Book Review: The Meanings of Death

With droll humour and characteristic polymatic scholarship, John Bowker begins his study of the wide variety of ways in which different cultures and religions have faced – or avoided – the fact of death. He begins with the new science of cryonics as merely one of the more recent attempts to avoid the reality of death. Cryonics offers immortality by freezing. Ellinger's evangelical book The Prospect of Immortality claims "with your active co-operation, the next death in your family need not be permanent", and, more pungently, " … we no longer need to take death lying down …".

Bowker's first chapter outlines the intellectual context within which reflection on death takes place. He casts a wide net that covers, not only the wilder excesses of Californian cryonics, but also Marx, Freud, Malinowski, Taylor, and Beckett, as well as surveying the more recent work in the fields of the archaeology, the anthropology and the phenomenology of death. Subsequent chapters extend the net in place and time over Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, Islamic and Christian cultures – both ancient and modern – in an impressively detailed exploration of the meanings that human beings have given to the fact of death, and its putative finality.

The depth, breadth and analytical clarity of Bowker's survey is impressive in itself, but his work has a more challenging and polemical theme. Belief in life after death, like belief in God, has gone out of fashion amongst many intellectuals, and is treated – if it is treated at all – as being variously quaint, embarrassing, irritating, primitive or neurotic. One important determinant of such attitudes is an unquestioned assumption inherited from the founding fathers of the social sciences in the nineteenth century; that the origin of religious beliefs about life after death – as indeed of religion itself – lies in the abject denial of the fear of death by the compensatory, but therefore illusory, consolations of religion.

The assumption that the origins of religious belief can be accounted for through the psychological hypotheses of denial, projection or compensation is subjected to searching criticism from Bowker, despite the assumption's distinguished history. For instance, unconstrained by any self-consciousness about his own superior viewpoint, Freud in The Future of an Illusion, permitted such beliefs to "the great mass of the educated and oppressed", but approvingly noted their disappearance from "superior educated people and brain workers". Freud, like most 19th Century social scientists is a spiritual child of Feuerbach. Feuerbach had made his plausible and seductive suggestions that the origins of religious belief lay not in the heavens but in the abject bosom of the believer. Feuerbach's frankly reductionist Credo converted most of the founding fathers of psychology, sociology and anthropology. Some, like Freud, were more evangelical in their beliefs than others.

The analytic panoply of projection, denial and all the other interpretive tools provided the rhetoric by which these intellectuals could ringingly denounce religious belief as bogus. Everybody congratulates the clever boy who rumbles the Emperor's new clothes, and defrocking God was an even more heady activity. The sense of intellectual and moral superiority which writers like Freud and Frazer, Marx and Malinowski exude is palpable.

As time wore on, the early evangelical fervour wore off, and Feuerbach's credo was, more "modestly", simply taken for granted by the Twentieth Century. Beliefs in an after-life or in God would, I suppose, be primary examples of Sartrean mauvaise foi (note his normative credal language: bad faith), and in the world of Existentialist psychotherapy their denial would be implicitly foundational. The excellent Yalom, for instance, typically takes the inevitably of death as the first of his four "givens" of existence, and, unself-consciously dismisses any religious belief which questions death's absolute finality as "denial". (As Iris Murdoch succinctly puts it: "Almost anything that consoles is a fake".) In this respect Existentialism might appear to be as compulsively bullet-biting as some religions were bullet-denying.

But this take-no-prisoners Existentialist credo is a metaphysical belief too, (Bonhoeffer described both Existentialism and psychotherapy as secularised offshoots of Christian theology) and one of the functions of Bowker's book is to challenge this secular belief by throwing it into sharper relief. He takes this general assumption that the origin of religion lies in the denial of the terrifying fact of death (through the offer of various forms of eternal life), and shows this account to be demonstrably false. The sheer diversity and contrary nature of the religious, ethnological and anthropological data which Bowker surveys will not support so simplistic a view, especially since many of the great world faiths also began without any substantial belief in personal survival after death whatsoever. (As Michael Caine might say, "Not many people know that" – Freud and his followers certainly did not, but Bowker does).

Having demonstrated that the denial of mortality has rarely been a significant cause of religion he moves on in the central section of the book to survey the experiential and religious constraints which act on discourse about Death. Readers who are unfamiliar with some of the cultures with which Bowker deals may feel at first overwhelmed by the unfamiliar vocabularies and uncompromising detail of his treatment, but Bowker's erudition is always tempered by a parallel lucidity which rewards patient effort, since his insights are often original and bold. For instance, it is common to hear Buddhism held up as a religion which has no belief in any form of individual continuity after bodily death; common, but wrong. Bowker points out that the foundational Buddhist teaching of anatta (that there exists no enduring "soul", "spirit" or entity which constitutes human individuality) should not lead one to suppose that Buddhism is compelled to take a sceptical view of an individual's post-mortem continuity. On the contrary, Bowker demonstrates from classical Buddhist texts (he is able to translate the Pali for himself) that the Buddha himself explicitly denied annihilationism. Moreover, given the indubitable existence of differentiated individual human consciousness (encoded, according to Buddhist psychology, variously as citta or alaya vinnana) and the equally inescapable law of cause and effect (the law of karma which states that all actions and thoughts have consequences) it is almost inevitable that the karmic momentum generated in an average life will compel further re-births. Even within sceptical Buddhism, then, there is room for a modified form of postmortem continuity after death.

If the book as a whole raises the important question: "What meaning, then, are we to assign to death?", his survey makes it clear that the answering human imagination has been almost unbelievably profligate in generating pictures and theories about the meaning and claimed finality of death. Death is an enemy or a friend, a defeat or a punishment, a release or an opportunity, a seed falling to the ground, a final breath returned to its source, the fading smoke of a fire, the dissipation of salt savour, the sloughing of a skin. (The theme of sacrifice recurs repeatedly and interestingly throughout the book, although unusually Bowker makes no mention of the work of Rene Girard, particularly La Violence et le sacré which attaches considerable anthropological and religious importance to the idea).

Bowker is acutely aware that although the evidence shows abject accounts of the origins of religious belief to be false, nonetheless the sheer variety of meanings which his study reveals raises further problems. All the theories of a life after death could be false, but they cannot all be true together, so in the final section of the book he moves on to examine how we might assess the rival truth-claims made by religions and philosophies on the subject. He widens his investigation to discuss recent work in cosmology, evolution and thermodynamics, before passing on finally to consider Near Death Experiences.

In exploring the wider human experience of death, his methodology is essentially that of Husserl and the mainstream of European phenomenology (which he discussed in his earlier Licensed Insanities), but he also draws on Critical Realism, urging that both traditions should agree that all human knowledge is corrigible, approximate, provisional and incomplete, and this means that all our speculations about death and a possible future state are likely to be wrong, but they may nonetheless be wrong about something. He argues with scholarly plausibility that many human speculations about death and a life beyond are based not on wishful thinking nor abject denial of the unavoidable, but as intelligent and rational extrapolations from human experience within the boundaries of this body and this life. When it comes to death, religions are characteristically very critical of denial and escapism; attempts to evade, deny or belittle the radical seriousness of death, or to deny its place in the ordering of life, have usually been seen by religions as subversive, dangerous or heretical. Bowker argues that the major religious traditions resemble information systems which are, in Campbell's phrase, "well-winnowed traditions". Within their boundaries, the data of experience are intelligently scrutinised, and conclusions about the existence of an after-life or gods are reached only after considerable communal reflection and inter-subjective testing.

There can be no knowledge of the future, only speculative guesses or theories which exist as inferences or extrapolations from the data of present and past human experience. Theories about a future state, whether annihilationist or variously substantial, remain, in Eliot's phrase, " … hints and guesses, hints followed by guesses …". All such metaphysical claims, whether religious, Marxist or Existential, are subject to the ultimate test of "eschatological verification": Time will tell! It is clear that this earthly type of life is not infinitely sustainable. Each of us, Bowker says, is like a sandcastle built by children on the seashore against the oncoming and irreversible tide of entropy. In the end the tide will prevail and the outward forms of all this, of all we see and of all we love, will be carried off into a different shape and outcome, far beyond our competence. The sand will be smooth once more. He is equally adamant that death – our own death – remains a hard, bitter and inescapably personal experience, and discussion of death can only legitimately take place when we have held hands with both grief and death and not merely talked at it.

The temper of the present age and its plausibility structures militate against religious belief. For some, however, present human experience includes experience of God, and such experience – and not any abject fear of death – is more likely to modify the inferences people make about the future. In this way, Bowker puts a tentative question-mark against the current presumption in favour of annihilationism. He asks:

But what if we are organised and constructed in such a way that we are capable of entering into relationships of love (and of hate), of acceptance (and rejection) not only with each other, but also with that responsive and interactive Other, to whom we refer as God, and from which we enter into yet other levels of connection and possibility…. ?

It goes without saying that such a question cannot be answered definitely this side of the grave unless, of course, we believe unquestioningly that our Twentieth Century Western intellectual annihilationist prejudices have already been assumed into the heaven of Absolute Truth. The large body of "well-winnowed" human experience which takes seriously some type of continuance after death must put at least a small question mark against the bland assumption of annihilationism which uncritical theories of psychological "denial" have unthinkingly facilitated.

Bowker's valuable book displays the continuing diversity of human experience in the face of death. In doing so, he shows that several non-annihilationist views remain, not as reprehensible cases of Sartrean mauvaise foi but, as William James' "live options".

Chris O'Neil, Chaplain, Charterhouse.