Death is a darkness upon which Christian Scripture throws surprisingly little light. The churches' dogmas and the theologians' thoughts about the nature of the soul and what happens to it after death have relatively sketchy Biblical evidence to go on. Speculation on the subject was wide open in the early centuries of Christianity, and it was the church fathers of that period who laid the foundation for later Christian thought on death. In a new book, The Shape of Death (Abingdon Press; $2.25), leading Lutheran Theologian Jaroslav Pelikan of the University of Chicago analyzes the theories of five church fathers, shows that they are still stimulating and provocative to fission-era mortals.
The Sojourner on Earth. The 2nd century father, Tatian, attacked the Greeks' cyclical conception of immortality, which assumed the pre-existence of the soul, with life extending into eternity, backward as well as forward. Tatian held that the soul is as mortal as the body, but that it can be saved by God. Immortality is not the Christian hope, said Tatian, but "life eternal"—which means living in God. And God grants this only to those who do not grasp for immortality, but submit to death. "Die to the world and repudiate its madness. Live to God, take hold of Him, and lay aside your old nature."
The solution of Clement of Alexandria, who also lived in the 2nd century, was less harsh. Attempting to Christianize the Greek theory of cyclical immortality, he justified the idea of pre-existence (inimical to the Christian doctrine of creation) by maintaining that "we existed before the foundation of the world; because we were destined to be in Him, we preexisted in the sight of God." By "we," Clement meant the elect. Clement borrowed the Platonic idea of the superiority of the soul to the body—"the body tills the ground and hastens to it, but the soul presses on to God. Trained in the true philosophy, it hastens to its relatives above." The function of the church, thought Clement, is to train the soul for the return home.
Clement's answer, writes Theologian Pelikan, "provides a good opportunity to watch the Christian and the classical doctrines of man in combination and collision." Just as the body is not an inferior but a worthy thing, wrote Clement, so the Christian must not despise the world. "The elect man dwells as a sojourner . . . The body, too, as one sent on a distant pilgrimage, uses inns and dwellings by the way. It has care of the things of the world, of the places where it stops; but it leaves its dwelling place and property without excessive emotion."
Satan Back to Heaven? In his treatise De Mortalitate, written probably in A.D. 252 to comfort Christians during the ravages of a plague, Cyprian summed up the solaces with which men have long made do in the face of death: the fact that all the great and brave have suffered the same fate, the thought of death as a rest from labor and a surcease from sorrow, the idea that the good die young. But his main argument was that death for a Christian means "to be changed and reformed to the image of Christ and to the dignity of heavenly grace."