immortality

immortality attribute of deathlessness ascribed to the soul in many religions and philosophies. Forthright belief in immortality of the body is rare. Immortality of the soul is a cardinal tenet of Islam and is held generally in Judaism, although it is not an essentially Jewish idea. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed in an afterlife, in which the souls of men lived on, but generally only the gods were considered truly immortal. The ancient Celts believed firmly in immortality. In the East, Zoroastrianism posited immortality. The religions arising in India (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism) generally consider individual immortality undesirable and believe in reincarnation of men as a chain eventually leading to reunion with the infinite (Nirvana). Christianity teaches the resurrection of the body (in the sense of survival of personality) as well as immortality of the soul. See spiritism ; heaven ; hell .

Bibliography: See C. J. Caes, Beyond Time: Ideas of the Great Philosophers on Eternal Existence and Immortality (1985); P. and L. Badham, Death and Immortality in the Religions of the World (1987).

Immortality: see AFTERLIFE.

immortality. Though not a specifically Christian doctrine, the hope of immortality is an integral element in Christian belief. In pre-Christian times Greek philosophers had inferred the existence of the soul before birth and its survival of death, and had regarded the body as a prison-house from which death brought the release of the soul into a fuller existence. Early Hebrew thought about the next world hardly went beyond the conception of a shadowy existence in Sheol, but in later pre-Christian Judaism a greater sense of the reality of the future life developed. The essential shape which the doctrine assumed in Christianity arose from the fact of Christ's Resurrection. No longer was the highest destiny of man seen as the survival of an immortal soul, but as a life of union with the risen Christ which would reach completion only with the reunion of soul and body. Since the late-18th cent. the traditional arguments have been challenged, notably by I. Kant; he held that it was beyond the competence of ‘theoretical reason’ to establish the soul's immortality or otherwise, but he argued that it could be established on the ground of moral experience, i.e. through ‘practical reason’. The abiding character of the moral law and the manifest injustices of the present life were a sure index that there was a purer life in which these injustices would be remedied. A similar line of argument has been adopted by many modern apologists. See also RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD and CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY.