Rambling Meditation on Love, Philosophy, Angels, Heaven, Death, and Culture (10)

     As Plato/Socrates understood, love is defined by a lack. Philosophy is the love of wisdom, which thus implies the lack of wisdom. Philosophy exists because we lack wisdom, just as love exists because we lack the beloved. This is part of being human, mortal, finite. Our finitude, our being incomplete, being on the way, never fully possessing truth: that is essential to our humanity, as is our mortality, our existence in time (which for us takes the form of history). I can only wonder how it would be to be an angel. But angels, if they exist, aren't human, qualitatively different. If angels exist, they presumably lack our human restlessness, our need to search, the painful but beautiful struggle for understanding – for those who have kept their minds open. Angels, if they exist, cannot love as humans love, as love is bound to need, and need belongs to those who are finite. Angels, if they exist, cannot philosophize; they do not lack wisdom, at least not in the sense that we do. Perhaps angels see clearly what we only grasp in flashes of insight. I guess some human beings wish they were angels, and perhaps some angels wish they were human. Who's to say what would be better.

      Perhaps some angels would envy us our longing, our struggle, the meaning that comes from searching rather than possessing. This thought recalls Rilke’s Duino Elegies, where he suggests that the human condition, which is full of uncertainty, beauty, suffering, striving, is unique, and that angels, for all their perfection, lack it. And the film Himmel über Berlin, which I am sure draws on Rilke's poems. I suppose I would be greatly tempted were I offered the chance of transforming into an angel. I feel keenly my intellectual, moral, and spiritual limits and bang against their walls constantly. I would hope I had the wisdom to remain human.

    The desire to be more than human – reminds me for some reason of Galadriel's choice not to take the ring of power in the LOR. Galadriel’s refusal to take the Ring is precisely the kind of choice to remain finite rather than to grasp at absolute power or absolute knowledge. She could take it, she could be more than she is, but she knows she would cease to be herself. And that’s the real temptation: Not just the desire to be more than human, but the fear that in becoming something "greater," we might lose what makes us human (or elvish) in the first place. The very limits that frustrate us are also what define us.

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     In Christian myth, it is often said we will know all the answers in Heaven. I have thought that would erase our humanity. I imagine heavenly life rather like the lives of Tolkien's elves on Middle Earth, world enough and time to be more than we can be in our short lifetime. But that analogy has limits. The Elves in The Lord of the Rings have time enough time to master craft, cultivate wisdom, and grow into the fullness of their nature without being so finite that everything is cut short too soon. They don’t struggle with mortality in the way humans do, but they still experience change, history, and meaning. But even the Elves eventually fade. Their time is long, but not endless. The Christian vision of Heaven, I suppose, would have to be something different.

    What would happen to C. S. Lewis’s 'joy.' or Sehnsucht in Heaven? Lewis’s idea of joy as the deep, aching Sehnsucht, the longing for something beyond this world was central to his thought. He saw it as a kind of homing instinct for Heaven, an indication that we were made for something more than what we find in this life. Lewis I guess thought the longing would be fulfilled in Heaven. And we will be as gods. Humanity aufgehoben (transcended) in Heaven. And then what?

     I am not sure what Lewis would say. He might have imagined Heaven not as a static state of perfect satisfaction, but as an infinite journey into deeper being, deeper love, deeper joy, always growing, never-ending, but without the pain of lack. He intimates this in The Last Battle, where Heaven is described as an endless ascent, always moving "further up and further in." But the question is unsettling: if our longing is what makes us human, what happens when longing itself is gone? Would we become something unimaginable: a kind of being whose joy is no longer tied to unfulfilled desire? Would we still be ourselves without that ache, that reaching beyond? Or if we take the Lewis-Tolkien view, perhaps Heaven is not the erasure of longing but the transformation of it: not longing for something absent, but an infinite deepening of presence, always more to see, more to love, more to understand. Would that kind of Heaven preserve the best of longing, or does longing-joy itself require lack, finitude, incompleteness, which Heaven, by definition, cannot have? Fiction and myth are more appropriate for speculating on this aspect of our humanity than philosophy.

    Anthropologically, any kind of heaven negates our humanity. Anthropologically, any kind of Heaven, at least as traditionally conceived, would mean the end of humanity as we know it, because our mortality is constitutive of what it means to be human. (A denial of transcendence, a pure naturalism, would also end it.) The bittersweetness of life, the longing that is never quite fulfilled, the fragility that gives weight to love, to loss, to meaning – all of that would be erased in a state of immortality, and we would become something other than human. Our humanity is tied to the world. Our mortality is constitutive of our humanity, the bitter-sweetness of life, the kind of Sehnsucht or joy Lewis describes. Tolkien's Elves are closer to humanity than angels. To become god-like – as Christians imagine us in heaven – is simply the Aufhebung (overcoming) of humanity into something higher. (Nietzsche thought that Christianity was a hatred of human life.) In that view our humanity is just a stage of life, rather like childhood. It would certainly be wonderful, that Heaven, that leaving our humanity behind ("The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to"as Hamlet put it. And death "a consummation" even without Heaven.) To become god-like. No death. No violation of evil. To go beyond the human. That seems to energize the dreams of Heaven. Perhaps Nietzsche was right. Is human life something that in itself is something we should want to put behind us?

       Having been responsible for bringing children into this life, I can't think like that.  And perhaps I am foolish, but something would be lost in that glorious state, as the angel in Himmel über Berlin longing for the human indicates. And in Tolkien's mythology, I have read, the Elves partly envied man his mortality. They still experience history, change, loss, beauty that fades, even if on a much longer scale. And the Elves' envy of human mortality implies that what we see as a curse might actually be a gift – the gift of urgency, of meaning heightened by finitude. This is what Himmel über Berlin captures: the idea that an eternal being might long for the intensity, the fragility, the aching beauty of human existence.

But this is like science fiction, using myth to explore our essence of human beings. Metaphysically it is a mystery about which little can be said other than, hopefully, some sort of justice and mercy.

      Perhaps justice and mercy rather than infinite knowledge or godhood is all we can truly hope for. Because what else could we wish for in the end, other than to be gathered in love, to see that suffering was not in vain, that goodness meant something, that loss is not the last word? Hope is more important than certainty when thinking about what comes after. It’s not about knowing, but about trusting that whatever is beyond us is not alien to what we have loved here.

    This seems to me more fitting to our nature as creature. It makes no sense to me to imagine a Creator who creates the material universe, time and space, out of an overflowing love, just to have us love it as we may love sugar, a means to the end of pleasure, though pleasure wouldn't be the right word. It seems more fitting, given the supposition of a loving Creator, to love the gift of Creation, to be "true to the earth" as Nietzsche put it. If we are creatures, then it is fitting to think of our existence as something given, something meant to be received, not something to be transcended or discarded like an outgrown shell. The idea that creation itself is just a temporary means to a higher end, rather than something intrinsically good, does indeed seem unworthy of a Creator whose nature is love. It makes more sense to me, given the supposition of a loving Creator, that we are meant to love the gift itself, not merely as a means to something beyond it, but as something good in its own right. It is a Biblical idea that we are stewards of the gift, the earth is precious and part of our humanity shall be measured in terms of how well we love and care for it (We are doomed if that is the only standard. Perhaps we are meant to be true to the earth, to cherish this world, this life, this fleeting, fragile beauty – not just as a test or a passageway, but as something worth loving for its own sake.

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       And death loses a bit of its sting if – what is almost impossible today – you have a community that persists in time, loving families, where knowledge and wisdom are passed on, and the essential stories, where a world worth having survives you. Then death can be seen as a gift truly given to those who come after you who have a chance to experience it all, as a beloved German professor of mine, Thomas Baldwin, once expressed it to me. (Dr. Baldwin was a Methodist.)  But capitalism has killed that sense of historical continuity and a community with tradition that preserves what is truly valuable.

  I believe that death would lose much of its sting when it is embedded in a world that continues, in a culture, in a family, in a tradition that outlives us. Then death is not just an individual loss, but part of the great movement of life, part of something that persists, that carries meaning forward, that allows the world to go on being experienced by others who come after us. It becomes a true gift – not an annihilation, but a relinquishing, a making-room, a passing on. Perhaps the unnatural-seeming of death marks our alienation more than an essential feature of our humanity. Capitalism has shattered that sense of continuity. It has severed us from tradition, from generational wisdom, from a world that persists in time. It has turned human life into an isolated, consumable experience, rather than something woven into a larger story. And so death today feels not like a gift, but an abyss because there is no world left to give it to, no living community that receives it, remembers, carries forward what mattered. Therefore, it is possible that much of modern anxiety about death is not really about death itself, but about the loss of a world in which death had a rightful place; the violating of the possibility of a world in which it was not the end of meaning, but part of a larger, enduring human story.

   I am reminded of a Schiller poem, which is a bit sentimental, perhaps: "die Götter Griechenlands." (The Gods of Greece). He wrote "damals trat kein gräsliches Gerippe" (then with death there appeared no frightful skeleton). He imagined in the poem a more life-affirming culture of death. The truth the poem wants to communicate is that while death itself has not changed, our way of seeing it has. And this reflects a deeper change in how we understand life, beauty, and meaning. The Greek gods and myths, at least as Schiller idealizes them, gave death a place within life, rather than making it a terrifying, alien rupture. The gods themselves were woven into the world, and so death, too, belonged within a world that was still luminous, still meaningful. But as the gods faded, death became something dark, grim, final… something not within life but against life.

     That kind of mirrors the idea I am exploring: death in itself is not necessarily terrifying, but its meaning depends on the world in which it is embedded. If it belongs to a culture that continues, a world worth passing on, then it is a transition, a relinquishing, a making-room. But if nothing endures, if capitalism has uprooted continuity, then death becomes nothing more than the end of an isolated individual experience – indeed, a meaningless void. There has been a loss of, or from my point of view the prevention of the coming into being of a cultural and metaphysical framework that make death comprehensible, that made it something one could be reconciled to or even affirm (out of a love for the world and other living beings).

    The problem isn’t just that death is frightening; it’s that it no longer makes sense. It has become an absurdity, an intrusion, because the world around us no longer provides a structure in which it belongs. No wonder we banish it from our lives into the hospital and hospice. And if culture no longer provides a framework for death, it also means it no longer provides a framework for life – I mean for continuity, meaning, the passing on of wisdom, the preservation of what is truly valuable, all those things Wendell Berry pleads for. Without that, we are left with nothing but the individual; we are alone, cut off from both past and future, left to face the abyss without guidance, without tradition, without a world that holds meaning beyond fleeting personal experience.

    It thus is understandable why modern culture is so anxious about death. It is not because people are more afraid than they used to be, but because we have lost the means to understand it. And the irony is that, in uprooting death, we have also uprooted life, turning it into something isolated, fragmented, disconnected from any enduring human story.