The death of the Queen led many of us to remember the deaths of family and friends, and the many who died in the pandemic. Those of us of a certain age may also have thought about their own mortality and the brief time left to us. The Queen herself had a firm Christian view on death and its aftermath and that would be a comfort to her and her family. But other people, while not necessarily rejecting that view, may still be left a little uneasy.
What will it be like to be dead? We shall all find out, or perhaps we won't because, well, we'll be dead. Nevertheless, despite the absence of travellers' tales there is a huge worldwide literature, mythology and folklore about death and how or whether we survive it. I shall say a little about how death and its aftermath have been depicted in a few western cultures.
Greek mythology offers one very complex set of beliefs. The dead were thought to have a kind of shadowy existence in a land called Erebus in the far west. The ruler of Erebus was the god Hades with his wife Persephone. Hades was the brother of Zeus, ruler of the Heavens, and of Poseidon the sea god. Nowadays, Erebus is often called Hades, although Hades is in fact the name of its ruler. The dead are rowed across the river Styx to Erebus by Charon the boatman. On arrival they had to drink from the river Lethe, which gives forgetfulness of their mortal life.
If you had a good excuse, Charon would be willing to delay your crossing. At the end of his life Hume considered various excuses. He wondered about suggesting that he wanted to revise his works for a new edition. But he reckoned that Charon would not accept that as an excuse because there is no end to revisions.
The dead entering Erebus were not distinguished into the morally good or bad. Erebus is just where you go when you are dead. The house of Hades is guarded by a multi-headed dog (Cerberus) who doesn't go in much for tail-wagging. He does welcome newcomers, but if you tried to escape you were liable to be eaten. There was one escapee – Eurydice – who was assisted by the music of Orpheus. This is a famous example of the power of music, although I am not sure that anything from the Eurovision Song Contest would cut it. Perhaps ABBA.
Whether or not your ordinary Greek believed in the mythological account of the afterlife, many certainly believed that there was an afterlife. For example, in the
Phaedo, Plato gives us an account of the death of Socrates. Socrates was condemned to death by the authorities for challenging the fake news supplied by their spin doctors (the Sophists). He drank the cup of hemlock and when his followers asked him where they should bury him he said 'You'll need to catch me first!', thus indicating his belief that his essential identity as a person was not restricted to his body. He then asked them to make a sacrifice to Asklepios, the demi-god of healing, as a thanksgiving for his recovery from the sickness that is life. The death of Socrates is a very moving story. It is a forerunner of the death of Jesus.
The view that life is a sickness and death its cure is also found in a much-neglected Shakespeare play,
Timon of Athens. At the end of his tragic life, Timon says:
My long sickness
Of health and living now begins to mend,
And nothing brings me all things.
Not all Greek philosophers believed in an afterlife. For example, Epicurus (341-270 BC) adopted the materialism and atomism of Democritus and developed a school pleasantly named the 'Garden'. (Not many philosophers have a way of life – Epicurean – and indeed restaurants called after them.) In a letter to a young friend, Menoeceus, Epicurus wrote:
Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the yearning after immortality. For life has no terror for those who thoroughly apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live.
If we move to the Judaistic tradition, we find several very different presentations of death. Like all cultures in the ancient near east, the Israelites believed that persons continued to exist after death. It was thought that following death, the spirit went down to a land below the earth often called 'Sheol'. There was no suggestion of a judgement based on a person's life before death, a view similar to that concerning the Greek realm of Erebus. Moreover, the relationship between the body of the dead person and the spirit is not clear. The Bible does not discuss it. Interestingly, many believed that the dead had the same sort of needs as the living, especially for food and drink. This belief is attested by archaeologists who have found funerary offerings throughout Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Jewish thought concerning the afterlife underwent major changes as a result of the influence of Platonic thought which became available after the conquests of Alexander the Great. In particular, the idea of the immortality of the soul emerged. This resulted in two ideas which exist in tension in Christian thought to this day. The first idea is that of resurrection. At the end of time, the body will be resurrected and each of us will receive our appropriate reward or punishment. The second idea is that the immortal soul lives on after the death of the body and immediately receives its reward or punishment.
In contemporary religious practice, the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed speak of the 'resurrection of the body'. But the
Book of Common Prayer in its section 'At the Burial of the Dead', instructs the priest to say:
Almighty God, with whom do live the spirits of them that depart hence in the Lord, and with whom the souls of the faithful, after they are delivered from the burden of this flesh, are in joy and felicity;…
I dare say theologians will tell me that these two positions – that seem to me to be clearly in tension – are in fact compatible. But I fear I am too sinful to understand how they can be.
The ideas of death, heaven and hell became prime subjects for art and literature in the Middle Ages up till the Renaissance. It is not difficult to understand why. The shortness of life and its many tribulations obviously concentrated artistic imagination on an afterlife, and how to qualify for the best sort of afterlife. The paintings and frescoes of heaven and hell, of angels and devils, of the Virgin, of Christ and even of God, can be found in most churches and galleries across Europe. They offer warnings but also hope.
There are not so many paintings and sculptures of that kind in England as a result of Henry VIII and the vandalism which took place during the so-called Reformation. Worse, there are hardly any at all in Scotland as a result of the actions of John Knox. His destructive fanaticism is quite comparable to the recent destruction of art objects in the Middle East by Muslim fundamentalists. This criminal destruction is justified by one kind of understanding of the second commandment, which forbids making images.
Religious fanaticism did not succeed in killing the creative impulses in folk literature and drama. There are plenty jokey references to Death in popular stories, as in the familiar type of plot in which someone hears that Death will be visiting his village and hurriedly moves to an adjacent village, only to discover that Death has had an unexpected change of plan and is now in the adjacent village.
Burns has many references to Death, sometimes for comedy and sometimes for satire. For example, in
Death and Dr Hornbrook, Death is exasperated because Dr Hornbrook is killing more people than he can. It is sometimes said that humour enables us to cope with our inevitable end. I'm not sure about that.
Robin Downie is Emeritus Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow
