I
THE RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE OF DEATH
The Greeks had their story of Tithonus, a deeply significant myth of a man who could not die, but who grew ever older and more decrepit until the tragedy became unendurable and he envied those “happy men that have the power to die.” Methuselah’s biography is brief and compact, but it is full of pathos: “He lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years and he died.” There was nothing more to add. Somebody has invented a radium motor which strikes a little bell every second and is warranted to go on doing that for thirty thousand years. The Methuselah monotony and tedium seem much like that thin seriatim row of items. It just goes on with no novelty and no cumulation, and finally the one relieving novelty is introduced—“he died.” What a happy fact it was! The wandering Jew stands out in imaginative fiction as one of the saddest of all men—a being who endlessly goes on. The angel of death seems a gentle, gracious messenger when one thinks of the prospect of unending life, going on in a one-dimensional series, with no new values and no fresh powers of expansion. To many persons the idea of heaven is simply an expanded Methuselah biography.
Biologists have completely reversed the theory that death is an enemy. It has long ago taken its place in the system of teleology, among “the things that are for us.” Death has, beyond question, and has had, “a natural utility.” It has played an important rôle in raising life from the low unicellular type to the rich complex forms of higher organisms, from “the amœba that never dies of old age” to the new dynasty of beings that have greater range and scope, but which nevertheless do die. Edwin Arnold in his striking essay on Death says: “The lowest living thing, the Protamœba, has obviously never died! It is a formless film of protoplasm, which multiplies by simple division; and the specimen under any microscope derives, and must derive, in unbroken existence from the amœba which moved and fed forty æons ago. The slime of our nearest puddle lived before the Alps were made!” Methuselah was a mere child in a perambulator compared to an amœba.
In cases where the continued process of cell-division produced a lowered and weakened type of amœba a rudimentary form of union of cells took place, which resulted in raising the entire level of life and eventually carried the biological order up to wholly new possibilities. So that the threatened approach of death was met with an increase of life. “It is more probable that death is a consequence of life,” says the famous biologist, Edward Cope, “rather than that the living is a product of the non-living.”[2]
But in any case the testimony of biology can give us little help. Even if death has had a function in the process of evolution, as seems likely, that in no way eases the situation when the staggering blow falls into our precious circle and removes from it an intimate personal life that was indispensable to us. It is poor, cold comfort to be told that death has assisted through the long æons in the slow process of heightening the entire scale of life, if there is nothing more to say regarding the future of this dear one whose frail bark has now gone to wreck. We must somehow rise above the level of brute facts and discover some spiritual significance which death has revealed, before we can arrive at any source of comfort. We are all agreed with Shakespeare’s Claudio that “’tis too horrible” to think of death as a sheer terminus:
“ ... to die and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside