‘The Thought of Death Changes all our Ideas and Condemns all our Plans’

Abstract

The chapter highlights the variety of specifically Christian philosophical approaches to the question of the soul’s immortality. Leonard Lessius and Jean de Silhon, working within a broadly Aristotelian framework, argue that the purposiveness universally apparent in nature would be frustrated if humans were mortal. Descartes eschews such appeals to the divine purpose, but his dualist metaphysics offers grounds for belief in the soul’s capacity to survive death. He and Elisabeth of Bohemia discuss how far belief in a happier life after death should affect our pursuit of earthly happiness. Pascal rejects philosophical proofs of immortality, while insisting that we must take an existential stance that admits it as a possibility. Malebranche seeks to highlight the unreality of earthly goods, but, by distinguishing the physical from the intelligible body, he investigates the possibility of post-mortem forms of experience (sensations and attachments) that are in some sense continuous with those of this life.