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Farther Off From Heaven
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15106 |
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BOOK WORLD
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4 / 1989 |
3,935 Words |
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Julian Norris Hartt
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HEAVEN
A History
Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang
Yale University Press, New Haven & New York: 1988
410 pp., $29.95
Colleen McDannell is a lecturer in history and religion in the European Division of the University of Maryland; Bernhard Lang is professor of Religion in the University of Paderborn, Germany. Misappropriating Browning, we might ask these able scholars what's a book about heaven for. They clearly identify their interest as historical first and last. If here and there (and markedly at the end) they find fault with some philosophers and theologians, McDannell and Lang nowhere claim to have answers to questions those thinkers have flubbed. It seems that as historians they do not have a license to appraise the truth or falsity of theories and doctrines about heaven. Nor do they claim a warrant for making either aesthetic or religious judgments about the abundant images of heaven in Western art. They do not pose as representatives or protagonists of a religious tradition its adherents believe is endowed with superior knowledge about heaven. So what are these scholars after?
The character of their project is plainly stated at the outset:
The future life is of interest to us only as it explains
the mystery of this life…We study heaven because it
reflects a deep and profound longing in Christianity to
move beyond this life and to experience more fully the
divine. The ways in which people imagine heaven tell us
how they understand themselves, their families, their
society, and their God. …Changing ideas about love,
friendship, work, God, and spiritual growth in the other
life can serve as guidelines for understanding cultural
ideas and ideals of this life...[Thus] heaven can be used
as a key to our Western culture.
In prosecuting this purpose, largely sociological, the authors override a standard scholarly distinction between major and minor figures in Western intellectual history: "The most creative insights into the beyond often come from those seldom spoken of in scholarly circles…Frequently, those who made the most sense of heaven had no schooling in theological discourse at all."
The authors do not tell us what criteria they have used in appraising creativity and for making sense of heaven. Perhaps that is a philosophical issue. Be that as it may, McDannell and Lang have produced a remarkable feat of scholarship in this book, partly because of their use of writers and artists whose contributions are hardly remembered by anybody except historians and librarians. Heaven in a brilliant mosaic of intellectually formidable doctrines and of magisterial images and large amounts of kitsch, or religious thinkers of the first magnitude in Western culture and figures whose popularity in their own time seems as mysterious as Reverend
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