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 celestial beings and life after death. Do angels have real bodies? How fast can they move? Will everyone be the same age in Heaven? Today 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 thought carefully about all the problems mentioned above from the early Middle Ages until the eve of the Enlightenment. It is true that in 1638 the English Protestant William Chillingworth rebuked the folly of asking unduly abstract theological questions, such as “whether a million of angels may not sit upon a needle’s point”. But Chillingworth wrote at a time when the nature of angels was still a matter for serious discussion; it was only later that his remark came to epitomise the distaste of European thinkers for speculations about the properties of supernatural things. Most westerners now agree that such speculations are inane. But why? 1
