This is a lucid and readable introduction to the problems of the ‘afterlife’, which is at its best when presenting the importance of philosophical ideas to a Christian perspective. On pages 73–5, for instance, there is a short section entitled ‘Descartes and the modern period’ which, for all its brevity, is an excellent summary of a shift in thinking associated with what Nichols calls ‘modern science’ but which is perhaps better seen as the ‘Enlightenment science’ that began to break down in the twentieth century. Nichols sees how crucially important a shift it was when Descartes started to think of the soul not as ‘the life principle and principle of organisation of the body and the self’ (p.74) but as effectively synonymous with the mind, ‘a thinking substance’. Bodies became nothing more than complex machines; minds became spiritual substances somehow located ‘inside’ them and somehow able to drive them forward. Philosophers turned to the mind/body problem and lost interest in souls (Anthony Flew's introduction to Body, Mind and Death is still a stimulating though limited account of the trends involved and his selection of writings remains useful).
In taking this turn, the philosophers lost something that Aristotle and Aquinas had seen and that was regained in different form through the writings of philosophers like Heidegger in the twentieth century. Enlightenment science had produced a self-sufficiency of the material world which still feeds the gut understanding of so many today who simply don't see the point of theology when, they believe, there is clearly a self-sufficient world of objects all around – bodies that are born and die, planets orbiting in regular rhythm, tables that day in day out stay happily where they are, and so on. The theologian appears as someone who fusses about unnecessary extras that can simply be ignored – such as souls. The Thomist position, which rightly remains at the very heart of Catholic (in particular) theology, undermines this presumption. The soul is ‘what makes the body a substance and an independently existing thing’ (p.67). As the ‘substantial form’ of the body, it is neither another substance inside it nor a superfluous entity that can be discarded altogether, but something without which it is impossible to make sense of bodies at all. In other words, it is no good theology thinking that it can vacate the physical realm and set out its stall in some kind of ethereal spirit-world above it. Nichols sees this very well, and it guides him through the complexities of understanding notions such as ‘immortality’ and ‘resurrection’.
There are faults. At times it seems to me that philosophical rigour is sold a little short. The Anglican Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, is a great favourite in this book, but what he says is often confusing. Concerning the ascension we are told (in a quotation from Wright) that we are dealing with ‘two different kinds of what we call space, two different kinds of what we call matter and also quite possibly…two different kinds of what we call time.’ This kind of ‘bring on the multiverses’ language hardly makes itself clear. On page 43 Wright is quoted calling the resurrected body ‘transphysical’. Transphysical?!‘It is physical, but it also transcends the limits of our space-time universe’. But what does this mean? There is a similar quotation from John Polkinghorne (p.144) where it is suggested that the risen Jesus may be in an ‘alternate universe’. Nichols is not talking nonsense. He quite rightly sees that physicists are beginning to develop theories about what they themselves call radically different kinds of universe, and Polkinghorne has written interestingly about these developments. But Nichols does have a tendency to be a little pat in his assessments.
The book begins and ends with ‘Dying Well’, pointing out that though we might prefer (as a wag once put it), to meet our end by keeling over and ‘waking up dead’ (perhaps like those unfortunate people who fall asleep at the wheel of their cars), there is much to be said for the sort of preparation of self and others which comes from a period of dying. There are excellent observations here, reminding us that this book is useful from a pastoral as well as philosophical viewpoint (it also has helpful analysis of biblical material and the background of ancient Judaism)
Because Nichols has Aquinas to carry him through the analysis of beliefs about the ‘afterlife’, the occasional lapse into easy solutions is held in check. But occasionally one wishes the book had more steel. On page 130 Nichols tells us that ‘Like Aquinas, I think of the soul as the form, that is, the formative or organising principle of the body. In this view, without the soul the body would disintegrate into its component molecules.’ The form is therefore more than a simple pattern. It is what Nichols calls ‘a holistic cause’, something not just rearranging elements that could perfectly well exist in some other structure, but giving them the possibility of being in any sort of structure at all – the possibility of being independently existing things. ‘However,’ he goes on, ‘there is little support for this in contemporary science, so I do not insist on it’. Instead he says that it is enough, like Polkinghorne, to call the soul the ‘total informational pattern of the individual, which develops throughout life’. But does this ‘middle way’ between simple pattern and holistic cause make sense? And what exactly is the ‘contemporary science’ that has sent Nichols from the arms of Aquinas to those of Polkinghorne? Nichols's powers of explanation deserve not to be sidetracked in this way. On the whole they are too good for that.
