cell913blog.com #80

 The notion that the pain, suffering, anxiety, sickness, old age and death are the stuff of the ‘soul’ will come to many orthodox Christians as any one or more of a list of discomforting adjectives: morbid, dark, unpleasant, Buddhist, Taoist, tragic, heretical or even a mental illness. The Christian church seems tied to and locked onto the treadmill of its dogma of some form of salvation, as a path to contending with, or possibly even avoiding inescapable death, or winning the ‘eternal life’ lottery in the final warning for Judgement Day and a final holy sentence.

As the antithesis of life, and life given and sanctified by God, as the Christian perspective holds, then how could an appreciation of death, from a different perspective, one that acknowledges its inescapable connection with everything we think, say, and do in our life, be compatible with such a ‘holy truth and reality’?

Bifurcating death and segregating it and all of its implications, connotations, ramifications and imaginative overtones, from ‘life’ writ large, limits by restricting and constricting one’s perspective; it also offers a highly righteous, and yet fallacious, binary foundation for all other metaphysics, epistemologies, belief systems, and psychological perspectives.

The very difference between ‘knowing’ as an absolute foundational truth, and ‘unknowing’ as its erroneous, untenable, unimaginable, heretical, apostatical, sinful perception and belief, lies at the core of the Christian theology. Perhaps this observation applies more, if not exclusively, to the manner in which the Christian faith is prosletyzed, practiced, preached, and awarded and rewarded, within the ecclesial edifices than to its more mystical, ephemeral, ambiguous and transcendent aspirations.

The cognitive, emotive, imaginative capacities celebrated and idolized by our contemporary culture have come to be embodied in left-brain language, literal and empirical evidence, and the persistent and pervasive verb “to do.” So long as we are ‘doing’ something about whatever pain, anxiety, discomfort, loss, and even the formal palliative preparations for death itself, we are ‘individuating,’ and climbing Maslow’s ladder to self-actualized wholeness. As conscious, attentive, energized and ‘performing’ humans, we have the stamp of acceptance and approval of our culture, including our parents, teachers, professors, mentors and shamans.

Even our clergy, and certainly our marketing guru’s and our corporate and learning organizations and institutions, view and evaluate our ‘performance,’ based on our behavioral, physiological, emotive and social ‘actions.’ This perspective and its concomitant attitude of judgement extends even to our facial expressions, our body language, our wardrobe, hairstyle, and whatever relevant ‘signs’ and signals of our success and/or failure, depending on the person or organization perceiving and judging. And the various ‘lenses’ through which we ‘perceive/judge,’ is formed by a variety of other ‘performances of our parents, teachers, and others.

As Jung reminds us, if we are unsure ‘who’ we are when asked, the world will ascribe an identity to us.’ And we spend our lives trying on various ‘identities’ based on the mirror’s reflections from others’ impressions. Almost as if we were unconsciously morphing our associates, friends, classmates, co-workers, teachers, and mentors into the ‘directors’ (screen writers? secret role models? idols?) of our ‘life roles,’ as actors in our own ‘stage play,’ we come to depend on, even rely on and expect those ‘impressions’…even if and when they directly confront some interior perception or belief that has somehow made its way into our imagination and our fantasy.

The drama of those events, people, achievements, failures, families, houses, degrees, careers, that occupy our minds, hearts and bodies for, it seems, at least a half-life, (40-50), have a cumulative impact and what for some may seem like a ‘dead-end’ road, or something approximating a significant change in direction, motivation, structure, or belief and perception.

Flooding what are termed ‘extrinsic’ motivations into children, students, workers, athletes, for many, has the potential impact of relegating ‘intrinsic’ motivation (personal desires, ambitions, visions and fantasies) to a secondary and supporting role. Even the spectre, (promise? assurance? reward? award?) of an afterlife in heaven, where the streets are paved in gold and where no conflict exists imitates the (or is it imitating) a deeply embedded modality of classical conditioning. This classical conditioning serves as a template for organizations, including families, schools, workplaces of every variety, providing hierarchical ‘means’ of motivating, to produce desired results.

The convergence of such ‘extrinsic’ motivations, while relatively easy to imagine, design, deliver (and withdraw) can eventually seem empty and hollow. The English humorist, Terry Pratchett, is reported to have authored a profound insight: “Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.”

So deeply imbued, steeped and virtually drowning, as Christians, in the notion of death as contrary to, even defiant of death, and so culturally embedded in a binary of opposites, we are not only loath to open the door of our imagination to the prospect that everything we think, say, do, and imagine has something to do with death.  Mortality, rather than a venomous, nefarious, Satanic monster, is, if we were to acknowledge its psychic and inescapable ‘image’ is a constant in our lives. The Greeks had their Hades, their god of the underworld. There he ruled with his queen, Persephone, over the infernal powers and over the dead in what was often called ‘the house of Hades,’ or simply Hades. He was aided by the dog Cerberus. Though Hades supervised the trial and punishment of the wicked after death, he was not normally one of the judges in the underworld, nor did he personally torture the guilty, a task assigned to the Furies. Hades was depicted as stern and pitiless, unmoved by prayer of sacrifice (like death itself). Forbidding and aloof, he never quite emerges as a distinct personality from the shadowy darkness of his realm. (From Britannica.com)

And from theoi.com: He presided over funeral rites and defended the right of the dead to due burial. Hades was also the god of the hidden wealth of the earth, from the fertile soil which nourished the seed-grain, to the mined wealth of gold, silver and other metals.

The question of the timeline of Greek mythology and it relation to the Christian view of death, is one for another time. The Christian view of death, however, is not.

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’ (Romans 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’ (Romans 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 (Romans6:3-4) (from Britannica.com)

Rather than attempt a sorting out of the implications of the Christian marriage of sin and death, separating a psychological connection to and relationship with death from a Christian theology of sin and death seems more accessible and perhaps even more relevant.

 In Suicide and the Soul, James Hillman writes this about theology and death.

Theology has always known that death is the soul’s first concern. Theology is, in a sense, devoted to death, with its sacraments and funeral rites, its eschatological elaborations and its descriptions of heavens and hells. But death itself is hardly open to theological inquiry. The canons have been laid down by articles of faith. The authority of priesthoods draws its strength from canons that represent a worked-out position toward death. The position may vary from religion to religion, but it is always there….The anchor of the theologian’s psychology, and his authority, is his doctrine about life after death. Theological proofs for the existence of the soul are so bound to cannons of death—canons about immortality, sin, resurrection, last judgement—that an open enquiry brings into question the very basis of theological psychology. The theological position, we must remember, begins at the end opposite to the psychological one. It starts from dogma, not data; from crystallized, not living, experience. Theology requires a soul to provide ground for the elaborate death belief system that is power of its power. …The viewpoint of the natural sciences, including medicine, is more like that of theology. It is a fixed position toward death. This view shows signs of modern mechanism: death is simply the last of a chain of causes. It is an end state of entropy, a decomposition, a stillness…..Images of dying, such as running down, cooling, slowing, stiffening, fading, all show death as the last stage of decay. Death is the final link in the process of aging. (Hillman, Suicide and the Soul, pps. 47-48)

And then, following a psychological/philosophical perspective, Hillman writes:

Life and death come into the world together; the eyes and the sockets that hold them are born at the same moment. The moment I am born, I am old enough to die. As I go on living, I am dying. Death is entered continuously, not just at the moment of death as legally and medically defined. Each event in my life makes it to my death, and I build my death as I go along day by day. The counterposition must logically also follow: any action aimed against death, and action that resists death, hurts life. Philosophy can conceive life and death together. For philosophy they need not be exclusive opposites, polarized into Freud’s Eros and Thanatos, or Menninger’s Love against Hate, one played against the other. One long tradition in philosophy puts the matter in quite another way. Death is the only absolute in life, the only surety and truth. Because it is the only condition that all life must take into account, it is the only human a priori. Life matures, develops, aims at death. Death is its very purpose. We live in order to die. Life and death are contained within each other; complete each other, are understandable only in terms of each other. Life takes on its value through death, and the pursuit of death is the kind of life philosophers have often recommended. If only the living can die, only the dying are really alive. (Hillman, op. cit. p. 49)

Albeit these perspectives form the foundations of Hillman’s thesis that suicide is a legitimate human decision, from the perspective of archetypal psychology. In that vein, analysts are tutored in setting aside any preconceptions, attitudes, beliefs and/or biases about their attitude and belief about death, including the potential imminent death of a person contemplating suicide. Providing a safe, secure, non-judgmental time and space for the person, irrespective of the final choice, nevertheless, offers an experience that, one can only guess, escaped the person throughout his or her life: having the darkest, most hopeless, most isolating, alienating and desperate images, visions, voices and endings.

And, as Hillman holds throughout his writings, he encourages both analyst and desperate man or woman to dive directly into the symptoms, the images, rather than attempting to ameliorate, mediate, medicate or rationalize those symptoms. Go all the way to the depths, the psychic underworld, safely, supportively, non-judgmentally, and then, as Hillman posits, the ‘subject’ potentially and perhaps finally vents and hears and reconsiders which dark voices, myths, gods or goddesses, ‘have him’ (or her) in their grasp. S/he may still, after such a ‘dive’ into a world previously out of reach for a variety of reasons, impediments, distractions, dissociations, denials, fears, decide to end his/her life. And, according to Hillman, the analyst need not recriminate or succumb to guilt in that instance.

Is there ‘room’ or a place in the Christian belief, attitude and dogma for such a re-visionist notion of suicide, including the psychological notion that death and birth, death and life are intimately, intricately, inherently and inseparably linked in the psyche?

According to the pro-life movement on abortion, the answer is a resounding “No.” There will be those too who argue that Hillman’s perception and attitude that all the events in our lives are connected to death is nothing more or less than a rationalization or an excuse for those wishing to end their own life. Some will likely argue that such a view is a rationalization for depressive states.

The individual’s invitation to release the psyche from its heroic ego that must ‘resolve’ all traumas, depressions, psychological abnormalities, however, in favour of an imaginative, poetic, mythic lens on turbulent, troublesome and traumatic moments continues to hold relevance, promise and insight, without the specter of instant gratification, healing and ‘uprightness’ or even righteousness.

And that option could serve us individually and collectively if it were to be fully grasped, engaged and experimented.