"O death, where is thy sting?"

El Greco, Saint Paul

"much possessed by death"

(Image from Wikipedia)

In taking leave of Professor Warren Reich last Thursday, we spoke briefly about the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, who has recently had a book published on our modern secularity titled A Secular Age.

I hadn't heard of the book, but Reich informed me that my old Berkeley advisor Robert Bellah had praised it highly as "possibly the best book that he'd ever read." Those were Reich's words in recalling the blurb from Bellah on Secular Age's cover. On the basis of that recommendation, Reich told me that he intended to read the book.

I think that I'll also have to read it ... as soon as I finish Rosenstock-Heussy's Out of Revolution.

I've looked at the Amazon site and found Bellah's exact quote:

"This is Charles Taylor's breakthrough book, a book of really major importance, because he succeeds in recasting the whole debate about secularism. This is one of the most important books written in my lifetime. I am tempted to say the most important book, but that may just express the spell the book has cast over me at the moment."

At about 80 years of age, Bellah is speaking of a rather long lifetime, so the book is therefore edging out a lot of fine competitors, including his own Habits of the Heart.

Taylor and his new book were therefore on my mind when I received my periodic email from Commonweal Magazine and discovered that he has published an article relevant to the Death, Dying, and Spirituality Conference that I recently attended. The article is titled "The Sting of Death: Why We Yearn for Eternity."

The title is borrowed from I Corinthians 15:55 and occurs within a longer passage by Paul on Christ's victory over death:

50 Now this I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God; neither doth corruption inherit incorruption. 51 Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, 52 In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. 53 For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. 54 So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. 55 O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? 56 The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God, which giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (I Corinthians 15:50-57, KJV)

The passage is not exactly a simple one, though it's perhaps clear enough. Here's my take:

Christ has overcome death, presumably through his own resurrection from the dead (though this particular passage does not specify), and through his victory, believers will be transformed at the end times' final resurrection from their corrupted bodies to incorruptible bodies that live immortally, thereby drawing out death's sting, the very sin that had corrupted humankind and rendered humanity subject to the judgement of death according to the law, a judgement that Christ himself had undergone for humanity's sake in order to bring corrupted humankind uncorrupted back to God.

As I said, perhaps that's clear enough. Most commentators agree that verse 54's words "Death is swallowed up in victory" are borrowed by Paul from Isaiah 25:8: "He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from off all faces." As for verse 55's sting of death, Paul seems to be thinking of Hosea 13:14, although that verse does not easily lend itself to Paul's use:

I will ransom them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death: O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, I will be thy destruction: repentance shall be hid from mine eyes. (Hosea 13:14, KJV)

I'm tempted to ask, "O death, where is thy sting?" It's not exactly there in the King James Version. The New American Standard Bible slips it into the verse:

Shall I ransom them from the power of Sheol?
Shall I redeem them from death?
O Death, where are your thorns?
O Sheol, where is your sting?
Compassion will be hidden from My sight. (Hosea 13:14, NASB)

But this version is perhaps being harmonized to I Corinthians 15:55 -- though I'd need to do a lot more leafing through commentaries to be sure.

John Milton, I'll note in passing, perhaps locates this sting, somewhat mythologically, in the personified image of Death as a fearsome if amorphous entity bearing a "dreadful dart":

...black it stood as Night,
Fierce as ten Furies, terrible as Hell,
And shook a dreadful Dart; (Paradise Lost 2.670-2)

Also in the same passage, the personified figure of Sin appears and refers to this as a "mortal Dart" (2.729). I take it that Milton is thinking -- among other things -- of I Corinthians 15:55.

Be that as it may, Paul himself says that the sting of death is sin, by which, he means that the sting of death is the very corruption that sin brings to bring on death. More briefly put, the sting of death is death itself.

And that is how we usually understand the phrase, but what does Charles Taylor mean? This:

What is hardest of all ... is the death of loved ones. For death is one of the things that makes it very difficult to sustain a sense of the higher meaning of ordinary life, in particular our love relationships. It's not just that these relationships matter to us a lot, and hence there is a grievous hole in our lives when our partner dies. It's also that, because these relationships are so significant, they seem to demand eternity. A deep love already exists against the vicissitudes of life, tying together past and present in spite of the disruptions and dispersals of quarrels, distractions, misunderstandings, resentments. By its very nature it participates in gathered time. And so death can seem a defeat, the ultimate dispersal that remains ungathered.

In Professor Christopher M. Moreman's presentation on Friday, he located the all-too-human belief in God within the fearfulness with which we encounter the certainty of our own death, a mysterium tremendum in the sense meant by Rudolf Otto in his seminal work, The Idea of the Holy. According to Moreman, this terrible sense of our own death leads us to project onto the nonbeing of death a great Being in our own image who will rescue us from death.

Taylor would say no, that's not the dialectic. The experience that really leads us to long for eternity is not some trembling before the ineluctable certainty of our own death but the loss of those whom we love so dearly.

Though I don't entirely dismiss Moreman's argument, I think that Taylor comes closer to what most people feel about death. We can often come to some acceptance of our own death. But the death of one's mother, father ... of grandparents? Of a beloved spouse? Of a loved child?

These are the sting of death.