TOWARDS the end of a recent, extremely wide-ranging television interview, the former German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, now 96 and in all probability closer to the last than to the first days of his life, was asked if the notion of the hereafter or the next world was of any consolation to him.
He replied matter-of-factly: "No, I've no need of that."
Not unsurprisingly, the notion that belief in an afterlife might not be so much a source of consolation as a source of fear and trembling didn't even remotely surface in the television discussion.
Hell appears to have become unthinkable in the modern world as a possibility for the hereafter, whatever about its reality in this world for so many who suffer and die in conditions of unimaginable horror and squalor.
The former German Chancellor did, though, add that Loki Schmidt, his wife of 68 years who died in 2010, had noted that molecules and atoms cannot be annihilated, not even through cremation, so they might, in the case of a human being, regroup, as it were, in the form of a plant. He himself could go along with that.
Helmut Schmidt's coolly rational, no-nonsense, ethically-based approach to politics and life, gives his observations on the human scene a kind of oracular quality that has virtually become his trademark over the years, especially since he retired from active politics in 1986.
In this context, his attitude to the idea of an afterlife is interesting in so far as it is in his case evidently compatible with membership of the Christian Church, whereas some might consider it indisputable that acceptance of Christianity includes almost by definition belief in an afterlife.
But though apparently not accepting this traditional part of Christian belief and describing himself as a not particularly religious person, Helmut Schmidt still remains within the Church, which he values for its contribution to social cohesion.
Perhaps most modern politicians wittingly or unwittingly take a similar view of the role of religion, especially Christianity, in the world. And it is by no means a superficial or uncomplimentary view.
Yet it does seem to represent a shift in the perception of religion in recent centuries, at least in the West.
Before the Enlightenment, which was partly of course fuelled by unhappiness at the damage caused by the wars of religion in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, it might have sounded odd to praise religion as a force for social cohesion, when it was so patently a force for the exact opposite - and indeed still is in many places.
In fact, usually it is precisely religious traditions with a strong sense of an afterlife that are feared for their socially explosive power. Whereas when interest in an afterlife wanes, religions can be put to good use as valuable social glue.
Probably no simple pattern of evolution can be detected in this process. There are simply periods in history when religion is oriented on the hereafter and then tends to be socially disruptive, and other periods when religion's interest in the afterlife - or eschatology, to use the technical term for 'the last things' - tapers off and then religion begins to focus on the organisation of life on earth, as a response to what is taken to be the will of God for his creatures.
The two tendencies clearly have on occasion also overlapped over the centuries.
If ex-Chancellor Schmidt's instinctive reaction to the question of what an 'afterlife' might mean is in any sense characteristic of the intellectual mood of the modern age, and it does appear to be, this raises an interesting question about the legacy of the Enlightenment in terms of its influence on religion, particularly on Christianity.
If the rationalism of the Enlightenment has maybe effectively clipped Christianity's eschatological wings, it has nevertheless contributed, it could be argued, to a reinvention of Christianity as an engine for 'progressive' social change and solidarity.
Yet the temptation created by a binary interpretation of Christianity - either focused primarily on the next world or on this one - is that it risks deflecting attention from "the one thing necessary" (Luke 10:42).
Could it be that in recent centuries, in the West at any rate, Christianity has become so preoccupied with defending and justifying itself and its role in the world, that it has forgotten about God, its origin and its end?
::Martin Henry, former lecturer in theology at St Patrick's College, Maynooth, is a priest of the diocese of Down and Connor
