Meditation on Grief

 

Thinking about grief today. I wonder what it says about how the world must be if it is more than just a biological-psychological-evolutionary response to a certain stimulus, i.e. "subjective" i.e. "in the head only." Grief as a key to reality.

    If grief is nothing but a biological-psychological response, then the picture of reality informing it is pale. A highly social animal loses an attachment figure; evolutionary mechanisms produce distress because such mechanisms increased survival. The grief itself tells us nothing about the objective significance of the beloved. It tells us only about the structure of the grieving organism. The world could remain entirely indifferent. Grief would be real as an experience, but not necessarily as a disclosure of reality.

     Or grief is not merely a state of the subject but a response to something objectively significant. When we grieve over the loss of a beloved person, our grief is directed toward a reality in the world, not merely toward a change in neural states. Just as fear can be appropriate or inappropriate depending on whether there is a genuine danger, grief can seem appropriate because something genuinely precious has been lost. Murdoch and Gaita try to show in different ways that love discloses the intrinsic worth of another person. When a mother grieves her child, the depth of her grief is not simply evidence of attachment. It is evidence that the child mattered absolutely. If grief is an appropriate response to death, then the world contains beings whose significance is not reducible to utility, preference, or evolutionary advantage. In other words, if grief is merely subjective, it tells us about the one who loves; if grief is revelatory, it tells us something about the one who was loved.

     What fascinates me is that grief itself often seems to contain metaphysical implications. When someone dies, many people report that the world itself feels altered. The world is different. A chair remains where it was. The trees remain. The laws of physics remain. Yet the world seems diminished. This is difficult to explain in purely subjectivist terms because grief presents itself as a perception of absence. The beloved is not experienced merely as no longer useful or pleasant. Rather, there is a sense that someone who ought to be here is no longer here. That "ought" is already metaphysically charged.

 

     What sort of world must exist for grief to be a form of knowledge? The first possibility is Murdoch's and Gaita's. People as such are worthy of love, however much this may be darkened by the world and the lives people actually lead. This is real and not projected by us. Grief is a response to the destruction or absence of something objectively precious.

The death of a beloved person is not merely unfortunate for me. It is a genuine diminishment of the world. This view already goes beyond naturalism. Value is not merely a human reaction but part of the structure of reality.

   This can lead to a view associated with Plato, that what we love in a person participates in something eternal: goodness, beauty, truth, personhood itself. When we grieve, we respond to the rupture of a participation in Being. This is why grief often feels strangely disproportionate from a strictly material perspective. The death of one elderly person should, on a materialist account, be little different from the destruction of any complex organism. Yet it is experienced as something incomparably more significant. Plato might say that grief points toward the intuition that a human being is more than a temporary arrangement of matter. Plato has Socrates belittle grief in the Phaedo because he placed no value on the physical life in this world. Death was a liberation of the soul from the body and the Cave i.e. the material world, into light and freedom. The body belongs to the realm of change, contingency, and imperfection. Philosophy is a preparation for death because death finally frees the soul from bodily limitations. If that picture is taken seriously, grief appears to arise from a mistaken attachment to what is transient. One should rejoice for the philosopher who has been liberated. So the view I attributed to Plato is only one way his thought can be extended. But the belittling of grief reveals that grief depends on an affirmation of life in this world, on an affirmation of bodily existence. Otherwise, we could be glad and throw a party because the soul has finally been released from its prison.

 

   The Christian tradition takes another step. The reason grief is appropriate is that the beloved person is not merely a finite being but someone loved into existence by God. We grieve because someone whose existence possesses eternal significance has vanished from immediate experience. Christianity does not abolish grief through belief in immortality. The tears at the tomb of Lazarus of Bethany are real. Even if resurrection is true, separation is still real. In this view grief is partly a testimony to the eternal worth of the person.

    I want to expand on this as I have often seen – in movies, mostly – some Christian criticize another for grieving, implying it expresses a lack of faith and an attachment to this world over heaven. Christianity inherits some of this Platonic language, especially through thinkers like St. Augustine, but ultimately transforms it. The crucial difference is that Christianity does not regard bodily existence as a regrettable stage to be escaped. The doctrine of the Resurrection is decisive here. For Plato, death is the solution to the soul's imprisonment. For Christianity, death is an enemy. That phrase comes directly from St. Paul. Death is "the last enemy to be destroyed." The Christian does not ultimately hope to be rid of the body but for the redemption of the whole person.

     This changes the meaning of grief. A Christian grieves because something genuinely terrible has happened. A unity that ought to exist – the embodied presence of this particular person in the world – has been broken. The Christian does not believe that nothing important has happened; the soul has merely moved on. Rather they believe that something precious has been wounded, but not destroyed forever. That makes all the difference. The shortest verse in the Bible is that Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus. He weeps despite knowing that Lazarus will soon be raised. The tears cannot therefore be explained simply by ignorance of the happy ending. Christian theologians have wrestled with this for centuries. One answer is that Christ weeps because death itself is contrary to God's intention for creation. Death represents the rupture of communion. Even when resurrection is certain, separation remains painful. Another answer, especially in the Eastern tradition, is that Christ's tears reveal the full reality of love. Love necessarily grieves when the beloved is absent. I like that interpretation. Grief is not merely evidence of attachment to the body. It is evidence that this concrete person matters per se.

    Sometimes a saint, monk, or spiritually mature character criticizes excessive grief. But usually the criticism is not directed at grief as such. It is directed at despair. The distinction appears already in Paul: Christians do not grieve as those who have no hope.

Notice that he does not say that Christians do not grieve. Only that they grieve differently. The target is not grief per se but hopelessness. In practice, however, Christians have not always maintained that distinction well. At times a certain quasi-Platonic tendency entered Christian culture. The saint is portrayed as serenely detached, almost untouched by death. Excessive mourning is interpreted as evidence of insufficient faith. You can see traces of this in some monastic literature, some Puritan writings, and occasionally in pious Victorian literature. But there has always been a countercurrent. Augustine's grief for his mother, Monica, in the Confessions is an example. He initially tries to restrain his tears because he thinks grief might imply a lack of faith. Yet eventually he recognizes that his sorrow itself is an expression of love. The tears are not sinful. What would be wrong is to grieve without trust in God.

    Christianity begins not with the immortality of the soul but with the goodness of creation. This particular face and voice. This particular friendship. This particular father, mother, son. If these things were not precious, resurrection itself would make little sense. Why resurrect bodies at all? Why not simply release souls into a higher realm? The Christian answer is that God does not merely save souls. He saves us, and we are embodied beings with histories, relationships, and places in the world. From that perspective grief contains a double judgment: namely, this life, this person, this embodied presence was genuinely good and precious. Death does not have the final word. Remove the first claim, and grief becomes irrational. Remove the second, and grief tends toward despair. Christian hope lives in the tension between both. That may be why the most powerful Christian images are neither Socrates calmly discussing immortality nor stoics suppressing tears, but Mary at the Cross and Christ at the tomb of Lazarus, i.e., figures who grieve fully while refusing to concede that death is ultimate.