Category: Death and Immortality
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At the San Gabriel Mission
Catacomb Joe and I grew up near the San Gabriel Mission. He sends the following as a visual comment on a couple of recent entries:
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On the Fear of Death
A Substack meditation occasioned by Philip Roth's Everyman.
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A Love of Life Inordinate and Idolatrous?
Dying of cancer, Susan Sontag raged against the dying of the light, hoping for a cure. "If only my mother hadn't hoped so much." (David Rieff, Swimming in a Sea of Death, Simon and Shuster, 2008, 139.) Hers was a false hope, one fueled by an inordinate and idolatrous love of life: ". . .…
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Hitchens, Death, and Literary Immortality
Substack latest. Excerpt: To the clearheaded, however, literary immortality is little more than a joke, and itself an illusion. Only a few read Hitch now, and soon enough he will be unread, his books remaindered, put into storage, forgotten. This is a fate that awaits all scribblers but a tiny few. And even they will…
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The Christian View of Death and Immortality
Substack latest.
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On Her Deathbed
Substack latest. "I fear that there is nothing on the other side."
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Strange Anti-Epicurean Bedfellows
Top o' the Stack
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Platonism and Christianity: Josef Pieper on Phaedrus 246c
At the center of the confrontation between Platonism and Christianity on the question of the survival of death lies the tension: immortality of the soul or resurrection of the body? More fully: immortality of the disembodied soul or resurrection of the en-souled body? Connected with this is the question of whether and to what extent…
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A Philosopher’s Last Words
What I haven't been able to learn by living, I now hope to learn by dying.
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Ash Wednesday
"Remember, man, thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return." Memento, homo, quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. This warning, from the Catholic liturgy for Ash Wednesday, is based on Genesis 3, 19: In sudore vultus tui vesceris pane, donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris. How real can we…
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Death as a Boon to the Spiritual
I read the Sufi mystic Rūmī (1207-1273) when I lived in Turkey, 1995-1996. Here is an entry from my Turkish journal written on Christmas Eve morning, 1995. The following quotation is from The Masnavi. Death is in reality a boon to the spiritual, and it is only fools who cry, "Would that this world might…
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Death, Consolation, and ‘Life Goes On’
Substack latest. Transhumanist fantasies aside, we will all die. Faced with the inevitable, one naturally looks for consolation. Some console themselves with the thought that 'life goes on.' In the words of the great Laura Nyro song, And When I Die: And when I dieAnd when I'm goneThere'll be one child born in this worldTo carry…
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Body, Soul, Self
Tony Flood writes: Hard to imagine Hitchens at almost 73, had he lived. Great post, but I have a question. Briefly, why do you refer to the soul as one's "true self"? Genesis 2:7 reports that from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) God created ha-adam, i.e., "the man." The man became a living soul (le-nephesh hayyah) when God…
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A Reason to Live Long
There is work to be done, and it may be that it can only be done here. It may be that at death soul-making stops and one is stuck at the moral, intellectual, and spiritual level one has attained in the precincts of the sublunary. This could prove problematic if one survives one's bodily death. …
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Ratzinger on the Resurrection of the Body
Substack latest. You will note that in my writings I use the gender-neutral 'man' and 'he.' It is important to stand in defense of the mother tongue. She is under vicious assault these days. You owe a lot to your mother; show her some respect. On Easter Sunday and on every day. Anyone who takes…