Does the afterlife degrade and devalue this life? According to some critics of religion, it does indeed. If the real life of man lies on the other side of death, then how significant, how important can this earthly existence of ours really be?
Those who do not believe in any life after death may feel very strongly the value of the present life because they believe it is the only life we have; we only have one shot and so must cherish it. They feel that an afterlife makes us love death more than life and they point out how Islamic terrorists are motivated by the desire for heaven when they kill themselves and others. But they do not limit themselves to Islam; they are also objecting to Christianity. Truly, if death is good then it seems to imply that life is evil; but if our life is good, then it is death that is evil.
The objection is a legitimate one, but what it is objecting to is not Christianity but a Christian heresy called Gnosticism. Gnosticism drinks deeply from the wells of Eastern pessimism and regards the created world (and its Creator) and the human body as evil. To see the spirit of Gnosticism concretely one only has to recall the Terri Schiavo tragedy. The lawyer responsible for ensuring that Mrs. Schiavo was dehydrated to death, George Felos, wrote a book called Litigation as Spiritual Practice. He recounts his deep immersion into Eastern forms of meditation like yoga whose aim is to liberate the real self, identified with the divine, from the illusions of the body and the material world. In his book he describes a sort of psychic encounter he had with Estelle Browning, a woman severely disabled by a stroke and in a so-called “vegetative” state. It was his first “right-to-die” case:
I suddenly heard a loud, deep moan, a scream.… I realized it was Mrs. Browning.… As she screamed I heard her say, in confusion, “Why am I still here…why am I here?” My soul touched hers and in some way, I communicated that she was still locked in her body. I promised I would do everything in my power to gain the release her soul cried for. With that the screaming immediately stopped.
There is an uncanny resemblance of this episode to the recently translated Gospel of Judas, a Gnostic text condemned by St. Irenaeus in the late second century. This Gnostic gospel has Jesus imploring Judas to betray Him so that He could die and His spirit be set free. Jesus tells Judas not to worry, because that which would be killed was only “the man that clothes me.” Like this Gnostic Judas, George Felos wasn’t betraying Mrs. Browning; he was doing her a favor by fighting to release her from her “outer man.” Felos’s infatuation with death seems right in line with the Gnostics championing of biblical murderers like Cain (who killed his brother); and his fascination with removing people’s feeding tubes stands squarely in the tradition of the medieval Gnostics who exalted death by starvation. Really, the Gnostic Judas could be the patron saint of today’s right-to-die movement.
We can sometimes see a glimmer of this Gnosticism popping up in our public debates. For example, when talking about how living wills might help deal with the health-care crisis, former President Bill Clinton half-jokingly implied that Christians were hypocrites for being so “reluctant to get to heaven.” In a repeat of the Schiavo ordeal in Georgia, a woman who wanted to remove her grandmother’s feeding tube said, “Grandmamma is old and I think it’s time she went to Jesus.” This sort of flippant dismissal of death could not be more alien to Christianity. It smacks more of the Gospel of Judas than the Gospel of Jesus Christ, who prayed in the garden that “this cup pass from Me” and sweated blood at the thought of his coming death.
St. Paul says “For He [Christ] must reign, till He hath put all enemies under His feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” Death is no friend; it is an enemy because human life, bodily life, is good. We don’t believe that our bodies are just obstacles getting in the way of our real life as invisible souls. We profess in the Creed every week that we believe in the resurrection of the body, not that we become angels in heaven. Unfortunately, this part of the Creed is on our lips but rarely in our minds. A Scripps Howard pole done in March of 2006 showed that 54 percent of the 1007 Americans polled did not believe that their physical bodies would be resurrected someday. Commenting on these results, Anglican Bishop Spong said “maybe the old Greek idea of an immortal soul has taken over and the idea of a resurrected body has fallen into disrepute.” Our understanding of heaven tends to begin when someone dies and ends with the thought that the deceased person is “with God.” If we don’t balance this with the resurrection of the body then what is really an intermediate state of a person becomes a final state, and then we are back to Gnosticism.
Whatever our mode of existence happens to be after we die, it should not be mistaken as final. Heaven is not someplace totally alien to the life of humanity in its unity of body and soul; it must include the universe itself that will be made new alongs with ourselves. The destiny of the earth and the universe is forever tied up with our own destiny; it was made subject to futility after the fall, and it will be glorified with our rising. We were not made to shed our humanity like an outgrown shell and be dissolved into the infinite sea of the divinity; on the contrary, the history of salvation is the story of God’s coming down to unite Himself with His creation. Heaven is where God will be “all in all,” when He has become one with man and the universe; or as Pope Benedict put it in his Easter homily, “the Resurrection is a cosmic event, which includes heaven and earth and links them together.” What Christianity looks forward to is not so much an after-life, but a risen life. Christ is risen: Alleluia!
Brian Killian is a freelance writer and a columnist for the Atlantic Catholic. He writes from Nova Scotia and enjoys receiving feedback at numena1@gmail.com.
This article previously appeared in the Atlantic Catholic and is used by permission of the author.
