Death As a Stranger

“Let us now descend into the terrible, faceless depths of death as a stranger,” writes Peter Kreeft in his book Love Is Stronger Than Death. This second of death's five faces is the darkest, “a dead relationship with death.” The reason for this is that this posture of death corresponds to the human emotion not of hate (like one would feel towards an enemy), but of indiff-erence (like one who feels nothing at all). After all, the opposite of love is not hate, but apathy. To hate someone you must actually feel something towards him. Indifference is the absence of feeling: “Hate is like poison, but indifference is like starvation.”

Premodern man was fascinated with death, Kreeft argues, largely because it is the last true unknown. “A flat earth is more fascinating than a round earth because a flat earth has an edge, an end.” He points out that in Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, the world becomes round as the result of divine punishment:

“And those that sailed furthest set but a girdle about the Earth and returned weary at last to the place of their beginning; and they said, ‘All roads are now bent.’”

Modern man, unlike his premodern counterpart, ignores death the way he would a stranger on the street. One of the reasons for this is our worshiping at the shrine of technology. In previous cultures the problem was how to conform our lives to bigger things outside of ourselves (like truth or God) by means of virtue, wisdom, or religion. In our day, the challenge we face is how to gain conquest over nature by getting the world to conform to us.

How does this relate to our ignoring of death?

If modern man believes that there is no higher purpose in life than his own pleasure (which is achieved through technology and its conquest over nature), then suffering becomes unendurable. The flipside of Nietzsche’s statement that “he who has a why to live can bear with almost any how” is also true: he who has no why cannot endure any how.

“The fact of death is the failure of our dream of divinity. No wonder we turn our face from it. Death’s face grins at us, and we must frown. In order to put a smile on our face, we must put the mask of a stranger on the face of death.”

The most common defense against death, in other words, is not so much a good offense, but a yawn.

Kreeft concludes that if we do actually face death head on it would be like looking into the sun. Death, like God, says, “No man can see my face and live.” But if death only seems dark but is really light because it reveals the truth about ourselves, then death is neither an enemy nor a stranger, but a friend.

We’ll explore friendship with death in our next installment, so stay tuned....

Death As An Enemy

“Death wears five faces,” writes Peter Kreeft, “and the only way to see each of them is to have seen the others first. Each face is a password to the next.”

Death’s first face, argues Kreeft, is that of an enemy. Its subsequent faces are that of a stranger, a friend, a mother, and finally, a lover.

“If death does not first appear to us as an enemy, then it cannot appear truly as a friend, or as anything greater than a friend. Death cannot immediately appear as a friend. Death cannot be a friend; it can only become a friend, after first being an enemy. Otherwise, it is not death that is a friend, but something else we confuse with death, such as sleep, or rest, or peace.”

Death’s initial posture as an enemy flies in the face of the American fairy tale that “death is a natural part of life.” All the great myths throughout history argue against such euphemism, seeing death as disastrous and catastrophic. Stoicism, Kreeft insists, is not courageous but cowardly, for it refuses to face what we inwardly know to be true because death screams it at us: something has gone horribly wrong.

There is a puzzle here, Kreeft writes, because death, which on one level is most natural, feels to us to be most unnatural.

“We are shocked at the irreversibility of death although it is utterly familiar, utterly universal, utterly natural. We find the natural unnatural. Why? Let us be shocked at our shock. It is shocking that we are shocked at the inevitable, the familiar, the expected.”

The naturalness of death is seen in the cycle of biology. Death, in this sense, is the fertilizer of life. Yet we still rebel against nature, we have “a lover’s quarrel with the world” at this very point. The reason for this, Kreeft argues (quoting the Preacher), is that “God has put eternity in man’s heart” (Ecc. 3:11).

Furthermore, death is inextricably connected with sin and guilt. At this point Kreeft suggests a “thought experiment” in which the reader supposes for a moment that there is a God. This supposition serves to make some sense out of the strong intuition we have that connects death with sin and guilt.

“If death is indeed the consequence, symptom, and sign of sin, we are even worse off than we thought. We see in every death not only our defeat but our guilt. This is worse even than defeat.”

But there is light even in this cave. Kreeft quotes George MacDonald: “Ah, I would not lose my blame! In my blame is my hope.” As Celia says in T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party:

“I should really like to think there’s something wrong with me—because, if there isn’t, then there’s something wrong with the world itself—and that’s much more frightening!”

Thus ironically, “there is hope: we are guilty of death.” To blame ourselves is to vindicate reality, and ultimately, to vindicate God in the process.

Sounds a bit like good ol’ fashioned law/gospel preaching, innit?

Love Is Stronger Than Death

"Life is always fatal," writes Boston College philosopher Peter Kreeft in his pro-found little book Love Is Stronger Than Death. "No one gets out of it alive."

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In his introduction to the work he claims that life is either totally meaningful or totally meaningless, and determining which statement is true is only possible by first determining what death is. "We do not know why we die," Kreeft writes, "unless we know why we live."

"Death is the one pathway through which all people at all times raise the question of the absolute, the question of God. The last excuse for not raising the God-question is Thoreau's 'one world at a time.' Death removes this last excuse."

In his book Kreeft argues that death has five "faces," or assumes five different postures as it confronts us, and as we confront it. Death is (1) an enemy, (2) a stranger, (3) a friend, (4) a mother, and (5) a lover.

I hope to take us through some highlights from Love Is Stronger Than Death, so don't touch that dial.