Nature and Meaning of Death
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One of man’s earliest preoccupations was with the question of death: throughout recorded history, man has asked the question of whether or not death is bad, seeking ways of overcoming what might well be an instinctive fear of death and to find explanations for the very necessity of death. In all religious or philosophic systems, death is addressed to some extent. This brief essay will draw upon several different philosophical and religious traditions and examinations of this issue to demonstrate that death is neither “bad” nor “good” and that though it may be rational to fear death, death must be accepted as inevitable. First, the views of several philosophers or religious traditions will be presented; finally, the writer’s own synthesis of those opinions and answers to the question will be discussed.In Greek mythical thought, Death and Terror were regarded as the two great natural fatalities which govern all mortal lives; only the gods, or the “Immortals,” were exempt from either age or death (McClean and Aspell 9). Homer posited a human existed in which death marks the end of both physiological and intellectual life; he did not believe that the “torch of human life” was extinguished with death, but rather that it continued to burn in another world (McClean and Aspell 12). After the death of the physical body, man’s psyche descends to the underworld where it is reunited with a shadow of the physical self. The Homeric man found the
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tes and Aristotle, death offers the righteous man an opportunity to be united with the Good or with God. This belief would greatly influence later generations of Christian theologians.
In a nation and culture far distant from that of Hellenic Greece, other views on the subject of death were taking form. Juan Mascaro, in his introduction to the Hindu text of the Upanishads, points out that death is regarded as neither good nor bad – merely inevitable, and if man wishes to avoid the necessity of death, he must reach perfection through detachment and through submersion into the Godhead. “The eternal in man cannot die,” says the text, a validation of the Hindu belief that true perfection will result in eternal union with God (Mascaro 55-58). Though Hinduism and Christianity share few basic constructs, this focus on the immortality of the righteous soul represents a common bond.
St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest theologians of the Christian Church, wrote in Summa Contra Gentiles that the soul does not and cannot perish, no matter what happens to the human body (Aquinas 254). According to Aquinas, the acceptance of God and of man’s own obligations to God, and the living of a righteous life in pursuit of the “good” will miti
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Approximate Word count = 1380
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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