Appendix: on the afterlife An anonymous 16th-century Spanish poet once wrote a “sonnet to Christ crucified” that begins

This book was originally written in the above spirit: we cannot know anything about an afterlife, but we can experience God’s love in this life, and be filled, as a result, with such joy and gratitude, that we will not even consider worthwhile any other way to live. I intended to leave it at that, because I wanted to make the book as non-speculative as possible; and yet, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed almost hypocritical to start the book with a passage from 1 Peter on the Christian hope, and to avoid altogether commenting on the nature, and, as it were, the plausibility of that ultimate hope.