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One of the first great philosophical books, Plato’s Republic, concludes with the recounting of a near-death experience. Socrates relates the myth of Er, a soldier who died in battle but came back to tell what he saw in the other world. Like other myths in Plato’s works, this is meant to supplement Socrates’ philosophical arguments and to help instill noble beliefs. It’s a last ditch effort at making the case for living a just life.

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Whether they be songs about angels or demons, Heaven or Hell, the theme of the afterlife has inspired countless musicians of varying genres and has embedded itself into the lyrics of many popular hits. Though their styles may be different, artists show that our collective questions and musings about the afterlife provide us with a common thread across humanity. Here are some of the songs that best represent this wide range of emotions that many people have about what lies beyond.

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Al Pacino is John Milton. Not John Milton the writer of Paradise Lost, although that is the obvious in-joke of the movie The Devil’s Advocate (1997). No, this John Milton is an attorney and — in what thus might be another obvious in-joke — he is also Satan, the Prince of Darkness. In the movie, he hires a fine young defense attorney, Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves), and offers him an escalating set of heinous — and high-profile — cases to try, a set of ever-growing temptations if you will. What will happen to Kevin in the trials to come?

The Devil is a terrifying foe in this film, which should not surprise us. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in the Duino Elegies that “Every angel is terrifying.” We sometimes forget that our devils were angels first. Tales of angels fallen from goodness particularly bother us, and Satan’s rebellion is supposed to have inspired the most terrible of conflicts. In The Prophecy (1995), Simon (Eric Stoltz) describes the conflict in Heaven and its consequences: “I remember the First War, the way the sky burned, the faces of angels destroyed. I saw a third of Heaven’s legion banished and the creation of Hell. I stood with my brothers and watched Lucifer Fall.”

The Doctor Who episode “The Satan Pit” (2006) also retells the story of this conflict. The Doctor (David Tennant) encounters The Beast (voiced by Gabriel Woolf) deep within a planet. The Beast tells The Doctor that he comes from a time “Before time and light and space and matter. Before the cataclysm. Before this universe was created.” In this time before Creation, The Beast was defeated in battle by Good and thrown into the pit, an origin that clearly matches that of the Satan whose legend he is said to have inspired: “The Disciples of the Light rose up against me and chained me in the pit for all eternity.”

A majority of Americans believe in Satan, a personified cosmic force of evil, but why? The Hebrew and Christian testaments say almost nothing about the Devil. As with Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, angels, and other topics related to the afterlife, most of what we know — or believe we know — about Satan comes from human imagination, not from holy scripture.

We have used stories, music, and art to flesh out the scant references to the Devil in the Bible. We find Satan personified in medieval mystery plays and William Langland’s Piers Plowman (ca. 1367), and described in horrifying—and heartbreaking—detail in Dante’s Inferno: “If he was fair as he is hideous now, / and raised his brow in scorn of his creator, / he is fit to be the source of every sorrow.” (Inferno 34.34-36)  We find the Devil represented in the art of Gustave Dore and William Blake, and in our own time, represented graphically in the comics The Sandman, Lucifer, and disguised as “The First of the Fallen” in Hellblazer. We watch Satan prowling the crowds for the entirety of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), and arriving for an earthly visit at the end of Constantine (2005).

And we are terrified. Like him or not, the Devil is the greatest villain of all time. Who else stands for every quality and condition that we claim to despise? Who else helps us to understand why the world contains evil — and why we are ourselves sometimes inclined toward it?

We also work out these questions through characters who are not explicitly Satan, but who embody supernatural or preternatural evil. If writers and artists can be said to create “Christ figures,” then it makes sense that they might also create “Satan figures.” Professor Weston in C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra space trilogy, Sauron in The Lord of the Rings trilogy of books and films, Darkseid (the ruler of the hellish planet Apokolips in DC Comics), Lord Voldemort (The Dark Lord of the Harry Potter mythos), and Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter all fit this profile. Such characters — dark, scheming, and because of their tremendous capacity for evil, all but all-powerful — may tell us as much about evil as our stories of Satan do. In fact, Mads Mikkelsen, who plays Lecter in the television series Hannibal, makes that comparison explicit:

“I believe that Hannibal Lecter is as close as you can come to the devil, to Satan. He’s the fallen angel. His motives are not banal reasons, like childhood abuse or junkie parents. It’s in his genes. He finds life is most beautiful on the threshold to death, and that is something that is much closer to the fallen angel than it is to a psychopath. He’s much more than a psychopath, and there is a fascination for us.”

In our consumption of narratives and images of the Devil, we are trying to work out what — if anything — the devil means. Even if we don’t believe in an actual fallen angel who rules this world and contends with God, most of us have come to accept that Satan is an emotionally-satisfying explanation for all that goes wrong in real life. The stories in which Satan chills us prove this beyond doubt. What could be more frightening than Al Pacino’s John Milton plotting the destruction of our hero in The Devil’s Advocate, his schemes only moments away from coming to fruition?

Evil is real, and has real power. We see that in the daily headlines and history books, in our own lives and even in ourselves. To find out where that evil comes from — to understand why human beings do things that are so clearly wrong — perhaps we do need to wrestle with the Devil, even if the only way we encounter him is as a character in a story.

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Paradise, a 1982 knock-off of the movie Blue Lagoon, stars Phoebe Cates and Willie Aames as teenagers who find themselves alone in a place of natural beauty and experiencing the ultimate joy together. Ann Wilson of Heart and Mike Reno of Loverboy can see forever in each other’s eyes in “Almost Paradise,” their Top Ten hit from the Footloose soundtrack (“Almost paradise / We’re knocking on Heaven’s door”).  Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) references the Elysian Fields, a paradise beyond this one where the blessed go when they die. And the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue has more than once run a story – or titled an entire issue — “Paradise Found.” Literature and popular culture are awash with references to or appropriations of Heaven.

The Baylor Survey of Religion determined in 2011 that the vast majority of Americans (two thirds of us, and over ninety per cent of Americans who identify as “very religious”) believe that Heaven exists. Something about the idea of a heavenly realm — call it Zion, call it Paradise, call it Elysium, call it Shangri-La, call it Nirvana — meets a deep-seated need of human beings to hope for something more after this life. Whether because it fits our sense of justice that the good should be rewarded, or because it appeals to our ingrained hope that this sometimes difficult existence isn’t all that we will ever experience, the idea of Heaven has helped to dry the tears of the suffering and offered the possibility of some greater meaning in many earthly lives.

But Heaven is as much a concept as an actual place, even for those who believe in the actual place. The human imagination has served a vital role in helping us to imagine what Heaven might be. Dante and Milton, for example, crucially shaped our conceptions of a paradisiacal realm beyond human speech and reckoning. In Canto XXX of the Paradiso, Dante offers us a vision of light and joy, describing the saints in Heaven arranged as a rose with the Virgin Mary at its center even as he speaks at length about his inability to speak of what he has seen.

John Milton shows us God enthroned, and in glorious language supplies the dignity and beauty most human descriptions of Heaven would necessarily leave lacking:

Now had the Almighty Father from above,

From the pure Empyrean where he sits

High Thron’d above all highth, bent down his eye,

His own works and their works at once to view:

About him all the Sanctities of Heaven

Stood thick as Stars, and from his sight receiv’d

Beatitude past utterance; on his right

The radiant image of his Glory sat,

His onely Son; (Paradise Lost, Book IV, 56-64)

We require this sort of imaginative view of Heaven partly because the Bible (whether in the Hebrew or Christian testaments) contains very little teaching about Heaven as a place for the faithful departed. N. T. Wright notes in the book Surprised by Hope that most Christians assume that when the Bible speaks of something called heaven it is talking about the place where Christians go after death. Because they start with that belief, they misread Jesus’ teachings about the Kingdom of God or, in the Gospel of Matthew, the Kingdom of Heaven. Assuming that Jesus “is indeed talking about how to go to heaven when you die” may make us feel secure about the afterlife, but, says Wright, it “is certainly not what Jesus or Matthew had in mind.” (18) So, barring those mentions of Heaven in Jesus’ cryptic kingdom teachings, we are left with some references to a heavenly realm in apocalyptic writings like Daniel and Revelation, and some few sayings of Jesus. (The Paradise of Islam is mentioned considerably more often in the Qur’an and in the hadiths and other teachings).

Many Christians formed their understanding of Heaven from one of Jesus’ teachings in the Gospel of John: “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” (John 14:2-3, NRSV) This teaching has entered into our thinking from the King James Version, where “dwelling place” is translated as “mansions,” and prompted many to think of Heaven as a place where believers will have their own mansions (although the Greek monai« has no such denotative or connotative meaning; it simply means “a place where one may remain or live”).

But don’t tell those believers who have taken those expected mansions, shaken them with the Book of Revelation’s streets of gold, and served themselves a heavenly gated community where every occupant has a holy-water Jacuzzi with diamond handles. For many who have suffered in this life, it seems only just and right that they spend eternity in luxury. What is Paradise if it isn’t better than the world we know?

And if, like them, your image of Heaven is of a place where you will walk streets of gold and pluck a harp while holding forth with the saints, then you are certainly not in the minority. Jon Meacham notes in a recent TIME magazine cover story that this version of Heaven appears across Christian history, and is tied up in “culture, politics, economics, class, and psychology.” How we live now may be shaped by what we believe is happening to us in a next life, and can affect everything from how we vote to how we give. But more importantly, our stories about Heaven offer us consolation; they assure us that a just God will surely reward the faithful and punish the faithless, no matter what happens to us in this life. For that reason, those stories are vital to our peace of mind.

The post Almost paradise: heaven in imaginative literature appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Short Stories of Heaven is a wonderful resource for children and their families who are dealing with loss and terminal illness, as well as people who are looking for a way to explain the afterlife to children.

It has been a while since I reviewed any Young Adult books so for this update I will review Three wonderful YA books that your teens would love.  Please enjoy and grab them for the holiday season.

1) Starters- This book was written by Lisa Price and published by Delacorte Press in 2012. Imgine a world where a deadly war called the Spore Wars wiped out everyone between 20 and sixty years old. A young girl named Callie decides to rent her body to Enders-seniors who want to be young again.  Callie's world is divided and  full of danger, while teens are only second hand citizens. This book follows Callie and her survival in this detopian world full of renegades who will kill for food. As she rents her body she discovers that her renter intends to do more then just have fun. This is a great book to read. It will make you ask the question What if this can happen to us? I highly recommend this book not only for teens, but adults as well.  It will take you to place that may excist one day. Who know it may already be a parral world like this already. It is a very enjoyable read and lots of fun.

2) Elsewhere-  This book was written by Gabrielle Zevin and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2005. An imprint of Macmillan. "After fifteen-year-old Liz Hall is hit by a taxi and killed, she finds herself in a place that is both like and unlike Earth, where she must adjust to her new status and figure out how to "live".  This book look at the afterlife in a whole new way. The writer creates an amazing world that will imerse the reader in it's content. It is full of wonderful discrptions and has a great voice. As you read the book Liz will become a part of you and you will cheer her to the end. A great page turner.  Please grab this book and read it yourself or share it with your teen. A great gift  for everyone.

3) The Knife of Never Letting Go. Book 1 in Chaos Walking- This book is written by Patrick Ness and published by Candlewick Press 2008. "Pursued by power-hungry Prentiss and mad minister Aaron, young Todd and Viola set out across New World searching for answers about his colony's true past and seeking a way to warn the ship bringing hopeful settlers from Old World." I really enjoyed this book and the world the auther created. In this world males can here what other males are thinking. Our two main Characters Todd and Viola set out on a journey running away from death. This book is full of action and intersting characters. You get to know the young teens very well. As you read the book it will be a page turner. it also has a much deeper meaning to it. I highly recommend you grab a copy for yourself and your teens. Just be warned the is very gruesome and not recommended for children under 12.

Thank you everyone for reading my blog and have a wonderful Holiday season. Look for a new update soon.

BRIE'S LIFE ENDS AT SIXTEEN: Her boyfriend tells her he doesn't love her, and the news breaks her heart—literally.

But now that she's D&G (dead and gone), Brie is about to discover that love is way more complicated than she ever imagined. Back in Half Moon Bay, her family has begun to unravel. Her best friend has been keeping a secret about Jacob, the boy she loved and lost—and the truth behind his shattering betrayal. And then there's Patrick, Brie's mysterious new guide and resident Lost Soul . . . who just might hold the key to her forever after.

With Patrick's help, Brie will have to pass through the five stages of grief before she's ready to move on. But how do you begin again, when your heart is still in pieces?

"Inventive, gorgeous, funny and yes . . . heartbreaking. You will absolutely love this book." — Lauren Oliver, New York Times bestselling author of Before I Fall and Delirium.