Death
by Alexander Schmemann
Feast of St Titus the WonderworkerAnno Domini 2020, April 2
AS EASTER
approaches, thoughts almost involuntarily focus on a subject which is so stubbornly minimized by secular media and anti-religious propaganda, but which in one way or another unavoidably stands at the center of human consciousness, the subject of death. For Christians, Easter is the feast of victory over death, “Trampling down death by death.” In past ages of Christianity’s outward triumph, when Easter was the self-evident focus of the year, when its joy and gladness were shared by people as their own foremost joy, this celebration and its meaning needed no explanation. But today, for someone who knows little or nothing of what occurs on Easter night, who has not experienced that peculiar and joyful thrill when out of the darkness comes the first proclamation of “Christ is risen,” Easter has of course ceased being what it was for centuries: the proof, witness, and symbol of genuine victory over the darkness, sadness and hopelessness of death.
Anti-religious propaganda likes to claim that one of the sources for religions is fear of death: people were afraid of death and so they invented immortality of the soul, the world to come, eternity, and so forth. The reality, of course, is that none of this exists. With physical death, human being utterly disappear and turn into nothingness. It has always surprised me how fiercely and with what inexpressible inspiration the propaganda fights for this nothingness. They make it seem that dissolving into nothingness is very good, just fantastic; while on the other hand, faith in eternity and immortality are somehow dangerous and must be combatted with all possible force. Yet it appears to me that even if one could prove death to be the absolute end, after which there is nothing else, that this finally brings little joy. So someone lives, studies, suffers, feels inspired, loves, and then it’s all gone, as if he were never here. And therefore, it would seem that man’s eternal, indestructible dream of immortality, this desire for immortality, is something good, noble, and worthy of respect. But no! Nothing, it seems, is so hated by anti-religious propaganda as the idea of immortality and faith in man’s eternity.
But let’s consider the subject rationally. First of all, religion should not be ashamed of being concerned with death, or even of being accused that fear of death gave birth to religion. Death is too important a human phenomenon to be ignored or dismissed, as in anti-religious propaganda, as if there really is nothing to think about here, and the latest five-year plan is much more important. Fear of death is part of being human, because people instinctively feel a kind of terrifying, one could say awe-inspiring, discord between the experience of one’s own self and the knowledge that this self must die and come to an end. No matter how often I’m told that death is a natural event, an obvious law of nature, my own self feels that its own death is not only unnatural, but contrary to nature. This discord gives birth to fear, because everything strange or unnatural is frightening. And in spite of all we are told of the naturalness of death, the fear connected with it is the best proof that everything here is not so clear and simple. It is natural for human beings to desire what is natural. But death, disappearance, dissolving into nothingness, “a black pit with spiders,” as Dostoevsky said, the deafening sink-hole of non-existence is something no one desires.
Everywhere, death always remains a mystery which human beings, insofar as they are human and not machines, robots, or ants, cannot but look and reflect upon. Attempts, therefore, to simply remove this subject and replace it with discussion about economics or politics not only fail, but testify to shallowness and narrow-mindedness. And when we’re told to overcome fear of death by working for future generations and their happiness, none of the propaganda recognizes how incredibly stupid this is. For if we accept that human tragedy is grounded in the awareness of our own death, then this tragedy continues also in the future, regardless of the material happiness of those famous future generations. If human beings are doomed to nothingness, then permit me to ask: how does this awful absurdity become any less absurd in the future with, let’s suppose, more justice and better home heating? But no philosophy, no ideology based on rejection of immortality and eternity can promise anything more. If nothingness is human destiny, then the proponents of so-called “existentialism” are much more logical and honest; they simply begin with the premise that human life is absurd and meaningless. And then, of course, what Leo Tolstoy said, “after a stupid life comes a stupid death,” has more truth than the endless plans and discussions by cheap ideologies of future happiness.
All this brings us to a simple affirmation: death is an extremely important subject for human beings to ponder and attempt to understand. In some profound sense, the whole of a person’s life revolves around solving the riddle of his mysterious end. Religion’s depth lies in its refusal to avoid the subject. But anti-religious propaganda hides from people the actual religious teaching about death, and particularly Christian teaching. It equates this teaching with pre-historic and primitive “animism,” and most importantly, it conceals the fact that Christianity’s true inspiration lies not in reconciliation with death, but in fighting and overcoming it.
*From The Church Year: Celebration of Faith – Sermons, Volume 2
(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994), 111-114.
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"What is it that has ordered the things of heaven and those of earth, the things which move through the air and those which move in the water; nay, rather the things which proceeded them: heaven and earth and the natures of fire and water? What is it that combined and arranged them...set them into motion and put them on their unceasing and unhindered course?..But who is the architect of these things? Or did not he who made them also bring them into being? We shall certainly not attribute such power to spontaneity." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 3 This comes after St. John of Damascus sets out to delineate between the created and the uncreated, a fact which, while at the core of existence, seems for him to be, for this very reason, the simplest to believe. Everything but God is created and, thus, susceptible to change. This means people, but this also means demons, angels, the rest of the created order across the entire cosmos. Everything is vulnerable to unrest. Except for God. If you have ever tried to explain the Holy Trinity to a child for the first time, maybe you have felt as I have the weightier, inexpressible side of God's unchangeability: how do I possibly communicate this essential fact to the person in front of me? (This is usually when my faint stutter starts to pop up again.) I like that here, like St. Patrick reaching for a three-leaf clover, St. John brings us back to earth to better understand the cosmos. Fire and water are no less mysteries than heaven and earth. And yet here we are, cooking and washing, eating and drinking, filled and sustained on what we can neither fully explain nor claim to have created. Only God is unchanging. Vice versa, God is the only constant we need. Maybe the rest is better left unsaid. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
"Now, one who would speak or hear about God should know beyond any doubt that in what concerns theology and the Incarnation not all things are inexpressible and not all are capable of expression, and neither are all things unknowable nor are they all knowable. That which can be known is one thing, whereas that which can be said is another, just as it is one thing to speak and another to know. Furthermore, many of those things about God which are not clearly perceived cannot be fittingly described, so that we are obliged to express in human terms things which transcend the human order. Thus, for example, in speaking about God we attribute to Him sleep, anger, indifference, hands and feet, and the like." On the Orthodox Faith, Chapter 2 When I was studying Fiction in graduate school, one of the first methods I learned to really situate the reader in the story you were about to tell them was disorientation; if you wanted to ground them in one story, first you had pull the rug out from under their feet. So it's fitting that in the beginning of St. John Damascene's On the Orthodox Faith, before rebuilding our foundation, he first puts us squarely in limbo, seesawing back and forth between certainty and uncertainty. To paraphrase, there is no doubt (certainty) that about God some things can be expressed...but not all things (uncertainty). Some things about God are truly knowable (certainty), but some are unknowable (uncertainty). Oh, and while we're speaking about God (certainty), let's admit there's a gap, too, between what we say and what we know (uncertainty). My favorite line in this spiraling excerpt, "...it is one thing to speak, and another to know," takes me back to the final lines in Wendell Berry's poem, "How to Be a Poet," which he wrote primarily as a reminder to himself: Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. Wherever your preferences fall on the cataphatic or apophatic spectrum of theology (whether you lean more toward what we can say about God or what we cannot), Berry's poem, I think, would nod along with St. John: before we say too much, let our words be preserved by the silence from which they came. I'm thinking of the silence, that filling, restorative quiet I feel when I step into a cathedral or in some of my favorite moments with my kids in the early hours. Even before praying, can we hear the One already praying in us? Let's start there. LUKE TAYLOR GILSTRAP is Vice President of the Board of Directors for Eighth Day Institute. His poems have appeared in Spiritus, Ekstasis (Christianity Today), and Relief Journal, among others. He lives happily in Wichita, Kansas with his wife and three sons.
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