Another meditation of A Christmas Carol

                                                 

     The understanding of existence after death puzzles me. It doesn’t seem to fit neatly into any Christian scheme I know of. As I said, it can’t be Hell because Marley intervenes for good in the case of Scrooge, and suffers from the impotent desire to intervene for the good. Hell is hate. Hell is the absence of love. Hell is final isolation, a kind of imprisonment in one's own ego. It is a kind of solipsism: nothing is real except one’s own “fat, relentless ego.” That doesn’t describe Marley’s spiritual condition. But neither does there seem to be any hope, which is a feature of Purgatory.  However much the souls suffer in Purgatory – in Catholic doctrine – their salvation is assured. Marley has no such knowledge or hope. Marley is depicted as a ghost, condemned to wander the earth bound in heavy chains as a punishment for his selfish and greedy behavior during his lifetime. The chains he wears are a symbol of the burdens he forged through his own avarice and lack of compassion. Marley's punishment is not framed in terms of traditional Christian concepts of Hell or Purgatory but rather as a state of unrest or torment associated with his past actions. It’s like the soul is frozen in the spiritual state it was in at death and must see itself from the perspective of love or understand that spiritual state for what it was forever.  

     It is most deeply a picture of remorse. Remorse would not be remorse if it vanished. It's not like you do someone wrong, take the sacrament of confession, and then the remorse disappears. The harm you have done lives on after you, whether God forgives you or not. Thus remorse becomes part of your being. 

     At least that has the advantage that the good he wanted to do for Scrooge – and all the living that he can no longer do good for – is unmotivated by hope of reward. In that case, the desire would not have essentially changed in death; and would not be essentially different from Scrooge’s desires. The only thing that would have changed would be a genuine knowledge of the nature of reality. Then, in the false conception, it was in his interest to pursue wealth and block off the heart from compassion; in the real world revealed to him after death, compassion and helping others would be in his interest. A different accounting based on different conceptions of realities, but underlying both is the self-centered wish to thrive.

    But his desire to help Scrooge is gratuitous. It is unmotivated by the hope of reward, for he has no hope. His only motive is that Scrooge escape his fate. That is goodness. It is a kind of paradox: goodness deserves hope, faith, love; yet goodness by definition just is to doing good for someone just because it is good, without any motivation external to that. Insofar as Marley acted in any hope to help himself, his act would have been tainted with ego. Yet the idea of any goodness condemned to an existence without hope of salvation is tough.

   The same problem for Scrooge. Is his conversion just for the sake of avoiding the fate shown him by the Ghost of Christmas Future? Then no real conversion would have taken place, only a more accurate set of facts about what it means to succeed. There are hints that avoiding this fate does motivate Scrooge, though in general he seems to act out of a joy and generosity of spirit after the hauntings. This is why I think it important to leave it open whether Scrooge believes it was all a dream. That would leave open the question of the nature of reality to human capacities of hope, faith, and love. Which in turn would allow us to see Scrooge as a good man and not just as a selfish man acting in his own interests as the ghosts have revealed those interests to be. The effect of the hauntings is that the blinders have been removed from Scrooge’s spiritual eyes and the chains from his heart.

   This is a theological problem at the heart of Christianity. If I believe in Hell and Heaven, I follow the rules – in my interest – to get there. Heaven is the reward for following God’s rules; Hell the punishment if I don’t. It is a given that the soul seeks happiness, and the only question is what reality is like such that I can act in a way to make myself happy. That has nothing to do with goodness, but with getting the facts right and trusting the right authority since the facts in question transcend mortal knowledge. God did not become flesh and die on the cross to make himself happy. God is goodness, which is just another way of saying God is love. The lover doesn’t ask what’s in it for him when he does something good for the beloved; that parent doesn’t ask what’s in it for them when they raise their children (unless they are vulgar). Marley’s gratuitous care for Scrooge’s participates in this goodness. Scrooge’s newfound compassion, we must assume, is a gratuitous care for Tiny Tim and the rest – not just a way of avoiding Marley’s fate. I am not convinced the novel is coherent on this issue.

   And that raises questions about the relation of the afterlife to goodness. One interesting truth captured by Marley’s ghost: this life is important; this life is meaningful; we have one life, one chance to realize our potential – that is, to love well, to know God in the finite ways God can be known in this life. If you believe in an afterlife – perhaps also in a Purgatory – then this life is not final. There is hope in that, but it lessens the meaning of what we do and how we live. In Dickens’ vision everything we do here either moves us closer to the Good (God) or farther away from it. Death could come at any time, and the state of our souls at death determines our being for eternity. Well, that is a way of picturing meaning.

   The Good (love), moreover, is so absolute that our existence in a possible life after death is irrelevant to it – as irrelevant as the hope of improving his condition was to Marley’s desire to help Scrooge avoid his fate. Even if I believed that death was final, that there was no God or cosmic justice, I would still be bound to love and do good for my children, for example, and would lucidly suffer remorse if I neglected or abused them. I don’t refrain from neglecting or abusing them to avoid Hell or a fate like Marley’s; I don’t love them to punch my ticket to Heaven. It is not unimportant whether I believe or do not believe in a life after death – it colors how I see life. But it makes no moral difference, no difference concerning love and goodness – perhaps unless you cannot believe that life is good/loveable or your children are good/loveable without believing in an afterlife. To me, the fact that people really love their children or really do good without such a belief system shows that the two are separable. I go back and forth, but again, my hopes and fears about a possible afterlife don’t affect my loves.

     Honestly, it is mostly for the sake of those who have been deprived of life and love – victims of terrible fates – that I feel the need to affirm a possible life after death. It is hard to live with the fact that a child gets tortured and murdered, and that is all. The outrageous evil of such things is the seed for the hope that at least in an afterlife there may be comfort. And if the fear of Hell prevents some people from doing evil, I don’t want to say that is a bad thing. It is just not relevant to goodness (morality) – and the call to be good, to love others.

   Just a footnote. I am not sure what an afterlife even means – what time, for example, would be like. Part of me thinks: that after the heart stops, while the brain is dying but still generating electrical energy, perhaps we are given a vision like Dickens’ of Heaven or Hell which in our experience is timeless, though in the physical universe it happens in the few seconds before final brain death. That is one possibility. We couldn’t distinguish that from any other. I personally would like to be greeted by an angel and enlightened about my life and the world. It doesn’t matter to the deepest regions of our moral lives. Literary depictions of an afterlife – as in Dickens, Dante, Milton, or Lewis – allow us to picture moral reality and the nature of meaning. They are not newspaper reports of a distant country.

. . .

Afterthought

I wonder: if you knew – which you don’t – that death was the final end to every life, and that the earth itself and indeed all life in the universe, would you still choose to be born? Would you still be able to see life as a gift or blessing (assuming reasonable good fortune)? If not, I suppose, you definitely have to cling to hope in an afterlife. I myself would see human life as more deeply tragic than I already see it, but would still say yes to it. Anything more would be icing on the cake. (Again, I can say this because of reasonably good fortune. Could someone say it in Auschwitz or one of the other hells human beings have made for other human beings? That thought is beyond me.) I would still be grateful for life. I could still love my Creator. Again, it would be the lack of justice and consolation for those who have lived through those human hells that I would feel had a right to say no to life, and thus makes me hope there is a God that somehow holds them. I completely understand Ivan Karamazov though when he says the torture of one child is enough for him to reject God and the Creation.