Christian Mortalism from the Bible to Pulter
Pulter’s frequent references to a soul that sleeps may be no more than metaphorical flights of fancy, but they may also be contributions to an ancient debate about what happens to the soul after death. Christian mortalism takes two main forms, which can be difficult to distinguish. One, thnetopsychism, is the belief that the soul dies with the body. The second, known as psychopannychism or psychosomnolence, holds that the soul in some sense sleeps after the death of the body; Hamlet’s “sleep of death” is the most famous expression of such an idea. In both cases (with very rare exceptions), Christian mortalists believe that the soul is reborn or awakes when the last trumpet sounds at the Resurrection.
Both forms of mortalist belief claim support from biblical texts, although both have generally been considered errors if not outright heresies by church authorities. At the Reformation, Martin Luther sometimes appeared to espouse a mortalist belief—which among other things was a useful tool with which to cudgel Purgatory—though most scholars feel that his writings as a whole are inconclusive on this point. His English followers William Tyndale and John Frith also adopted versions of a mortalist position. However, most later Continental reformers—among them John Calvin, Martin Bucer, and Henry Bullinger—rejected mortalist belief, which came to be identified with Anabaptism. In England this remained true until the 1640s, when mortalism itself appears to have undergone something of a resurrection, with John Milton and Richard Overton among its prominent defenders. But while such defenses remained rare in print, perhaps because a 1648 Parliamentary law against blasphemy made them punishable by imprisonment, attacks on mortalist views multiplied during the 1640s and 1650s. William Tutty, for example, protested that souls do not “sleep in the grave with the body, till they are awakened by the sound of the great trumpet, at the day of judgement, as some now among us have sinfully held forth” (William Tutty, Canticum Morientis Cygni [London, 1659], 9 [modernized]). Was Pulter among the sinners Tutty had in mind?
The texts that follow illustrate mortalist belief from the Bible to Pulter’s time, concentrating on post-Reformation expressions of and attacks on psychopannychism, or soul-sleeping. They begin with parts of a long passage from the 15th chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, which includes the biblical passage to which Pulter alludes in “Aurora [2]” (Poem 37). Paul’s meditation on the afterlife contains some of the biblical verses most frequently cited in mortalist writings; as Norman T. Burns notes, “Overton and Milton found the key texts for Pauline mortalism in 1 Cor. 15” (Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972], 178). The passage was well-known, since verses 20–58 made up about half of The Order for the Burial of the Dead in the Book of Common Prayer.
12. Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?… 16. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised: 17. And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. 18. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished…. 20. But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept. 21. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. 22. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive…. 35. But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come? 36. Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die: 37. And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain…. 50. Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption. 51. Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, 52. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. 53 .For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. 54. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. 55. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
Martin Luther’s response to biblical passages such as 1 Corinthians 15 might be characterized as less doctrinal than pastoral. His concern, as he says in this sermon, was that “we should learn to view our death in the right light.” Luther’s language allows some doctrinal flexibility: for example, he writes that “we call it [death] a sleep,” and that in death we rest “as on a sofa.” His main point is that such an attitude towards death offers “consolation” and “comfort”—a very different perspective from that of the opponents of mortalism, who almost universally asserted that it denied comfort to believers.
Two Examples of Faith, and Christ’s Call from the Dead
We should learn to view our death in the right light, so that we need not become alarmed on account of it, as unbelief does; because in Christ it is indeed not death, but a fine, sweet and brief sleep, which brings us release from this vale of tears, from sin and from the fear and extremity of real death and from all the misfortunes of this life, and we shall be secure and without care, rest sweetly and gently for a brief moment, as on a sofa, until the time when he shall call and awaken us together with all his dear children to his eternal glory and joy. For since we call it a sleep, we know that we shall not remain in it, but be again awakened and live, and that the time during which we sleep, shall seem no longer than if we had just fallen asleep. Hence, we shall censure ourselves that we were surprised or alarmed at such a sleep in the hour of death, and suddenly come alive out of the grave and from decomposition, and entirely well, fresh, with a pure, clear, glorified life, meet our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ in the clouds.
… Scripture everywhere affords such consolation, which speaks of the death of the saints, as if they fell asleep and were gathered to their fathers, that is, had overcome death through this faith and comfort in Christ, and awaited the resurrection, together with the saints who preceded them in death. Therefore the early Christians (undoubtedly from the Apostles or their disciples) followed the custom of bringing their dead to honorable burial and wherever possible interred them in separate places, which they called, not places of burial or grave-yards, but coemeteria, sleeping-chambers, dormitoria, houses of sleep, names which have remained in use until our time; and we Germans from ancient times call such places of burial God’s acres, as St. Paul, 1 Cor. 15, 44, says: “It is sown a natural body;” for what we now call church-yards were not at first places of burial. This is the teaching and comfort of this Gospel lesson.
The Swiss theologian John Calvin’s contribution to the debate was published in 1542 as Psychopannychia. Calvin coined the term to refer to his own belief that the soul was active and alert after death, but it came instead to signify the mortalist beliefs that Calvin meant to refute. Early in his treatise (here cited from the full English translation of 1581), Calvin outlines the three main positions in the controversy—soul-sleeping, thnetopsychism, and his own view that the soul continues to have “sense and understanding” after the death of the body.
An Excellent Treatise of the Immortality of the Soul
The controversy then, which now we have in hand, is of the soul of man, which some indeed do grant to be somewhat. But yet they think that after a man is dead, that the soul sleeps until the day of Judgement, at which time it shall awake out of sleep, without either memory, understanding, and feeling whatsoever. Others there are which grant nothing less than that it is a substance, but say that it is only a power of life, which is led by the moving of the pulses, or of lungs and lights [lungs], and because it cannot be without a body, therefore they feign that it dies and perishes together with the body, until such time as the whole man be raised up again. Howbeit we say and maintain the soul to be a substance, and that it lives in very deed, after the body is dead, having sense and understanding: both which, we are very able to prove by evident testimonies of the scriptures.
Calvin’s argument was widely influential in England. For example, clergyman Robert Allen refers to it in support of his argument that a belief in soul-sleeping refuses the living the comfort of knowing that their souls will experience joy immediately after death.
And verily, the cause why we have oftentimes the less comfort, and holy confidence against death is for that we have not so earnestly instructed our souls in the persuasion of this blessed immortality, immediately after this life is ended, but do suspend our comfort, and put it too far off, when we will apprehend no comfort, till our thoughts come at the resurrection of our bodies. I fear me, the Psychopannychie, or soul-sleeping after the natural death, deceiveth many that be not professed Anabaptists, because they are not in their lifetime waking enough to meditate of this most sweet and comfortable doctrine of the blessed immortality of the soul, immediately after the bodily death. But the knowledge of this (saith Master Calvin) is the cause of that calm and quiet trust, which we repose in God.
In 1642, the Cambridge Platonist Henry More published a literary contribution to the debate about soul-sleeping, his philosophical poem “Antipsychopannychia, or the Confutation of the Sleep of the Soul.” More, whom Sarah Hutton has seen as a possible source for Pulter’s thought (“Hester Pulter [c.1596–1678]. A Woman Poet and the New Astronomy,” Études Épistémè 14 [2008], 77–87), argues against the sleep of the soul largely on philosophical, as opposed to biblical, grounds. His poem comes nearest to Pulter’s at the end of the fourth stanza of the first canto, where he addresses his opponents’ position that the soul “shakes off” its drowsy condition at the last trumpet, or “clarion.”
- 2
- For sure in vain do human souls exist
- After this life, if lulled in listless sleep
- They senseless lie wrapped in eternal mist,
- Bound up in foggy clouds, that ever weep
- Benumbing tears, and the soul’s centre steep
- With deading liquor, that she never minds
- Or feeleth ought. Thus drenched in Lethe deep,
- Nor misseth she herself, nor seeks nor finds
- Herself. This mirksome state all the soul’s actions binds.
- 3
- Desire, fear, love, joy, sorrow, pleasure, pain,
- Sense, fancy, wit, forecasting providence,
- Delight in God, and what with sleepy brain
- Might suit, slight dreams, all banished far from hence.
- Nor pricking nor applauding conscience
- Can wake the soul from this dull Lethargy;
- That ’twixt this sleepy state small difference
- You’ll find and that men call Mortality.
- Plain death’s as good as such a Psychopannychie.
- 4
- What profiteth this bare existency,
- If I perceive not that I do exist?
- Nought longs to such, nor mirth nor misery,
- Such stupid beings write into one list
- With stocks and stones. But they do not persist,
- You’ll say, in this dull dead condition.
- But must revive, shake off this drowsy mist
- At that last shrill loud-sounding clarion
- Which cleaves the trembling earth, rives monuments of stone.
One of the most important pro-mortalist voices in the 1640s was the Baptist and future Leveller Richard Overton. Though he took a thnetopsychist position, Overton, like Luther, defended mortalism on scriptural grounds, and like Luther, he refused to distinguish between metaphorical and literal meanings of sleep. Death, he writes, “is well figurated in Scripture by sleep, as slept with his fathers, 1 King. 11. 43. falne asleep in Christ, 1 Cor. 15. 18. &c. not that it is so long a time to the dead, but that in nature there is nothing so represents death or non-being, as sleep” (17). Overton finds “gradations” of death in scripture, a position he develops with particular reference to part of Pulter’s biblical text (“we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed”).
[I]n Scripture we read of a threefold gradation in death; the one sleeping in corruption, which is general, another sleeping but not seeing corruption, as Christ’s, the last a sudden change, as Paul saith, Behold, I show you a mystery, we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, &c.
Thomas Edwards begins his Gangraena (1646), one of the best-known attacks on the diverse religious beliefs that proliferated in the 1640s and 1650s, by enumerating 176 “Errors, Heresies, [and] Blasphemies” that he claims existed among the religious sects of the time. Errors 83–90 concern beliefs related to death and the afterlife, with the views of the soul stated in 83, 84, and 88 being the most relevant to Pulter.
83. That the soul of man is mortal as the soul of a beast, and dies with the body.
84. That the souls of the faithful after death, do sleep until the day of judgement, and are not in a capacity of acting anything for God, but ’tis with them as ’tis with a man that is in some pleasing dream….
88. That none of the souls of the Saints go to Heaven where Christ is, but Heaven is empty of the Saints till the resurrection of the dead.
Ralph Robinson’s Safe Conduct shows the persistence of the orthodox position on mortalism during the Interregnum. Like earlier English writers such as Robert Allen, Robinson, a Presbyterian minister, emphasizes the immediacy of post-mortem bliss and the soul’s dignity and independence from the body, while dismissing opposition with a reference to Calvin’s authority.
The souls of God’s Elect do immediately upon their departure out of the body possess this happiness. There were some of old in the Church, who thought that the souls of men did sleep with their bodies, and that they did not either enjoy happiness, or suffer torment till the Resurrection. Reverend Calvin hath a learned treatise, which he calls Psychopannychia, wherein he doth confute this absurd opinion, which it seems had infected many in those times; the very mentioning of it is a sufficient confutation. Those that know anything of Scripture, or of the spiritual nature of the reasonable soul of man, cannot but understand the vanity of this opinion. If I could swallow down such a gross opinion as that of soul-sleeping is, I should imagine those men’s souls were in a dead sleep, who did first broach this doctrine. The soul of man is a spirit, and spirits do neither eat nor sleep as bodies do. The reasonable soul is a substance distinct from the body, and therefore doth not die, or sleep with the body.
John Milton adopted a thnetopsychist position in Chapter 13 of his Christian Doctrine, arguing that the whole person—body, soul, and spirit—dies. Of 1 Cor. 15:42–50, he states that “the reasoning proceeds from the simply mortal to the simply immortal, from death to resurrection. There is not so much as a word about any intermediate state” (Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 6, Christian Doctrine, ed. Maurice Kelley, trans. John Carey [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973], 403). Milton does not distinguish in Christian Doctrine between death and the sleep of death.
Finally, John Flavel (or Flavell), like Robinson a Presbyterian minister, dismisses soul-sleeping as an “uncomfortable” doctrine—that is, one that fails to provide comfort—in 1681, three years after Pulter’s death.
It should not scare us to be brought to death, the King of terrors, so long as it is the office of death to bring us to God. That dreaming opinion of the soul sleeping after death is as ungrounded as it is uncomfortable: the same day we loose from this shore, we shall be landed upon the blessed shore, where we shall see and enjoy God forever. O if the friends of dead believers did but understand where and with whom their souls are, whilst they are mourning over their bodies, certainly a few believing thoughts of this would quickly dry up their tears, and fill the house of mourning with voices of praise and thanksgiving.