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The idea of death as enemy, though – ‘the most fearful of bodily evils’ (Thomas Aquinas) – might look out of date in the twenty-first century.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’.

Article

Creed

Trauma

6 November 2023

5 min read

The tale as old of time

There is no fairy tale that resolves the suffering of women but there is another side to their stories of violence and anonymity, Claire Williams reflects.

Claire Williams

Claire Williams is a theologian investigating women’s spirituality and practice. She lecturers at Regents Theological College.

A woman stand beside a busy road with her back to the camera. There is a red sky behind her.

Florian Kurrasch on Unsplash.

From accusations of assault by celebrities to the murder of a teenage girl on her way to school, and the discussion on television about feminists and their lack of sexual appeal - we have had our fill recently of stories of trauma and violence done to women. These events are brutal interruptions to the lives of women whose futures have been changed, or even stopped, by these terrible acts. It is a story that we read in the news over and over again. It is also an ancient story, of women who are mistreated by men in power over them. It is the tale as old as time. When we tell these tales we anonymise women, for their own safety and privacy, but also lock them in their story. They are, to those of us who read or hear about it, only the tale of violence, we see nothing else about them.

We feel our past in our bodies, we know ourselves in our bodies and these feelings and knowings are part of the story that remains untold, that isn’t understood by anyone.

In one ancient telling in the bible, there is a story of a woman who is cast out, loses position, hope for the future, agency and bodily autonomy. Hagar was a servant in the household of Abraham. She was an Egyptian and therefore of a different ethnicity to her master and his wife, Sarah. Hagar, as a servant, had no choices in life and would do what she was told and when she was told. So, when she was commanded to become Abraham’s wife in order that he might have a child with him, she had no choice at all. In the bible there are stories of Abraham and his quest to have a son and heir when Sarah had been unable to conceive. It was indeed Sarah’s idea. Hagar underwent what could be described as a rape and a forced pregnancy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sarah and Hagar fell out. Hagar ran, she ran away from the cruel treatment of her mistress and the violence perpetrated unto her and into the wilderness. Hagar’s story is out of time with our own stories yet has resonance none the less because of her subjugation, the violence done to her and the consequential fear and fleeing. I wonder as I read about Hagar, what she looked like, or what her other stories are. What did she like to do? What had her hopes been for the future? But Hagar, is unseen by us, apart from the stories of violence done to her. She is unseen like the women who are raped, stabbed, assaulted, followed, catcalled, touched and upskirted. For these unseen women, stories are all that remain.

Telling of the stories isn’t enough. With violent, or emotional, trauma, words are only some of the message. We feel our past in our bodies, we know ourselves in our bodies and these feelings and knowings are part of the story that remains untold, that isn’t understood by anyone. The loneliness from being unknown is bone deep. That nobody understands is part of the horror of the traumatic injury. Hagar’s story does help us here. Twice Hagar runs into the wilderness to escape from Sarah and Abraham. When she is there, she expects to die. After her child is born, she puts him away, under a bush, so that she doesn’t have to watch him die. Both times in the wilderness, where she is away and hidden there is one who sees her and acts. The first time, so the bible tells us, Hagar is met by an angel in the wilderness who speaks to her and promises her the future we assume she has lost, Hagar identifies her visitor as from God – the first person to do so. In response to God seeing her, she sees God. She is not anonymous to God. The second time, as she lays down to die, God provides not only hope but water and we learn that she has a future with her son.

The story of Hagar is told still, as a reminder that God sees. This does not mitigate the harm that is done to women, nor use it for higher purposes. However, we only know a small part of these stories, these terrible accounts of horrors, God holds their entire stories together.

There is no fairy tale that resolves the suffering of these women in the stories, either the ancient story or the most recent ones. Male violence against women is repetitive and so far, little abating it. I do not offer a solution to why these terrible things happen to women, why they continue to happen even though millennia separate Hagar from today. Nonetheless, despite the uncertainty that surrounds the traumas wrought upon women in situations such as above there is another side to the story of violence and anonymity, that is of a hope in God who sees the women and offers a future.

That future we discover does not retreat from the misery of the past but moves on through it.

These women are not unknown, their stories, which are acts of resistance to the violence that was perpetrated upon them, are known to God. With telling and retelling of the stories of women we testify to their story and acknowledge it. There is hope in this situation, a promise that those who come to Jesus can find rest, that they will not feel condemned or ashamed in his presence and that there is the possibility of hope and wholeness in the face of such devastating actions of humanity. This can seem trite and it does not offer a sticking plaster solution to the problems of great trauma, but rather a God who, in Jesus, is a witness to the pain and the hurt and one who offers peace, who sees the women at the heart of these stories of terrible violence and who knows them. The promise of the future is that every tear will be wiped away, that when the final plans of God are enacted on earth there will be a world where there is no longer violence and the long-lasting pain, injury and horror will be removed.

The God who knew Hagar and the anonymous women who report sexual violence today, also knows the end of their story, and that end is hopeful, even if it doesn’t feel that way yet. Ultimately, God intervenes for Hagar. She is cast out, she expects she will die and potentially see her son lost too. Hagar, who names God is in return named by God, ‘Hagar’ he says as he ushers her into a future,

‘get up, hold your boy, I will make him into a great nation’.

That future we discover does not retreat from the misery of the past but moves on through it. We leave Hagar with her fully grown son, both thriving in the wilderness with Hagar arranging his marriage. I picture her, a matriarch in her own right, with her son, not overcome by violence anymore.

This reading of Hagar is from the work of Dr Eve R Parker in her forthcoming contribution to ‘Theologies from the Inside Out: Critical Conceptions of Pregnancy and Birth’ ed. Karen O’Donnell and Claire Williams, SCM forthcoming 2024.