SO WROTE JUSTIN MARTYR in about 155–157 CE in his First Apology, addressed to the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius. His project was to justify Christianity and explain why Christians should not be persecuted. The passage was part of Justin's proof of immortality and the truth of the Resurrection. When he wrote of the sensation that remains to everyone even after they die, he was referring to spiritual sensation, not physical, but as we have seen, theologians expended much thought and disputation determining what exactly it meant to live on after death. It was a thought process that could conceive the dead as still conscious, still sentient.

The question asked by Thomas Aquinas, whether more than one angel could occupy the same space at the same time, which Robert Bartlett wrote is probably the source of the erroneous and much-mocked assertion that Scholastics debated how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, was an attempt to determine whether angels had physical bodies. As Bartlett writes, this had implications for whether demons could move things or interact with human beings. It also suggests an openness by theologians to the possibility that angels, good or evil and despite Augustine's assertions to the contrary, could be corporeal. There was, as Peter Brown wrote, a ‘tremendous sense of the intimacy and adjacency of the holy’: ‘Priests serving at the altar must, if they spit, spit to one side or behind them; for at the altar the angels are standing.’ If angels could have bodies, why not the dead?

Christianity was meant to banish superstition, to wash away the charms and totems of Paganism. Its construction of a Christian afterlife was meant in part to keep the dead dead until the Last Judgement.