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The Covid-19 Experiment exposes our deepest fears. Most of us are confined to home and would find reality unbearable without Netflix, Amazon Music, Minecraft, and YouTube.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, we Americans blinded ourselves to illness, aging, and dying. The critically ill were moved to intensive care units, where they were hidden beneath cables and tubes connected to monitors and respirators; the old and infirm with cognitive problems were housed in memory-care facilities and were often confined to a single room with a flat-screen TV and artificial flowers; the dying spent their last days in a hospice center, staffed by professionals, all strangers.
I just returned from grocery shopping at 6:30 AM; six customers were in the store, all with masks and rubber gloves, trying to avoid the Covid-19 virus and dying. Suddenly, death has become present for everyone.
Death is grim, cruel, a source of immense grief, a terrifying truth we flee from, yet cannot.
The Great Contradiction
At birth, we are given two destinies, to be connected to all that is and to die, to be everything and to be nothing.
Each one of us began as a single cell, developed in our mother’s womb, and was born into a tiny world, no larger than our mother’s arms and breasts. Within two years, our universe expanded enormously. We walked through grass, giggled with others, petted animals, and began to speak English, Russian, Hindi, or whatever our native language was to be. We inhabited a new world, seen for the first time. We loved the simplest things, wondered about everything, and asked, “Why?” Our intense desire to know continued to expand our universe.
In the Western, the Eastern, and the Native American traditions, the child becomes an adult with the capacity to embrace the totality of being. Each culture, of course, expresses this wonderful capacity in its own way:
Greek: “The human soul is, fundamentally, everything that is.”[1]
Hindu: “Thou are that.”[2]
Christian: “Every other being takes only a limited part of being whereas the spiritual soul is capable of grasping the whole of being.”[3]
Jewish: “At opposite poles, both man and God encompass within their being the entire cosmos. What exists seminally in God unfolds and develops in man.”[4]
Islamic: “Who knows his soul knows his Lord.”[5]
Chinese: “He who cultivates the Tao is one with the Tao.”[6]
Native American: “To walk the path of beauty, you must connect to all things, take them seriously, with reverence.”[7]
Human life seemly is absurd: We are given two contradictory ends, to be everything and to be nothing.
Yet, most of us do not despair over the dreadful situation we find ourselves in. We use amusement and fantasy to divert our attention from reality. Philosopher-mathematician Blaise Pascal observed in his day, the early seventeenth century, that the chief diversions were the hunt and the dance. A man whose mind is occupied with where to rightly put his feet cannot reflect upon the inevitable death that awaits him.
In our democratic era, the diversions readily at hand to us far surpass those available to seventeenth-century French aristocrats. With the touch of a finger, we change channels on the TV, select a different track on a CD, or go to a new website on the internet.
What we hate most of all is silence and solitude. Home alone, the TV set drones away in the background, even when we are not watching it. We get into the car by ourselves, and our hand automatically reaches to turn on the radio. We avoid every opportunity to reflect upon where we come from, what we are doing here, and where we are going. When reality intrudes, we reach for the psychotropics, and thank Pfizer, the maker of Zoloft, for taking the edge off life.
But pain and suffering cannot be avoided indefinitely; both are an integral part of human life. Death cannot be ignored forever, and the dread of total annihilation is real. In the face of death, the riddle of human existence grows most acute. If we refuse to grapple with the mystery of death, we risk wasting the life we are given. But thinking on our own about death would most likely end in one of two unfruitful ways: Either fear would drive us back to our mindless diversions or despair over the apparent hopelessness of the human condition would cause us to fall into a passive despondency. We need the help and guidance of the masters, Buddha, Socrates, and the Patristic Fathers.
The Buddha
The Buddha unflinchingly stared death down. He preached in his first sermon to five ascetics, his old companions, in the Deer Park at Isiptana near Benares that human existence is inseparable from suffering (dukka), that the cessation of suffering occurs by extinguishing craving, and that the liberation from craving results from ardently following the Eightfold Path: “right views, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration [meditation].”.[8]
Dukka follows from the most fundamental principle that Buddha taught: the impermanency of all compound things, an indisputable principle. Civilizations rise and fall; species of plants and animals come and go; continents drift and produce mountain ranges; that wind and water erode rock and level mountains. Twentieth-century cosmologists discovered that the universe, itself, is destined to end with the Big Freeze, a cold eventless state of electrons, neutrinos, antielectrons, and antineutrinos. We are born, walk around for a while, and then disappear. Everything and everyone we love inevitably changes, decays, dies, and vanishes. Nothing lasts. All this is indisputable; although unlike the Buddha, we blind ourselves to this reality.
Surprisingly, many American Buddhists are experts at denying death, unlike their Master. Buddhism in our culture verges on being a bourgeois amenity, like Whole Foods, where the production of fruits, vegetables, and meat is sanitized, hidden from view. Robert Wright, in his best-selling book Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, translates dukka as “unsatisfactoriness.” Life is a series of disappointments; “getting the next job promotion, or getting an A on that next exam or, eating that next powdered-sugar doughnut” does not bring “eternal bliss,”[9] nor does watching your spouse die of brain cancer. Meditation, “an essentially therapeutic endeavor — a way to relieve stress or anxiety, cool anger, or dial down self-loathing just a notch — can turn into a deeply philosophical and spiritual endeavor,”[10] although Wright confesses that nirvana remains a mystery to him and that so far meditation has made him only somewhat less irritable. In effect, Wright transforms Buddhism into a well-being commodity, drained of all reference to death.
Socrates
How strange to us is Socrates’ claim that “true philosophers make dying their profession, and that to them of all men death is the least alarming.”[11] Socrates argued that if a person fixes his attention on the material world, he falls “prey to complete perplexity and uncertainty,”[12] for the senses can report that the same object is both hot and cold, big and small. Consequently, he advocated a philosophical training that “consists in separating the soul as much as possible from the body, and accustoming it to withdraw from all contact with the body and concentrate itself by itself.”[13] After such a philosophical training that aims at direct experience of the eternal, the “soul can have no grounds for fearing that on its separation from the body it will be blown away and scattered to the winds, and so disappear into thin air, and cease to exist.”[14]
On the day of his forced suicide, many of Socrates’ young friends arrived at his cell early in the morning to spend the last day with the Master. Socrates saw that all his followers were afraid of death, and he spent the last hours of his life consoling them! He attempted to cast a “magic spell”[15] over his disciples to charm away their fear of death. If he could show them that the soul is immortal and what awaits it after death is a life more abundant, then in a sense, he would have slain death for them. (See illustration.[16])
He explained to them that through philosophical training, their souls would experience the invisible, the divine, and the timeless and that such experience inspires confidence
in the immortality of the soul. His young friends, however, had doubts and demanded a logical proof that the soul is immortal. Socrates must have known that such a proof would never allay the fears of his friends; nevertheless, out of love, he proceeded to spin a tale of logic to dispel the fear of death from his young friends, all the time directing them to the deepest experiences of the interior life.
Socrates used philosophy to wind his way into the labyrinth of human existence to slay the monster — death — and thus to rescue Athenian youth. At his trial, he had refused to save himself from death, and while in prison, he did not permit his wealthy friends to arrange for his escape. In effect, Socrates offered himself as a sacrifice to death in order to teach publicly that the soul is immortal.
Many of us in the modern world are awed that Socrates spent his last day on Earth as he spent the days before, pursuing truth with his friends and looking out for their welfare. He calmly drained the cup of hemlock in one breath, prayed to the gods that his “removal from this world to the next may be prosperous,” and asked his friend Crito “to offer a cock to Asclepius,” the god of healing; thus died the “bravest and also the wisest and most upright man” in Athens.[17]
Is the Self Immortal?
In Modernity, self displaces soul, because the basic unit of democracy, capitalism, and the Nation-State is the isolated, autonomous self.[18] As a result, Socrates’ discussion of the nature of the soul is mainly of historical interest to most of us; we what to know if the self is immortal.
While ancient theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas spoke of the immortality of the soul, New World Christians proclaim that the self is immortal. When a bereaved self asks a priest or pastor, “Will I see my loved one again?”, the answer is invariably “Yes,” with the implication that the desires, habits, and memories of the loved one are either immortal and live on now or will be resurrected in Christ. C. S. Lewis, a New World Christian apologist, even argued (hoped or believed) that his favorite dog would be resurrected with him.[19] Lewis expressed the desire that all loves in this world will last forever.
Margaret Guenther, retired director of the Center for Christian Spirituality of the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, imagines, “Maybe the next life will be a feast for the mind, like great expanses of time in the main reading room in the Library of Congress, only with good lighting and comfortable chairs. Maybe it will be bountiful, like the homecoming picnics at the Martin City Methodist Church, where my father worshiped as a boy.” She confesses, “Sometimes I play with the idea that I will see my grandfather, whom I loved deeply and who died when I was nine, and meet my German grandparents for the first time. . . . Maybe I can have a beer with Meister Eckhart or crochet and chat with Dame Julian of Norwich, while she sews on humble garments, suitable for anchorites.”[20]
Implicit in Guenther’s picture of the next life is her answer to the most fundamental question a person can ask: “Who am I?” Guenther gives the common answer — I am my memories, a view that does not hold up to scientific or philosophical examination. Neurologist Oliver Sacks reported that a man under his care had suffered a sudden thrombosis in the posterior circulation of the brain, which caused the immediate death of the visual parts of the brain. The patient became completely blind — and did not know it! Sacks’ questioning revealed that the patient had lost all visual images and memories yet had no sense of loss. The patient had no memory of ever having seen; he was unable to describe anything visual and became bewildered when hearing the words “seeing” and “light.” An entire lifetime of visual experience had been erased from memory in an instant.[21]
The visual memories stored in a person’s brain are nonmaterial[22], but they do not exist separate from his brain; the same is true for all other perceptual memories. My memory of winning the eighth-grade math prize in 1956 at the Middle School in Union Lake, Michigan will die with my brain as will my memory of crossing frozen Wilkins Pond during a full moon in mid-winter of the same year. What is true of memory is also true of imagination. My image of myself — a gypsy outsider — will perish with my death. All my acquired emotional habits, such as the fear of dogs and the love of Bach and Mozart, depend upon brain physiology. Even discursive reason, which moves in time, seems perishable.
Through such reflection, my intellect uncovered a terrible truth — my mortality. I then concluded that the mortality of George Stanciu was a calamity that rendered human life meaningless. To ignore or to forget the reality of death, to force this unbearable truth from my mind, I often turned to a sensual life, to amusing diversions, or to other forms of self-narcosis. What kept me from firing a bullet into my brain was that deep down I thought that I had possibly made an error in my analysis of who I am.
Timelessness
How strange that Homo sapiens, a flash in the pan in the history of the universe, can intellectually grasp the beginning and the end of everything, the Big Bang and the Big Freeze. Unlike zebras, kangaroos, and chimpanzees, human beings in some mysterious way transcend space and time.
All biological life is locked into time, into the cycle of birth, growth, reproduction, senescence, and death. Perceptual life is of the here and now; memories are of past particulars, and imagination in the restricted meaning of the word is the faculty for rearranging perceptual images and in the extended use is the ability to form interior images, to envision eventful scenes and peopled places.
Clearly, then, some special element or aspect of the mind allows Homo sapiens to transcend space and time. Without this special element, science would be impossible, for the goal of science is to find unchanging causes of phenomena, that is, first principles, or laws, that apply universally, not merely to one or two particular instances in space and time. The principle of inertia states that matter resists a change in motion, not that one James Brown found it difficult to move his suitcase from his front porch to his car in Atlanta, Georgia, on July 17, 1958.
In my first encounter with the truth and beauty of mathematics, my fourteen-year-old mind saw dimly that I was being called to the transcendent, in Christian terms to God. Socrates, from his experience of beauty, said beauty calls us to the source of beauty; for this reason, beauty is named kalos in Greek, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the verb kaleô, “to call.” Socrates as a young man, obviously much deeper than I am now as an old person, saw that when a person comes to know the source of beauty, “he shall be called a friend of god, and if ever it is given to man to put on immortality, it shall be given to him.”[23] When in my thirties and still dim-witted, Socrates pointed out to me that since I could grasp the eternal truths of mathematics, there had to be something in me that was eternal, something deathless. For Socrates, the deepest answer to “Who am I?” is arrived at by stripping away the accidents of birth and culture until the true self appears, timeless and in some mysterious way connected to all existence.
The Patristic Fathers
For me, of course, this true self was a complete mystery, so after stumbling around for years exploring Hinduism and Buddhism, I turned to the most profound understanding of the human person that Christianity offers.
The Patristic Fathers embraced the theological insights of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopogite[24]: God is not any of the names used in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, not God of gods, Holy of holies, Cause of the ages, the still breeze, cloud, and rock.[25] God is not Mind, Greatness, Power, or Truth in any way we can understand, for He “cannot be understood, words cannot contain him, and no name can hold him. He is not one of the things that are, and he is no thing among things.”[26] God is the Unnamable.
Surprisingly, Thomas Aquinas, the most rational of theologians, also reached the conclusion that God is beyond our comprehension: “It is because human intelligence is not equal to the divine essence that this same divine essence surpasses our intelligence and is unknown to us: wherefore man reaches the highest point of his knowledge about God when he knows that he knows Him not, in as much as he knows that that which is God transcends whatsoever he conceives of Him.”[27]
According to St. Gregory Palamas, we know the energy of God, not His essence: “Not a single created being has or can have any communion with or proximity to the sublime nature [of God]. Thus, if anyone has drawn near to God he evidently approached Him by means of His energy.”[28] A person becomes close to God by participating in His energy, “by freely choosing to act well and to conduct [himself] with probity.”[29] Here, Gregory distinguishes between God’s essence, or substance (ousia), and His activity (energeia) in the world. The energy of God is experienced as Divine Light, such as the light of Mount Tabor or the light that blinded St. Paul on the Road to Damascus.
The Church Fathers, however, warned that for most devout Christians, visions and heavenly voices do not come from God but from a fevered imagination and are distractions in the spiritual quest. Modern spiritual directors issue the same warning about imagined experiences. Thomas Merton, for example, told his novices that “since God cannot be seen or imagined, the visions of God we read of the saints having are not so much visions of Him as visions about Him; for to see any limited form is not to see Him.”[30]
Given this understanding of the God, the image of God within us means that the essence of each one of us is unnamable and that we are known to others only through our activity in the world, that is, through a socially-constructed self. We are unknowable to ourselves, although through meditation, or what the Patristic Fathers called contemplation, we can witness our thoughts, memories, and storytelling, and thus know that we are not what we witness. Through more advanced contemplation, we may experience Divine Light, the presence of God.
The True Self
At the core of our being is the unnamable, the “empty mind” of Zen Buddhism, the “pure consciousness” of Hinduism, and the “spirit” of Christianity, although all words ultimately fail to capture our true self. We, the unenlightened, believe that the false self given to us by culture is permanent and fail to see that the false the self is an illusion, with no more permanency than a smoke ring, destined to vanish with the death of the body. Because we take our culturally-given self for our true self, we fail to experience who we truly are. Our true self is always present, completely perfected with no need of development from us; we must merely step aside. Every spiritual master calls for the death of self and a spiritual rebirth beyond egoistic desires, beyond religious practices, beyond any given culture, beyond the dictates of society, into the law of love, into compassion for every living being.
The image of God within us also means that each one of us has the energy to transform the physical and social worlds we inhabit, either for good or evil. For instance, we are free to use the fruits of science for the benefit of life or the destruction of humanity, for creating polio vaccine or thermonuclear weapons, aids for life or instruments of death. Through such free choices, we either draw closer to God or more distant from Him.[31] Each one of us becomes what we choose.
Our freedom is virtually unlimited; we can thumb our nose at God, refuse to become who we truly are, and embrace a self of our own choosing; however, to freely abandon God, to exist in oneself, and to seek satisfaction in one’s own being is not quite to become a nonentity but is to verge on non-being.[32] Hell is not the fiery pit of received Christianity, but the complete separation from God — forever. Heaven is not the reuniting with one’s favorite dog or the blissful meeting with one’s unknown relatives or the pleasure of conversing with the saints, not such “enthusiastic fantasies,” but to “know more deeply the hidden presence by whose gift we truly live.”[33] Heaven is joining the Holy Trinity in Love, as wonderfully expressed in the icon The Trinity, also called The Hospitality of Abraham, by Andrei Rublev. The three angels in the icon are metaphors for the three persons of the Holy Trinity. The figures are arranged so that the lines of their bodies form a full circle. In motionless contemplation, each angel gazes into eternity. Because of inverse perspective the focal point of the icon is in front of the painting on the viewer, inviting the viewer to complete the circle of angels, to join in a union with the Holy Trinity. (See illustration.[34])
Like every person, I live in two worlds, the temporal and the eternal. I love the pungency of Stilton cheese, the softness of cashmere, the dance of cherry blossoms, and the smell of the ocean salt air, and wonder about the abundant beauty of Nature, where nothing is not beautiful, either to the eye or to the mind, and am enthralled by the poetry, drama, and music that touch the transcendent. Yet, this physical world, like “George Stanciu,” is transient and eventually vanishes without leaving a trace.
I live among the rich and the poor, the powerful and the weak, the ambitious and the lazy, the good and the bad, the loving and the hateful. Grappling with death taught me how to live in this world. I now see that every person I meet in ordinary, daily affairs — the mailman, the bank teller, the butcher at Whole Foods, the obnoxious teenager down the street with his blaring boom box — is part human and part divine, a storytelling self, often confused, dislikable, and in pain, but always transient, and a mysterious self, deathless, an image of God, worthy of unconditional love.
Endnotes
[1] Aristotle, De Anima, Bk. III, Ch. 8, (431b). Available http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.html.
[2] Chandogya Upanishad, 6.12-14. Available http://www.hinduwebsite.com/sacredscripts/hinduism/upanishads/chandogya.asp.
[3] See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. Three, Part II, Ch. 112. Available http://dhspriory.org/thomas/ContraGentiles.htm.
[4] Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem: Keter, 1974), p. 152.
[5] Jalaluddin Rumi, Signs of the Unseen: The Discourses of Jalaluddin Rumi, trans. W. M. Thackston, Jr. (Putney, Vermont: Threshold Books, 1994), p. 59.
[6] Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, no. 16.
[7] Billy Yellow, interview by David Maybury-Lewis, Millennium, aired on PBS, 1992.
[8] The Buddha’s first sermon, known as the “Foundation of the Kingdom of Righteousness” or the “Setting in Motion of the Wheel of Dharma,” in Buddhism: A Religion of Infinite Compassion, ed. Clarence H. Hamilton (Indianapolis, IA: Bobbs-Merrill, 1952), pp. 28-29 and “The Sermon at Benares” in The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha, ed. E. A. Burtt (New York: New American Library, 1955), p. 30.
[9] Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), pp. 6, 55.
[10] Ibid., p. 55.
[11] Plato, Phaedo, trans. Hugh Tredennick, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 67e.
[12] Plato, Seventh Letter, trans. L. A. Post, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 343c.
[13] Plato, Phaedo, 67c.
[14] Ibid., 84b.
[15] Ibid., 77d.
[16] Jacques-Louis David, The Death of Socrates. Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
[17] Plato, Phaedo, 117c-118.
[18] See George Stanciu, “Individualism: The Root Error of Modernity,” http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/11/individualism-root-error-modernity-george-stanciu.html.
[19] C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1962), Ch. 9.
When Lewis grieved for his wife, after she died from cancer, he scoffed at the sentiment of “the happy past restored, for “what we should all like—there are cigars in Heaven.” C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: Bantam, 1976), pp. 28-29.
[20] Margaret Guenther, “God’s plan surpasses our best imaginings,” http://arc.episcopalchurch.org/episcopal-life/AfterD.html.
[21] Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York: Summit, 1987), p. 39.
[22] See George Stanciu, “Wonder and Love: How Scientists Neglect God and Man,” http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/06/wonder-love-why-scientists-neglect-god-man.html.
[23] Plato, Symposium, 212a.
[24] Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite is the anonymous theologian of the late 5th to early 6th century whose works were erroneously ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of St. Paul mentioned in Acts 17:34.
[25] Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 596A.
[26] Ibid., 872A.
[27] Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae De Potentia Dei, trans. English Dominican Fathers (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1952, [1932]),Q. VII: Article V. Available http://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdePotentia.htm.
[28] Gregory Palamas, Topics of Natural and Theological Science and on the Moral and Ascetic Life: One Hundred and Fifty Texts in The Philokalia, Vol. IV, ed. and trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 382.
[29] Ibid., p. 383.
[30] Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1962), p. 132. Italics in original.
[31] See Palamas, p. 382.
[32] See Augustine, City of God, Bk. 14, Ch. 13.
[33] Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, 2nd ed., trans. Michael Waldstein (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988), pp. 233-234.
[34] Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.