Ashes to ashes: toward a Christian understanding of death.

The first time I seriously questioned what we usually think of as the self, or the soul, was following an operation which required general anesthesia. My loss of consciousness was so profound that there was no experience, none at all, of time passing, as there is during ordinary sleep. I went under, then seemed almost immediately to wake up. The hours between might as well not have been there.

If an anesthetic can do this, I thought afterward, if it can so thoroughly cancel what I thought of as me, what will death be like? And this led me to wonder what it is that I consider my self. Is it the sum of my memories? That could be canceled by a blood clot. Is what I consider my self, or my soul, what God considers my self? And could I imagine my self or my soul without a body that is unquestionably me, any more than I can consider my mind without my brain?

After ten years as a parish priest, and after many conversations with parishioners and with other clergy, I am convinced that, where death and the afterlife are concerned, most Christians are functionally Neo-Platonists. Neo-Plationism was an influence on many early Christian thinkers, Augustine among them; it tended to find the soul not only superior to the body, and an entity quite separate from the body, but saw the body as in many ways an encumbrance, something we will be happy to escape.

Think of the way many of us were taught: after death, an immortal soul leaves the mortal body and goes to heaven or hell (or, if you are Catholic, maybe--even probably--to purgatory). The implication of this way of thinking is that we will be much happier once the soul leaves our body behind. There was always a nod to the idea that resurrection was somehow part of this--we would get glorified bodies after the general resurrection at the end of time, and they wouldn't be much like bodies at all--but the really important thing was whether we were going to heaven after death. In much of our writing and preaching about death there is an implicit denigration of the body and the flesh. The spirit is seen as superior to flesh, and the soul, freed from the flesh, will certainly be better off.

It is easy to see how some scriptural passages could be read this way. "Who will deliver me from this body of death?" Paul asks in Romans (7:24). For Paul, though, the sense of the flesh as a negative thing comes not from the fact that flesh is physical rather than spiritual, but that, as a result of sin, it is death-bearing. For Paul, the world, before God's will is completed in it, is given over to suffering and death, to the mystery represented by Christ's Passion and Cross. The problem is not with the physical, fleshly nature of our being. The problem, rather, has come about because the physical world and the flesh--both holy, both good, from the time of creation--have been dragged into sin and death by a failing that is spiritual, not physical: by sin, something we both choose and fall into, a dark possibility that infected the world from the moment we were given the possibility of choice.

In his book O Death, Where Is Thy Sting? (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press), Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann cites Romans 5:12--Through sin, death has come into the world--and comments that

   for Christianity, death first of all is revealed as part of the moral
   order, as a spiritual catastrophe. In some final, indescribable sense
   man desired death, or perhaps one might say, he did not desire that
   life that was given to him by God freely, with love and joy.... The
   world is a perpetual revelation of God about himself to humanity....
   But the tragedy--and herein lies the heart of the Christian teaching
   about sin--is that man did not desire this life with God and for God.
   He desired life for himself.... And in this free choice of himself,
   and not of God, in his preference for himself over God, without
   realizing it, man became inextricably a slave of the world, a slave
   of his own dependence on the world.

Schmemann points out that even our life-sustaining eating is a communion with death. The plants we eat have been cut away from their roots, the fruit has been plucked from the tree, the animals have been killed.

   He eats in order to live, but with his food he communes with what is
   mortal, for food does not have life in itself.... Thus, death is the
   fruit of a life that is poisoned and perpetually disintegrating, a
   disintegration to which man has freely subjected himself. Not having
   life in himself, he has subjected himself to the world of death.

If we bracket the assumptions we have been educated to have with regard to death and life after death, the Scriptures make it clear that the idea of an afterlife seen in terms of the immortality of the soul is more a Neo-Platonist than a Christian idea. Biblically, eternal life and the resurrection of the body are essentially the same thing. Resurrection implies embodiment. It means taking the flesh--God's creation, a good thing--more seriously than much of Christian thought has tended to. In 2 Maccabees 7, resurrection is spoken of most dramatically. After torture, one of the persecuted brothers "quickly put out his tongue and courageously stretched forth his hands, and said nobly, 'I got these from Heaven, and because of his laws I disdain them, and from him I hope to get them back again.'" Isaiah is even more explicit in linking the body to immortality: "The dead shall live, their bodies shall rise. O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy!" (26:19).

We should nevertheless understand why the Neo-Platonist idea of the unencumbered soul's immortality remains so attractive. It is easier, in a way, to think that something naturally immortal inheres in us, to be freed by death. It makes death seem less total, less thoroughly annihilating. This is precisely where we move away from the Bible. Ruah, in Hebrew, and pneuma, in Greek, are often translated "spirit" but both literally mean "breath." "Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no help," says Psalm 146. "When his breath departs he returns to his earth; on that very day his plans perish." Another psalm is even starker: "As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a flower of the field; / for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, / and its place knows it no more" (Psalm 103). Biblically, death is what it looks like. The corpse in front of you is not the husk of Fred, who has left a fleshly prison to go in some shining form to a better world. It is Fred, dead.

Our belief in the immortality of the soul is attractive because we hope that there is something about us that is less contingent than the body, something less creaturely, that possesses an inherent immortality. For much of history it was possible to think of the mind as somehow separate from the body, consciousness as somehow spiritual in the way the meat soup of our brain is not. This has been especially true in the West, but Hinduism and Buddhism have also seen lively debates about this dualism. That has changed in recent years. Although philosophers and neurologists still debate the relationship between mind and brain, the idea that one can be in any way separate from the other is no longer tenable.

If we see our bodies as the selves we are, if we understand that soul and body are not separate entities but that the fullness of what we are spiritually can only exist embodied, we are totally dependent on something that we do not and cannot possess. While believers hold that God wills us into being from nothing, heartbeat by heartbeat, and that from the beginning of time God knew that we would exist and saw this as something good, we also know that before a certain point--our physical conception--we simply were not. It was God's will that brought us into being, and any being we have after death will likewise have to be willed by God. This has nothing to do with something we possess or are due.

It puts our faith more on the line to believe in resurrection than to believe in an immortal soul. To believe in resurrection means that just as there was no life before conception, there can be no life after death that is not given by God's willing it to be so. And we are incapable of knowing what any kind of life after death will be like, or how it will be accomplished. This is an insult to our imagined autonomy.

All of which means that we are putting ourselves completely into the hands of a God we cannot understand, except through trust--stepping over the edge of a cliff in the dark, hoping that the promised net will be there--that what we have been told, second-hand, will be true. I say second-hand because even someone who thought he had witnessed the Transfiguration or the Resurrection might later legitimately wonder, might have second thoughts. Peter, after witnessing the Transfiguration, denied Jesus three times, and we are all far from having come that close to witnessing God's glory. Still, as believers we have a story which is compelling to us. We hold on to it because it makes more sense to us than any other story--more sense than reincarnation, or ultimate meaninglessness, or an extinction we won't have to worry about because we won't be there to experience it.

Returning to my experience of anesthesia, I am not sure I have resolved what I encountered there, except to say that death may be known as a cancellation, as total an ending as humans could experience (if total endings can actually be a matter of experience), but at the same time God has the power to raise me to life. There may be no interim ... we are out of the space/time continuum, the "now" and "later" of the universe as we know it, with time as one of its limited dimensions. Yet I have no way of knowing this. My faith is that if I am canceled by the power death has in our world, God's greater power can overcome it.

Is the desire to survive death, to live despite death, a case of wanting to believe in something because the alternative seems too bleak? Or, as some would have it, a result of not wanting to face the truth? Here one must ask why the assumption that the truth will be bleak ought to be preferred to good news to the contrary. Is one view inherently more realistic or more naive than the other? I say this as one whose instincts are all thoroughly agnostic, dark, and pessimistic; but I have experienced enough to know that I am often wrong in allowing those instincts to govern my assumptions. That lump turns out not to be cancerous more often than not ... but even apart from such obvious things, there are those times when an experience of great beauty or joy bursts in on you, or the incandescence of love overwhelms you, and such experiences put darkness and pessimism in their lesser place. Such experiences either are merely human symptoms (like indigestion and dandruff) or they have something to do with what the universe is about, its ultimate ground. Without proof--without proof being possible--I will try to live as if the latter were true.

The idea that a soul has a separate existence--separate from the body, existing as a monad--is, if not part of orthodox Christian thought, a popular misunderstanding among Christians. It is hard, especially in a culture that stresses individualism, to accept the idea that the self exists only in relationship with others. In fact, who we are is formed by the family into which we are born, the language we learn, the culture in which we are immersed. Finally, we are, we exist, because we are loved by God, who wills us to be. Even within the Trinity, the persons exist separately only in relation to one another. The moment we think that our being is in any way independent of the relationship we have with God we fall into the trap Genesis warned us about: We want to be like gods.

I want to make it clear that when I move away from terms like "immortal soul" to a more biblical understanding I do not mean that God wishes for us to be transitory, or to say that we are not in fact called forth into eternal being. Rather, I mean only to move away from giving the priority to the idea of disembodiment, to the idea that what really matters is liberation from the flesh. To think that we can have an eternal life apart from resurrection is not Christian. It means taking neither death nor resurrection seriously enough, neither seeing the tragedy of the first in all its depth, nor the great joy of the second in all its glory.

First, as Christians we must take seriously the tragedy of death. Christianity is not meant to reconcile us with death, but to see it for the horror it is. Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus, and at Gethsemane he is filled with horror at what awaits him. This is a contrast with those forms of religion that console us with the idea that "death is just a part of life." Some part. We must face the fact that death is as bad as it looks, that it is not a simple rite of passage. It is the loss of everything we have known. No one who has loved anyone or anything in this life can find the idea of leaving life anything but tragic.

For the Christian, joy is found in the fact that even this enemy, even this thing we fear most--and rightly so--has been overcome in Christ. The Paschal liturgy of the Orthodox Church sings over and over again, "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life." It is a victory dance. And it involves embodiment. Schmemann again:

   In essence, my body is my relationship to the world, to others; it
   is my life as communion and as mutual relationship. Without
   exception, everything in the body, in the human organism, is created
   for this relationship, for this communion, for this coming out of
   oneself. It is not an accident, of course, that love, the highest
   form of communion, finds its incarnation in the body; the body is
   that which sees, hears, feels, and thereby leads me out of the
   isolation of my I.... The body is not the darkness of the soul, but
   rather the body is its freedom, for the body is the soul as love, the
   soul as communion, the soul as life, the soul as movement. And this
   is why, when the soul loses the body, when it is separated from the
   body, it loses life; it dies, even if this dying of the soul is not a
   complete annihilation, but a dormition, or sleep.

What will this be like? Who knows, or can? We should allow ourselves--in fact, should demand of ourselves--an agnosticism about imagining the afterlife, or what resurrection will mean. Our best scriptural witnesses stammer. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 15, speaks of the body we now have as a mere kernel, as if what it will blossom into is something we are incapable of imagining. In 1 John 3:2 we are told, "Beloved, we are God's children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is."

Of course it is hard to have faith that this will be so. Still, as Daniel Callahan suggests ("Visions of Eternity," First Things, May, 2003), some secular approaches to the idea of immortality are even more problematic. Callahan addresses, for example, the scientific vision of life extension (which encompasses even the idea of extending life forever), and contrasts it with the Christian approach to the question of eternal life. He quotes professor of religion Carol Zaleski: "To be given everlasting longevity without being remade for eternal life is to live under a curse." The extension of human life as it is, for many years or forever, would mean extending nearly infinite forms of misery, heartlessness, boredom, and torment, most of them the result of the kind of people we are. Callahan goes on to point out the obvious: death and suffering are not made the agonies they are by a conquerable biology, but by human behavior.

Because Christian belief has held that eternal life requires embodiment, Christianity has a long tradition of thought about what eternal embodiment might mean. It would mean a transformed reality participated in by a transformed people. Callahan offers a delightful quote from Marguerite of Oingt, a fourteenth-century nun and mystic, who wrote that "the saints will be completely within their Creator as the fish within the sea; they will drink to satiety, without getting tired and without in any way diminishing the water.... [They] will drink and eat the great sweetness of God. And the more they eat, the more their hunger will grow. And this sweetness cannot decrease any more or less than can the water of the sea."

So much for the problem of boredom. This is very much like the vision of St. Gregory of Nyssa, who said that because God is infinitely other than we are, an eternity of approaching what we can never reach will mean our continual transformation. "We can conceive then of no limitation in an infinite nature; and that which is limitless cannot by its nature be understood. And so every desire for the Beautiful which draws us on in this ascent is intensified by the soul's very progress towards it. And this is the real meaning of seeing God: never to have this desire satisfied" (From Glory to Glory, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press).

Christian thinkers have approached the idea of immortality in a way that is, in Callahan's words, a "much richer, more nuanced picture than anything the scientists and their followers have conjured up." Callahan quotes Caroline Walker Bynum's The Resurrection of the Body: However absurd the idea of resurrection may seem, "it is a concept of sublime courage and optimism. It locates redemption there where ultimate horror also resides--in pain, mutilation, death, and decay.... Those who articulated [it] faced without flinching the most negative of all the consequences of embodiment: the fragmentation, slime, and stench of the grave.... We may not find their solutions plausible, but it is hard to feel they got the problem wrong." Comments Callahan: "The crux of their 'courage and optimism' was to make the body the center of their attention, turning their back on the Greek notion that the soul is the essence of personhood. Not so, the medievals held: it is the body."

Callahan is bold enough to suggest that scientists might pay more attention to the Christian vision, much as it might gall them to take seriously a tradition they too often see as hostile to science: "Nonetheless, in the doctrine of the resurrection of the body many generations of thoughtful and imaginative people have tried to imagine what eternal life might be like; and, even more to the point, what it ought to be like if we are sensibly to desire it."

And we do desire it, sensibly or not so sensibly. Having been given the vision of a God whose care for us is so heartbreakingly thorough that he became one of us, suffering what we suffer, dying as we do, to show us that even what we fear most has been conquered by a love we are called to show one another, we cannot but hope that it is true and try to stake our lives on that hope. Our faith tells us that we have been baptized into Christ's death and the hope of resurrection. "For you have died," Colossians tells us, "and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory." This is the risen Christ who asked Mary not to cling to him, who showed Thomas wounds received on our side of death, and who made breakfast for his friends at the edge of the sea. And if we find this hard to believe, let us hope that our doubt has something in common with that of the Apostles in Luke's account (24:41) when they encountered the risen Christ: "While they still disbelieved for joy and wondered, he said to them, 'Have you anything here to eat?'"

John Garvey is an Orthodox priest and a columnist for Commonweal.