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The idea of death as enemy, though – ‘the most fearful of bodily evils’ (Thomas Aquinas) – might look out of date in the twenty-first century.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’.

Essay

Art

Awe and wonder

Creed

Trauma

7 December 2024

10 min read

What good is a beautiful Notre Dame to a traumatized world?

Beauty reminds us why life is worth preserving.

J. S. Averill

J.S. Averill is an American writer and children's educator. She has recently started Substacking.

Stone columns and walls frame round and arched stain glassed widnows.

Notre Dame interior.

Notredame.fr.

On the day the Notre Dame cathedral burned my daughter was just a few days shy of her fourth birthday. She was serious and silent as we watched, on our computer screen, the flames lick through the roof and the spire fall. When I closed the computer, my daughter slipped quietly upstairs to her bedroom and pulled out her collection of pennies scrounged from parking lots, sidewalks, and in between furniture cushions. She placed them into an envelope along with a drawing of the cathedral (spelling wasn’t in her tool kit yet) and directed me to please post it to Paris “for them to fix Notre Dame with.”

It was a beautiful thing to do. And while, unfortunately, it was going to take rather a lot more than a few US pennies to do the job, my daughter was instinctively picking up on something that many others were too: first, that we didn’t want to lose Notre Dame, and second, that it was going to cost a lot of money to save it. Within the first 48 hours €900mn were pledged to the restoration effort from French sources alone.

It was heartwarming at first, France and the rest of the world rallying to save this architectural and historical treasure. But a sour note soon crept in. This sudden appearance of so much money, ready and available to help rebuild the cathedral left many wondering why that money had not been directed toward improving and even saving lives in France and throughout the rest of the world.

A few weeks later, ethicists Peter Singer and Michael Plant co-authored an article echoing these concerns. Bluntly titled “How Many Lives is Notre Dame Worth?”, Singer and Plant argue that the €1 billion currently pledged to Notre Dame’s reconstruction would be better directed to, for example, bed nets for impoverished people in malaria-stricken regions of the world. They estimated that €1 billion dedicated to this cause could prevent approximately 285,000 premature deaths.

It made me uncomfortable, the facts stated like that. Is it right to be devoting so much money to a project that is largely aesthetic when there are people dying of want? If my daughter were in danger of dying from malaria or malnutrition, I would wish for her to be prioritised over a thousand cathedrals.

And yet, envisioning a world in which everything beautiful, but not strictly necessary to keeping a heart beating – ballet companies, art galleries, poetry publishing houses, infrastructures that protect the world’s national parks, ancient cathedrals – is neglected and left to crumble until every human on the globe has their basic, practical needs met seemed to me to be self-inflicting another kind of deep poverty. What ought we, as people who want to make the world better for everyone, to do with our resources of money, time, and strength?

Beauty allows the trauma sufferer to discover empathy both for themselves and others (goodness) and thence to recognize themselves once more as human (truth).

Recently, a book entitled The Ethics of Beauty, by Greek Orthodox ethicist, Timothy Patitsas, has informed my perspective on this quandary. In the preface of his book Patitsas critiques the definition of contemporary ethics (“the rational investigation of morality”) in its elevation of two of the Socratic transcendentals, Truth and Goodness, to the exclusion of the third, Beauty. He writes,

“. . . we find Ethics identifying itself as the investigation of ‘the Good’ by ‘the True’ . . . But, in discarding Beauty, Ethics itself risks becoming not only unlovely but also an affront to loveliness and loses its power to motivate the human soul except through the force of argument.”

I recognize this modern approach in Singer and Plant’s article. They extrapolate what goodness would be (directing money toward providing bed netting) from what is true (the number of needy people and the lives that could be saved). Patitsas suggests, instead, an approach to ethics that leads with Beauty, then flowing to Goodness and Truth. “If we do not begin with Beauty,” he writes, “it is all too easy to miss the full complexity of human personhood.”

Patitsas believes that only those who have “encountered the very antithesis of Beauty” can judge whether the “Beauty-first” approach has any merit, and so his first chapter is a discussion of how it might serve those who have suffered severe trauma. Citing the work of psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, Patitsas explains that a traumatic experience is the profound learning of a soul-shattering “truth”, resulting in a profound excommunication of the sufferer from their fellow humans, from God, and from themselves:

“In any all-engulfing experience, you obtain a knowledge that totally overtakes you, but when such an experience includes trauma, other effects are added, including the cutting of communion, the unraveling of character, and the learning of heretical truths.”

These “heretical truths”, according to Patitsas, are newfound, deep, perhaps unarticulated, revelations that the world is hostile towards the sufferer, and that their life is not situated in a mutually dependent, mutually beneficial relation to their fellow humans. Instead, humankind is a threat to them, and God, at best, has no interest in their flourishing. In other words, it leads the sufferer to view and position themselves as something outside the bounds of humanity. Patitsas writes, “When we experience trauma, our very being is thrust away from coherence and solidity and towards non-being - and this is hell.”

Shay found that suicide among traumatized war veterans increased significantly when they were treated using talk therapy, an exclusively truth-centric Freudian approach. Instead, Patitsas argues, the trauma sufferer must be “recommunicated” through Beauty – Beauty being the only agent with experiential power sufficient to meet the potency of trauma. Beauty allows the trauma sufferer to discover empathy both for themselves and others (goodness) and thence to recognize themselves once more as human (truth).

When I first read Patitsas’s description of a Beauty-first path back from trauma I immediately recognized it as my own. In my twenties I experienced, within 18 months of each other, the violent deaths of my brother and my baby son. And truly I felt like a razor blade had engraved in the marrow of my bones the heretofore concealed truth of the universe: nothing precious will survive. I viewed other people as a threat, either for their propensity to suddenly die and break my heart, or the way they caused harm either deliberately or accidentally. God became my worst enemy, all-powerful and merciless.

And yet, most of the rest of the world did not appear to know what I now knew, so I felt forced to cut myself off in order to protect myself and to stay true to truth itself. I was a Gollum-like creature living in the shadows, reduced to panic-attacks set off by ordinary noises such as the doorbell ringing or an object being dropped. Sometimes I just lay in a ball on the floor and screamed for no particular reason other than that the world was so terrifying, so horrifying. I used to be a sane person, now “truth” had made me insane.

The way back to the land of the living was not, for me, through rationality. I cannot, to this day, say why these tragedies happened; I don’t imagine I will ever feel at peace with them. And it was a long time before I was able to speak the truth of what had happened without feeling that I was just twisting the knife in my wound. The first time I caught an inkling that maybe I still might find a place in the world was through a work of fiction. I read of a young Italian who becomes a soldier and is caught up in the ravages of the first World War. He loses everything and everyone precious to him over the course of the war and he witnesses and participates in situations contrary to all moral order. He survives the war, but must discern whether and how to live in its aftermath. The book is his recollection and reflection, as an old man, upon his life. He dies pronouncing the sum of it all as beautiful and precious beyond measure. And reading it I could see that it was. I could recognize myself in much of his pain and struggle, but for the first time I had seen a vision of a way of living that does not deny all that is traumatic and cruel, but can yet hold it within a vessel of costly and weighty beauty.

When we encounter something truly beautiful, we do not perceive that we are all-important, but it affirms that we are a precious part of a transcendent whole.

Another agent of recovery was a recording I owned of the great pianist Artur Rubenstein performing the second movement of Chopin’s first piano concerto. The way he touches the piano keys at certain moments is the tenderest, gentlest thing I have ever known. I used to lay on the floor, a bloody mess, and break my heart into that music and feel it miraculously held. I found that my heart, though black and almost smoking with ruin, surprisingly arose and responded to that gentleness. It could live in that small corner of the universe, completely without fangs. I could still find a home among such things.

There was also a very large, old cemetery, an oasis of big trees, flowers and grass, in the midst of the gray concrete city in which we lived. I used to walk the miles of paths through the cemetery and watch the seasons change: the flowers in the spring, the leaves in the autumn, the green grass in the summer, snow in the winter. I would read the inscriptions carved into the gravestones by the people who loved them, and I could not deny that although death was here in abundance, so too was life.

It was then, once Beauty had cracked the door open and enabled me to at least consider the possibility that I might still be able to live, that was I able to follow where Beauty had gone ahead and allow people to touch me with love. Then I could speak of my pain in a way that could heal instead of just fester the wound.

As I have spent time pondering Patitsas’s thesis, it occurs to me that a worthy definition of Beauty might be that which regifts to all of us – trauma sufferers or not – the goodness and truth of our humanity. From the earliest days of the Judeo-Christian faith, Beauty has been believed to be a manifestation of God in the world, a showing-forth of his character. Since this tradition also teaches that the primary identity of humans is that we bear God’s image, it seems logical that Beauty might also act as a corrective and restorative mirror to us humans in a world in which our humanity is constantly barraged both from within ourselves and from outside influences. When we encounter something truly beautiful, we do not perceive that we are all-important, but it affirms that we are a precious part of a transcendent whole. Beauty does not flatter us that we need no improvement, but rather, it acknowledges our limited strength, limited power, limited knowledge and wisdom, limited desire and ability to do good, and yet assures us that it can hold these wounds and that we possess incorruptible dignity. And when we grasp the reality and blessedness of our own humanity, we are able to recognise and embrace it in others as well. Then we are moved to provide bed netting for those who need it, food for those who are hungry, medical help for the sick and wounded, companionship for the lonely, and all other acts of kindness and mercy.

And so, I affirm with all my heart Singer and Plant’s assertion that we ought to make great efforts to save lives and ameliorate suffering. Indeed, these actions are themselves beautiful! However, it is only at our very real and profound peril that we discount Beauty as a waste of resources. If we do not allow Beauty the seat at the head of the table, we are in grave danger of forgetting why it is that we must do what we can to ease suffering, of forgetting why life is worth preserving, of forgetting that it is possible to have every physical need met and yet be dying.

In this world we are often constrained to choose between tragic options, and there may come a day when Notre Dame must be left to crumble. However, even though I live thousands of miles from Paris, it does my heart good to see it so wonderfully resurrected, and I sense many share my joy.

Notre Dame is already birthing more Beauty into the world. According to a recent article, the reconstruction project has injected a surge of life into the arts and crafts sector. I hope it will result in the creation and preservation of many good and beautiful things. And I hope that we will, all of us, become artisans of the world, creating and tending Beauty. May Beauty appear as stories, music, art, and architecture. May it show up as the tending and protection of nature. May it be food, clean water, mosquito netting placed into hurting hands. May it be caring medical attention. May it be gardens tended and work well done. May it be patience, forgiveness, and grace extended. May it be measured, considered words spoken and printed. May it be children generous with their pennies.May it be Notre Dame standing another 800 years and more.