There isn't enough space here to write a review that does justice to this book. It is an extra-rich and extra-comprehensive scholarly work It takes on the unusual task of comparing and contrasting return-from-death literature in medieval Christendom with similar stories in contemporary secular society that fall under the designation of "near-death experiences," all toward the end of demonstrating a means of solving the challenges of "meaning" that NDEs present to modern science and especially to religious orthodoxy. I may not be parsing my words carefully enough to convey the careful nuances involved in Carol Zaleski's purpose, but I think my statement is correct enough to give the reader a good "boiled down" idea of the kind of conclusions that the author will draw.
The book section that deals with NDEs covers about 100 pages in the last half. If you are reading this book because of an interest in NDEs, I'd say you should put it at the top of your list because Zaleski does a very good job of summarizing all the major "scientific" approaches to the controversies about NDEs, pro and con, and so she will save you the work of reading a lot of other books in an effort to formulate perspectives on the problems of what causes NDEs, whether or not there are really invariable characteristics of NDEs, whether or not they are always positive in their effects, etc. (Recall this book was published in 1987, and I think that since then more NDES about hell have come to light than she was aware of.) After examining all the scientific arguments that try to explain and support or debunk NDEs, Zaleski decides that the battle is not conclusive and must end in a draw.
Further, after Zaleski examines various attitudes from members of the Christian and some other types of religious communities, she decides to find a way to jump over the unresolved difficulties of the religious challenges and to state a way that she sees toward finding NDEs to be salutary and legitimately useful within a religious context. This is through an understanding of the "religious imagination" and how it works in narrative forms of visionary revelation. The long exposition of her entire book leads to her concluding argument that centers upon "religious imagination" and the use of symbolic language. She is excited about scholarship along these lines and, for the reader who may be interested in pursuing these concepts, she especially points in Chapter 3 (note 33) toward two articles and two books that deal with concepts of "religious imagination."
(Of interest, I note that she has written another book that is a brief meditation making use of NDEs interwoven with images from writings of the Church fathers ordered under the framework of the Prayer of the Hours, Lauds, Vespers, Compline, and which material was presented as a lecture during the Easter Octave: Life in the World to Come: Near-Death Experience and Christian Hope: The Albert Cardinal Meyer Lectures, 1996.)
(Zaleski's PhD is from Harvard and she is Professor of World Religions at Smith College; is an editor for The Christian Century; collaborates with her husband Phillip on writings of religious scholarship; and happens also to write about the group called The Inklings which included CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein.)
In the first chapter of this book, Zaleski provides a general overview of the types of otherworld journey literature that occur in cultures worldwide. In Chapter 2, she differentiates between the various typical characteristics and socio-religious purposes of the medieval forms of 1) the apocalyptic vision which had its prototype in the Vision of St. Paul--not the Scriptural account, but the influential, purportedly authentic, 3rd century manuscript in which Paul elaborated upon the details of his vision; 2) miracle and vision stories which had their well-springs in the Dialogues of Gregory the Great; 3) conversion visions such as the 8th century journey of Drythelm as recounted by the Venerable Bede; and 4) the pilgrimage experience with its prototype in the medievally well-known Purgatory of St. Patrick Having established this basis of the types of medieval visions that would compare well with the concept of the NDE, Zaleski goes on in three subsequent chapters to explore elaborately some typical medieval symbols and literary conventions found in near-death stories.
Zaleski deals with the question as to whether medieval otherworld visions contained some elements that were reportage of actual NDE experiences and actual other kinds of visions, and concludes that they did. She demonstrates how the literary conventions probably came to overlay and change the original vision report. This exposition was of interest to me because I approached the book with an idea that some actual NDEs might have been the basis for certain medieval literary works which did appear to contain descriptive details strikingly similar to those of modern NDE stories. Zaleski's treatment of medieval literature was so interesting, however, that I became even more fascinated with her accounts of the conventions of medieval death-vision literature. I must say that at first I thought the idea of comparing medieval vision literature and contemporary NDE stories was far-fetched and inappropriate, but I became fairly well convinced otherwise by her explanation about how and why medieval changes obscured the original reportage of near-death stories.
For the reader who can take the intellectual quality of her scholarly narrative, the book proves to be an amazing treasure trove of information. Further, at the back of the book are 37 pages of notes, a four-page list of primary resources of medieval vision literature, and a 19-page bibliography, so the book also provides a wealth of reference materials.
There's just a whole lot of information compressed into this book. This lady's learning and her ability to express it toward the end of illuminating the subject of otherworldly journeys past and present is more than remarkable. I found it very enjoyable to be stuffed with a feast of good learning, BUT, Zaleski's writing is sometimes so dense with concepts and conclusions that reading her book, simultaneous with creating intense interest in it, gave me a headache! Especially moving through the NDE sections and into her interpretive ending. It sometimes required a great deal of concentration and re-reading of sentences to follow her lead. I was relieved when I got to the end of the book! But, I cherish it as one terrific book!
Eventually, Zaleski's religious conclusions regarding NDEs have to do with the idea that our religious language and communication is based on "symbols," and she defines symbols after the mode of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Paul Tillich, and others, as something that participates in the reality it represents and which cannot be translated adequately into conceptual terms. Furthermore, religious imagination, or the capacity to create or appreciate religious symbols (which is demonstrated in Zaleski's analyses of literature and NDE accounts) can work with both universal patterns and idiosyncratic material to fuse the universal and particular into "a seamless whole." Theology, as a discipline of critical reflection on religious experience and religious language, cannot escape some fundamental limitations such as the lack of a mode of expression that combines both analytic and symbolic thought. According to Zaleski, our understanding of the transcendent comes to us and we communicate about it through the use of symbols. (For instance, when one says "God is dead," or "God is both Father and Mother.") Thus, theology's fundamental material will be symbol, and theology's task should be to assess the health of our symbols. Zaleski argues that one cannot really say whether a symbol is true or false, but only whether it is vital or weak. In order to diagnose the vitality of religious symbols, theology deals with ranges of experience that cannot be verified as ultimate truth. If we have no direct conceptual or sensory access to reality, then the only way to judge the validity of images and ideas is how well they serve "a remedial function, healing the intellect and the will." According to Zaleski, if we fully recognize the symbolic nature of near-death testimony, and accept the limits it imposes upon us, then we will be able to accord it a validity and value that would not otherwise be possible, and this will yield further insight into the visionary, imaginative, and therapeutic aspects of religious thought in general.
From my reading of the book, I did not have a clear understanding or firm grasp of most elements of the above-stated argument, which may be more my fault than the author's.
The author says that even the most potent images of God, good, and evil can lose potency over time, and sometimes what is needed is a "fresh gust of iconoclasm." She writes, "At its best, theology is the art of detecting and serving the changing needs of religious symbol systems; thus it proceeds in a rhythm of creation and destruction rather than a progressive conquest of truth....If we view theology in this way, as an essentially therapeutic rather than theoretic discipline, it is easier to come to terms with religious change while maintaining respect for tradition....What is needed is not the pursuit of superficial 'relevance' for its own sake, but a balance between preservation and innovation." She insists that theology and religious teaching and inquiry must deal not so much with truth-telling as with truth-seeking. She quotes Gregory the Great in support of her assertion that when we sit in judgment upon newly coined concepts of God, the soul, and immortality, we should consider the context in which they appear rather than measure them against "a narrow intellectual standard."
The social context of religion in our time is growing increasingly individualistic as many persons are choosing personal, solitary experience as a religious way amidst what Zaleski points out is a "dizzying array" of competing world views and paths. She sets up a formulation of the necessity for both social and personal validity in religious experience. Religious experience is invariably social and religion is a cultural system whose traditions reflect and promote social order and tend to value the group over the individual. In sum, Zaleski sees a deficiency in the social aspect of NDEs, "On a personal scale, a revelation must organize life into a meaningful whole, without excluding other experiences. On a social scale, it must create or serve a community, and on this score near-death testimony breaks down into private testaments which, despite their common features, have not mustered the collective energy to produce a coherent world-view. Those who experience near-death visions, as well as those who are affected by hearing them, still face the problem of finding a community and a context in which to search again for and apply the insights they have received."
Zaleski quotes William James as follows: "In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James uses psychological and medical observations to shed light on the nature of religious melancholy and joy, conversion, and mystical states, and shows that these subjective phenomena inhabit those same realms of human experience where the sublime coexists with the spurious. When it comes to questions of truth or value, however, James refuses to yield the privilege of interpretation to doctrinaire skeptics. Against 'medical materialists' and dogmatists of every stripe, he insists that an experience should not be evaluated on the basis of its origin; he proposes, instead, these general criteria: 'immediate luminousness....philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness.' Speaking in more traditional terms, he urges us to decide the validity of subjective religious phenomena solely on the basis of their 'fruits for life.'"
Although Zaleski faults James' viewpoint as too personalistic, lacking the needful social universality and broad religious importance, I tend to favor James' criteria as most nearly like my own with regard to willingness to accept and embrace the messages of most NDEs that I've heard about.
There are plenty more remarks and ideas that I'd like to cite, such as those in which she discusses how a belief in the afterlife has salutary personal and social effects, but this review is already over long. Not all passages of the book are difficult reading; some of the reading goes fast. It's an exceptional book.
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