Brushing it Under the Carpet

How beliefs about death define our attitude to life

On 31st October 1517, a young Augustinian priest named Martin Luther wrote to his Archbishop, Albrecht of Magdeburg and Mainz, complaining about the sale of indulgences.

It was a bold thing to do, and the letter is couched in grovelling rhetoric. But in spite of the tone, the message is clear: do something about it, or I’m going to cause trouble. 

The rest, as they say, is history.

The reason for this unprecedented step was that a substantial economy had developed around ways of mitigating the sufferings of purgatory by performing acts of piety in this life, preferably accompanied by a cash payment. 

Essentially, there was something called the treasury of merits, which was an accumulated surplus of good deeds earned by the saints and the Virgin Mary that far exceeded their own requirements. These merits were therefore potentially available for redistribution to the faithful as pardons, or ‘indulgences’, for their sins, which could then be offset against punishments due in purgatory, thus smoothing the path to heaven.

And the keeper of this treasury, the successor of St Peter, was obviously the Pope. 

In return for the granting of an indulgence, the pious Christian would make a financial thank-offering to the Church. In time, these payments came to be made before, rather than after, the granting of the indulgence, which conveniently provided a very lucrative revenue stream for the Vatican coffers. 

The notion of purgatory, an in-between afterlife state for those not so wicked as to go straight to hell, but not yet pure enough to go straight to heaven – a halfway house in which sins unspent could be worked off before the final judgement – was controversial enough. The notion that the Pope could extend his jurisdiction into the afterlife by selling indulgences, not only to the living but also on behalf of souls already dead, was a step too far for some.

From our perspective today, it seems rather odd to think that an argument about what happens in the world to come could have such an enormous and far-reaching impact in this world. But this controversy gave rise the Reformation, bringing to birth the modern era, which within a few centuries would largely dispense with any kind of commonly accepted belief about life after death altogether.

Yet those beliefs persist. And whilst we may have doubts about traditional notions of heaven, hell and purgatory, many still pray for the repose of the souls of the dead, especially when they are our friends and family. At the very least, we feel it is right and proper to remember them. Beliefs about these matters may be quite varied now, but the truth is they always have been. 

At one time or another, Christians have believed that the soul is immortal, and that it is mortal; that it sleeps between death and the last judgment, and that it is sent straight away to bliss or damnation; that it is completely insensate, and that it has an almost bodily existence; that it returns to the being of God, like a drop of water returning to the ocean; that it existed before the birth of the body, and that it ceases with the death of the body.

To say nothing of the beliefs of those who follow other religions.

We could spend a great deal of time discussing all these matters and still be none the wiser. People will believe what they believe, and because it is, for obvious reasons, quite impossible to have certain knowledge one way or the other, people will continue to believe all sorts of different things. 

When I was the parish priest of a church in a busy city centre, a wide variety of people would pop into the church during the course of any given day. Some came to look around, some to pray; some were seeking help and advice, while others just wanted money for drugs. As might be expected, I met quite a lot of people who were in need of one sort or another and, of these, some who were in a state of extreme anxiety or desperation. There were those who were upset or distressed, those who were bereaved, and those complaining of some kind of psychic disturbance, including strange and inexplicable phenomena in their houses, disturbing dreams, and, oddly, a surprising number of people complaining of ghosts on their mobile phones. More specifically, they claimed to have photos on their phones, which they could not account for and denied having taken, but that had apparently just appeared, and which looked to them like some sort of supernatural phenomenon.

When it transpired, however, that the ghostly apparitions had manifested the morning after a drunken night out, I felt it reasonable to consider alternative hypotheses. Nevertheless, the distress those people clearly felt was very real, and whilst being acutely aware of my inability to solve anyone else’s problems, I saw it as my job to try my best to ensure they left feeling better than when they arrived. 

Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. 

We may feel that supernatural phenomena belong to a pre-industrial age, yet the seemingly incongruous alliance between modern technology and the supernatural has a well-established pedigree. Psychic researchers have always, if rather optimistically, used the most advanced instruments available to them in order to try and detect or demonstrate the reality of other dimensions of experience, with new forms of technology purportedly giving rise to new forms of evidence. 

During the 1960s Konstantin Raudive, a Latvian parapsychologist, made thousands of recordings of the white noise that can be heard on the radio when you move the dial between stations. He claimed to be able to identify human voices – often of famous deceased people, including Hitler and Stalin – uttering short words or phrases. Disappointingly, the rather mundane or nonsensical things the voices were alleged to have said, together with the fact that the interpretation of these noises seemed rather arbitrary, might lend itself – like the ghosts on phones – to alternative explanations.

Nevertheless, Electronic Voice Phenomena, or EVP, has since become a mainstay of paranormal investigation. And in spite of its rather tenuous evidential foundations, it does raise some interesting psychological questions. Why, for example, do we have such a strong tendency to see patterns in random information, whether it be ghosts on phones, voices in the static, or the face of Jesus in a slice of bread?

To explore this further, an experiment was conducted in which participants were played a series of repetitive electronic noises. Exposed to these sound sequences for long enough, a significant proportion confirmed that they were indeed able to detect human speech. Needless to say, however, there was little or no consensus regarding the words or phrases that people claimed they could hear.

Interestingly, people seem to hold simultaneously contradictory views in this area. On the one hand, there appears to be a fairly widespread skepticism about paranormal phenomena in general but, at the same time, many nevertheless privately claim to have experienced or witnessed things they cannot explain. Personally, I am happy to maintain an open-minded agnosticism about matters of which I cannot be sure either way. After all, even in terms of our ordinary everyday experience, there are sounds we cannot hear and colours we cannot see. If there is literally more to this world than meets the eye, then is it really too much of a stretch to suppose that the range of what exists could extend further still beyond what we are ordinarily capable of perceiving? 

In spite of its apparent inability to offer substantive proofs, paranormal research retains a strong measure of popular appeal. At some level, perhaps, we secretly want it to be true, presumably reflecting our need to feel connected with departed loved ones. The phenomena I have encountered, of people claiming to have pictures of ghosts on their mobile phones, may be just one of the latest ways in which people imagine contact with the dead. But what – since this is the underlying question behind it all – do we think actually happens when we die?  Sometimes, when people ask me this, as they inevitably do in my line of work, I give the only answer I can, which is that, like everybody else, I honestly don’t know.

That’s not always what people want to hear, of course, but I’d rather tell the truth, than simply offer comforting platitudes. 

I don’t know the answer. Nobody does. We may believe in resurrection, we may believe in reincarnation. People believe in all sorts of things, and for all sorts of reasons. But we cannot be certain, one way or the other. If we could, there would be no need for faith; specifically, faith that somehow there is, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, a meaning and purpose to human existence after all. To have faith is to trust that, in the end, it all somehow adds up to a story that makes sense, even though we know not how, and quite possibly never will.

We may sometimes feel that death makes life meaningless and futile but, in fact, the opposite is the case. Death is not what makes life meaningless, but precisely that which gives it whatever meaning it actually has. Ultimately, this is the meaning we choose to live by. We may choose to live life shaped by the Christian story of Christmas and Easter, incarnation and resurrection, we may choose to live a life of hedonistic self-indulgence, or we may choose from any number of other possibilities. The point is, we make a choice, and whether we are conscious of it or not, that choice is connected with what we believe will be our ultimate fate. The beliefs we have about what happens next shape who we are in the world and how we behave in relation to the other people with whom we share it. 

So, what does happen when we die? It’s one of those unanswerable questions we’ve all pondered at one time or another. Do we go to heaven? And if so, what does that mean? Are we resurrected in the prime of life, to remain for ever in our early thirties? Or do we have to start all over again, whether in human form or, perhaps, as an insect? Or is there, simply, nothing?

It’s actually surprisingly easy to answer this question, in spite of the fact that nobody knows the answer. We just have to ask a different question. It’s not so much a question of ‘what happens when we die’, so much as, ‘who or what am I, now’?

Because if who and what you really are is ‘nothing more’ than the physical body, then when you die, you die. That’s it. Game over. End of story. But if we are willing to imagine that there could be more to life than what we think we know, that there could be planes of existence extending beyond the one dimensional material world to which we have for the past 250 years increasingly reduced it, or that consciousness could manifest in forms of which we are not aware, then the matrix of possibility changes.

The answer to what happens next depends on who and what we think we are now. An immortal soul? Nothing but the physical body? A character in a computer game? A collection of random natural processes that just thinks it exists? 

Or what?