Customer Reviews

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

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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.)