Life of the World to Come: Near-Death Experience and Christian Hope: The Albert Cardinal Meyer Lectures [Hardcover]

Carol Zaleski (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 25, 1996 | ISBN-10: 0195103351 | ISBN-13: 978-0195103359 | Edition: First Edition

Critics of religion have argued that Christianity's success stems from its promise of eternal life, that people become Christian at bottom merely to cope with their fear of death. Contemporary theologians and philosophers, highly sensitive to this charge, tend to skirt the issue of life after death. To speak of the afterlife is at best to engage in wishful thinking, at worst to descend to the level of pop religion, encounters with angels, and UFO abductions. In The Life of the World to Come, however, Carol Zaleski asks the question, "Are we rationally and morally entitled to believe in life after death?" and answers with a spirited and emphatic "yes."
Drawing on a rich and varied array of sources ranging from Plato to St. Augustine to Heidegger, from the samurai warrior code to New Yorker cartoons to conversations with her young son, Zaleski not only brilliantly defends the right of Christians to believe in a life after death, but she illuminates the real value of imagining what that life might be like. It is important to spiritual maturity, she says, for the believer to be able to imagine a state of complete fulfillment, of oneness with God. And a vision of the ideal society, the heavenly communion of saints, is essential to the ordering of both our own lives and the society in which we live. Zaleski organizes her defense into three parts corresponding to the three great hours of the Divine Office, the cycle of prayers that is the heart of monastic life: Lauds at dawn's first light, Vespers at twilight, and, with the coming of night, Compline. In this liturgy of darkness and light, sleeping and waking, Zaleski discovers a poignant awareness of the ever-presentness of death in life and life in death, an awareness that we sadly miss amidst the medical and technological wonders of modern life. The timeless prayers and rituals of classical Christianity, she finds, are not a distraction from life, but a way of orienting oneself to life. Zaleski stresses the importance of the testimony of near-death experiences for Christian thinking about the afterlife. While these experiences do not by themselves provide objective evidence of life after death, she says, neither should they be dismissed as wishful thinking merely because research shows them to be influenced by cultural expectations. Zaleski asks "If God, the unknowable, wishes to be known, what other recourse does God have but to avail himself of our images and symbols, just as he has availed himself of our flesh?"
This book will inspire, challenge and console readers seeking to confront their own hopes and fears of death and the afterlife with dignity, rather than despair or denial. Candid, surprising, and profoundly wise, it will fascinate anyone intrigued by the strange and wonderful phenomena of near-death experience and the beauty and mystery of the unknown.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In these graceful meditations, Zaleski, a professor of religion at Smith College, searches for the affinities between narratives of near-death experiences (NDEs) and the traditional Christian doctrines of hope and the afterlife. Delivered originally as lectures during the Octave of Easter, Zaleski's reflections are ordered according to the three great hours (Lauds, Vespers, Compline) of the Divine Office. The meditation on Lauds, or morning prayer, thus explores the ways that NDEs may be understood as awakenings to the reality of death, while the meditation on Vespers, or evening prayer, reflects upon the NDE as an experience on the threshold of death. Weaving a rich tapestry of images of the afterlife from the writings of the early Church fathers and from New Age accounts of NDEs, Zaleski concludes that traditional Christian images of the afterlife may be greatly enriched by an encounter with the images of afterlife offered in NDE accounts. Because Zaleski's meditations possess that rare combination of intellectual gravity and lyrical playfulness, they are certain to appeal to a wide range of readers.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Zaleski is a well-known scholar of near-death experiences, and there is much interest in such experiences in both popular and scholarly circles, so this meditative little book is likely to have a substantial audience. It is an expanded version of three lectures presented in 1993 at the University of St. Mary of the Lake^-Mundelein Seminary. Zaleski delivered the lectures during the Easter season and noted a division between Western and Eastern Christianity that marked the time as a simultaneous reminder of death and resurrection. She conceived the lectures as a set of meditations on the hours of Lauds, Vespers, and Compline in the Divine Office, "which traces the mystery of death and resurrection through the course of a single day." Many readers will find the liturgical structure an aid to meditation; many more will find comfort in Zaleski's emphatic yes to the question of whether Christians are morally entitled to believe in life after death. The real theme of the book is hope, and that is a theme in great demand. Steve Schroeder

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First Edition edition (April 25, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195103351
• ISBN-13: 978-0195103359
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.7 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,432,557 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5.0 out of 5 stars NDEs and traditional Christian eschatalogical spirituality, May 25, 2011

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This review is from: Life of the World to Come: Near-Death Experience and Christian Hope: The Albert Cardinal Meyer Lectures (Hardcover)

Once again, but in a slim volume of three lectures placed within the multi-faceted Catholic symbolism of the Hours of Lauds, Vespers, and Compline, and presented in the author's characteristic academic style, we have the opportunity to examine the same theme and argument that Professor Zaleski offered so fulsomely in her book about Near-Death Experiences entitled Otherworld Journeys.

This book is also about the development of Christian doctrines concerning the after-life. A Roman Catholic context is highlighted within a broader, universal cultural base. Professor Zaleski states that awareness of death is a complex spiritual discipline with various implications, some of which she explores in the course of these lectures. She points out the ubiquity of imagistic thinking with regard to death and the after-life, and declares that awareness of death is "ineradically an imaginative activity." She asks then what criteria we should use to determine "which kinds of imagistic thinking are sound."

Zaleski uses a new concept of symbolism to help make her case regarding the truly revelatory nature of contemporary NDEs and, again, as in Otherworld Journeys, when she comes right down to defining this new symbolism, she does so only very succinctly: "Not so long ago, a symbol was seen as a mask that embellishes or conceals an idea that might otherwise be expressed in straightforward moral or religious terms. More recently, however,....the symbol has been interpreted as a mediating form by which realities are conveyed that are not available for conceptual expression. A living symbol participates in the reality it represents. It does not copy or fully contain that reality, but it does communicate some of its power."

She provides the names of the new symbolism's originators, and it looks as if we have here, in place of an extended explanation of the concept, Professor Zaleski's reading assignment for us: Paul Tillich, Ernst Cassirer, Suzanne Langer, Paul Ricoeur, and David Tracy.

As for Tillich, however, Dr. Zaleski attacks in no uncertain terms his dismissal of a literal belief in an after-life and the typical Christian concepts of the after-life that to him are banal and even "hellish." She is against "the discomfort with popular and imaginative piety that has led religious intellectuals to feel embarrassed by icons and rosary beads." From the approaches both of natural reason and spiritual dogma, Zaleski explores arguments regarding the "right" to believe in and imagine the after-life. "We need to imagine a faraway state of consummation," she says, "a state in which every noble impulse is expressed, fulfilled, and shot through with the radiance of divine energy." She believes that we would be seriously bereft without the concepts of death and immortality that contribute to the "total religious world picture."

Zaleski states as pointedly as possible her own convictions regarding NDEs as messages that really do come from God. One of her first major premises, though, is that NDEs always reflect the concepts of the culture out of which they arise. She sees NDEs as being "profoundly shaped by cultural expectations." (For instance, she cites differences in culture as reasons why contemporary NDEs, unlike medieval NDEs, do not focus upon concepts of punishment in Purgatory and Hell.) Zaleski believes that God wants us to Know Him but that a full and direct disclosure of Himself would be "to destroy our freedom, not to mention our nerves," and so in order to reveal Himself to us, he clothes himself in "our symbols and images, just as he availed himself of our flesh." To find other words for this concept, she quotes a hymn on Faith by St. Ephrem, "He clothed Himself in language so that He might clothe us in His mode of life." She further elaborates as follows: "If God is willing to descend into our human condition, may he not also, by the same courtesy, descend into our cultural forms and become mediated to us in and through them? To deny that this courteous descent can take place is to reinvent the heresy of the iconoclasts."

(I cannot agree with her idea that contemporary NDEs are cultural FORMS.)

With the felicity of an eloquent intellectual style, Zaleski presents the gift of these beautiful lectures. I would imagine this book to be an exceedingly appealing, enjoyable, and satisfying Read most precisely for Catholic intellectuals. It draws from many classic fonts of Catholic theology and spirituality by way of suggesting comparisons to images and concepts from NDEs. This book is not light reading although it highlights writings and concepts that will be heartening and uplifting.

Zaleski concludes by saying, "Christian eschatology...is not a distraction from life but a way of orienting oneself to life. [It] is the story of divine love calling creation back from death, a story that can be told only by drawing upon a repertoire of images that is endlessly varied and at times seemingly at variance with itself...." It's in Zaleski's facile expression of the particulars that support this general statement that the reader will find most enjoyment.

My one big problem with Zaleski's approach to arguing the spiritual legitimacy of NDEs is her insistence that they are culturally shaped, although I can agree with her that they are both real and imaginative (drawing upon the imagination). Further, I can't see using the new symbolism as a basis for perceiving the same kind of reality in contemporary NDEs and works of medieval literature. Given the important role of the imagination in shaping the symbolism imbedded in our very language, I still see too great a difference between historical fact and what might be termed literary "truth" to place them in the same revelatory category. I may be still in a traditional mindset with too poor an understanding of how much "symbolic language" may legitimately be said to affect the nature of REALITY.

Lastly, I take exception to Professor Zaleski's assertion that only conservative evangelical Christians that studied near-death literature found the presence of hell, purgatory, and postmortem punishment there. Other non-conservative, non-evangelical Christians and secular researchers have noted their presence.

(You can get a copy of this book, as noted by Amazon, for just a penny! ---plus the exorbitant cost of the shipping.)