Death, Immortality, and Eternal Life

T Ryan Byerly

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000388282
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Theology & Religion
• Thema: Philosophy of Religion

This book offers a multifaceted exploration of death and the possibilities for an afterlife. By incorporating a variety of approaches to these subjects, it provides a unique framework for extending and reshaping enduring philosophical debates around human existence up to and after death.

Featuring original essays from a diverse group of international scholars, the book is arranged in four main sections. Firstly, it addresses how death is or should be experienced, engaging with topics such as near-death experiences, continuing bonds with the deceased, and attitudes toward dying. Secondly, it looks at surviving death, addressing the metaphysics of human persons, the nature of time, the nature of the true self, and the nature of the divine. It then evaluates the value of mortality and immortality, drawing upon the resources of the history of philosophy, meta-analysis of contemporary debates, and the analogy between individual death and species extinction. Finally, it explores what an eternal life might be like, examining the place of selflessness, embodiment, and racial identity in such a life.

This volume allows for a variety of philosophical and theological perspectives to be brought to bear on the end of life and what might be beyond. As such, it will be a fascinating resource for scholars in the philosophy of religion, theology, and death studies.

PART 1

Experiencing death

1

Interacting with the afterlife

Continuing bonds with deceased loved ones

Edith Maria Steffen

This chapter is based in part on a keynote presentation given at the Annual Conference of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion (BSPR) in Oxford, September 2019. It focuses on a specific topic and perspective in the field of bereavement scholarship and practice, continuing bonds, which is concerned with how people continue to stay connected with deceased loved ones beyond their death, and it considers how the idea of an afterlife could be seen to be implicated in continuing bonds. The article gives an overview of how ongoing relationships with deceased loved ones have been viewed in 20th century bereavement studies and how these views have changed with the emergence of the continuing bonds perspective. It looks at different ways of making sense of continuing bonds and seeks to address what role religious beliefs and particularly afterlife beliefs may play in ongoing relationships with deceased loved ones and specifically in how anomalous or extraordinary experiences of the deceased are perceived and made sense of. The chapter concludes that a dimension that can be termed “afterlife” is operative for the majority of bereaved people, that people are and seem to stay in contact with a realm that lies beyond material existence, independent of their professed views on the existence of an afterlife. In developing this idea, I will draw on qualitative research I have previously undertaken into sensory and quasi-sensory experiences of the deceased (SED) and on pilot data from a recently conducted survey into continuing bonds.

The continued presence of the dead

I don’t feel I’ve completely lost her. I feel somewhere she’s there […] she’s not changed at all. She’s just the same person that she was […] It’s almost like she’s there in the background, almost […] just making sure things are kind of OK.˙

(Elaine; Steffen & Coyle 2011, 591–592)¹

The way this participant in a previous study (Steffen & Coyle 2011) describes the continued presence of her grandmother, who had died a few years before, is not unusual for how people talk about a deceased loved one who they feel to have an ongoing connection with. There is often a paradoxical mix of certainty around the person, that they are the same or behave in ways that is characteristic of them, while there is also uncertainty or lack of concreteness, as expressed here through the use of “almost”: “it’s almost like she’s there … almost.” The identity of the deceased person is clearly felt, but the presence is still diffuse and difficult to pin down: “I feel somewhere she’s there.” The sense of presence of the deceased is in fact a very common phenomenon, and while sensory and quasi-sensory perceptions of a deceased loved one are reported by 47–82% of the bereaved population (Castelnovo, Cavallotti, Gambini, & D’Agostino 2015; Kamp, O’Connor, Spindler, & Moskowitz 2019; Kamp et al. 2020), the number of people who experience an ongoing connection or continuing bond with the deceased is likely to be a lot higher still.

While some of the experiences that we categorise as expressions of a continuing bond with the deceased are spontaneous and unbidden experiences, such as the aforementioned sensory and quasi-sensory experiences of the deceased (SED), other experiences and behaviours could be deemed to be more intentional on the part of the bereaved, for example talking to the deceased, sharing stories about the deceased, keeping significant mementos, or engaging in rituals to honour or memorialise the deceased. Some of the practices that people employ with regard to continuing bonds are quite ordinary or mundane, for example drinking my morning coffee out of a particular cup that reminds me of my mum. However, other examples seem to denote a more out-of-the-ordinary realm.

In a recent (as yet unpublished) pilot survey, conducted together with Karina Kamp from Aarhus University, Denmark, into ongoing relationships with deceased loved ones, 65.9% of the 44 participants who completed the survey said they noticed signs, symbols and coincidences that were meaningful in connection with their deceased loved one, 63.4% said that they had had a sensory experience of a deceased loved one, another 63.4% endorsed having had vivid dreams that felt more real and meaningful than normal dreams, 53.7% said they would talk or write to the deceased, 19.5% said they viewed their deceased loved one as coming back as another being and 14.6% said they had tried to make contact with a deceased loved one through a psychic or medium or specific practices. When asked to detail how they experienced their deceased loved one, participants reported:

Mostly by hearing his voice. I generally just stop and listen, because it feels like a special moment. At these times I also have a sense of his presence, like he’s here somehow.

When going into his shed I sense he is there.

I imagine her above and behind me I feel a sort of warmth – only for a few seconds but it is clearly felt.

When I take a great photograph it’s like my father shows me the shot as he was a keen photographer.

These examples from free-text survey responses demonstrate the variety of the kinds of experiences that people report: from clearly sensory experiences such as hearing a voice, and quasi-sensory experiences such as sensing the person’s presence to half-imagined, half-perceived presence, to the metaphorical or symbolic interwovenness of the deceased in one’s ongoing life. While it may appear rather benign and even sweet to consider how many people continue to relate to their deceased loved ones, deriving comfort and pleasure from their interactions, such practices have not always been viewed as harmless expressions of the power of love and how this might be stronger even than death itself.

Continuing bonds as prohibited or pathologised

As explored particularly by sociologist Tony Walter (1996, 2000), grief and its expressions have been subject to more or less heavy policing across different cultures and historical periods. How the bereaved can or cannot maintain connections with their deceased loved ones is one among many aspects of grief that is culturally determined and societally regulated. In the West, the power to dictate how grief should be “done” has for many centuries lain in the hands of Christian institutions. For ordinary people to maintain relationships with deceased loved ones has often tended to be discouraged if not actively suppressed. It has been suggested that direct spiritual experience without mediation of priests has possibly been prohibited on account of it challenging the authority of the Church (Fenn 2001), and a reluctance to talk about sensory experiences of the deceased with priests has been reported (Rees 1971). With regard to interactions between the living and the dead, Klass and Goss (1999) provide an interesting comparative discussion of contemporary continuing bonds with the deceased in relation to Japanese Buddhist and Christian frameworks. They describe how asymmetrical relationships such as with the sacred dead or saints are permitted in many different religions and within Catholicism, but the symmetrical relationship between the living and the ordinary dead, as in Japanese ancestor rituals, is frequently not condoned in Christian contexts. This has been and still is potentially a problem for those of a Christian persuasion who view their sensory or quasi-sensory perceptions of the deceased as spiritual experiences (see also Steffen & Coyle 2010, for a discussion of whether and how these experiences can be seen as spiritual phenomena). For example, in our interview study (Steffen & Coyle 2011), one participant reported that their church community told them that their experience of the presence of their deceased child came from the Devil.

In recent times, one of the greatest influences on grief expressions and practices in the West has not come from religious authorities but from the medical field, in particular psychiatry, and within psychiatry particularly from classic psychoanalysis. Here a perspective on grief was taken that marked a shift from viewing relating to the dead as prohibited or evil to a view that relating to the dead is pathological. The view that ongoing connections with deceased loved ones are a sign of pathology is often traced to Freud’s famous paper Mourning and Melancholia (Freud 1917). Here, Freud proposed that the goal of grief was the relinquishing of the bond with the deceased in order to become free to engage in new relationships. He saw this to occur through a painful process of hypercathexis: “working through”, i.e. an active and painful process of confronting thoughts and feelings associated with the loss, and decathexis, i.e. “letting go and moving on”. Thus, adjustment to loss and disengagement from the deceased were seen as closely linked, and cases of maintaining connection were then understood as “unresolved” loss, as failure to accept the reality of the death. Critics have pointed out that Freud’s theory needs to be understood as located in modernism, i.e. there is a strong emphasis on reason, rationality, on observation, continuous progress, goal-directedness and efficiency. In a world with modernist values, grieving is then seen as a debilitating emotional response, a troublesome interference with daily functioning (Stroebe et al. 1996).

Building on Freud’s perspective on grief, attachment theory compares grief reaction (which is regarded as non-adaptive) to separation reaction (which is regarded as adaptive) and explains it as an evolutionary side-effect, an inevitable cost of the formation of close relationships, necessary for survival and leading to natural selection. In the mid-20th century, stage theories became popular, not just in grief, but it is here that we are still experiencing the legacy of stage theories particularly keenly. British psychiatrist John Bowlby (1998), the originator of attachment theory, formulated a number of stages that people were seen to go through in their grief process: numbness and disbelief, yearning and searching, disorganisation and despair, reorganisation. More famously, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross (2005), Swiss-American psychiatrist, made the Stages of Grief popular: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. While there is no empirical evidence for the validity of these stage theories, they have powerfully remained in public perceptions of grief.

The continuing bonds revolution

It is against the backdrop of these dominant 20th-century Western theories that we must view the continuing bonds perspective, which emerged towards the end of the 20th century. Rooted in insights from non-Western cultures, the seminal publication of Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief in 1996 by Klass, Silverman and Nickman signalled a paradigm shift in bereavement research and practice, as it revolutionised the landscape with its key message that continuing our relationships with the deceased is normal and can be positive for the deceased. The origins of the continuing bonds perspective lie in understandings from practices across different cultures, e.g. Japanese ancestor worship, findings from an ethnographic study of bereaved parents in the United States by Dennis Klass (1997) that showed their practices to be rather similar to those observed in Japan, insights from developmental psychology about “bonding” processes, and, as a...