"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.

Death as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans?

Rudolf Otto

Author of The Idea of the Holy

(Image from Kelley L. Ross)

Still working on my prepared responses to several scholar papers scheduled for this week's upcoming religious studies conference at Sogang University on Death, Dying, and Spirituality, I have written the following couple of paragraphs as part of my response to a paper about experiencing the numinous in the face of death (albeit reworked for this blog to leave the scholar unidentified):

The scholar offers the interesting perspective that the world's religions provide a panacea for our fear of death, by which he may mean to imply that this is their primary function, but we will have to see on this point. What strikes me about his point is that he argues that even Hinduism and Buddhism affirm continuation of the self after death through reincarnation or translation to a heavenly realm and that this affirmation of the continued existence of one's self is what helps these religions provide consolation to the average believer. Even more striking, because surprising, is his observation that even science, or perhaps 'Scientism', seeks to deny death and aims to overcome it by achieving physical immortality. Yet, he wonders if fear of death is common to humans in every epoch, and he cites the possibility that our early ancestors didn't fear death as we do today. If this is correct, he suggests, then the world's religions have developed alongside a rising sense of self-importance. This would suggest that as the individual has grown increasingly in importance, so people have grown to see themselves as individually important, and perhaps all-important, which is somewhat counter-intuitive since the great world religions claim to diminish the significance of the individual. At this point, I would note the remark by Dorothee Soëlle quoted in the paper, namely, "never are people so self-involved as when they fear death" (Soëlle, Mystery of Death, page 5), which suggests the ironic possibility that belief in immortality reduces self-involvement by removing the fear of death. Moreover, if Hinduism and Buddhism have proven attractive for many people for so long because -- despite what they may affirm about dissolution of the self as an ultimate aim -- they offer personal immortality in their popular forms and have long done so in cultures not noted for their individualism, then I wonder about the thesis that fear of death undergirds religion and that the great religions have developed along with a growing fear of death as the self grows in significance. There is at least some complexity to this issue, and perhaps even an ironic counter-argument, as I've suggested.

At any rate, the possibility that death might end not just our earthly life but even our entire being remains troubling to many of us, and the scholar cites Martin Heidegger's description of the sort of anxiety stirred up by the realisation of one's impending demise as unheimlich, or uncanny, which is understood in the sense offered by Rudolf Otto for the experience of our encounter with "The Holy," for Otto describes our encounter with the numinous in the sense of the sacred as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, a mystery both terrifying and fascinating (Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy). In such a sense as this, death itself seems to take on the qualities of a fearsome deus absconditus who is not so much the ontological ground of our existence as an existential threat to our being. For most of us, however -- suggests the scholar -- perhaps as a sort of Freudian reaction formation (cf. Freud, Reader, page 295 et passim), rather than directly confronting our mortality, a belief arises in us that we shall become like the Wholly Other and live forever, the Wholly Other being a God who has not absconded but who offers a reliable promise guaranteeing the survival of our self.

Such is the current state of these remarks as I try to develop them. They sound a bit awkward to me now, partly because I've had to rework them to avoid quoting or mentioning the scholar whose paper I'm responding to, for the conference has yet to take place.

Perhaps I'll be reporting on this sort of topic over the next several days, for the conference begins tomorrow.

Bibliography:

Freud, Sigmund. The Freud Reader. Edited by Peter Gay. W.W. Norton and Company, 1995.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.

Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. Translated by John Harvey. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Soëlle, Dorothee. The Mystery of Death. Translated by Nancy Lukens-Rumscheidt and Martin Lukens-Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007 (Mystik des Todes: Ein Fragment. Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, 2003).

The God Terror

WTC Attack 9-11

(Borrowed via Squire)

Today's heading is an expression that I picked up this morning from Don Bryd, who used it in the immediate aftermath of 9/11:

The god Terror has two kinds of followers -- the agents of terror and the terrified. They belong to the most vicious circle. The one makes no distinction between the guilty and the innocent, killing indifferently. The others accept the terrorists' simplification and respond.

This statement and the essay in which it occurs, "Something Big Has Happened: There are no Commercials on TV (In The Aftermath of the Terror, 9-11-01)," appear in the online journal CTheory. I know nothing of this journal, which describes itself as "an international peer-reviewed journal of theory, technology and culture" edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker.

Its editorial page lists Jean Baudrillard, which gives me some idea of its intellectual orientation. Baudrillard is infamous for his remarks in the wake of 9/11:

That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree, -- this is unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact, and one which is justly measured by the pathetic violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it.

It is almost they who did it, but we who wanted it. If one does not take that into account, the event lost all symbolic dimension to become a pure accident, an act purely arbitrary, the murderous fantasy of a few fanatics, who would need only to be suppressed. But we know very well that this is not so. Thus all those delirious, counter-phobic exorcisms: because evil is there, everywhere as an obscure object of desire. Without this deep complicity, the event would not have had such repercussions, and without doubt, terrorists know that in their symbolic strategy they can count on this unavowable complicity. (Jean Baudrillard, "The Spirit of Terrorism," translated by Dr. Rachel Bloul, Le Monde, November 2, 2001.)

Both Bryd and Baudrillard would make us all worshippers at the altar of the god Terror, though Bryd draws a distinction between terrorist and terrorized that Baudrillard erases. In Baudrillard's words, "It is almost they who did it, but we who wanted it." Perhaps Baudrillard wouldn't have wished his French translated to sound so eerily like the classic rapist's defense -- "She wanted it" -- but there it stands.

I don't like the theoretical style of either article, for both tend to over-intellectualize the motives of the 9/11 terrorists, but both Bryd and Baudrillard rightly sense the religious significance in the terror of 9/11.

And by that, I don't mean Islam ... not quite yet, anyway.

What I mean is that both Bryd and Baudrillard perhaps implicitly understood that the terror experienced at the force of 9/11's overwhelming destruction echoes the extreme dread that Rudolf Otto characterizes as a fundamental response to "The Holy."

Since primal religions do not radically differentiate the holy and the impure, both being felt as powerful, dynamic spiritual forces that can overwhelm human beings, and since we all perhaps retain the tendency to react in primal ways to extreme circumstances, then I would argue that the dreadful awe experienced in the presence of the holy can also be felt in the presence of overwhelming evil.

I think that Baudrillard is right to refer to "evil ... as an obscure object of desire." We tend to worship what we fear, desire what we worship, and direct that powerful desire toward destruction.

In "What We Have to Lose" (City Journal, Autumn 2001) Theodore Dalrymple recounts a personal experience with the delight of destruction:

I remembered an episode from my childhood. My brother and I took a radio out onto the lawn and there smashed it into a thousand pieces with croquet mallets. With a pleasantly vengeful fury, as if performing a valuable task, we pursued every last component with our mallets until we had pulverized it into unrecognizability. The joy we felt was indescribable; but where it came from or what it meant, we knew not. Within our small souls, civilization struggled with barbarism: and had we suffered no retribution, I suspect that barbarism's temporary victory would have been more lasting.

As John Milton put it, "Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather" (Areopagitica).

The terrorists of 9/11 submitted themselves completely to a primal religious force that aims at casting nonbelievers into a state of terrified dread. We must resist that dread in the face of evil. Even more, we must resist submitting to that part of us that finds in "evil ... an obscure object of desire," the impurity within that echoes the impurity without, the delight in destruction, the worship of the god Terror.

This is our great moral struggle.