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For prehistoric man, everything he saw probably seemed alive; death was the unthinkable anomaly. The situation is reversed in a scientifically oriented world; amid dead matter, life seems an unaccountable, brief flash in the interstellar dark. Not that this has destroyed the power of faith to confront death. Beyond the doubts of its own "demythologers," and on a plane of thought beyond either denial or confirmation by science, Christianity still offers the hope of eternal life. Theologians are debating whether this means immortality in the sense of the survival of the soul, or resurrection, in the sense of a new creation. Either concept is totally different from the endless treadmill of reincarnation visualized by the Eastern religions; the Christian view of eternity is not merely endless time, and it need not involve the old physical concept of heaven and hell. It does involve the survival of some essence of self, and an encounter with God. "Life after death," said Theologian Karl Earth, should not be regarded like a butterfly—he might have said a balloon—that "flutters away above the grave and is preserved somewhere. Resurrection means not the continuation of life, but life's completion. The Christian hope is the conquest of death, not a flight into the Beyond."
The Fear of Nothingness
Admittedly, this hope so stated is more abstract than the fading pictures of sky-born glory, of hallelujah choruses and throngs of waiting loved ones. "People today could be described as more realistic about death," says one psychiatrist. "But inside I think they are more afraid. Those old religious assurances that there would be a gathering-in some day have largely been discarded, and I see examples all the time of neuroses caused by the fear of death." Harvard Theologian Krister Stendahl agrees. "Socrates," he points out, "died in good cheer and in control, unlike the agony of Jesus with his deep human cry of desertion and loneliness. Americans tend to behave as Socrates did. But there is more of what Jesus stands for lurking in our unconsciousness."
Alone with his elemental fear of death, modern man is especially troubled by the prospect of a meaningless death and a meaningless life—the bleak offering of existentialism. "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem," wrote Albert Camus, "and that is suicide." In other words, why stay alive in a meaningless universe? The existentialist replies that man must live for the sake of living, for the things he is free to accomplish. But despite volumes of argumentation, existentialism never seems quite able to justify this conviction on the brink of a death that is only a trap door to nothingness.
There are surrogate forms of immortality: the continuity of history, the permanence of art, the biological force of sex. These can serve well enough to give life a purpose and a sense of fulfillment. But they cannot outwit death, and they are hardly satisfactory substitutes for the still persistent human hope that what happens here in threescore years and ten is not the whole story.
"Timor Mortis conturbat me," wrote the 15th century Scottish poet William Dunbar, and he continued:
Since for the Death remedy is none,
Best is it that we for Death dispone.