, ‘laws and statutes and governors and subjects, and those of different ranks, orders, and degrees’.

Influential in this conspicuous move away from the contemplative vision of heaven (that of the Cambridge Platonists) to a more active view, reflecting Protestant notions of virtuous work and energy, was the Dissenter Isaac Watts. He filled the afterlife with saintly and
endless action and improving possibilities. In a best-selling funeral sermon delivered in 1722, entitled ‘Death and Heaven; or the Last Enemy Conquered, and Separate Spirits Made Perfect’, Watts described a heaven standing between the theocentric heaven of Calvin and the unashamedly anthropocentric heaven proclaimed by nineteenth-century books like
Heaven our Home
(a favourite of Queen Victoria). The orthodox considered that heaven was a place of contemplation and rest. Watts rejected this view. Christians accustomed to an active life would be disappointed with a passive beatific vision. ‘When angels are so variously and delightfully employed in service for God, in his several known and unknown worlds,’ reflected Watts, ‘we cannot suppose the spirits of just men shall be eternally confined to a sedentary state of inactive contemplation.’ Although contemplation ‘is a noble pleasure’, the very sight of the divine ‘will awaken and animate all the active and sprightly powers of the soul’. A perfect instance of the Protestant work-ethic, Watts concluded that, rather than being confined to eternal meditation, the soul will ‘set all the springs of love and zeal at work in the most illustrious instances of unknown and glorious duty’. Since fatigue was unthinkable in heaven, the saints would endlessly join in the work of God. ‘Those spirits who have tasted unknown delight and satisfaction in many long seasons of devotion, and in a thousand painful services for their blessed Lord on earth,’ Watts noted, ‘can hardly bear the thoughts of paying no active duties, doing no work at all for him in heaven, where business is all over delight, and labour is all enjoyment.’ Active Christians, who might have got bored with eternal meditation, would serve God ‘perhaps as priests in his temple, and as kings, or viceroys, in his wide dominions’.

Also influential in England was the vision of Emanuel Swedenborg, who made London his second home and published many of his works there. Few Englishmen became true Swedenborgians, but his ideas point to changing outlooks, from the erstwhile primarily theocentric doctrine of heaven to a more domesticated model. In his
The Economy of the Animal Kingdom, Considered Anatomically, Physically, and Philosophically
,
Swedenborg suggested that only a thin curtain would divide heaven from earth, with heavenly life commencing straight after death, less as the antithesis of terrestrial existence than its continuation and completion. Although heaven remained the traditional garden of repose, the saints were now depicted as engaged in spiritual improvement. And finally, the traditional primacy of the beatific vision was replaced by an accent on human love, expressed through family, friends and neighbours.