On the Immortality of the Soul

 

Writing in a time of war, again. Though my sympathies are with those Iranians, mostly women, who are victims of the theocracy, I am just sickened and appalled by these wars of choice inflicted by my country on the peoples of that region. Nothing those war-makers want to gain is worth destroying the life of one of those little girls, much less the whole school. And all the other innocent lives, any life maimed or lost in this war ordered by those wicked fools. 

 

. . .

 

As I get closer to the end – a weird thought of how many people have died, namely, everyone who was ever born except those currently breathing and taking in the sweet light of the sun – the question of the immortality of the soul moves more to the forefront. Here the basics for me as I understand it, in a brainstorming way: the Good requires love and obedience whether or not there is an afterlife, whether or not it means anything in the end; I don't see how surviving death – the very idea seems an oxymoron – is physically possible, thus would require divine intervention into physics and biology (nature); in C. S. Lewis's explication of "glory," I don't think it primitive carrot-stick morality to hope for it; I am a bodily creature and would not choose afterlife as a ghost, without the life of the senses, the taste of good food, the sweet light of the sun, etc.; love requires hope (you can't really love someone and accept their annihilation as final); the argument of Ivan Karamazov notwithstanding, those who suffered horrors in life must be comforted, and there must be some kind of judgment on evil-doers (though I think Christians must hope for universal salvation with Purgatory); my love of my children compel me to hope they are loved by God and hope for their being taken up into God's life after death; I personally, just for me, would still affirm life even if I knew for sure death was final; trust in Jesus' is the main source of belief in immortality for Christians, and the deepest longings of the human heart (C. S. Lewis on "joy" and Sehnsucht); I believe that consciousness nor spiritual capacities like love and intellect (Aquinas) are not reducible to what science can conceptualize, that the material body transcends our science; this connects with Plato’s thought still, I have little faith and almost no hope that my soul will survive the death of my body, almost no hope, meaning a little. Any arguments or sources of hope I missed?

 

Here a brief explication of these ideas.

 

1. “Surviving death” (taken from the title of a book by Mark Johnston, the Princeton theologian) may not be the right picture. I wrote the idea seems like an oxymoron, and that is right if we imagine survival as a continuation of the same biological process. But Thomas Aquinas would remind us that the soul does not survive as a body survives, and it does not survive as a ghost either (a diminished human). For Aquinas, the act of understanding and loving is not intrinsically tied to matter in the way digestion or vision is. Thus the claim in not that “the organism keeps going” but “what is most properly you is not identical with the organism.” True, that doesn’t make it easy to believe but it does reframe the “oxymoron.” It is only an oxymoron if we assume in advance that the human being is exhaustively physical in the current scientific sense.

 

2. When we grasp a universal (e.g. justice, truth, triangle), recognize a logical necessity, or love someone as irreplaceable, we are not relating to particular, measurable data. Aquinas’ (Platonic) argument is that if an act is intrinsically non-material in its object (the universal, the absolute, the irreplaceable person), then its root cannot be fully explained by material processes. Now that in itself does not prove immortality. It does intimate something interesting though. If intellect and love are not reducible to matter, then their principle may not be subject to corruption in the same way matter is. That opens a door. Not to certainty regarding the immortality of the soul, but to the intelligibility of the very idea of it.

 

3. “You can't really love someone and accept their annihilation as final.” I read this thought in Josef Pieper’s Über die Liebe. Pieper wrote: "Love is affirmation… it means: it is good that you exist." And he connected that thought to something Gabriel Marcel wrote: "To say to someone ‘I love you’ is to say ‘you shall not die.’" The idea is conceptual: to love someone is to say: it is good that you exist, not just now, but simply; and therefore it cannot be right that you are simply erased. So love contains, implicitly, a protest: “Death must not be the final truth about you.” This is not a proof, of course, but it is not nothing either.

     When I read this, I immediately affirmed it, not because I grasped as I might a geometrical proof but because I had already experienced exactly that. When my grandmother Lovan died, I was a hardened rationalist for whom religion and its dogmas meant nothing. At the Methodist funeral I found myself feeling condescension towards the Christian views about death implicit in the rituals. During the recitation of the 23^rd Psalm, in particular at the “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” it struck me how cold and indifferent my rationalism had left me, and something broke. I began to cry for I had loved my grandmother and she was gone. At that moment I felt intensely the thoughts expressed by Pieper and Marcel without being able to articulate them. Reading Pieper articulated them, finally, perfectly.

   Either love is fundamentally at odds with reality, or reality is deeper than death.

 

4. Ivan’s protest (in The Brothers Karamazov) is not just “There must be justice” but “No future harmony can justify past suffering.” Now, one response (found in Simone Weil, see previous entry) shifts the focus. The deepest need is not compensation but attention, recognition, and restoration of meaning. If that is right, then immortality is not about balancing accounts, but about the full acknowledgment of reality. And if reality is ultimately true, then nothing truly meaningful can be lost without remainder. Otherwise, reality itself would be, in part, a lie.

 

5. C. S. Lewis, his thought about joy and Sehnsucht (a longing for that which exceeds this life in principle, painful insofar as it always exceeds our grasp but for more pleasurable in its painfulness than all longings for pleasures that might be realized). The point is not that we desire immortality, therefore it exists. That is too easy. Lewis’ argument is that we experience a desire that nothing finite can satisfy; this desire is not for “more time” or “more pleasure” but for a kind of fulfillment that would not pass away. Lewis’ claim is that if a natural desire is not satisfiable by any finite object, it points beyond the system of finite objects. Again, not proof. But it intimates that human consciousness is open-ended toward Being itself.

 

6. One of the most outlandish and unbelievable dogmas of Christianity is the resurrection of the body, yet that is the only kind of resurrection that I would desire. Idea of a ghostly afterlife, at least in my present state, seems undesirable to me. I have no longing for that. The Christian hope is not that

the soul escapes the body, as it was for Plato. Rather the hope is that the person, as embodied, is restored and transformed. And that is what I long for. Logically, this shifts the burden from whether the resurrection is physically possible to whether there is a God who can re-create.

 

7. Which leads to the crux of the matter. I wrote: “Trust in Jesus is the main source… but I have little faith, almost no hope.” That is, in a sense, exactly where the New Testament locates things, not in a demonstrative proof ala Plato but in a kind of relational trust. Hope need not entail confidence. Hope can be grounded in a refusal to believe that love is meaningless and that the good is finally defeated, that my children and all the people I love and all the people who are loved are ultimately disposable, doomed to extinction.

It can begin as refusal. That refusal is already a form of hope. And the same man who gave us the Sermon on the Mound, the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, and forgave the adulteress tells us that we may indeed hope.

 

8. Of course I agree that the Good must be followed unconditionally. Plato and Jesus both are clear on this. For me that means whatever else is true about the soul or Being as such, love my neighbor as myself. (I will not unpack what this means here except to agree with Aquinas that love means to will the good of the beloved, not equivalent to liking or having warm sentiments.) So how does the longing that my loved one will be resurrected fit in? C. S. Lewis, in “The Weight of Glory,” argues that the desire for re-creation (“glory”)is not a mercenary longing for reward but a response to the intrinsic worth of the Good itself. What this longing amounts to is to be fully seen and delighted in by God, to know, as it were, the divine affirmation that one’s existence is not in vain. This does not subordinate goodness to reward; rather, it reveals that the Good is so good that participation in it naturally awakens a hope for its consummation. The moral life, then, is not sustained by a bargain (“I obey in order to be rewarded”) but by fidelity to a reality whose value is unconditional, yet whose very nature is to draw the creature toward fulfillment. Thus, to hope for glory (resurrection to a life in friendship with the Creator) is not to instrumentalize the Good, but to acknowledge that the Good is not indifferent to the one who loves it. (If I do something good for my children, I do no expect praise or any reward. If they love me partly because I do good for them, however, rejecting their love to preserve the purity of my motives in doing the good would be absurd.)

 

9. Thus I affirm the Good, regardless of outcome. I see reasons to think the human person is not reducible to matter as understood by natural science. I experience love as incompatible with annihilation. I find the idea of the immortality of the soul hard to conceive. I retain a small, stubborn hope. That “little hope” is not irrational. I would say that it is, in fact, proportionate to the evidence available to finite creatures. Put philosophically, it is reasonable to live as if reality is ultimately faithful to love, even when one cannot see how.