Last Judgment - A.D. 1320 at Chora Monastery, Constantinople
Where does the soul go when the body dies? According to Jacob Boehme, there is no need for it to go anywhere. On a similar subject, William Empson says in his poem “Ignorance of Death”:
Otherwise I feel very blank upon this topic,
And think that though important, and proper for anyone to bring up,
It is one that most people should be prepared to be blank upon.
In other words, over-concern for one’s immortality could be a sign of an exaggerated individualism. One could propose the thesis that, where there is a sufficiently fulfilling life to be lived, worry about what happens after is
de trop. For instance, if a national identity were sufficiently valuable, it would be completely fulfilling to live to serve it, and to die knowing that it would survive one.
Yet, in spite of this, archaeology has unearthed many examples of man’s concern for survival after death. But other branches of science have made it more difficult to believe. the probes have gone on, outward into space, inward into the very marrow of humanity; and the reductionists’ conclusion is always the same: life, the universe, man are nothing but elaborations of physical laws which can be subsumed under comparatively simple equations.
It is neither a priest’s job nor a poet’s to put the adversary’s case for him. The world is growing grey, not with the breath of the Galilean, as Swinburne maintained, but with that of scientology or of an increasingly commercialized or prostituted science. “Art thou a master of Israel and knowest not these things?” This is the drop of bitterness in the modern cup. To be able to take a man to pieces and put him together again; to be able to realize power brighter than the sun; to be able to walk in space and land on the moon; and not to be able to answer the bereaved child’s question: “Where has Daddy gone?” And our assurance, our “nothing buts” are always misplaced. We, with our veneration for John Locke, have our ears perpetually teased by Blake’s singing question: “How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight closed by your senses five?” (“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”).
Because of the immensity of that world, there will surely be many ways of apprehending it. We are fuddled with democracy: fair shares for all! “Ah, well, ‘e’s in ‘eaven now,’ said the widow of a notorious rogue to the vicar who condoles with her. “I was never so near doubting in all my life,” said the priest to a friend. Yes, it is the great good place that all are bound for: rich and poor, sinner and saint, healer and torturer, on some super Canterbury pilgrimage. And St Peter stands at the gate, and he says to a Hitler or an Eichmann: “Um, there’s just that matter of the Jews to be settled first.” And they say: “Oh, the seven million, you mean? Yes, well, I’m sorry about that.” And so the burning, fiery furnace was invented. Can its temperature be adjusted to the equation between a homicide who was sorely provoked and a Hitler?
“A little water clears us of this deed,” scoff the Lady Macbeths of this world, appealing to reason. But the heart has its reasons that reason knows not of. “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?” asks Macbeth. And his answer still wakes an echo in a million hearts:
No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
So, in a way, it is the moral argument that persuades. The tough, the thug, the hard-headed businessman say: “I go my way. I do as I please. I make the world serve my turn. And when my time comes, I’m not afraid to die! Stone dead has no bedfellow!” True. If you are stone dead, you can feel nothing. So what is there to fear? But just supposing it is not true? Which is not impossible.
Methought I heard a voice cry: “Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep.”
If there is to be any meaning to life, if justice and righteousness, as the Jews thought, are to be necessary ingredients in the divine makeup, there must be a future vindication of the innocent, who have suffered pain and oppression in this life, as there must be a correction of the arrogant and intolerant who have fed off the fat of the land here at the expense of the weak.
And yet, an uneasiness dogs one. Is not this legalism? “And Jacob vowed a vow, saying: If god will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father’s house in peace, then shall the Lord be my God” (Gen. 28:20-21). This is man, proud man, dictating his terms even to God, and so no better than the scientist or the philosopher, who put life to the question. So different from the great cry of Job: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him” (Job 13:15).
This is an age of searching and doubt, of confidence and hesitation. In the strangely shifting climate which is common to most of the world today, can there be a finer, more satisfying response than trust? The great hymn of the Christian Church, the
Te Deum Laudamus, closes on the humble yet proud verse: “In Thee, O Lord, have I trusted, let me never be confounded.”
There is no God but God. The very use of the word answers all questions. The ability to create life automatically posits the ability to re-create it. We die utterly, completely. Our bones are consumed in the crematoria. Shall the Creator, who composed this solid, fertile earth out of incendiary gases, find more difficulty in forming a new life around the nucleus of a human soul? The question is rhetorical. It can be framed in a hundred different ways. It was a cardinal doctrine of Aquinas that God reveals Himself in accordance with the mind’s ability to receive Him. I have already scoffed at democracy. To one person, God may reveal Himself as a loving shepherd leading to green pastures; to another as a consuming fire. I must end this talk, surely, by telling you how He has revealed Himself to me, if that is the right way to describe the knowledge—half hope, half intuition—by which I live.
“When the sun rises, do you not see a round disc of fire somewhat like a guinea?” “O no no, I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host crying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty!’ I question not my corporeal or vegetative eye any more than I would question a window concerning sight. I look through it and not with it” (William Blake, “A Vision of the Last Judgement”). So said William Blake and, similarly, in my humbler way, say I. With our greatest modern telescope we look out into the depths of space, but there is no heaven there. With our supersonic aircraft we annihilate time, but are no nearer eternity. May it not be that alongside us, made invisible by the thinnest of veils, is the heaven we seek? The immortality we must put on? Some of us, like Frances Thompson, know moments when “Those shaken mists a space unsettle” (“The Hounds of Heaven”). To a countryman it is the small field suddenly lit up by a ray of sunlight. It is T. S. Eliot’s “still point, there the dance is” (“Four Quartets”), Wordsworth’s “central peace, subsisting at the heart of endless agitation” (“The Excursion”). It is even closer. It is within us, as Jesus said. That is why there is no need to go anywhere from here.
*Originally published in The Listener, 8 August 1974, pp. 177-178
