Possibility One: There Is No Afterlife

There is only a material universe.

If there is nothing beyond matter, if there is no creator God outside the temporal sequence of emergent reality within the universe, then this universe somehow came into being by itself. Put the strangeness of that aside for now. We are still faced with the brute fact that, like all things within it, the universe too must perish at the end of time. Without God, the transcendent-divine ground of being, annihilation is the rule for everything.

In terms of human living, William Lane Craig writes

If there is no God, then any significance, value, or purpose in life depend upon whatever meaning we would give to it. Without God, life could have no intrinsic meaning. But life would not be meaningless. I am here to confer meaning to my life. You can give meaning to your life too. Or not. Without God, life would not be meaningful in itself—there would be no meaning of life—but you and I could assign whatever meaning we wanted to it.

With God there is the eschaton, the ultimate significance, value, and purpose. Without God, there is no ultimacy, but there remains a set of penultimate significances, values, and purposes that we will have generated ourselves and in tandem with others.

If God does not exist, Craig argues, then we are just filling our days, assigning meanings here and there to what remains essentially meaningless in itself, before the end inevitably comes.

We look upon the faces of our children, and we love them. You bind your life to your spouse’s life because you love her. We are prepared to lay down our lives for our friends because they are worthy of our love.

But without God, who are they?

Ultimately, without a transcendent-divine ground, those we love are no more than a unity of material and cultural processes to whom we attach a value. They are valuable because we say so, but not in themselves. Not intrinsically valuable. They are valuable in relation to us, but not ultimately valuable in themselves, because if there is no God, nothing is ultimately valuable.

If this is what we think, this is certainly not how we love.

We tell ourselves that there is no God, but this necessarily means that life—mine, my beloved’s—lacks ultimate meaning. The absurdity rings out when we try to integrate our irreligious minds with our passionate hearts. “I love you and you are precious. But there is no God and there is no ultimate meaning. Ultimately, you are nothing. Nor does it matter, because I am nothing too.”

How does one reconcile the ocean of grief that wells up after the loss of a loved one with the insistence that he or she was ultimately nothing at all? Our grief flows out as raw, unexpurgated honesty. Grief is a torrent of reality that, in being a passion rather than a theory, remains an apprehension of something like that ultimate value in which our beloved participated by simply existing.

If God does not exist, then you are just a miscarriage of nature, thrust into a purposeless universe to live [an ultimately] purposeless life. … Do you understand the gravity of the alternatives before us? For if God exists, then there is hope for man. But if God does not exist, then all we are left with is despair. Do you understand why the question of God’s existence is so vital for man?[5]

If annihilation is what the life of any person culminates in, then our love and grief are ultimately absurd. If love willed to love the beloved forever, then it lied. Love deceived us. There is no afterlife because life is material and death is no mystery. Death is complete annihilation.

Possibility Two: There Is an Afterlife

Our minds work within temporal limits, but our hearts open to a horizon of eternity when we love. Either the mind is right or the heart is right.

What does grief answer?

Grief pours out from burning hearts, but relativist minds will not allow the consolation of hope. They cannot find within them the resources to accept that, in deep, painful grief, we have already caught sight of the Mystery in our midst; the Mystery whose unknowability is an abiding presence that radiates infinite meaning, infinite value, and infinite purpose.

In the white-hot blaze of grief, and in spite of our rationalized commitment to a godless universe, we call out, de profundis, into the cosmos after our infinite loss. “Deep calls to deep/ in the roar of your torrents/ and all your waves and breakers/ sweep over me.”[6]

The acknowledgment that Mystery permeates all life and death is the beginning where our minds can be brought into sync with the truth of our grieving hearts. It is the acknowledgment that neither the universe nor anything in it have brought themselves into existence. Existence is a fact that does not explain itself, but points toward the Mystery that encompasses all things.

This acknowledgment is the beginning of consolation. For Craig, if there is a God, there are grounds for hope in the face of death.

Socrates is one whose life models the integration of mind and heart. In the end, as he awaits his imminent execution, he has the conviction that, in death, he is on the final leg of a journey. For most of his life, he has pursued wisdom through loving it. In his prison cell, he speaks to his friends for the last time.

His friends wonder about what will happen to him in a few moments once he has drunk the poisonous hemlock and has died. What will become of the soul of Socrates? One friend, Cebes, confesses his fear that on the release of the soul from the body, the soul will dissipate like a cloud.

Socrates, from the authority of his wisdom-loving soul, offers the following response to his friends. Since the soul is capable of receiving wisdom, of being impregnated by wisdom,

Socrates addresses the fears of his friends about the existence of the soul after death by pointing to how body and soul are not reducible to the other. The body is material, but the soul is not. It cannot dissipate or decompose because it was never composed of parts that would come apart in death.

That can never be, dear Simmias and Cebes. The truth is that the soul which is pure at departing draws after her no bodily taint.

Bodily death affects the body. Socrates consoles his friends by reminding them that the hidden life of a person’s interiority is not of the body: wonderment, curiosity, the unrestricted desire to know, to value, to love. These belong to the soul. The soul must surely persist since death pertains to the body alone.

Socrates has the courage to meet death because the separation of the soul from the body in death is an event that he understands precisely as a homecoming. With hope that supersedes the weight of dread, he understands death to be nothing less than the consummation or perfection of life, because his life had a purpose that reached beyond the mortal conditions of that life. Death is not otherwise than life but is the completion of life.

The death of the lover of divine wisdom is a homecoming into the fullness of divine wisdom. In fact, the life that fell in love with truth, goodness, and beauty—the transcendentals, dimensions of being, facets of divine wisdom—is a life that practiced what Socrates calls the “art of dying.”

Such an evocative phrase!

The “art of dying” begins in the assumption that the pattern of one’s life will be the pattern of one’s afterlife.

Socrates has the conviction that he is going home. It was to wisdom, indeed, that he always belonged in love.

Like love, wisdom straddles the divide that is mortal life and death. In love and wisdom, death takes on the meaning of the perfection of the soul. That is, death is not the annihilation of life, but for the one who dies, it is more properly said to be the consummation of her life.

Something consummated is something completed and brought to its perfection. Death is the annihilation of the body, but not of the person who is more than a body. For Socrates, death is the occasion of the person’s completion, if love and wisdom were the patterns of the person’s life.

At the end of Socrates’s final conversation, the executioner enters. In the course of the conversation between Socrates and his companions, death has acquired a sacramental quality because dying has become a sacred act. It has become the sign of a homecoming, a welcoming home into the divine Mystery at journey’s end. As such, it requires the ritual dressing of the body and an almsgiving to the gods that Socrates now performs. In gratitude that outweighs sorrow, Socrates anticipates his consummation or perfection in wisdom. He dies in the hope that in death he is going home to meet the god who is wisdom and to be perfected there.

For those who grieved the passing of Socrates, death has framed his life: this is who he is.

In Summary

Death is no evil. It closes the term of a mortal life. We learn from Socrates that death is like the deepest, most restful sleep that does not end or that it is a transition of some kind that many wisdom traditions of humanity have suggested. Is there some other way to grasp what death can be?

If there is no afterlife, then we sleep uninterruptedly in the tranquility of the cosmos, our life and its works complete. Annihilation or not, there are no grounds for fear.

If there is an afterlife, then we are already on our way, even now. What is worthy of us in such an afterlife is being prefigured in the present by who we choose to be in the present. Not precluding grace, our lives are charged with the possibility that there is an eternal perspective, and within this perspective that does not end, ours is the choice about who we are to be. Plato’s “art of dying” is really the art of living sub specie aeternitatis.

In grief, you love as you have always loved: from the perspective of eternity. What grief is telling us as it angles itself toward lamentation is that your beloved was, in her own idiosyncratic way, already living the “art of dying.” She was always on her way.

Perhaps your grief has already turned into lamentation. Your love for your deceased beloved carried within itself from the start a seed of hope that love endures beyond the term of mortality.