The Meaning of Life 4: Paradise Promised

Arguably, my earlier posts linking the meaning of life to instinct and passion evade rather than answer the question. Maybe I've conflated know-nothing states with knowing. There are two distinct kinds of knowing represented by different words in German: knowing-how and knowing-about. If knowing how to act with instinctive assurance implies knowing-about, then earthworms are philosophers.

           Knowing-about the meaning of life implies being able to make categorical, meaningful statements, or that's the dream of reason. We want to point to something and say, "There is is. That's the meaning. That's real. It exists." Or even, "That really matters." This is different from merely acting decisively. If knowing-about is what we're after, my earlier posts are evasions. They say, "Don't look," rather than telling what to see. They name discomforts rather than destinations. Distractions rather than deities. Suppose that the meaning of life is a teleological question. What is the purpose of it all? When life is summed up, what does it amount to?

The easy answers are unsatisfying. Teleological atheism denies ultimate meaning, and teleological agnosticism accepts that our limited human minds are incapable of knowing the ultimate. Pious teleological agnosticism sighs, "God only knows!" There is a point to here. Even if God underwrites meaning and reveals it in scripture--the strongest case--his scriptures exist in many versions open to a wild variety of interpretations. Orthodox piety is more about trust in mysterious coming-into-being, than detailed knowledge of a plan. "You know not the hour nor the day." Graphic predictions, examined closely, are usually gestures of desperate pride.

Teleological agnosticism is a reasonable place to start on earth where everything has a name and date, but "God only knows" is a queazy place to stop. It's a void. Existentialism is right that we need meaning, but we may resist positing it on our own authority or waiting for the blind wheels of life to turn--for another cat to chase as we treadmill toward death. We may want to believe that there is something more to the meaning we embrace.

          My earlier reflections on meaning as heroism and sainthood, meaning as instinct, and meaning as passion make sense,¹ but as autotelic moments on a treadmill of life, not as destinations. Religious faith finds a focal point off the treadmill, out-of-reach but fixed as a guide, like "love" in Shakespeare's Sonnet 116:

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark, 

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

It may be an afterlife drawn concretely in the imagination, like the Christian heavenly city by a river with jeweled gates and golden streets² or maybe the garden of ripe fruits and sexual pleasure in Islam. Whatever it is, this astral meaning hovers fixed over the bog of life and death.

Absolute meaning implies an afterlife. Around the ancient Mediterranean where Western religion originated, the earliest assumption was that, after death, shades of the living fell to an underground darkness much less substantial and pleasant than the earth's surface. Sacrifices could feed the starving dead, burial could give them peace, and there were sporadic references to suffering for insults to the gods, but significant happiness was in this life. Only the darlings of the gods such as Greek demigods, a few Hebrew prophets, and the Pharaohs in Egypt had any kind of meaningful afterlife. Life-meaning implied personal heroism or service to family and tribe.

The democratizing of a personal afterlife with rewards and punishments seems to have begun in Egypt. The dead Egyptian described in the Book of the Dead repeatedly risks having his heart devoured--his seat of consciousness destroyed--unless he knows the right spells to recite, so immortality wasn't automatic. It depended on knowing magical spells. Early texts of these spells appeared in the Third Millennium BCE as hieroglyphics on the walls of royal tombs and evolved through paintings inside coffins to mass-produced scrolls by the First Millennium. Spell-based immortality, an afterlife in the lush Field of Reeds, became available to middle-class Egyptians but not to poor workers buried in the sand.

The Field of Reeds

          Platonic Greek philosophy assumed the immortality of all souls, and the resurrection of the dead begins to appear in Jewish scripture after the Babylonian Captivity. By Jesus' time, Jewish opinion was divided. The Sadducees, the conservative Temple party, held the old view that death was the end. The Pharisees taught a judgement day when the virtuous would rise bodily from their graves to live on a purified earth. Sinners were tortured or simply consigned to oblivion. Jesus and the early Christians agreed with the Pharisees but expected a mass resurrection after no more than a generation or two. When this didn't happen, there emerged the idea of an instantaneous spiritual resurrection. At the moment of death, spiritual souls rose to a spiritual Heaven rather than "sleeping" in physical graves until Doomsday. 

Both views have coexisted in Christianity ever since, and similar beliefs are shared by contemporary Judaism and Islam. A 2021 Pew Research Center poll found that 73 percent of Americans (92 percent of Christians) believe in Heaven, unchanged from a 2015 poll that defined the place as “where people who have led good lives are eternally rewarded,” 

          Logically at least, Heaven defines the meaning of life. As Renee Descartes noted in his famous Wager, a few decades of pleasure are worthless compared to an eternal reward. So any "meaning of life" derived from animal instinct or personal passion distracts from the only thing that matters: doing what it takes to get to Heaven, presumably by leading a good life. Analogues to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic Heaven appear in Eastern religions that aim to escape from a cycle of reincarnations. Even short of this escape, Hindus may earn centuries of bliss in a temporary heaven, and Pure Land Buddhists may achieve reincarnation in a blissful country.

Of course, even if religion gives meaning to life by promising infinite reward for good behavior, there remains a question: what sort of goodness wins the reward? Even if some sects excommunicate each other, kicking the competition downstairs, there's a lot of ecumenical toleration. Forty-three percent of Christians in a recent Pew Research Center poll responded that Heaven is available to members of other religions. 

          At the roots of American toleration may be the civic religion of Deism, the system that Thomas Jefferson assumed in the Declaration of Independence. Deism was first expressed in Herbert Cherbury's book De Veritate (1624), where he dismissed scriptural religion as superstition but listed five common notions that he thought were self-evident to reasonable people. One of his notions was that God "dispenses rewards and punishments both in this life and after it." Heaven exists because the injustice of this world would be unreasonable without it.

Many Americans who believe in Heaven do imagine a members-only resort for their own sect, but it's common, especially at funerals, to suppose a far less exclusive afterlife. Maybe that's just a polite obfuscation, like the old custom here in Virginia of refusing to take sides on the Civil War, calling a bypass the Blue and Gray Parkway. Still, public language implies ecumenical salvation. 

A ticket to Heaven seems to imply no more than treating people fairly, not violating moral basics, and occasional charity. Some folks would add a ritual obligation to worship some form of the Divine. Of course, nobody's perfect, and lapses are forgiven if repented. This low bar of good life seems to be enough to consider you Heaven-bound at your funeral, suggesting a consensus that the meaning of life consists in stumbling through it without too much unrepented meanness.

¹Meaning as hero or saint: https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/11/the-meaning-of-life-part-i.html; meaning as instinct: https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/12/the-meaning-of-life-instinct-enacted.html; meaning as passion: https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2021/12/the-meaning-of-life-3-passion-enacted.html

²"Longing for Death in Shape Note Hymns": https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/06/death-wish-in-dixie-afterlife-in-shape_15.html