Explainer

Creed

Death & life

1 November 2023

7 min read

How Christianity transformed attitudes towards death

Once we buried bodies outside cities. Then we started burying loved ones inside them. This is why.

Andrew Davison

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

Dozens of candles in cloured jars and holders litter the ground of a cemetry.

Commemorative candles at cemetery in Srebrniki, Gdańsk, Poland.

Ludomił Sawicki on Unsplash.

‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.’

Seeing things two ways at the same time doesn’t mean ambivalence. Christianity has two things to say about death, and it says both forcefully. They particularly come to mind during November, as the season of the year when we remember the dead. In this month we get the modern secularised rituals of Hallowe’en, but we also get Remembrance Sunday, when we think of those who fell in war; and on 2 November, we have All Souls’ Day, when ‘the faithful departed’ are recalled, and in many traditions, prayed for.

Christianity’s two entwined attitudes to death are lament and hope. On the one hand, death is a shadow; on the other, a light has dawned that will banish that shadow. Both aspects are in that line from St Paul:

‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.’

Death is our enemy; death is slated for destruction.

Whatever a popular funeral poem might claim, death is not ‘nothing at all’. That poem has been suggested a few times when I’ve been planning a funeral. It’s never stayed in the draft order of service longer than it’s taken me to ask the question ‘But do you really think that death is nothing at all?’

Unlike our benighted predecessors, ancient and mediaeval, don’t we now understand that death is natural, just part of being the sort of creatures we are?

I take the opposite approach to funerals. I do not treat death as ‘nothing at all’. I wear black vestments: I do not assume that mourners are ready, only a week or two into their bereavement, to skip to the bright hope of white as a liturgical colour. I make the liturgy solemn. I avoid circumlocutions like ‘he’s moved on’ or ‘she has passed’ (somehow popular at present). No: someone has died, and even if that came after a long illness or a long life, a death is a loss.

The idea of death as enemy, though – ‘the most fearful of bodily evils’ (Thomas Aquinas) – might look out of date in the twenty-first century. Unlike our benighted predecessors, ancient and mediaeval, don’t we now understand that death is natural, just part of being the sort of creatures we are?

It’s almost always a mistake to underestimate our forebears. They knew that we are animals, but also said that we are animals of an odd sort: we are ‘rational animals’. That left them with a conundrum (and here I continue to have Aquinas in mind). On the one hand, we are animals, and animals are mortal, so that makes death natural. On the other hand, Christianity also insists that death is a wrench, a disjunction, an affront.

Reconciliation for this tension rests on that odd status of the human being, as a rational animal. We are animals, but also the sort of self-aware animals who are made for a relationship with God: suited for it, called to it. One model for that relationship, remarkably, has been friendship, with Moses as an example: ‘So the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend.’ That sort of relationship, that sort of seeing God face to face, would confer immortality on our naturally mortal bodies (‘when we see him, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’). Thus, both parts of the conundrum are true: as animals, we are naturally mortal, yet our animality is called to a destiny beyond its nature. Our tragedy is not that we are animals, but that we are rational animals foolish enough to turn from God, and from the light of immortality.

The message of the Incarnation and the hope of the resurrection turned something around for early Christians. They no longer found dead bodies frightening.

That’s the first half of our opening phrase: death is our enemy because, although mortal by nature, we were originally called to something beyond nature, but lost it. God was turned towards us, but we turned away. However, enmity, tragedy, and loss are not the whole story, and they are certainly not the end of the story. There is also death’s destruction. That’s what the life, death, and resurrection of Christ were about. If death is our enemy, then it’s a routed enemy, overcome, although not fully destroyed, until God recreates the world.

Christians can be so excited about the prospect of death’s destruction that they forget that this destruction is still a promise, and we still live under its sway. For now, the hope and the sadness lie woven together. That is why we read in the New Testament about ‘not grieving as others do who have no hope’. I don’t take that as a blanket injunction against grieving (death is still our enemy, after all), but as standing only against the kind of grief that has no hope (because death’s destruction is assured). Again, here are the two strands, woven together. We also see that two-sidedness in a funeral prayer used by Eastern Orthodox Christians (and at the funeral of the HM Queen Elizabeth II), the kontakion of the dead. Its final lines put place wrenching tears right next to the church’s great word of praise and celebration, ‘Alleluia’:

All we go down to the dust;

weeping o’er the grave we make our song:

Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

This duality in Christian attitudes to death shows up in how Christians treat the bodies of the dead. We probably take burial practices for granted, but the idea of treating the bodies of the dead with utmost care and dignity was a point that Christianity really belaboured. Christ, for instance, had given a list of six good deeds in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, sheltering travellers, visiting the sick, and visiting prisoners. It would be a bold decision to add to any list draw up by Christ, but the church did it, adding a seventh ‘act of corporeal mercy’: burying the dead.

Christianity is definitively the religion of the Incarnation: of God taking up human flesh. Bodies therefore matter. Talk of casting off the body, as if the body were just some old cloak that the soul has outgrown, is not something Christians say. We are bodily creatures, so Christian hope is for the resurrection of the body. (So also – I should add for completeness – is Christian doom also bodily. Those who die at enmity with God and the good, the faith insists, turning down the offer of reconciliation, face the consequences in the resurrected body.)

The message of the Incarnation and the hope of the resurrection turned something around for early Christians. They no longer found dead bodies frightening. In the ancient world, bodies were to be buried outside the city, cast out from the human community. Christians changed that, and started burying their loved ones inside the city. Bodies were to be treasured, not feared. The bodies of their heroes – those who excelled in virtue, and especially the martyrs – were brought right into their churches. Before long, no altar (the communion table) was quite proper unless it was built over the body of a martyr or other saint, or at the very least contained some part or relic.

Veneration of relics has not been so common in the Church of England (the church to which I belong) since the Reformation, nor in the wider Anglican Communion. Slowly, however, it has edged its way back. In 2002, the cathedral where I’m a canon, St Albans, received a shoulder blade of St Alban, England’s first martyr, the gift of one of the dozen remarkable Romanesque churches in Cologne. That bone gets considerable honour on the weekend closest to his feast day (22 June). Relics are also familiar in the church in Philadelphia where I currently celebrate the Eucharist once or twice per week. The altars are usually at least lightly decked with relics. During Eastertide, they groan under the weight of them, including some impressive whole-bone affairs. Only in Advent and Lent – penitential seasons – do the relics disappear to the sacristy, replaced with statues of the prophets in Advent.

It’s easy to grow accustomed to relics after a while. I should remind myself of their strangeness. Defying any trend in religious thought down the ages to denigrate the body in favour of the soul, here the body is holy, recognised as the site of God’s great works. Here, dead bodies are no longer to be feared. They are the most precious things the church owns, and threaten no contamination. Or, rather, if they suggest any contagion, it is a contagion of the good.

Care towards the bodies of the dead reflects both poles of Christian attitudes to death. On the one hand, Christians have preserved the bodies of the dead with great care because death is an affront. Death is the enemy that falls upon us all, even the most holy among us. Lamenting that loss, we keep bodies safe until it is reversed. And there is also the other side of the Christian attitude to death: alongside lament there is hope in death’s destruction.

Christianity, at its wisest, has not skipped through lamentation too quickly, but neither has it given lamentation the final word. Day-by-day funeral practice probably connects most clearly with the sadness, although the hope is woven through. The place of relics in many strands of Christianity (although by no means all), swings more towards an emphasis on death’s defeat. It rejoices in having among us, in all those slivers of bone, fragments poised towards Resurrection, when ‘death shall be no more’.

Essay

Christmas culture

Creed

1 December 2023

6 min read

The poem became flesh and dwelt among us

Ponder the poetic depths of Frank Skinner’s thoughts on the Incarnation.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

Against a night blue sky an angel cradles a baby and is followed by an angel train of cherubims

E.R Hughes, 1912.

Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash.

This summer I got to interview Frank Skinner; comedy-legend-come-football-anthem-maestro. The whole interview was a lot of fun, but the final six minutes were my favourite. They’re the reason this article exists.

Frank, who is the host of Frank Skinner’s Poetry Podcast and carries a pocket-sized book of poetry with him wherever he goes, spoke about the "super-poetry" of Jesus.

If you haven’t listened to it yet, do. Frank is incredibly worth an hour of your time.

But, for now, allow me to summarise his thoughts:

"Christianity is like living the poem… it’s like the Old Testament was a collection of poetry, I’m not saying that there’s no factual stuff within it, but clearly it’s written in a poetic style, with great truths and insights into human nature. And then, with that whole phrase, “The Word became flesh”, it’s like now the poetry gets real, there’s going to be a poem that lives, and it’s all going to make sense… this is super-poetry, this is poetry that’s actually physical, it actually exists."

Frank goes on to suggest that we’ve lost sight of this, that humanity have forgotten, or perhaps never fully grasped, that we exist because of this super-poetry, that we exist within it, that ‘there’s a line waiting just for us’. And then he turned to me and Justin (my co-host) and said,

"Here’s your mission, should you choose to accept it, go and sort that out."

So, here I am. Sorting that out… Kind of. That’s a lot of pressure, Frank.

The Word became flesh

The ‘phrase’ to which Frank is referring, the one which turns poetry into super-poetry, can be found in the Prologue of John’s Gospel. And it is a theological juggernaut of a chapter – mind-bendingly complex and eye-wateringly dense – it is arguably one of the most influential chunks of the entire bible. So, a nice and easy place to start.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.

That’s the incarnation summed up in ten words. It’s ironic that it would take ten-million words to fully unpack the depth of them, isn’t it? Gosh. John’s such a genius.

The Word - that’s Jesus – who, as the Prologue goes on to state, is the Son of God, the very source of life itself, and the light of the world. He was present since the beginning, preceding and partaking in the creation of the universe. He, the Word – Jesus - became flesh, and moved into the neighbourhood. And in so doing, he bound together centuries worth of prophecies, predictions, expectations and hopes. The maker squeezed himself into the confines of the made; it is, without a doubt, one of the most outrageous claims that Christianity makes.

The Word has an accent.

The Word gets tired.

The Word burns the roof of his mouth on his food.

And yet, still God. Always God. The Word of God, with a name and a birthday and a bedtime. Wherever you fall on the whole ‘believing it’ scale, you have to admit, it’s pretty astonishing. It is a cosmic-sized plot-twist.

But what if one were to assume that this really happened? If one were to believe that a God who transcends time, space and matter actually made a physical appearance in human history, as Frank Skinner does, then it changes everything. Such a belief leaves nothing untouched, it is utterly un-containable.

The poem became flesh

And that’s why I think that Frank’s poetry analogy is so genius. Let’s follow his train of thought for a moment, shall we?

Poetry has a tendency to dodge and disobey definitions at any given opportunity. It is, in its very essence, defiant. In fact, poetry’s unwillingness to sit contentedly in any given definition might be the only way in which it can be defined. And yet, despite very few of us feeling confident in our own abilities to define or explain the inner workings of poetry (perhaps we can leave such a task to Frank and his podcast), we all know it when we see it.

It would, I suppose, be rather poetic of me to suggest that there’s something innate going on there. To wonder whether there’s a capacity woven into us, a capacity to feel poetry to a degree that we could never understand it. I think this to be true even if our only exposure to it is through the snippets that have leaked through the cracks, the phrases that have escaped their literary confines and snuck their way into popular culture. And perhaps therein lies its power; we are able to spot poetry and somehow know that it is wanting access to parts of us that move through, but ultimately beyond, the cognitive. And then I suppose we decide whether we shall let it.

Poetry, at least the good kind, describes the indescribable, explains the unexplainable and identifies the unidentifiable. We can feel that it is making profound sense of us, even if we haven’t made sense of it. I haven’t worked out how it does that; if I had, I’d be putting such knowledge to good (and profitable) use. But there are incredibly deep insights beneath each word chosen in poetry, there are ‘ah-ha’ moments waiting to be stumbled upon, there are echoes of our own feelings – our fears, our longings, our hopes and our struggles – encapsulated in each stanza. Our choice is whether we’ll give it the time to shows us such. And if/when it does, will we trust it? Will we pay attention to our strangely warmed heart? (to borrow a phrase – many thanks John Wesley)

The truth that poetry is seeking to tell cannot be wholly proved by whether or not we can expound it with words or measure it with reason. The whole point is that it cannot be contained in such a manner. The truth of it can be more aptly identified in the odd resonance that we can no more deny than we can explain, it is in the familiarity that we find in brand new sentiments, it is in the ache that binds us to the words. It is in those places that the truth of poetry is most keenly felt.

And that is the case with the Christian faith, the epic story of the made and their Maker, the ultimate poem of the cosmos. And so, the story of Christmas, the enchantment of the Incarnation, and the beauty of Jesus is that the poet became the poem.

The Poem with an accent.

The Poem who gets tired.

The Poem who burns the roof of his mouth on his food.

Jesus is the super-poetry that I live and breathe, he is the poem to which I can belong. I can’t make sense of the incarnation, but I know that it makes sense of me. The intricacies of that poem can be debated, they can be observed, they can be weighed up – I’m not opposed to putting the Incarnation under the microscope – I’m just opposed to that being the only means by which we assess its truth. Rather, I would suggest that its truth can be more keenly felt in the places that poetry is designed to be felt – the deepest ones. Just as we have an oddly innate capacity for poetry, I believe us to have an innate capacity for Jesus.

The Poem became flesh, and he dwells among us. You know what, that is pretty insightful. Bravo, Frank.