Death and resurrection from the point of view of the cell-theory

by Gustaf Björklund

It is evident, therefore, that to the ancient world life in the lower regions seemed dismal and repulsive. Achilles would rather be a day-laborer on earth than king of the hosts in Hades. Life there passed in a shadowy inactivity amidst all wealth, a desolate emptiness in all superfluity, so that the soul could not help but suffer a ceaseless regret whether it moved in the halls of Valhalla or in the Elysian fields. Glorious meadows, crystal waters, streams of milk and honey, could not obliterate the craving of the soul for its corporeal existence. It returns time and again to the body in the grave to enjoy the sacrifices and cares of the surviving.

This mourning for the body and continuous longing for the sunny life on earth made death seem something terrible that fretted and tormented men. Was it not natural, then, that the mental disharmony caused by the thought of death, should sooner or later bring about a reaction; give birth to the hope of a reunion of the soul with the body on a resurrection day of the dead? At some such conclusion several religions have arrived. We need mention only the Norse sagas, Islam, Parseeism and Judaism. A resurrection, everywhere taught in almost identical terms, is placed at the end of the present system of the world in connection with a cosmic catastrophe out of which new heavens and a new earth with an ennobled humanity will emerge.

The bodily resurrection on the day of judgment is a doctrine also in the Christian faith, as it is interpreted by the orthodox creeds. But this dogma has entirely lost its former authority. It is repeated at each Church burial, but the reading has now become a mere formality. We do not believe any more in a resurrection in the old sense.

What factor in our time has been sufficiently powerful to overturn conceptions so deeply rooted in human nature? It is the scientific spirit as acknowledged even by faithful theologians. Science has shown that man’s body is renewed several times during life and that even the bones, placed in the grave, soon “arise” through nature’s forces themselves and take part again in the universal circulation of matter. In face of all the evidence for this truth, it is impossible to believe in the old doctrine of a physical resurrection.

Another question is, whether this ancient belief could disappear without leaving traces in contemporary consciousness. Can man have changed so radically in a century, or rather in a few decades, that the conviction of the body’s importance to the soul after death will no longer find an echo in his religious instincts? By no means. We are the same human beings and have the same human nature as our forefathers. Forms of conception may go, but not the instincts to which they once gave a satisfactory expression.

We may therefore rest assured that the important change of attitude in this question forcefully reacts on religious life in our day. The reaction does not necessarily mean progress at first. Evolution does not follow a straight line; a step forward is generally immediately followed by phenomena in the opposite direction.

The religious instincts, underlying the conception of the body’s importance to the soul in a future life, must create new expressions, and the logic of the old conceptions themselves indicates what forms they would take.

When the belief in a restoration of the union between the two factors in a human being was suddenly and almost violently shaken by natural science, there seemed at first no other way out of the difficulty than to choose between them and declare either the soul or the body as the essential part.

Those who felt inclined toward the former alternative evidently found themselves confined to a one-sided idealism of little vitality, because an existence without body seems as shadowy and unsatisfactory to man in the present as in ancient times. An increasing weakening of the intensity of religious life would be the natural consequence.

Those again who, because of a more realistic tendency, insisted upon the essentiality of our body, were logically driven to a gross materialism. If science had proved that the belief in a bodily resurrection is untenable, why should it not be able to demonstrate that all religious doctrines were delusions? This reasoning seemed to many so natural that many scientific facts contributed evidence in their favor even when these facts pointed entirely in the opposite direction.