Church History
and
Religious Culture
CHRC  () –
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Book Reviews
John Casey, After Lives. A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. Oxford
University Press, New York , ix +  pp., ISBN     .
US .
The subtitle of this book, A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, is slightly
misleading. A Guide suggests something far more pedestrian than this elegant
and learned essay, magnificently written, but following an individual path.
John Casey’s approach to the history of the afterlife, which he traces from
the ancient Egyptians, through Mesopotamia and Israel, to Christianity (by
far the larger part of his study), tends to be just as literary as it is theological.
The text most quoted is probably Dante’s Divina Commedia, while Aquinas is
mentioned by the way. Casey’s point of departure is the vivid description of
hell in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. There are comparatively
few references to secondary sources. Readers will find no mention in the
chapter entitled “The Decline of Hell” or in the bibliography of D.P. Walker’s
homonymous work.
The author’s erudition, the originality of his approach, and the intelligence
of his perceptions make After Lives a particularly refreshing book to read.
In the first section, on hell, Casey emphasises the absence of any reference
to eternal damnation in the Pauline Epistles (as opposed to the Gospels).
The descriptions of hell only really start with the apocryphal apocalypses of
Peter and Paul, dating from the first half of the second century. Casey then
passes on to Tertullian and Lactantius and provides an excellent survey of
Origen, whose belief in hell as a form of punishment leading to improvement entailed a denial of eternal torment. He also devotes a couple of pages
to the accounts of hell in the Qur"an, and his extensive analysis of Dante’s
Inferno is followed by an examination of the teaching of predestination, above
all in St Augustine and Calvin. In the chapter on the decline of hell Casey
discusses the inclination on the one hand to describe hell in the most realistic terms—his examples include the Jesuit Dresselius and the English Puritans Christopher Love and Thomas Vincent—and, on the other, to spiritualise it, as we see in the writings of another Jesuit, Louis Bourdaloue. In
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 
DOI: 10.1163/187124112X621590
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Book Reviews / CHRC  () –
the same period, moreover, voices were raised which questioned the justice
of hell. Like Origen before them both the Baptist Samuel Richardson and
the theologian Thomas Burnet called in doubt the eternity of divine punishment.
Purgatory, in a chapter appropriately entitled ‘Rome’s happiest inspiration?,’
gets short shrift, and the examples of its description are limited mainly to St
Catherine of Genoa and Dante. Heaven, on the other hand, is dealt with at
length. Casey’s first examples, in ancient Egypt, show that heaven was initially a place reserved for the likes of kings and closed to the great majority of the population. At first this was also true of Israel, but the idea later
developed that individuals might ascend to the kingdom of the gods after
death irrespective of their background. Thanks largely to Philo, this idea was
further elaborated. “Life,” writes Casey, became “a spiritual preparation for
ascent to God,” and in the case of Irenaeus we find heaven conceived as a
reward applied far more generally. If hell was to be increasingly spiritualised
and its existence ultimately to be doubted, there would seem to have been
a contrary development in the case of heaven. After the ascetic heaven of
Dante, it begins to fill with human delights. We see this in a humanist text,
Lorenzo Valla’s De voluptate, in the work of François de Sales, and, in a far
more extreme form, in the heaven described by Robert Blair and William
Blake (who both also suggest the satisfaction of sexual desire), and in that
imagined by the Swedish mystic and spiritualist who influenced Blake so
strongly, Swedenborg. For Swedenborg heaven was, in Casey’s words, “a pleasure palace.”
But where did the teaching of Swedenborg, for whom the existence of spirits was of such importance, lead? In his last chapters Casey examines the
phenomenon of Spiritualism, a movement which was extraordinarily fashionable in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which had eminent
supporters such as Elisabeth Barrett Browning, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan
Doyle, and W.B. Yeats, but which also produced somewhat fraudulent conjurers like David Dunglas Home. “Spiritualism,” writes Casey, “would transform
utterly our understanding of death, turning the experience of it into something really rather pleasant […] It would confirm the existence of angels and
the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory, but not hell, which would drop
out of consideration.” The diminishing fear of death, it might be claimed, also
contributed to the conclusions of the Second Vatican Council in which eternal damnation was certainly played down, albeit not actually denied. Casey’s
epitaph for Spiritualism, however, is that of T.H. Huxley, who wrote: “The
only good that I can see in a demonstration of the truth of ‘spiritualism’
Book Reviews / CHRC  () –
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is to furnish an additional argument against suicide. Better live a crossing
sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a ‘medium’ hired at a guinea
a séance.”
Alastair Hamilton
[email protected]
The Warburg Institute, London