Thoughts about the Afterlife

Last Judgement, Beauvais Cathedral, 16th century

One of the odd things that struck me on reading Dante is how obsessed he is with the afterlife and the Church's emphasis on judging the world. So absorbed is he in describing the afterlife, it seems, that he does not appear to notice the ludicrousness of apportioning everyone in human history to a specific location in the afterlife, like marking an examination. Today we laugh at the scales being used to weigh the souls of the dead for their moral goodness, but clearly at the time it was taken very seriously - and few seemed to notice who it was holding the scales.

Philip Almond's book, Afterlife: a history of life after death (2016), mentions this point:

Almond ... notes that as early as the fourth century Ambrose was wanting to acknowledge that a straight division between saved and damned at the point of death was morally crude and unnecessarily harsh. He also acknowledges that the historic preoccupation with purgatory and hell (more than heaven) has been largely for psychological and political reasons - namely to motivate a good and obedient life.[Vernon White, review of Afterlife,TLS, November 4 2016]

Somewhere here the obsession with the afterlife seems to have overtaken ideas of tolerance and acknowledgement of human doubt; something that still occurs today, where attachment to a principle continues to outweigh ideas of reasonableness. It makes those scales of judgment just slightly less endearing.

Quote of the week: Stefan Collini on assessing universities

Image by Luke Jones, CC BY 2.0

Writing in the London Review of Books (Diary, 10 May 2018), Stefan Collini complains about new ways of measuring universities, including his (Cambridge):

Last year the government introduced a new wheeze. Universities are now awarded Olympic-style gold, silver and bronze medals for, notionally, teaching quality. But the metrics by which teaching quality is [sic] measured are - I am not making this up - the employment record of graduates, scores on the widely derided National Student Survey, and 'retention rates' (i.e. how few students drop out). These are obviously not measures of teaching quality; neither are they things universities can do much to control, whatever the quality of their teaching.

Whatever the relationship of university teaching to the first two metrics, the third is another matter. Mr Collini states that teaching quality is not in any way linked to students dropping out, and that universities have no control over it. Perhaps at Cambridge the undergraduates are so grateful to be admitted that they put up with whatever teaching they are offered, and will remain there regardless, but it would be reasonable to assume in lesser institutions some causality between quality of teaching and retention rate.