near–death experiences. a theological interpretation
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Near–death experiences. A theologicalinterpretationHarm Gorisa
a Department of Systematic Theology and Philosophy, TilburgSchool of Catholic Theology, Utrecht, The NetherlandsPublished online: 30 Jul 2014.
To cite this article: Harm Goris (2014) Near–death experiences. A theological interpretation,International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 75:1, 74-85, DOI: 10.1080/21692327.2014.938098
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2014.938098
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Near–death experiences. A theological interpretation
Harm Goris*
Department of Systematic Theology and Philosophy, Tilburg School of Catholic Theology,Utrecht, The Netherlands
(Received 8 May 2014; final version received 20 June 2014)
Stories about near-death experiences (NDEs) draw much attention from the generalpublic and are extensively discussed by medical doctors and neuroscientists. However,though eschatology belongs to their core business, only few theologians participate inthe debate. This article proposes a theological interpretation of NDEs as ‘privaterevelations’. I first give a critical analysis of the development of the modern, allegedly‘scientific’, concept of NDE. This concept changes concrete personal testimonies intostatistical data that are used as scientific evidence for the existence of an immortal soul.Next, the main criticisms against this concept from neurosciences, study of mysticismand philosophy of mind are discussed. Finally, I argue that ‘private revelation’ is auseful model for a theological understanding of NDEs and that an analogy fromThomas Aquinas’ view on prophetic dreams can help to account for the specificcircumstance of imminent death. The interpretation I propose can do justice to theimpression NDEs make on people, but can also accept and meet some of the mostimportant criticisms raised against the modern concept of NDEs.
Keywords: near-death experience (NDE); mysticism; private revelation; ThomasAquinas
I. Introduction
In an interview in 2000, actress Elizabeth Taylor describes an experience she had in thelate 1950s while undergoing surgery. To the interviewer’s question if she did not feardeath anymore, Taylor answered:
I don’t fear it anymore. Because when I was on the other side, like in a tunnel and waswith Mike [Mike Todd, Taylor’s third husband and her great love, who died in 1958], itwas so beautiful and warm and the light was so welcoming. And I held onto him and hesaid ‘you have to go back, you have things to do and I’ll be here.’ And this was so longago. When I came out of like seven minutes of not breathing and no heartbeat andpronounced dead. … It is still something I don’t like to talk about much because it wasvery painful, I wanted to stay with Mike. Adjusting to life again was like learning to walkall over. But then I started appreciating sounds, colours, music. And I thought ‘my God, Ihave taken all this for granted and it is so incredibly beautiful’. And it made me cry and Ithought, thank you, God.1
Taylor’s story is one of countless others that since the 1970s have become known underthe label ‘near-death experiences’ (NDEs). NDEs have become a fashionable topic inpopular spiritual literature and TV shows. But also pastoral ministers often hear
*Email: [email protected]
International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 2014Vol. 75, No. 1, 74–85, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2014.938098
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emotional stories from parishioners about very intense personal experiences in the faceof mortal danger.
Testimonies about NDEs appeal to a wide audience. Could it be that these experiencesoffer conclusive scientific proof that there is something after death? That the soul isimmortal and that we shall be happy for ever in the afterlife, reunited with all ourloved ones? Can science now give us the comfort and hope that religion once offered?
Or is it humbug, as many claim? After all, is it not the case that neurosciences havealready come up with purely natural explanations for all the characteristics of NDEs?2
While NDEs receive much attention nowadays, both in the broader culture and inthe practice of pastoral care, academic theologians have generally shunned the issue,with few exceptions. It could be that we fear our academic respectability as theologianswill be (even more) at risk when we seriously engage in what seem esoteric topics likeNDEs, miracles, angels, Marian apparitions and the like. Furthermore, most of thesetopics have been monopolized by either Protestant or Catholic, right-winged fundamen-talists, with whom academics do not always want to be associated.3 And, finally, sinceKant theologians have gradually appeased the natural scientists by respecting a sharpborderline between science and faith or between natural sciences and the humanities.What Stephen Jay Gould has termed ‘non overlapping magisteria’ has become theprevailing model. NDEs, many think, belong to the domain of medical and neuros-ciences, with which theologians should not interfere and about which they are notknowledgeable.
There are only few full-length studies about NDEs that support the use of theologicalmethods. Two are from experts in the field of religious studies: Carol Zaleski’s (1987)Otherworld Journeys and Religion, Spirituality and the Near-Death Experience by MarkFox (2003). Zaleski adopts the method of comparative literary analysis and proposes toview NDEs as culturally shaped ‘works of the religious imagination, whose function is tocommunicate meaning through symbols rather than to copy external facts.’4 Fox employsa phenomenological approach and calls for an interdisciplinary study of the NDE, inparticular from the perspectives of theology and of religious studies.5 Unlike Zaleski, Ishall consider the NDE from a more specifically theological angle, focusing on topicsfrom theological anthropology. In doing so, I want also to answer Fox’s call for theparticipation of theologians in NDE research.
In my view, we as theologians can and should take NDEs seriously, but on ourown theological terms. In this article, I shall give a critical analysis of the present-day discussion about NDEs and propose a theological reading that I think doesjustice to the impact these experiences can have on individuals, bring out theirtheological and religious relevance, and refute exaggerated consequences that somedraw from them.
First, I shall give a critical account of the development of the modern concept of NDEand summarize the positions of its most important advocates, who think that NDEsprovide scientific evidence for the existence of an immortal soul. Next, I shall discussthe main criticisms and problems that can be raised against the view that NDEs giveevidence-based proof of an afterlife. These counterarguments are derived from differentfields: neurosciences, mystical studies, and the philosophy of mind. The final part of thearticle offers a theological evaluation of NDEs that takes into account the objections butalso tries to value their religious significance. I shall argue that the concept of ‘privaterevelation’ offers a very useful theological model for interpreting NDEs and I shall drawan analogy with the view of Thomas Aquinas on prophetic dreams in order to accountalso for the specific character of NDEs.
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II. The modern concept of Near–Death Experience
Although stories about ‘otherworld journeys’ are of all times and of all cultures, themodern notion of the NDE was only shaped in 1975 when medical doctor and psychol-ogist Raymond Moody published Life after Life. The Investigation of a Phenomenon:Survival of Bodily Death. The small book is a collection of about one hundred stories ofpeople who were considered ‘clinically dead’ and had had extraordinary experiencesbefore ‘returning to life’. In the 1970s more and more of such stories had became publicand Moody’s book came out at the right moment. Sociologist Allan Kellehear lists anumber of medical, social and cultural reasons for the growing popularity of these stories:development of new medical technologies like CPR, which saved many people whopreviously would have died, changing views on death because of higher life expectancy,dissatisfaction with traditional religions, rising interest in and social appreciation ofpersonal testimony and of the experience of ordinary people.6
Moody’s book shaped our present-day discourse about NDEs in two ways. First bycoining the expression ‘Near-Death Experience’ itself. The introduction of this termestablished the very concept of NDE as a special category of peculiar experiences that –so it seems – are essentially distinguished from all other kinds of experiences. Second,Moody selected and listed 15 ‘elements’, which, he claimed, are common in most NDEsand which characterize a concrete experience as an NDE, although he admitted thatnone of the stories in his book displayed all 15. The best known ‘elements’ are: out-of-body experience (OBE), travelling through a tunnel, meeting a being of light and lovedones, feeling of bliss, experiencing a life review, returning painfully into the body,having life altering effects. Most of these are also found in the story of Elizabeth Taylorcited at the beginning of this article. Later Kenneth Ring reduced the number ofelements to a scale of five ‘stages’ of the ‘core experience’, ranging from ‘feeling ofpeace’ to ‘entering the light’, though not all persons reach this final and highest stage ofthe NDE, as Ring points out.7 Bruce Greyson refined King’s ‘Weighted Core ExperienceIndex’. He questioned a group of members of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) and developed a 16-item ‘NDE scale’ in order to quantify andidentify NDEs, and to classify them further into four types.8 All this shows that it turnedout to be problematic to specify the criteria that a concrete experience – or story – mustmeet to qualify as an NDE.
After the publication of Moody’s book, NDEs became the subject of scientificresearch, first and foremost by medical doctors, like Bruce Greyson (psychiatrist),Michael Sabom (cardiologist) and Pim van Lommel (cardiologist), who succeeded inpublishing an article about NDEs in The Lancet, one of the leading journals in medicalscience, in 2001.9 Nowadays, prestigious universities officially sponsor long-termresearch projects, a scientific peer-reviewed Journal of Near-Death Studies is beingpublished by the IANDS, and there are academic conferences devoted on NDEs. Mostrecently, the autobiographical book Proof of Heaven. A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into theAfterlife, published by neurosurgeon Eben Alexander in 2012 about an NDE he claimed tohave had in 2008, has become a bestseller, although the author has been accused byjournalist of not giving a truthful report of all the circumstances of the 2008 events.10
The intervention of scientists, especially of medical doctors, who enjoy a highepistemic authority in modern Western societies, has given a specific appeal and trust-worthiness to personal stories from ordinary people about extraordinary experiences.What the scientists’ interference in fact causes, is the transformation of single, subjective,private testimonies into public, empirical, statistically processed evidence for the existence
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of a separate and immortal soul and of the afterlife. At least, this is how the expertspresent their NDE research and how it is perceived by many ordinary people.
This ‘scientification’ is a key factor in explaining present-day popularity of NDEs. Itpersists in spite of what one might call ‘controversial spiritual radicalisations’ amongprominent NDE-researchers. Moody, for example, claimed that he knew about previouslives, including his existence as some pre-human tree-creature and he started to experi-ment with mirror-gazing; Ring predicted apocalyptic destruction and the dawning of aGolden Era, and connected NDE-research with UFO abductions and shamanism. VanLommel subscribes to the ‘New Paradigm Science’, which seeks to combine New Agespirituality with Einstein’s physics and quantum theory and is somehow reminiscent ofhow nineteenth century Victorian spiritualists appealed to the then developed physicaltheories about electricity and magnetism.11 Some of these rather exotic heterodox viewsprovoked the anger of another prominent NDE researcher, Michael Sabom, who hadbecome a conservative Christian. It led to the so-called ‘religious wars’ in the ‘NDE-movement’ and the IANDS around the year 2000.12
The ‘scientification’ of NDEs was also not completely undone by the criticisms frommainstream science, in particular from neuroscientists who claimed that physiologicalprocesses in the brain can completely account for NDEs. In the next section, I shalldiscuss neuroscientific arguments for a purely naturalistic explanation of NDEs, togetherwith other objections from the study of mysticism and from philosophy of mind.
III. Criticisms: neuroscience, mysticism, philosophy
The most popular refutation of the claim that NDEs offer experiential evidence of animmortal soul and of what happens to it in an afterlife, comes from neuroscientists.13
Susan Blackmore’s hypothesis of the ‘dying brain’ is probably the best known example.14
She argues that specific neurophysiological reactions in the brain to the breaking down ofits normal functions during the process of dying, account for all the impressive features ofNDEs. OBEs, by which people witness their own body from an external vantage point,are the result of a new perception-model that the dying brain develops in response to thestress caused by the increasing malfunctioning of the senses. The normal ways by whichsensory information is processed are disrupted and the brain tries to organize the chaoticinput from the senses in a new way, which creates the impression of seeing and hearingfrom an external vantage point. The stress the dying brain experiences also leads to therelease of endorphins, which brings about ecstatic feelings of peace and bliss. Stimulationof the cells in the temporal lobe produces the reliving of memories in the ‘life review’,while the random neural firing in the visual cortex explains the sensation of moving fastthrough a tunnel. Blackmore and other scientists, including many psychologists, concludethat NDEs offer no evidence whatsoever for an immortal soul, ‘other worlds’ or anafterlife. However, their arguments have been questioned again by other researchers.15
Less discussed, but more decisive I think, are two other forms of criticism. The firstone comes from the study of mysticism and cross-cultural studies. It concerns the callinginto question of the very concept of an NDE, on the basis of two arguments. First, it hasbeen empirically shown that NDE-like experiences occur also in situations in which thereis no question of imminent death. Drugs and meditation can provoke similar feelings ofbliss and images of a tunnel or of light, but these can also arise unexpectedly under perfectnormal circumstances. Mark Fox conducted research on the 6000 stories about religiousexperiences, collected since 1925 in the archives the Religious Experience ResearchCentre (RERC) at the University of Wales, Lampeter. Using Moody’s 15 elements of
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the NDE, Fox selected 32 testimonies of what he called ‘Crisis-Experiences’ (CEs) and 59so-called non-CEs. Fox introduces the term ‘Crisis-Experiences’ to cover cases in whichthere had been some kind of life threatening situation but in which the danger appeared tobe no longer imminent. While the category of CEs is already broader than that of theclassical NDE, the number of non-CEs still exceeds by large the number of CEs. Alsosome leading NDE-researchers admit that near-death is not necessary for an NDE.16 Inother words, the term ‘near-death experience’ turns out to be something of amisnomer and the very concept becomes questionable. It seems more reasonable tosubsume so-called NDEs under the broader category of ‘mystical experience’. Or, whenfocusing on the life changing effects of the experience, one might further characterize it asa ‘conversion experience’.17 The second argument against the concept of NDEs as aspecific, well-defined category of experiences, has to do with its defining characteristics.We already saw that Moody’s 15 ‘elements’ were considered too strict and that otherscame up with gliding scales for identifying the ‘core’ of an NDE. However, in the study ofmysticism the notion of a kind of universal, common, unmediated, cross-cultural ‘core’ inmystical experiences, which could be isolated and purified from all culturally and sub-jectively determined interpretation, has been seriously called into question. Steven Katz’s1978 paper in which he argued that ‘the notion of an unmediated experience seems, if notself-contradictory, at best empty’, was epoch-making.18 George Lindbeck illustrates theincommensurability of mystical experiences as follows:
Buddhist compassion, Christian love, and […] French Revolutionary fraternité are notdiverse modifications of a single fundamental human awareness, emotion, attitude, or senti-ment, but are radically (i.e. from the root) distinct ways of experiencing and being orientedtoward self, neighbor and cosmos.19
Zaleski gives the example of a woman who told Kenneth Ring that in her NDE she sawJesus with a communion chalice. To reduce this image of Jesus to an allegedly underlying,neutral category like ‘a being of light’ and qualify the rest as merely subjective, personal‘embroidery’ does not do justice to the woman’s experience. ‘Meeting a being of light’ isnot just an innocent phrase nor the formulation of a pure experience. Such a reformulationignores that ‘a being of light’ fits very well in the present-day, Western, pluralist, non-traditional spirituality and is in fact as culturally specific and no less an imaginative formthan Jesus with the chalice.20 We might even consider such a reduction an act of violenceagainst the personal experience and proper imagery of the person involved.
In conclusion, the concept of ‘NDE’ seems highly problematic, both because thelimitation to a near–death situation is arbitrary and because the abstraction of a neutral‘core experience’ of phenomenal commonalities stripped of all meaning and interpreta-tion, is impossible. As a consequence, quantification over NDEs becomes highly proble-matic and the whole statistical basis of NDE-research is severely undermined.
A third fundamental criticism can be brought in from philosophy, in particular fromphilosophy of mind. Most NDE-researchers seem to assume a Platonic or Cartesian typeof dualism of body and soul. The human being is thought to consist of two substances: aphysical body and a purely spiritual, immaterial soul.21 Especially OBEs serve to illustratethis anthropological dualism. OBEs are considered as proof of the existence and ongoingactivity of a soul that has been separated from the body. However, such an interpretationof OBEs is confronted with a serious paradox: the sensory activity of disembodied souls.How can a purely spiritual soul by itself have sensory experiences, either of events andthings in this world, for example of the person’s own body, or – a fortiori – of a
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transcendent, non-sensory, spiritual reality? When it lacks sense organs and a brain thatcan process sensory input, how can a soul see and hear? These philosophical questionsseem obvious, but they are hardly raised by NDE-researchers.22 This may be becausephilosophers participate even less in the discussion about NDE than theologians.Moreover, because most present-day philosophers favour some form of physicalism,which somehow favours the physical (brain) over the mental (mind), they are morewilling to speculate about the epistemic activities of soulless bodies or zombies, thanabout what a disembodied could or could not know and learn, in contrast with theirmedieval predecessors.23
IV. A theological interpretation
In this section, I shall resume and evaluate the criticisms from neuroscience, philosophy ofmind, and the study of mysticism, and then propose a theological interpretation of NDEs a‘private revelations’, which I shall elaborate with the help of Thomas Aquinas’ analysis ofprophetic dreams.
Most neuroscientists that are very critical of NDEs, connect their empirical findingswith a position in the mind–brain debate that is contrary to dualism and is usually labelled‘reductive physicalism’. Basically, it claims that in reality the mental is nothing but thephysical: the mind is the brain. All that we call ‘spiritual’ can be reduced to materialprocesses.24 If one accepts this philosophical view, any final explanation of NDEs must benaturalistic and theological interpretations become vacuous. NDEs can be disregarded asmere hallucinations, produced by abnormal neurological processes in the brain. However,physicalism is a philosophical view, not a scientific theory that can be empiricallyvalidated. Therefore, there seems to be no cogent, let alone valid, argument fromneuroscientific data and explanations to the denial of the existence of the mental or thesoul. One can accept the former without the latter.
On the other hand, neither do I think that a theological appreciation of NDEs requiresa form of Cartesian dualism, as many NDE-researchers and some theologians do.25 First,there are general problems that face dualism, like questions about the unity of the humanperson and about how the body and the mind could interact. Second, in the previoussection, we saw that NDE-like experiences can also occur when there is no life danger andthat there are logical problems with sensory perception by an immaterial soul of empiricalreality and even greater problems in the case of the, allegedly, transcendent reality of theafterlife. Third, I see no compelling reason why we should not allow for the possibility, inprinciple, of neuroscientific accounts of striking phenomena of NDEs, like OBEs –without, however, endorsing physicalism and claiming that neurosciences can give afull and final explanation. In fact, as I shall argue in the next paragraph, some neuros-cientific explanation must always be possible, because every human experience necessa-rily involves bodily, neurophysiological processes. For these three reasons, I think thatNDEs do not constitute objective, neutral, empirical evidence that warrants beliefs aboutsurvival of a soul or about an afterlife, and by which each rational, right-minded, unbiasedperson should be convinced of the truth of such beliefs.
We can avoid the two extremes of reductive physicalism as well as Platonic–Cartesiansubstance dualism. A middle position is the Aristotelian hylemorphic view, adopted alsoby Thomas Aquinas, that a human being is a unity, composed not of two substances, butof two principles, matter and form.26 The soul is the ‘form of the body’, i.e. the soulmakes the body a body, which is by definition organic and living. Without the soul, thebody is no longer a body, but a corpse. One consequence of the more unified view on the
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human person is that all of his or her epistemic activities, ranging from basic sensations tothe highest forms of intellectual contemplation, necessarily involve both the body and themind.27 The human intellect simply cannot function without neurophysiological processesin the brain. This explains why some neuroscientific description and partial explanation ofNDEs must always be possible.
Finally, there is the phenomenological evidence, mentioned above, that imminentdeath is not necessary for having an NDE, making ‘near-death experience’ a misnomer.Although I think this evidence is convincing, I still want to suggest that a life-threateningsituation and a ‘dying brain’ can be relevant. I shall come back to this when discussingThomas Aquinas’ view of revelatory dreams. Because I think mortal danger can have aspecific role, I shall continue to use the term ‘NDEs’ in the remainder of this article,though I remain sceptical about considering NDEs as a well-defined, separate class ofexperiences.
From the proper perspective of theology, the concept of ‘private revelation’ seems tome to be the most appropriate category for interpreting NDEs. This is in line with a recentremark by Carol Zaleski: ‘In traditional language, a near-death experience is a kind ofprivate revelation, which can neither provide its own warrant nor interpret itself.’28 Privaterevelations concern visions and revelations from God that occurred after the completion ofthe New Testament, the testimony of God’s final and decisive public revelation in Christ.The Catechism of the Catholic Church says about private revelations:
It is not their [viz. of private revelations] role to improve or complete Christ’s definitiveRevelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history. Guided by themagisterium of the Church, the sensus fidelium knows how to discern and welcome in theserevelations whatever constitutes an authentic call of Christ or his saints to the Church.29
Qualifying NDEs as private revelations has at least three consequences. First, being‘private’ precludes generalizations of and quantifications over NDEs. The interpretationis no longer a matter of selecting variables and identifying common denominators in orderto generate statistical data as the basis of scientific research and to construe a ‘coreexperience’. ‘Private’ means that the individual experience and testimony is consideredin its own particularity. The concrete, specific circumstances and imagery can and must befully acknowledged and taken into account.30 Second, ‘revelation’ implies a divine origin.From a Catholic viewpoint, this entails that the interpreter is not so much the individualwho has the experience, let alone the (secular) scientist, but rather the whole faithcommunity, with a specific role for pastors, theologians, and the magisterium. Thisconcerns the sensus fidelium (‘sense of the faithful’) which the Catechism mentions andwhich expresses the idea that all believers participate in elaborating Christian truth.31 Thisdoes not mean that the individual is dispossessed of his or her own personal experienceand that church authorities can impose an interpretation. Rather, it means that it is onlyfrom the insider perspective – or emic approach – of the Christian faith that theseindividual experiences should be interpreted and assessed, and that the interpretation isa communal effort and task of the Church – as the faith is. Private revelations ‘are to beunderstood within the life of faith.’32 In the case of private revelations that have a largeimpact, like the Marian apparitions in Fatima or Medjugorge, many believers and Churchofficials will have their say. But with an NDE, it will rather be the local faith communityand pastor that can help the person to give meaning to the particular experience. Third, theconcept of ‘private revelation’ also indicates that the experience does not belong to therealm of human ‘nature’, in which we can act autonomously as self initiating agents, but
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rather to the realm of ‘grace’, of God’s special gifts and charismas. However, supernaturalgrace does not destroy or bypass human nature. Private revelations by God must fit ourhuman condition and our corporeal-mental cognitive capacities and operations, if Godwants to truly communicate with us without violating the natural integrity of the humanperson and his cognitive acts.
The last two consequences of considering NDEs as private revelations, viz. thequalified interpreter and the role of natural corporeal-mental processes in humancognition, can be clarified by making use of Thomas Aquinas’ account of propheticdreams. I am not saying that NDEs are dreams, but a comparison with what Aquinas saysabout prophetic dreams can offer some insights for better understanding what is typical ofNDEs. Aquinas distinguishes different forms of prophecy: they can happen with orwithout images and the latter can occur either when awake or in dreams.33 Accordingto Aquinas, sleep creates a favorable situation for receiving a prophecy from God. Ineveryday life, our cognitive processes, in particular the outer senses, are occupied with theimpressions from immanent, empirical reality. However, in sleep, we are less engaged bythese external sensory impressions and are more open and have a heighted sensitivity toother influences.34 In this way, God has, as it were, a better opportunity to make use ofand to work on our internal senses, in particular the power of imagination, while respect-ing the natural mode of operation of human cognition. Being a bodily power, as Aquinasargues, the activity of the power of imagination includes necessarily all kinds of physio-logical brain processes. And one may also include psychological and cultural influenceson the religious imagination. But Aquinas considers the immanent, physiological andmental natural processes in dream formation only as instrumental causes for God’s agencyand he would claim that the natural processes, though necessary, do not give a completeand final explanation of the phenomenon.
We can extend what Aquinas says about sleep and dreams to other situations in whichthe distraction by the regular input from the outer senses is suspended, like meditation or acrisis of imminent death. In such situations our imagination is more receptive to theinfluence of divinely inspired sensory impressions. In this way, I would argue that ‘near-death experience’ is not completely a misnomer.
However, the representation in the imagination is only part of what is needed inprophetic dreams. Interpretation by the intellect is even more necessary. According toAquinas, in all human cognitions the intellect has to play its own role. While our intellectis always dependent on phenomenal representations or images produced in the power ofimagination in order to function properly (what Aquinas calls the conversio ad phantas-mata), the intellect also interprets and judges them. Sensory images as such are not self-explanatory and need to be understood by the intellect. However, in the case of propheticimages the normal interpretation by the intellect’s natural capacities does not suffice. Inthe case of ‘things divine’ (in divinis), the mind needs the extra help of an innerintellectual illumination by the supernatural ‘light of faith’ or maybe even the charismatic‘light of prophecy’ in order to understand the religious imagination correctly.35 Aquinaspoints out that the divinely inspired intellectual judgment need not even be made by thesame person who has the religious images. In the Old Testament, it is Joseph who givesthe right interpretation of the dreams of Pharaoh, and Daniel who knows how to read thesigns on the wall of the palace of King Belshazzar. In other words, Aquinas’s explanationof the interpretation of prophecies strengthens the idea that, in the case of an NDE, itsreligious interpretation is not simply an autonomous decision, which is up to the indivi-dual person who has the experience, but that the interpretation must be developed in thelight of faith, which has its proper subject in the Church, the community of the faithful.
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V. Conclusion
Nowadays, NDEs are a phenomenon too remarkable and too widespread for theologiansto ignore. Most theologians get cold feet when confronted with stories about NDEs, but Ithink we should try to overcome our reluctance in dealing with these stories. Theologiansshould take NDEs more seriously and bring their own theological expertise into thediscussion. This means that we have to be critical about two extreme interpretationsthat are given by scientists and that are accepted in popular and esoteric media. On the onehand, there is need for unmasking the usually hidden metaphysical presuppositions ofneuroscientists who apply a form of reductive physicalism in order to come up with purelynaturalistic, neurophysiological explanation for NDEs. On the other hand, theologiansshould be critical of some of the strategies and interpretations adopted by medical doctorswho are advocates of NDEs and think they give scientific proof of the existence of animmortal soul and of an afterlife. First, we should question the procedure of consideringindividual testimonies of ordinary people as mere empirical data and of transforming thesestories into statistical evidence for metaphysical claims. In particular, we could learn fromstudies in the field of mystical theology that it is questionable to classify NDEs as adistinct category of its own and also to abstract a kind of universal core NDE, which,allegedly, underlies all concrete instances of an NDE. Second, theologians (and philoso-phers) can explicate the problems involved in interpreting the way in which the experien-cing subject and the experienced objects are usually represented in NDEs: one shouldquestion the tacitly assumed anthropological dualism of mind (or soul) and body and alsopoint out the transcendental character of the afterlife itself.
An adequate model for understanding NDEs from a theological perspective is theconcept of ‘private revelation’. It preserves the particularity of an NDE as an individual,personal testimony; it points to the community of the faithful as the first qualifiedinterpreter; and it can account for the supernatural origin of NDEs, with respect for thenatural workings of the human mind. Aquinas’s analysis of God-sent dreams offers ananalogy for better understanding the last two elements. Aquinas argues that commonphysiological and mental processes are always needed for there to be genuine humanexperience and human cognition at all. The particular situation of sleep, in which one isless absorbed in ordinary sensations and thoughts, can create a certain openness andsensitivity in the human mind and imagination for extraordinary divine influence. Byanalogy, we can extend what Aquinas’ example of sleep to other particular situations likemeditation, imminent death, or other crises, in which the natural workings of the humanbody and mind offer a specific openness for divine influence. However, the rightinterpretation of the God-sent images depends on the illumination of the intellect throughthe light of faith, of which the Church is the primary bearer.
Notes1. A video of the relevant part of the interview can be found on YouTube: www.youtube.com/
watch?v=9P8Y5K62U8w (accessed 10 March 2014).2. A selection of relevant texts on NDEs can be found in Bailey and Yates, The Near-Death
Experience. A good survey of the most important debates in the study of NDEs is: WilliamsKelly, Greyson and Kelly, “Unusual Experiences.”
3. On the other hand, many conservative Christians keep away from a phenomenon like NDEbecause they associate it with Satanism and witchcraft.
4. Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, 187.5. Fox, Religion, 344–345.
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6. Kellehear, Experiences Near Death, 80–99. Kellehear also thinks that NDE is the present-dayform of the perennial inspirational idea of an ‘ideal society’ in Western culture, the successorto Cokaygne, Arcadia, Utopia etc. (100–115).
7. Ring, Life at Death, 32–66.8. Greyson, “The Near-death Experience Scale.”9. van Lommel, van Wees, Meyers, and Elfferich, “Near-death Experience in Survivors of
Cardiac Arrest.” There have been other publications in The Lancet about NDE-research.10. Dittrich, “The Prophet.”11. On Moody, see: Fox, Religion, 51–54. See also Ring, Heading Toward Omega, esp. 197;
Ring, “Near-Death and UFO Encounters” and van Lommel, Consciousness Beyond Life,223–257.
12. Fox, Religion, 330–338.13. Also psychologists have come up with explanations of NDEs: see Williams Kelly et al.,
“Unusual Experiences,” 374–378.14. Blackmore, “Near-death Experiences.” See also Jansen, “Neuroscience, Ketamine.”15. For a literature review, see Greyson, “Near-death Experiences: Clinical Implications.”16. See: Ring, Heading toward Omega, 220–251; Cook, Greyson, and Stevenson, “Do Near-death
Experiences Provide Evidence,” 378–379; Williams Kelly et al. “Unusual Experiences,”368–369, 411–414.
17. On the life-changing effects of NDEs, see Greyson, “Psychology of Near-death Experiences”,518–520.
18. Katz, “Language, Epistemology and Mysticism,” 26. Fox, Religion, 98–141. Katz’s position isstill dominant, though it has been challenged: King, “Mysticism and Spirituality”, 333.
19. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 40.20. Zaleski, Otherworld Journeys, 127. Ring himself advocates a pluralist, de-institutionalized,
de-traditionalized universal spirituality: Ring, Heading Toward Omega,21. For an overview of dualism in its different forms, see: Robinson, “Dualism.”22. Terence Nichols thinks the epistemological problem the strongest objection against NDEs:
Nichols, Death and Afterlife, 108. Ornella Corazza suggests an Eastern, Japanese view as analternative, but does not discuss the internal tensions of the Western view: Corazza, Near-death Experiences. Exploring the Mind-Body Connection.
23. The cognitive activity of an anima separata was a much debated topic in medieval philosophy.See Potts, “Sensory Experiences.” In his interesting paper, Potts sketches several possibleThomist interpretations of NDEs especially on the basis of Aquinas’ speculations about howand what a soul separated from the body – either after death or in prophetic ‘rapture’ – mightknow. Because I question the classification of NDEs as a separate category of experiences, Ishall focus in the next section on the situation of revelations in sleep, which Potts alsomentions (92, 97).
24. On the mind–brain identity theory, see Smart, “The Mind/Brain Identity Theory.” Cf. alsoNichols, Death and Afterlife, 118–127 for an overview of different contemporary philosophi-cal views on the mind-body/brain relation.
25. The theological appreciation of NDEs by Walls and by Nichols is based on substance dualism.See: Walls, Heaven, 156–160 and Nichols, Death and Afterlife, 109–112, 117–118.
26. The Aristotelian-Thomistic view cannot be easily classified in terms of any of the contem-porary forms of dualism. Neither is it a form of non-reductive physicalism or emergentism.See McInerny and O’Callaghan, “Saint Thomas Aquinas,” section 8.
27. Pickavé, “Human Knowledge,” 314.28. Zaleski, “Near-death Experiences,” 622–623.29. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 67. See also the theological commentary on private
revelations by the then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, JosephRatzinger, in: Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Documents Regarding ‘TheMessage From Fatima’.” In 2012, the same Congregation also published a document draftedin 1978 about the official procedure and criteria for the recognition of private revelations:“Norms Regarding the Manner of Proceedings in the Discernment of Presumed Apparitionsand Revelations.”
30. One could draw a parallel with Marian apparitions, which – as far as I know – are alwaystaken as concrete, particular occurrences and have never been quantified and subjected tostatistical analyses.
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31. Burkhard, “Sensus fidelium.”32. Ratzinger in “Documents Regarding Fatima.”33. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae IIa-IIae q. 174 a. 3. For Aquinas on prophecy in general,
see Wawrykow “Prophecy.” Thomas Aquinas also knew hagiographic stories about journeysto the underworld. Michael Potts refers to a text in Quaestio Disputata De Anima art. 19 ob.18 where it is said: “it is related of the dead who are brought back to life, as we read in manyhistories of the saints, that they said they saw certain imaginable objects, for example, houses,camps, rivers, and things of this kind” (Potts, “Sensory Experiences,” 91).
34. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae IIa-IIae q. 172 a. 1 ad 2.35. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae IIa-IIae q. 173 a. 2–4. Also Goris, “Thomas
Aquinas on Dreams,” 275–278.
Notes on contributor
Harm Goris is a senior lecturer in systematic theology at the School of Theology of TilburgUniversity, the Netherlands, and member of the Thomas Institute at Utrecht. His area of specializa-tion is the thought of Thomas Aquinas.
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