The close juxtaposition of the dehydration of Terri Schiavo and the natural passing of Pope John Paul II makes Death a natural topic for reflection. Our secular culture has two attitudes toward human mortality, mutually contradictory but fervently held.
The first is that death is so great an evil that no end can justify it. Thus, statistics about how many people were killed in overthrowing the Ba’athist regime in Iraq are cited as proof that the effort wasn’t worth the price, while cost-benefit analyses that argue that some environmental protections or safety measures are too expensive for the number of lives that they would save are denounced as inhumane.
The second is that “death is a natural part of life”, that we ought to welcome it for the aged and the infirm, that for many,
Come, lovely and soothing Death.
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later delicate death.
Both of these feelings – they scarcely possess the thoughtfulness and coherence to be called “opinions” – are distortions of the Christian tradition, which likewise has two teachings about death.
First, death is mankind’s great enemy and curse. In Genesis, God is represented as telling our first parents that, should they defy the divine command and eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (that is, claim for themselves the autonomy to declare what is right or wrong), the punishment will be death. That punishment attached to human nature and has been inherited ever since. It is not the same as the natural termination of organic existence; that animals and plants are mortal is not a punishment for their sins. Organisms decay, but blotting out a creature with rational intelligence and free will, with what we label a “soul”, is a horrible event. Our moral instinct revolts against it, even as it does not revolt against the peaceable deaths of dogs, sparrows or oak trees. Indeed, men have instinctively realized, from as far back as we have information about their beliefs, that death for a rational being is not simple extinction: The soul continues, because rationality is not a purely material phenomenon and cannot be cut off by material obliteration. The instinctive view is that this persistence is by nature a miserable fate. In Homer, the ghost of Achilles says that the meanest slave is happier than the most glorious of the dead.
Death is not, then, good in and of itself, not “lovely and soothing”. It is the negation of good – not just an evil but the summation of all evils. A Christian rightly prays that it will be averted. On joyous occasions at Orthodox churches, we sing, “God grant you many years!”
If that were all that there is to be said about death, life would be hopeless, for each of us will die, and after a relatively brief period. If we scale down the time span of the universe, from its creation till today, into a single year, the longest lived human dies less than a third of a second. If we thereafter survive as immaterial souls, what could be more dreary? The most vivid picture of the pains of Hell is cheerful next to the prospect of billions of years of ghostly prolongation.
This hopelessness pervades classical Greek and Roman thought. Either the extinction of the rational soul or its bodiless survival was an unbearable concept. The ancients found palliatives: the mystery cults, reincarnation, Epicurean denial of reason and free will; none of them healed despair. The best remedy was a jocular agnosticism, as in Emperor Hadrian’s deathbed poem:
Animula vagula blandula,
Hospes comesque corporis,
Quae nunc abibis in loca
Pallidula rigida nudula,
Nec ut soles, dabis iocos?
[Sweet, wandering little soul,
My body’s guest and companion,
Where will you go now,
Pale, stiff and naked?
No longer, as you used to, will you play jokes on me.]
In Christian belief, Christ is the medicine for despair. By His death and resurrection, He conquered death and gave those who believe in him the promise (but not the certainty: we have the free will to reject Him) of our own resurrection unto life eternal, not a simple replication of the life that we now lead under the dominion of sin and death but everlasting life in the presence of God.
To say that Christians have no reason to hate death is mistaken. Christ trampled down death; He did not make it “lovely and soothing”. Death is not beautiful; it is ugly. “Embracing” it or praising it as a relief and a boon is a denigration of the gift of life that God has bestowed upon us.
Therefore, the Christian view of death is the opposite of the contemporary secular one. We do not hasten death, for either ourselves or others. At the same time, we do not tremble at the prospect. To use an earthly analogy, secularists are like soldiers who flee from the enemy, hide wherever they can and, when caught, tamely surrender. Christians are soldiers who face the enemy resolutely, staying at their posts under the heaviest bombardment, fighting with confidence of victory.
The world recedes; it disappears;
Heav’n opens on my eyes; my ears
With sounds seraphic ring:
Lend, lend your wings! I mount! I fly!
O Grave! where is thy Victory?
O Death! where is thy Sting?
– Alexander Pope, “A Dying Christian to His Soul”
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