If I Should Die

Christian Century, March 13, 2002 by Lucy Bregman

Edited by Leroy S. Rouner. University of Notre Dame Press, 216 pp., $20.00 paperback.

THE ESSAYS in this anthology are loosely linked around the topic of death and afterlife, but there is no dialogue between the various points of view presented. The editor notes that there is a gap "between the philosophers ... and the storytellers, theologians, and poets," and adds: "We miss the presence of a thinker like Paul Tillich" who could build a bridge between these groups.

Lacking a Tillich to do the job, I will try to comment on a book that ranges from a light-hearted survey of myths in which mortality is preferred to endless eternity (Wendy Doniger's article) to a serious study of Locke and Spinoza (Aaron Garrett's). Only two essays are paired: an appreciative account of Buddhist teachings about death and the afterlife by Malcolm Eckel and a somewhat superficial critique of Buddhist no-self doctrines by Brian Jorgensen.

The latter essay usefully raises the important question of what in each tradition or outside it is to be compared and contrasted with what else. Is the child's prayer "Now I lay me down to sleep ..." from which the book's title is taken comparable to the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or is the vision of the latter best measured against Dante's Divine Comedy? And what do Locke and Spinoza have to do with the two religious visionary texts, or a bereaved mother's contemporary poems? The sum total is not so much an example of apples and oranges as of apples, screwdrivers, oranges and laundry detergents.

This is itself an important clue to the situation many of us face when speaking about the afterlife. We have lost much of our sense of how the language of "eternity," "immortality" and "resurrection" ought to work. Add "reincarnation" to this trio, and the plot thickens. To argue that our language about the afterlife is philosophically incoherent, as contributors John Lachs and David Roochnik do, is one way to disregard the topic altogether. But religious people have used and continue to use some of this language; it appears not just in funeral liturgies but also in greeting cards and in obituary pages, where letters and poems addressed to the beloved dead by the bereaved are standard fare.

Moreover, even the psychologically oriented death and dying movement has found space for certain forms of afterlife images and ideas, although these are not the primary concern of those working in that field. If anything, the choice of this topic for a volume in the Boston University Studies in Philosophy and Religion series shows that the subject itself is not dead, but newly intriguing. Not one of the previous 21 volumes in the series covers similar material.

What do the contributors willing to use the language of afterlife do with it? One theme that appears across many disciplines and in many individual contributions is the contrast between an idealized, "purified metaphysical me" who might be eternal but is also all but unrecognizable, and the "me I normally recognize," rich in particularity, idiosyncratic history and sensuous experience. The phrasing comes from Garrett's essay, but many of the other contributors also rely on some such opposition. Jorgensen dislikes Eckel's account of Buddhism precisely because "the awakened self" is a purified metaphysical nonentity which appears to trash the lived richness of individual experience and the vitality of creation.

Dante's Divine Comedy retains all of the latter, and so Jorgensen considers it spiritually and morally superior. (This kind of comparison may infuriate many readers, or shortchange both texts, but it is the sole direct comparison in the whole anthology.) Doniger chimes in by pointing to the many Greek myths in which the mortal life is preferred because it is less static and somehow more fully alive than immortality. The immortality of the Greek gods is profoundly boring and trivial, and so, it seems, is the portrait of immortality offered in traditional Christianity. History, individuality and growth aren't things we must shed to be "eternal." They are us, they are the stuff of our real lives and selves. On this, Jurgen Moltmann, Doniger and several of the philosophers agree.

But after a while I became suspicious of all this enthusiasm for the "me I normally recognize." Isn't a lot of this "me" too trivial and silly to deserve eternalizing, even by very generous standards? When I look closely, what I recognize as "me" is a partial product of the thousands of television commercials I have half-wittingly absorbed. This "normal" me is a conglomerate of consumerist fantasies mingled with the kind of "real" experience that so impresses many of the book's contributors, and it is beyond my capacities to separate one from the other.

Christians have traditionally been committed to scrutinizing this "me I normally recognize" just as severely as Buddhists do, recognizing that idols and illusions are endemic to what I call my self. The biblical injunction to "set your minds on things above, not on earthly things" is tied to the hidden nature of the Christian self. "For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory" (Col. 3-4), and this glorified self will not be exactly the same as the person who now is enmeshed in "earthly things."