At 11:03 AM 12/21/00 EST, you wrote:
>I'm curious as to when the question was first asked, because I suspect that
>for a long time it wasn't. The OT descriptions of "the world to come" are
>equally spare, and it's my impression that at least originally one wasn't
>supposed to ask for further information. Not because there was any kind of
>taboo against asking, but because asking is futile. One can't know (the
>knowledge is God's prerogative), although one will learn in due time. It's a
>great contrast to the Christian conception of the afterlife, which is filled
>with much detail drawn from Rev., other texts, and even all those paintings
>of angels with lutes. The Christian approach to the afterlife almost mirrors
>the Western approach to science--that one asks questions, develops theories,
>seeks answers even to questions that may seem unanswerable. The original
>insight--that there are things one simply can't know--recedes farther and
>farther into the distance.
>pat sloane
I am somewhat surprised by your conception of the contrast between OT and
Christian approaches to the afterlife. It is one thing to have apocalyptic
literature or iconographic depictions for the sake of diffusing certain
doctrinal truths to the illiterate; but to say that the Christian
conception is more scientific in the sense that it is inquisitive to the
point of filling in details whereas the Jewish approach would be more
mystical, I think rather this has more to do with the influence of
Aristotielian and Scholastic approaches to theology in Western
Christianity, since among the Orthodox Christians of the East you very
often get this same, "no point asking" approach.
There is a very strong current in Medieval Christian theology, e.g. the
Cloud of the Unknowing, the Ascent of Mt. Carmel, based on St. Paul's "eye
has not seen, ear has not heard nor has it even entered in to the mind of
man ..." which is far more fundamental to Christian Medieval thought in
principle, if not in artistic expression, for the fact that what is
invisible cannot be depicted. Yet this is the common misconception, since
as in recent films such as Black Robes, about the Jesuits in 17th C. New
France, one of the French men is depicted saying, in comparing the
indigenous beliefs with those of the French: "what's more strange, saying
that the afterlife is a place out in the woods or a place where you sit on
a cloud all day gazing at God." -- I can't see how anyone of the period
would have held such a conception of Christian afterlife except the very
illiterate or by way of exaggeration. It is very easy to paint broad
strokes that depict medievals as ignorant or overyly imaginative; but I
think that would be to take the artistic currents as too strongly
indicative of religious conceptions, rather than as an attempt to
concretise many ideas of which were not visualizable. I would grant to the
Medieval as much ability to concieve of incorporeals as the modern, at the
very least; but perhaps even more so.
Sincerely in Christ,
Br. Alexis Bugnolo
|