Time’s up
FOR about 10 years, starting in my mid-20s, I carried two quotations in my wallet. One, from Bertrand Russell, read: “[O]nly on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.” The other, from Saigyo, the 12th century Japanese poet-monk, read: “I do not know what is in here, but feeling some upwelling of gratitude, I cannot help but cry.” I carried these words with me as tokens of my inability to escape either the logic of science or the romance of religion.
In “Hereafter,” Richard Schweid’s survey of beliefs about (im)mortality, the Russell line, from his 1903 essay “The Free Man’s Worship,” appears at the culminating moment of the third and final section, “The Nonbeliever’s Faith.” In the larger context that Schweid provides, Russell wrote as follows:
“That Man is the product of causes which had no provision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes, and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve the individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of the human genius, are destined to extinction.... All these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.”
Schweid clearly counts himself among the nonbelieving faithful, and he does well to cast Russell as his prophet. Though many philosophers and scientists have emulated the elegiac eloquence of “The Free Man’s Worship” in the 20th century, I doubt that any have surpassed it in English. Its author, one recalls, was a late-in-life Nobel laureate not in science -- though his greatest work was “Principia Mathematica” (with Alfred North Whitehead) -- but in literature.
The history that Schweid brings to a climax with Russell recalls Peter Heinegg’s “Mortalism,” a unique anthology of classic statements of the belief that nothing survives the death of the body. Parts one and two of Schweid’s book introduce what Heinegg would call immortalism. Immortalism West is the view classically shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims that we live once, die, undergo a divine judgment and then receive our eternal reward or punishment. Immortalism East is the view classically shared by Hindus and Buddhists that our not necessarily immortal souls are reborn in many bodies over eons, shedding or accruing karma in each subsequent incarnation, until the moment -- reached by only a hallowed few -- when perfect enlightenment and true extinction are simultaneously attained.
“Hereafter” opens with words that, according to legend, were spoken by the Buddha at the moment of enlightenment: “Gone to dissolution is the mind, / The cravings have come to an end.” But Schweid’s final vote is not for this mystical version of mortalism but for Russell’s scientific version: “As science gains credence through an ongoing revelation of empirically proven processes, more and more people are convinced that it offers the most reasonable and attractive explanation for how and why things happen as they do.” The book ends in faintly glum deference to this growing consensus.
But is this consensus really growing?
Not according to Spencer Burke, a former pastor at Mariners Church, an Orange County evangelical mega-church. “There are few atheists left in the world these days,” he writes in “A Heretic’s Guide to Eternity.” “Over the years, more and more people have turned toward faith to ... give shape to their lives. But interestingly enough this rise in faith has not necessarily resulted in greater religious participation.”
Science as cosmology may deepen the popular sense that the world is weird and mysterious, Burke allows, but scientific secularism as a worldview has lost credibility because technology has done so much harm. The same loss of credibility has happened to government, media, business, sports and organized religion, and this across-the-board reaction, Burke maintains, has actually fostered an openness to mystery. But what can respond to this new openness?
Spirituality can, he rather buoyantly answers, and his book includes a checklist in which 13 virtues of spirituality and matching vices of religion are listed. Though this put me in mind of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” (“Four legs good, two legs bad”), I must concede that in his very vagueness, Burke has a little something in common with Saigyo, him of the upwelling gratitude for he-knew-not-what. Burke would also fit well into Harold Bloom’s penetrating “American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation.” What Bloom identifies as the essence of the American spirit in religion is what Ralph Waldo Emerson long ago identified as the essence of the American spirit in general -- namely, entrepreneurial self-reliance. Your American will deal directly with God, thank you very much. He is a do-it-yourselfer. He has no need of go-betweens and clerical intermediaries. Dissatisfied with one religion, he may try another. Dissatisfied with all, he may invent one, even if he is its only adherent.
In a fully American adaptation, then, Saigyo would say, “I do not know what is in here, but feeling some upwelling of gratitude, I’ve decided to quit the monastery, fend for myself, and maybe start up a little something on the side.” But that optimism, the can-do attitude of a Saigyo Inc. (better, a Saigyo.com), utterly short-circuits what the Japanese poet is known for, a distinctive 12th century Buddhist fusion of grief and gratitude. And, sure enough, the sad mortality that o’ersways our powers is not the animating question for Burke. “Eternity” in Burke’s title simply stands in for the word he does not want to use -- namely, religion. He is concerned with how we live rather than how we die: He speaks for the ill-defined but surely large constituency of unaffiliated, culturally Christian Americans in search of a better way of life.
Could seekers of this stripe, I ask, build themselves, perhaps with a little effort and a little coaching, a “soul’s habitation” using Russell’s “scaffolding of [scientific] truths” and a “firm foundation of unyielding despair”?
I doubt it, and I do so for a reason that Russell advanced decades after writing his famous essay. Note the language of “safely” and “firm foundation” in Russell’s ostensibly heroic climactic sentence. Here is a hero in search of shelter. Note, too, in the previous sentence, the haste to harden the softness of things “not quite beyond dispute” into a functional certainty. For me, though I still thrill to the mounting cadences of Russell’s prose, the mood of “The Free Man’s Worship” evokes nothing so much as the get-it-over-with, bang-or-whimper melodrama of another young man’s masterpiece, T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”
Russell lived long enough to fault his earlier rush to closure as “platonic.” In our day, I submit, the philosopher’s anti-platonic second thought tends to be everyman’s first thought. Scientists of the more grandly theoretical sort may bridle when their work is confused with mere engineering or medicine, but, historically, the origins of their work lie in technology rather than in theory, and there is a certain collective wisdom in the popular inclination to keep it there. The late Carl Sagan became a figure of fun for the theatrically awestruck way he spoke the phrase “billions upon billions of stars” in his PBS series “Cosmos.” Today, fewer are willing than they were even 20 years ago to enlarge cosmology into “an unbeliever’s faith.” In a way, Saigyo and Russell have changed places.
Which leaves us exactly where, vis-a-vis (im)mortality? Near the end of his book, Schweid names the one and only thing that writing it has changed his mind about: “I have come to believe that death is not the opposite of life, it is the opposite of birth.” Personally, I believe that the opposite of birth is dying, as the opposite of entrance is exit, while the opposite of death as a condition is life as a condition. But since a full understanding of life as a condition would entail a full understanding of the entire universe as its matrix, our understanding of life is likely to remain partial into the foreseeable future -- and with it our understanding of death, a word that, without reference to life, is simply meaningless.
“We,” as scientists use that pronoun, know much, in other words, but we do not know how much, and we do not know the significance of what we may be missing. As the end nears, the working assumption for most people is that what “we” know may be enough someday but someday will not come soon enough to help me. As death nears, a deeper spirituality might help us cope with what we so imperfectly understand, and yet cope we shall when the moment comes, with whatever we have on hand, and perhaps not all that badly. As Bill McKibben writes in his wise and under-noticed book “Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age”: “Each time some meaning, some context, disappears, it becomes a little harder to figure out a reason to hang on to what remains. And yet, and yet. People are enormously strong. We can deal with death -- it fractures very few of us. Not just Socrates, but ordinary people, every hour of every day in every town on earth, lay down their lives with as much grace as they can muster. A lot of grace, sometimes.”
For that grace, some of us will pray, but all of us may hope.
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Hereafter
Searching for Immortality
Richard Schweid
Thunder’s Mouth Press: 276 pp., $15.95 paper
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A Heretic’s Guide to Eternity
Spencer Burke and Barry Taylor
Jossey-Bass: 248 pp., $21.95
