PicoBlog

A commenter on my previous post asked how, if heaven is understood to be something like annihilation, Christians ought to understand their own belief in the resurrection of the body, which they profess in the Creed. This is an important question, and in fact it is quite central to my reflections lately — but I haven’t really written about it at in detail on this blog yet. I answered his comment in the comment box there, but I would like to discuss the issue in slightly more detail here. Moreover, as Christians around the world are about to celebrate Easter at the end of this week, I figured that it is the fitting time to reflect upon the meaning of the resurrection.

To begin, it must be emphasized how important it is not to spiritualize or relegate to mere metaphor this ancient belief in physical resurrection — as is the temptation among many modern theologians who seem embarrassed by this particular item of their faith. Such theologians have been seduced by a kind of vulgar naturalism or materialism, the prevalent philosophical worldview that informs the institutionalized secular practice of the natural sciences. Out of respect for the scientific experts, and out of a desire for their respect — these are the main reasons I can think of anyhow — too many modern theologians, even some who are quite orthodox in other ways, are all too willing to downplay the literal sense of resurrection as it is professed in the Christian creed, and to hype up its spiritual and metaphorical meanings: it symbolizes a radical spiritual awakening or inner rebirth, or some such thing. To be sure, it probably does have those meanings; but as an old-fashioned traditionalist, I insist that Christians must also profess the resurrection quite literally, in all of its challenging absurdity from the perspective of a naturalistic ideology. My body and your body will literally rise again on the last day, and that is that.

However, some atheists, such as Alexandre Kojève, are quite right to criticize this belief when it is contrived to provide Christians with a cop-out or an escape route from the confrontation with death. Man’s being is enshrouded in negativity and finitude: he is doomed to death. From nowhere he came, and to nowhere he goes — this, at any rate, is how death must be known and experienced, and if belief in the resurrection gives Christians an excuse not to face this terrible fact of their finitude, then they are doing it wrong. Christians, no less than ordinary human beings, are obliged to face the reality of their own nothingness and contingency and all the fear that it evokes in creatures who are mired in attachment to life. For only by thus facing and embracing death as absolute can the Christian find in himself the will to lose his life for Christ’s sake. (Cf. Matthew 16:25.) It is this losing of one’s life, this taking up of one’s cross, that is the absolute condition and prerequisite of being a follower of Christ.

So, how is the resurrection to be understood? If it is misguided to rely overmuch upon the hope of resurrection as reassurance that, in spite of death, I can go on living after death, then how exactly am I supposed to believe in and hope for the resurrection? If heaven is a kind of death of the self, the return of the created self to its uncreated state (i.e. its existence in and as God himself), then what purpose does the resurrection serve? And if we profess the resurrection, how does it make any sense to live “as if” there were no resurrection? — which would seem to be entailed by the conception of heaven as a kind of annihilation of the self. If heaven is annihilation, even the losing of one’s life for Christ, then what business do we have talking about a resurrection or an afterlife at all?

An answer to this question might be suggested in the following way of rephrasing the question itself. If heaven is my total annihilation, then who exactly rises when my body is resurrected on the last day? This way of rephrasing the question gets at exactly the point: it is not I who am resurrected when my body rises with new life, but an entirely new “I,” if indeed “I” can be said of it at all. Having been reduced, by the annihilation of mystical reunion with God, to my uncreated self, or my non-self (to use the Buddhist term), the only “I” that I can say of myself at this point will be the “I” of God himself. That is, if my uncreated self exists only in the Godhead itself, then it is God himself who rises again in my body. My resurrection at the last day is thus, in a very real way, a new Incarnation, a re-Incarnation of God, in which I become another Christ (alter Christus), God in another body. It is precisely because I have completely died in beatific union with God that the “I” who rises on the last day is not I, but God in my body. I believe it is exactly this reconciliation of life and death that St. Paul was aiming at when he wrote: “I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20)

Addendum. A couple of random but related thoughts on the Eucharistic and Marian dimensions of resurrection (as re-incarnation) in the Catholic tradition, as I understand it:

1) It is common for theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, to observe that in the sacrament of the Eucharist there is a peculiar reversal of the relation between the consumer and the consumed. In ordinary eating, the food that is consumed becomes or is assimilated into the body of the person who consumes it. In the Eucharist, by contrast, we who consume our Lord in the sacrament become or are assimilated into him — almost as if it is we who are consumed by God in our very act of consuming him sacramentally. The sacrament of Christ’s death becomes our own death. It is as though we offer our own bodies to be remade into him, to be the stuff out of which he is to be remade and re-Incarnated. Thus, our death and resurrection in Christ, by which “it is no longer I but Christ who lives in me,” are built into the very structure of the sacrament itself.

2) In a similar way, as I have reflected elsewhere, we are “mothers” of God because, like Mary, we offer our bodies to him to be the stuff from which he is made and incarnated — or rather re-made and re-incarnated: for as Mary offered her body (her matter) to God for his first becoming and incarnation, we offer our bodies and our matter to God for his second becoming and incarnation at the end of time. He is to be re-incarnated in us, in the matter of our bodies which we “maternally” give away to him. To be a mother is to be a living and deferred death: a mother gives her body away quite literally to the child who is fashioned from her. As God was Mary’s child, to whom she gave herself away in a kind of death to herself, so is God to become a child again, our child, made from our very own matter and born from us in newness of life upon the last day.

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