Religion: The Shape of Death

Death is a darkness upon which Christian Scripture throws surprisingly little light. The churches’ dogmas and the theologians’ thoughts about the nature of the soul and what happens to it after death have relatively sketchy Biblical evidence to go on. Speculation on the subject was wide open in the early centuries of Christianity, and it was the church fathers of that period who laid the foundation for later Christian thought on death. In a new book, The Shape of Death (Abingdon Press; $2.25), leading Lutheran Theologian Jaroslav Pelikan of the University of Chicago analyzes the theories of five church fathers, shows that they are still stimulating and provocative to fission-era mortals.

The Sojourner on Earth. The 2nd century father, Tatian, attacked the Greeks’ cyclical conception of immortality, which assumed the pre-existence of the soul, with life extending into eternity, backward as well as forward. Tatian held that the soul is as mortal as the body, but that it can be saved by God. Immortality is not the Christian hope, said Tatian, but “life eternal”—which means living in God. And God grants this only to those who do not grasp for immortality, but submit to death. “Die to the world and repudiate its madness. Live to God, take hold of Him, and lay aside your old nature.”

The solution of Clement of Alexandria, who also lived in the 2nd century, was less harsh. Attempting to Christianize the Greek theory of cyclical immortality, he justified the idea of pre-existence (inimical to the Christian doctrine of creation) by maintaining that “we existed before the foundation of the world; because we were destined to be in Him, we preexisted in the sight of God.” By “we,” Clement meant the elect. Clement borrowed the Platonic idea of the superiority of the soul to the body—”the body tills the ground and hastens to it, but the soul presses on to God. Trained in the true philosophy, it hastens to its relatives above.” The function of the church, thought Clement, is to train the soul for the return home.

Clement’s answer, writes Theologian Pelikan, “provides a good opportunity to watch the Christian and the classical doctrines of man in combination and collision.” Just as the body is not an inferior but a worthy thing, wrote Clement, so the Christian must not despise the world. “The elect man dwells as a sojourner . . . The body, too, as one sent on a distant pilgrimage, uses inns and dwellings by the way. It has care of the things of the world, of the places where it stops; but it leaves its dwelling place and property without excessive emotion.”

Satan Back to Heaven? In his treatise De Mortalitate, written probably in A.D. 252 to comfort Christians during the ravages of a plague, Cyprian summed up the solaces with which men have long made do in the face of death: the fact that all the great and brave have suffered the same fate, the thought of death as a rest from labor and a surcease from sorrow, the idea that the good die young. But his main argument was that death for a Christian means “to be changed and reformed to the image of Christ and to the dignity of heavenly grace.”

Origen, the great pupil of Clement of Alexandria, cited three possible explanations for the origin of the human soul: i) “creationism”—that each soul is especially created and introduced into the body when the body is formed; 2) “tra-ducianism”—that the soul is transmitted from one generation to another; 3) “pre-existence.” Origen chose the third—a theory that the church later condemned, as it did his other theory, that at the end of time, God would restore all things (even Satan) to himself, as they had been at the beginning of creation.

Origen, writes Pelikan, “cannot be persuaded that God has truly become ‘all in all’ … so long as death remains. Giving death the last word would be a negation of God.” Therefore Origen brought all creation round full circle, from eternity through existence to eternity. But however Greek this cycle of the soul may sound, Origen did not accept the idea that all things integrate and disintegrate again and again without ceasing. As opposed to the Stoics, he wrote, Christians “hold that, as from the grain of corn an ear rises up, so in the body there lies a certain principle that is not corrupted, from which the body is raised in incorruption.”

Death for Pity’s Sake. Irenaeus (2nd century) was more orthodox. Existence and the world of history he saw as willed and created by God, and therefore good; there is no need, as in Origen, for the soul’s descent from eternity to history and back again. Man as God created him had the capacity for immortality but sacrificed it by his disobedience. God condemned him to death, but out of pity—Irenaeus thought—so that he would not continue a sinner forever.

“The core of the Christian faith,” sums up Author Pelikan, “is pessimism about life and optimism about God . . . and nowhere do they come together more dramatically than in the Christian view of death.” Today’s world seems far removed from the world of the early Christians. “We look at the stars differently, and at disease, language, history, and many other constituent parts of life. But we still have to die, just as they did. Hence the Christian description of the shape of death can still make itself heard through a church father from long ago and far away: ‘And by it he, being dead, yet speaketh.’ “