May 9, 2007

Dear Colleague:  

    I know you kids are far too sophisticated and this worldly to be interested in immortality. Yet interest in it is part of our heritage, and I would like to say something about it. One argument for human immortality is his capacity for truth. Arguing from this capacity "can be found," writes Josef Pieper, "in one form or another throughout the whole tradition from Plato and Augustine to Thomas Aquinas. The angel and the human soul, says Thomas, are imperishable, incorruptibiles, because they are by nature capable of grasping truth, capaces veritatis" (Pieper, Death and Immortality, 2000). That capacity, in humans, has its roots in language and thought. Both are natural phenomena, products of biological evolution, yet both can seem unnatural. In the first place, they can seem unnatural because they are so extremely rare in the universe. They can also seem unnatural because thinking and speaking reflectively separate one from the senses. A man who thinks is "out of his senses," dead to the world. Or to put it another way, when a man thinks he is no longer a creature bound to earth, submerged in a tangle of sensory bombardments; rather he has risen high above it—like an angel or spirit, into a state of existence that is conceivably immortal.

    My fundamental egalitarianism makes immortality problematic. The condition for immortality, if it exists, must be so stringent and demanding that only a very small number can hope to qualify. For most of us, truth and justice are just words; or, if more than words, we instinctively know that their passionate pursuit can have dire consequences, including death. In a bleak mood--or is it in the light of reason?—I see us as not so much good or bad, as hopelessly inconsequential and mediocre. The idea that a heaven and a hell exist for our eternal bliss or damnation seems ludicrously out of proportion to the fluff that we are.

    Buddhism's idea of reincarnation is, to me, logically absurd, yet morally compelling, for it allows almost endless time for a creature to work through his salvation. Christianity has to admit Purgatory and the possibility of infinite progress for a creature to be fit for immortal life. But can there be a sense of continuity, of being the same creature through all the changes and improvements? Here Buddhism's idea of reincarnation doesn't work for me. I see a radical, unbridgeable, discontinuity from one incarnation to the next, from leading the life of a pig to leading the life of a saint. Buddhists are not bothered because they don't believe in a continuing self in the first place. Christianity's postulation of a Purgatory, a hard school wherein one graduates from one level to the next, or of a graded heaven in which one ascends from one level of perfection to the next, does allow for a sense of continuity: that is, of a creature, however changed, being essentially the same. A hint of this exists in our brief life on earth. Take me. I have a picture of me as a fat six-month old baby. I look like a piglet and is probably no smarter. And here I am today, a wise old man (even if I say so), yet there is undoubtedly a thin thread of continuity between the two selves. So, in heaven, I may start as a cartoonish saint in a white robe and develop through the aeons to become a saint solid and glorious enough to carry on a real conversation with God. Miraculously, through all the changes, I remain, in some sense, the creature that God intended when he first breathed life into me.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu