ABSTRACT
Are there toilets in heaven? Do angels eat food? How big is a soul? These questions evoke the naivety of childhood. They appear to be innocent and unsophisticated, and few adults would give them serious attention. The same can be said about most speculations concerning the physical nature of heavenly beings and life after death. Do angels have real bodies? How fast can they move? Will everyone be the same age in heaven? These questions seem pointless, but this response should not prevent us from asking why – exactly – they deserve to be treated so lightly. Viewed from a historical perspective, the peculiar nature of modern attitudes towards these matters becomes apparent. Western intellectuals gave serious consideration to all the problems mentioned above from the early Middle Ages to the eve of the Enlightenment. It was only in the eighteenth century that European thinkers began to dismiss such speculations as pointless. In the early 1800s, Isaac D’Israeli, the father of the Victorian British prime minister, summed up this attitude by mocking those scholars who asked “how many angels can dance on the head of a very fine needle, without jostling one another?” Most westerners now share D’Israeli’s assumption that such questions are inane. But why?
