Explainer

Creed

Death & life

1 November 2023

7 min read

How Christianity transformed attitudes towards death

Once we buried bodies outside cities. Then we started burying loved ones inside them. This is why.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

Dozens of candles in cloured jars and holders litter the ground of a cemetry.

Commemorative candles at cemetery in Srebrniki, Gdańsk, Poland.

Ludomił Sawicki on Unsplash.

‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.’

Seeing things two ways at the same time doesn’t mean ambivalence. Christianity has two things to say about death, and it says both forcefully. They particularly come to mind during November, as the season of the year when we remember the dead. In this month we get the modern secularised rituals of Hallowe’en, but we also get Remembrance Sunday, when we think of those who fell in war; and on 2 November, we have All Souls’ Day, when ‘the faithful departed’ are recalled, and in many traditions, prayed for.

Christianity’s two entwined attitudes to death are lament and hope. On the one hand, death is a shadow; on the other, a light has dawned that will banish that shadow. Both aspects are in that line from St Paul:

‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.’

Death is our enemy; death is slated for destruction.

Whatever a popular funeral poem might claim, death is not ‘nothing at all’. That poem has been suggested a few times when I’ve been planning a funeral. It’s never stayed in the draft order of service longer than it’s taken me to ask the question ‘But do you really think that death is nothing at all?’

Unlike our benighted predecessors, ancient and mediaeval, don’t we now understand that death is natural, just part of being the sort of creatures we are?

I take the opposite approach to funerals. I do not treat death as ‘nothing at all’. I wear black vestments: I do not assume that mourners are ready, only a week or two into their bereavement, to skip to the bright hope of white as a liturgical colour. I make the liturgy solemn. I avoid circumlocutions like ‘he’s moved on’ or ‘she has passed’ (somehow popular at present). No: someone has died, and even if that came after a long illness or a long life, a death is a loss.

The idea of death as enemy, though – ‘the most fearful of bodily evils’ (Thomas Aquinas) – might look out of date in the twenty-first century. Unlike our benighted predecessors, ancient and mediaeval, don’t we now understand that death is natural, just part of being the sort of creatures we are?

It’s almost always a mistake to underestimate our forebears. They knew that we are animals, but also said that we are animals of an odd sort: we are ‘rational animals’. That left them with a conundrum (and here I continue to have Aquinas in mind). On the one hand, we are animals, and animals are mortal, so that makes death natural. On the other hand, Christianity also insists that death is a wrench, a disjunction, an affront.

Reconciliation for this tension rests on that odd status of the human being, as a rational animal. We are animals, but also the sort of self-aware animals who are made for a relationship with God: suited for it, called to it. One model for that relationship, remarkably, has been friendship, with Moses as an example: ‘So the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.’ That sort of relationship, that sort of seeing God face to face, would confer immortality on our naturally mortal bodies (‘when we see him, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’). Thus, both parts of the conundrum are true: as animals, we are naturally mortal, yet our animality is called to a destiny beyond its nature. Our tragedy is not that we are animals, but that we are rational animals foolish enough to turn from God, and from the light of immortality.

The message of the Incarnation and the hope of the resurrection turned something around for early Christians. They no longer found dead bodies frightening.

That’s the first half of our opening phrase: death is our enemy because, although mortal by nature, we were originally called to something beyond nature, but lost it. God was turned towards us, but we turned away. However, enmity, tragedy, and loss are not the whole story, and they are certainly not the end of the story. There is also death’s destruction. That’s what the life, death, and resurrection of Christ were about. If death is our enemy, then it’s a routed enemy, overcome, although not fully destroyed, until God recreates the world.

Christians can be so excited about the prospect of death’s destruction that they forget that this destruction is still a promise, and we still live under its sway. For now, the hope and the sadness lie woven together. That is why we read in the New Testament about ‘not grieving as others do who have no hope’. I don’t take that as a blanket injunction against grieving (death is still our enemy, after all), but as standing only against the kind of grief that has no hope (because death’s destruction is assured). Again, here are the two strands, woven together. We also see that two-sidedness in a funeral prayer used by Eastern Orthodox Christians (and at the funeral of the HM Queen Elizabeth II), the kontakion of the dead. Its final lines put place wrenching tears right next to the church’s great word of praise and celebration, ‘Alleluia’:

All we go down to the dust;

weeping o’er the grave we make our song:

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

This duality in Christian attitudes to death shows up in how Christians treat the bodies of the dead. We probably take burial practices for granted, but the idea of treating the bodies of the dead with utmost care and dignity was a point that Christianity really belaboured. Christ, for instance, had given a list of six good deeds in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering travellers, visiting the sick, and visiting prisoners. It would be a bold decision to add to any list draw up by Christ, but the church did it, adding a seventh ‘act of corporeal mercy’: burying the dead.

Christianity is definitively the religion of the Incarnation: of God taking up human flesh. Bodies therefore matter. Talk of casting off the body, as if the body were just some old cloak that the soul has outgrown, is not something Christians say. We are bodily creatures, so Christian hope is for the resurrection of the body. (So also – I should add for completeness – is Christian doom also bodily. Those who die at enmity with God and the good, the faith insists, turning down the offer of reconciliation, face the consequences in the resurrected body.)

The message of the Incarnation and the hope of the resurrection turned something around for early Christians. They no longer found dead bodies frightening. In the ancient world, bodies were to be buried outside the city, cast out from the human community. Christians changed that, and started burying their loved ones inside the city. Bodies were to be treasured, not feared. The bodies of their heroes – those who excelled in virtue, and especially the martyrs – were brought right into their churches. Before long, no altar (the communion table) was quite proper unless it was built over the body of a martyr or other saint, or at the very least contained some part or relic.

Veneration of relics has not been so common in the Church of England (the church to which I belong) since the Reformation, nor in the wider Anglican Communion. Slowly, however, it has edged its way back. In 2002, the cathedral where I’m a canon, St Albans, received a shoulder blade of St Alban, England’s first martyr, the gift of one of the dozen remarkable Romanesque churches in Cologne. That bone gets considerable honour on the weekend closest to his feast day (22 June). Relics are also familiar in the church in Philadelphia where I currently celebrate the Eucharist once or twice per week. The altars are usually at least lightly decked with relics. During Eastertide, they groan under the weight of them, including some impressive whole-bone affairs. Only in Advent and Lent – penitential seasons – do the relics disappear to the sacristy, replaced with statues of the prophets in Advent.

It’s easy to grow accustomed to relics after a while. I should remind myself of their strangeness. Defying any trend in religious thought down the ages to denigrate the body in favour of the soul, here the body is holy, recognised as the site of God’s great works. Here, dead bodies are no longer to be feared. They are the most precious things the church owns, and threaten no contamination. Or, rather, if they suggest any contagion, it is a contagion of the good.

Care towards the bodies of the dead reflects both poles of Christian attitudes to death. On the one hand, Christians have preserved the bodies of the dead with great care because death is an affront. Death is the enemy that falls upon us all, even the most holy among us. Lamenting that loss, we keep bodies safe until it is reversed. And there is also the other side of the Christian attitude to death: alongside lament there is hope in death’s destruction.

Christianity, at its wisest, has not skipped through lamentation too quickly, but neither has it given lamentation the final word. Day-by-day funeral practice probably connects most clearly with the sadness, although the hope is woven through. The place of relics in many strands of Christianity (although by no means all), swings more towards an emphasis on death’s defeat. It rejoices in having among us, in all those slivers of bone, fragments poised towards Resurrection, when ‘death shall be no more’.

Article

Belief

Creed

Education

24 January 2025

7 min read

The myth of secular neutrality

Where academia went wrong.

Alex Stewart

Alex Stewart is a lawyer, trustee and photographer.

A phrenology head is shown with its eyes closed.

David Matos on Unsplash.

In the recent horror-thriller Heretic, Hugh Grant plays Mr. Reed, a sharp-witted psychopath who imprisons two missionaries, subjecting them to ceaseless diatribes about the supposed irrationality of all religions. Mr. Reed is also a terribly smug, self-righteous bore, a caricature of the fervent atheist who dismisses faith as mere superstition while assuming atheism is objective and neutral.

This kind of assumption lies behind the criticisms directed by secularists at those who argue from a position of faith, as we saw recently with the debates on the Assisted Dying Bill. Yet, the notion of secular objectivity is itself a fallacy. Secularism, like any worldview, is a perspective, ironically one that is deeply indebted to Christianity, and humanity’s history of abandoning faith and its moral foundation has had disastrous consequences.

Secularism is a bias, often grounded in an ethical vanity, whose supposedly universal principles have very Christian roots. Concepts like personal autonomy stem from a tradition that views life as sacred, based on the belief that humans are uniquely created in God's image. Appeals to compassion reflect Jesus’ teachings and Christian arguments for social justice throughout history. Claims that the Assisted Dying Bill was "progressive" rely on the Judaeo-Christian understanding of time as linear rather than cyclical. Even the separation of the secular and sacred is derived from Jesus’ teaching to “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”. Authors like Tom Holland in Dominion and Glen Scrivener in The Air We Breathe have shown how Western societies, though often disconnected from their Christian roots, still operate within frameworks shaped by centuries of Christianity.

The antidote to human pride and self-deception was to be found in the Almighty. Ironically, it was this humility, rooted in a very theological concern about human cognitive fallibility, that gave birth to the scientific method.

A political secularism began to emerge after the seventeenth century European religious wars but the supposed historical conflict between science and religion, in which the former triumphs over superstition and a hostile Church, is myth. Promoted in the eighteenth century by figures like John Draper and Andrew White, this ‘conflict thesis’ persists even though it has been comprehensively debunked by works such as David Hutchings and James C. Ungureanu’s Of Popes and Unicorns and Nicholas Spencer’s Magisteria. Historians now emphasize the complex, often collaborative relationship between faith and science.

Far from opposing intellectual inquiry, faith was its foundation. Medieval Christian Europe birthed the great universities; this was not simply because the Church had power and wealth but because knowledge of God was viewed as the basis for all understanding. University mottos reflect this view: Oxford’s "Dominus illuminatio mea" (The Lord is my light), Yale’s "Lux et Veritas" (Light and Truth), and Harvard’s original "Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae" (Truth for Christ and the Church). This intertwining of faith and academia fuelled the Enlightenment, when scientists like Boyle, Newton, and Kepler approached the study of creation (what Calvin described as ‘the theatre of God’s glory”) as an affirmation of the divine order of a God who delighted in His creatures “thinking His thoughts after Him”.

Their Christian beliefs not only provided an impetus for rigorous exploration but also instilled in them a humility about human intellect. Unlike modernity's view of the mind as a detached, all-seeing eye, they believed man’s cognitive faculties had been diminished, both morally and intellectually, by Adam’s fall, which made perfect knowledge unattainable. Blaise Pascal captures this struggle with uncertainty in his Pensées.

“We desire truth, and find within ourselves only uncertainty....This desire is left to us, partly to punish us, partly to make us perceive from whence we have fallen.”

For Pascal and his believing contemporaries, the antidote to human pride and self-deception was to be found in the Almighty. Ironically, it was this humility, rooted in a very theological concern about human cognitive fallibility, that gave birth to the scientific method, the process of systematic experimentation based on empirical evidence, and which later became central to Enlightenment thinking.

Orwell was not alone in thinking that some ideas were so foolish that only intellectuals believed them.

Although many of its leading lights were believers, the Enlightenment era hastened a shift away from God and towards man as the centre of understanding and ethics. Philosophers like David Hume marginalized or eliminated God altogether, paving the way for His later dismissal as a phantom of human projection (Freud) or as a tool of exploitation and oppression (Marx), while Rousseau popularised the appealing idea that rather than being inherently flawed, man was naturally good, only his environment made him do bad things.

But it took the nihilist Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran pastor, to predict the moral vacuum created by the death of God and its profound consequences. Ethical boundaries became unstable, allowing new ideologies to justify anything in pursuit of their utopian ends. Nietzsche’s prophesies about the rise of totalitarianism and competing ideologies that were to characterise the twentieth century were chillingly accurate. Germany universities provided the intellectual justification for Nazi atrocities against the Jews while the Marxist inspired revolutions and policies of the Soviet and Chinese Communist regimes led to appalling suffering and the deaths of between 80 and 100 million people. Devoid of divine accountability, these pseudo, human-centred religions amplified human malevolence and man’s destructive impulses.

By the early 1990s, the Soviet Union had collapsed, leading Francis Fukuyama to opine from his ivory tower that secular liberal democracy was the natural end point in humanity's socio-political evolution and that history had ‘ended’. But his optimism was short lived. The events of 9/11 and the resurgence of a potent Islamism gave the lie that everyone wanted a western style secular liberal democracy, while back in the west a repackaged version of the old Marxist oppressor narrative began to appear on campuses, its deceitful utopian Siren song that man could be the author of his own salvation bewitching the academy. This time it came in the guise of divisive identity-based ideologies overlayed with post-modern power narratives that seemed to defy reality and confirm Chesterton’s view that when man ceased to believe in God he was capable of believing in anything.

As universities promoted ideology over evidence and conformity over intellectual freedom, George Orwell’s critique of intellectual credulity and the dark fanaticism it often fosters, epitomized in 1984 where reality itself is manipulated through dogma, seemed more relevant than ever. Orwell was not alone in thinking that some ideas were so foolish that only intellectuals believed them. Other commentators like Thomas Sowell are equally sceptical, critiquing the tenured academics whose lives are insulated from the suffering of those who have to live under their pet ideologies, and who prefer theories and sophistry to workable solutions. Intellect, he notes, is not the same thing as wisdom. More recently, American writer David Brooks, writing in The Atlantic, questions the point of having elite educational systems that overemphasize cognitive ability at the expense of other qualities, suggesting they tend to produce a narrow-minded ruling class who are blind to their own biases and false beliefs.

It was intellectual over-confidence that led many institutions to abandon their faith-based origins. Harvard shortened its motto from "Veritas Christo et Ecclesiae" to plain "Veritas” and introduced a tellingly symbolic change to its shield. The original shield depicted three books: two open, symbolizing the Old and New Testaments, and one closed, representing a knowledge that required divine revelation. The modern shield shows all three books open, reflecting a human centred worldview that was done with God.

However, secular confidence seems to be waning. Since the peak of New Atheism in the mid-2000s, there has been a growing dissatisfaction with worldviews limited to reason and materialism. Artists like Nick Cave have critiqued secularism’s inability to address concepts like forgiveness and mercy, while figures like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Russell Brand have publicly embraced Christianity. The longing for the transcendent and a world that is ‘re-enchanted’ seems to be widespread.

Despite the Church’s struggles, the teaching and person of Christ, the One who claimed not to point towards the truth but to be the Truth, the original Veritas the puritan founders of Harvard had in mind, remains as compelling as ever. The story of fall, forgiveness, cosmic belonging and His transforming love is the narrative that most closely maps to our deepest human longings and lived experience, whilst simultaneously offering us the hope of redemption and - with divine help – becoming better versions of ourselves, the kind of people that secularism thinks we already are.

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