Survival (Rant 108)

Once upon a time there was a king. A man who hankered after knowledge and wisdom. He therefore summoned the wise men & women of his kingdom. ‘Make me an encyclopaedia that includes everything mankind should know’, he ordered. The fellows dutifully obeyed. In due course, they produce the result – say, in a 100 volumes. Alas, the king told them off: ‘Are you joking? Life’s too short. I haven’t the time to read all that. Condense it. Make it shorter.’ Off the wise ones went. Laboured again. Returned with a 10-tome affair. ‘Still too long!’ the ruler growled, ‘Shorter!’ Crestfallen, the encyclopaedists tried once more…You’ve got the picture by now. The king really was a difficult man to please. Again and again, more brevity was demanded of the royal scholars. Until, the insatiable monarch really commanded the impossible. ‘Put it all in one word!’ One single word to express, distil the sum of universal human wisdom. Crazy, isn’t it? Yet, the much harassed wise men, after taking counsel, complied. Returning to the king, in fear and trembling, they offered him that one word. And, lo and behold, he was much pleased.



What could that word be, gentle reader?



I am not keeping on tenterhooks – the answer is: survival.



Disappointed? I hope so. The answer will vary as people vary. Like an inward mirror, the quiz must reflect your own mind’s values. Still, as answers go, survival ain’t too bad. You can see why it would appeal to those in high places. ‘Survival’ must be a thought very much on poor Prince Charles’ mind right now…



Father Frank, please, give that unhappy man a break. Instead, why don’t you tell us what word you would choose?



The same: survival.



Yak! Can’t be serious! Something so earthbound, evolutionary, material. You, a priest. Really!



Ah, you are jumping to conclusions. Physical survival – I mean not that. Rather, it is post-mortem survival…geddit it?



Oh! What a relief. Life after death. Yes, that belief does become a clergyman. But it raises a few problems. For one thing, unlike bodily survival, why should we care? You know Lucretius’ short answer to that, no doubt?



Indeed I do. ‘When we are, death is not. When death is, we are not. Hence, death can be nothing to us.’ Ergo, Lucretius contends in On the Nature of Things, death is nothing to worry about.



Seems pretty neat…



Aye, too neat. Lucretius, a follower of Epicurus’ atomistic philosophy, was a materialist. The soul, for him, wasn’t deathless. And his cosmology a priori ruled out Providence. He made no allowances for the possibility of a God who apportions rewards and punishments in the afterlife. That’s why his argument is fatally flawed. I wonder what he is thinking now – if he has not perished, as he expected. By the way, a modern, logically tougher Lucretius might be Wittgenstein. ‘Death is not an event in life. We do not live to experience death’, he gnomically wrote in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Deep down, he too suffered from tiresome, reductionist metaphysics…



Sounds like an unpleasant disease, Fr Frank. But how do you construe your post-mortem survival then? I mean, what exactly survives after death? Not the body, surely…



Personal identity, that’s it. Whatever survives, it must relate to that. And personal identity, to mean anything, must mean my identity, the identity of me as a person. That is why, for example, great Schopenhauer’s laboured proof of eternity misses the point. That notorious misogynist claimed that personal identity was what Hindus call Maya, illusion. Albeit a necessary illusion, brought on by our being trapped in the causal and spatio-temporal frame of our cognition. In actual reality, sans the human conceptual apparatus, there is no ‘I’, no self, no personal identity at all. Survival can’t be of me, because there is no real ‘me’ in the first place. Hence, it must be impersonal. Tough.



Did he persuade many people?



No, apart from a few misguided young men who went on to commit suicide.



Here, despite my proud BA in philosophy, I must side with the hoi polloi. Call me bloody selfish, I wouldn’t care a two-pence for a survival that wasn’t a survival of me. Would you?



Er…not much, Fr Frank. But the body disintegrates at death. What survives then? The soul?



The soul does survive. It is the necessary condition of personal identity. Plato saw that. However, necessary does not mean ‘sufficient’. My survival as a disembodied soul is not fully the survival of my self. Because this Fr Frank communing with you in cyberspace is not simply a pure mind or soul – it is also a body (an aging, at times aching one, alas…) – crucially so. And mind+body= the human person. St Thomas Aquinas, a fellow, bulky Italian, put it in pellucid Latin: ‘Anima mea non est ego - I am not my soul’. Christianity is often accused of being other-wordly, detached from materiality. Aquinas refreshingly teaches that matter, the body, is an essential condition of being human. It takes more than an ectoplasm, an ‘astral body’ or a disembodied spirit to make a full human person. That matches the ordinary pub wallah’s intuitions, I bet. Plus my own…



I follow you. But, in the post-mortem life, the soul is separated from the body. How then does the person, the real ‘I’, survive?



Here helpfully revelation steps in. The Christian faith affirms the resurrection of the body. The redeemed life of the blessed in Heaven will include restoration of the whole psychophysical organism – bodily resurrection – because Adam and Eve were created by God not as ethereal spirits but as embodied beings, as full persons. (Islam also teaches Qiyamat, the resurrection of the body.) Goody.



And what kind of body precisely shall we have at the resurrection, pray? Our body aged 20? 40? 60? As infants, or what?



You ask for precision. With Aristotle I’ll reply that it is the mark of the educated person that he/she asks for no more precision than the subject matter allows. (St Augustine wondered whether the resurrected person would be spherical, because a sphere is the perfect shape - I care little for that.) Maybe the Lord will reassemble the same atoms making up our earthly bodies, revivified in a wondrous way, quien sabe? St Paul in I Corinthians hints at a glorious mystery: the risen body will be new. St Clement of Alexandria says that the redeemed ‘will shine like the sun’. Stupendous stuff.



But can we really believe that, Fr Frank? Honestly? Would it not be more spiritual, more mystical to give up this problematical, mythological stuff? To believe instead in eternal life here and now?



God forbid. A religion that did not believe in a life beyond the grave would be no religion: it would be atheism in disguise. The ultimate liberal cop-out. I can see how it might hugely appeal to a secular, faithless world, of course. What a beacon are Christ’s comforting words here: ‘Be of good cheer. I have overcome the world!’