The Christian legacy

The spread of rationalistic and scientific ideas since the 18th century has undermined many aspects of religion, including many Christian beliefs. The church, moreover, although still seeking to exert its influence, has ceased to dominate civil life in the way it once did. Religion is no longer the pivot of all social relations as it once was in ancient Egypt and still is in some Islāmic countries. The decline of the church is epitomized by the fact that, while it is still prepared to speak of the symbolic significance of the death of Jesus Christ (and of human death in general), it has ceased to emphasize many aspects of its initial eschatology and to concern itself, as in the past, with the particular details of individual death. In the age of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the elaborate descriptions of heaven, purgatory, and hell in Dante’s Divine Comedy, while remaining beautiful literature, at best raise a smile if thought of as outlines for humanity’s future.

Death is at the very core of the Christian religion. Not only is the cross to be found in cemeteries and places of worship alike, but the premise of the religion is that, by their own action, humans have forfeited immortality. Through abuse of the freedom granted in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve not only sinned and fell from grace, but they also transmitted sin to their descendants: the sins of the fathers are visited on the children. And as “the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23), death became the universal fate: “Therefore as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men” (Rom. 5:12). Christian theologians spent the best part of two millennia sorting out these implications and devising ways out of the dire prognosis implicit in the concept of original sin. The main salvation was to be baptism into the death of Jesus Christ (Rom. 6:3–4).

Among early Christians delay in the promised Second Coming of Christ led to an increasing preoccupation with what happened to the dead as they awaited the resurrection and the Last Judgment. One view was that there would be an immediate individual judgment and that instant justice would follow: the deceased would be dispatched forthwith to hell or paradise. This notion demeaned the impact of the great prophecy of a collective mass resurrection, followed by a public mass trial on a gigantic scale. Moreover, it deprived the dead of any chance of a postmortem (i.e., very belated) expiation of their misdeeds. The Roman Catholic notion of purgatory sought to resolve the latter problem; regulated torture would expiate some of the sins of those not totally beyond redemption.

The second view was that the dead just slept, pending the mass resurrection. But as the sleep might last for millennia, it was felt that the heavenly gratification of the just was being arbitrarily, and somewhat unfairly, deferred. As for the wicked, they were obtaining an unwarranted respite. The Carthaginian theologian Tertullian, one of the Church Fathers, outlined the possibility of still further adjustments. In his Adversus Marcionem, written about 207, he described “a spatial concept that may be called Abraham’s bosom for receiving the soul of all people.” Although not celestial, it was “above the lower regions and would provide refreshment (refrigerium) to the souls of the just until the consummation of all things in the great resurrection.” The Byzantine Church formally endorsed the concept, which inspired some most interesting art in both eastern and western Europe.

During its early years, the Christian Church debated death in largely religious terms. The acerbitas mortis (“bitterness of death”) was very real, and pious deathbeds had to be fortified by the acceptance of pain as an offering to God. Life expectancy fell far short of the promised threescore years and 10. Eastern medicine remained for a long time in advance of that practiced in the West, and the church’s interventions were largely spiritual. It was only during the Renaissance and the later age of Enlightenment that an intellectual shift became perceptible.