Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

So, too, Christian asceticism followed from the same motive. This life was mean and it mattered little how squalid it was, for it was only a provisional, probationary moment compared to the eternal joy and happiness where all real worths and values were confidently awaited and compared to which those of earth were only dross. “There is no death. What seems so is transition” to an infinitely higher state than this. Never did the other world so absorb the power of this. Visions, trances, homilies, poems, poetry and theology fitted the other world out with every good and the chief offices of the church were to keep the keys of the transcendental world and to wield its tremendous sanctions in a way to dominate life and determine good and evil. Thus never was the greatest Verdrängung (repression) that ever oppressed the human race so completely removed. The most essential claim of Christianity is to have obviated the fear of death and made the king of terrors into a good friend, if not into a boon companion, by this the most masterly of all psychotherapies. If it be only a pragmatic postulate or hypothesis or Als Ob (As If) in Vaihinger’s sense, it has worked well on the whole. Despite the ever present dangers of transcendental selfishness that prompts only to save one’s own soul, it is nevertheless the supreme demonstration of the “Allmacht” (omnipotence) of the folksoul to minister to its own gravest diseases and banish its greatest enemy, the death fear.

Thus Jesus is most widely known as the Man of the Cross and the crucifix and even the fragments of the Cross are revered throughout the Christian world. In no other religion has the death of the founder had such prominence or efficacy. All the events of Holy Week have been wrought out in great detail by tradition and art. Its story is the world’s great masterpiece of pathos. The ecstasy of the passover represents the culmination of the conquest of the death-fear by Mansoul. The gift of the Holy Spirit was simply the conviction that death itself was dead. For centuries preaching consisted of nothing else than telling this story, which was the gospel of the gladdest of all glad tidings. If Christ is not arisen, our faith is vain. To doubt this has always been the most culpable of all heresies save that of atheism itself.

Thus night, day; sleep, waking; autumn, spring—cadence the soul to life and death. To these were added the higher symbolisms of sin and holiness, illness and health, old age and rejuvenation, crushing despair and triumphant hope, pessimism and optimism, with the latter and not the former, as had often been the case before, final and triumphant. Every known race of man initiates the young at puberty by a ritualized pain and pleasure treatment that anticipates all this. Youth was isolated, made to fast, scarified, tattooed, made to endure extreme hardship, fatigue, sometimes partial burial; and then followed remission, dance, feasting, perhaps orgies, only after which did the young become full members of the tribe. Thus it is the inveterate consensus of man through all his history that on the threshold of mature life each individual should be oriented to its sovereign master’s pain and pleasure by extreme experience with each in turn, as if thereby to develop the power of elasticity, resilience, and reaction, and to impress upon it throughout all its profoundest depths the conviction that there is no defeat that should not be followed by victory, no darkness so black as that which just precedes day, no virtue like that which has just overcome evil, no passivity that will not tend to react toward progressiveness. Indeed, this is a kind of modulus that Christianity has impressed upon the entire occidental world and it is this that has given it its courage, élan, and enterprise. This is the chief imprint it has left upon the human soul, even for those who have forgotten or denied all its tenets. Thus there is a deep psychological sense in which all those who have not passed rigorously through the experience that Christianity symbolizes by the phrase “dying and rising with Jesus” are not initiated into life and remain immature.

It is they who are more liable to be arrested in the trough of the wave and to become discouraged or even melancholic and when they meet the ills and hardships of life to flee from reality and seek some refuge from its stern demands, because life in them has not conquered death. They have not learned the great law of taking their pleasure and pain in the things they ought and in a measure proportionate to each. Indeed, modern psychotherapy is, for the most part, a new application of this old mode of rescue for such souls in distress. Maeder[214] has well and wisely found all its processes typified in Dante’s descent into hell at the nethermost center of the earth where Satan himself was; and his emergence a slow ascent up the purgatorial mount to the infinite joys of paradise, first under the guidance of a human sage and then led by Beatrice, a type of the supreme self-directing oracle within. Dante, as everyone knows, called his poem a comedy because it had a happy ending, but every modern novel and drama is constructed according to the same formula that Christianity made current.

And who would read a story or see a play in which at the end the hero or heroine did not achieve all they desired? And, again, why do we love to experience all the desperate miseries to which our favorites in story and on the stage are subjected before the happy dénouement begins to show but that we are dead sure that in the end both the villain and the virtuous will get their deserts. Indeed, at least one German “pithiatric” psychiatrist prescribes a drastic experience of the story of the Cross as a therapeutic method in certain cases. All this, of course, has no reference to the question whether the story is all fact or all fancy. The psychologist only studies its effects and its inner mechanisms, which, save for those who have grown scrupulous under the influence of modern controversy, are no more relevant than is the historicity of Hamlet, Lear, or Portia to the audience in a theater. In the patristic and in the Middle Ages, and even now, children and neurotics have suffered almost to the point of stigmatization at any realistic description or at the Ober-Ammergau dramatization of the items of the crucifixion and feel with all the vicariousness that sympathy can yield the thorns, bitter cup, nails, spear, etc., as we have elsewhere shown in detail.[215]

But despite all the realistic pedagogy of the church the conviction of another life is very rapidly fading from the modern consciousness and even within the church itself is becoming an ineffective shadow of a shade. Dr. George A. Gordon of the Old South Church, Boston, preaching to the Congregational State Association in 1902, said: “We ministers of the Lord Jesus Christ know as no other persons in the community what a paralysis has come over intelligent and thinking people in regard to the reality of the other life. So many doubt it; so few have any strong confidence in regard to it.” This opinion, of course, was posited not only on the confidences of the pastor’s study but also on the confidences of the sick room and the death chamber. The tendency has steadily increased and in funeral services we hear little of future rewards and punishments and only of rest and peace. The old evidence from death-beds is fallacious.

Sir William Osler[216] says:

I have careful records of about five hundred death-beds, studied particularly with reference to the modes of death and the sensations of the dying. The latter alone concerns us here. Ninety suffered bodily pain or distress of one sort or another, eleven showed mental apprehension, two positive terror, one expressed spiritual exaltation, one bitter remorse. The great majority gave no sign one way or the other; like their birth, their death was a sleep and a forgetting. The Preacher was right: in this matter man hath no preëminence over the beast—“as the one dieth so dieth the other.”[217]

This belief persists, thus, only as a dead article of faith which men no longer live by. It is a desiccated herbarium specimen and not a living plant. If common observation did not sufficiently show this, it has appeared very significantly and statistically in many recent studies.[218] These showed that it diminishes progressively as we go up the educational grades from high school through the university and that, in general, the more cultivated man becomes, the less he believes in any form of personal survival. If we had a similar investigation of the old as compared with the young, my own partial studies incline me to believe that this conviction of personal persistence beyond the grave in general loses its force in senescence, as indeed it becomes vital only at adolescence. If it be thus a creed that first blossoms with the advent and tends to decay at the close of sexual life, we have a new key for understanding both its function and its limitations. True, it often persists, if only feebly, as with the momentum of a spent force, in those who have not fully realized the senium, although they all do not wish to be conserved as old as they really are but to be rejuvenated as they once were.

In what follows we believe it will appear that upon analysis by mechanisms akin to metonymy or synecdoche the vigor with which we have clung to a belief in personal is really motivated by a deeper belief in racial immortality and that in this latter, when the strophe of life is succeeded by its antistrophe, the deeper faith tends to come out and true sages realize what the soul meant by what the tenuous and falsetto faculty called faith blindly groped its way toward.