Heaven as the Death of the Self

Whereas Hell is for those who are not willing to lose their life

“Whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” (Matthew 16:25) This little phrase from Jesus sums up a teaching that is expanded and explicated in great detail by many of the Catholic tradition’s greatest mystics. The idea is that in order to attain “eternal life” (whatever that is — it is essentially identified with “seeing God face to face”) one must be willing to lose one’s life. This is paradoxical and deliberately so: the renunciation of the desire for life is prerequisite to the attainment of (eternal) life. Indeed, it is striking that much of the tradition of reflection is also a reflection on the words of Exodus 33:20: “No one can see me and live.” These words led to the development of the notion that not only is death a condition for seeing God, but that to see God is itself, in some profound sense, to die. To restate the matter, the afterlife is itself death to this life; and hence to those that remain attached to life in all its forms (animality, the urge for self-preservation, egoism, sin), the afterlife necessarily appears as a kind of death or annihilation.

Though they are ultimately rooted in scripture, the philosophical origins of mystical reflection on this subject can be traced to Plato. In the Phaedo, Plato famously described the philosophic life as a kind of practicing for death. His reasoning for this was based on the simple conception of death as the separation of soul and body. Since the body was, in Plato’s estimation, largely an obstacle to the pursuit of wisdom, the philosopher should regard death itself as a gift, in which the soul was freed from its bodily shackles. Practically speaking, this meant that the entire philosophical way of life entailed a deep ascetic praxis of disdaining bodily pleasures and sensations, cultivating a kind of detachment from the body in order to preserve the soul’s ability to recall its spiritual kinship with the truth. To practice such detachment is the same thing as to practice death.

Aristotle shared with Plato the definition of death as the separation of soul and body, but unlike Plato he did not consider the body to be an obstacle to the attainment of knowledge. Rather, the body was a necessary instrument of philosophy, since for Aristotle “all knowledge begins in the senses.” For Aristotle, even though the intellect possessed a certain immortality (cf. On the Soul, III.4-5), since its operation as such was a purely spiritual or separable operation, it nonetheless depended upon the reception of “phantasmic” data from the bodily senses in order to operate at all. For this reason, the dissolution of the body-soul unity could not, for Aristotle, be considered desirable: it is an unnatural condition, a destruction of the unified substance. Consequently, philosophy as a practicing for death could have no meaning for Aristotle, at least prima facie. While this seems on one level to accord better with “common sense” than Plato’s conception, on the other hand it does seem to leave one with a philosophically unsatisfactory account of the immortality of the soul. What good is a soul that, though it technically survives biological death, is no longer able to activate its intellectual operations because it is separated from the body? Aristotle himself would sometimes assert that nature does nothing in vain: final causality is at work in every instance. What could be the final causality operative in a death where the intellectual faculty could not be activated? Such an intellect, though it continues to exist, might as well be dead.

The Neoplatonic tradition, beginning with Plotinus, achieved an impressive synthesis of the Platonic and Aristotelian systems that yielded both theoretical conclusions and ascetical practices which neither Plato nor Aristotle on their own considered completely, at least not in their known writings (though I’m happy to be corrected on this point). For Plotinus, the realization of contemplative union with the One was realized beyond intellect itself, and therefore only by transcending intellect. Plotinus thus surpasses Plato in the practice of death as separation from the body, since for Plotinus it is not only the body but even the operation of the intellect which must in some way be left behind as the soul ascends to the One. Paradoxically, in this way Plotinus’s way of practicing for death comes closer to Aristotle’s conception of the survival of the intellect after death, inasmuch as the latter is an intellect hardly worthy of the name, an intellect whose operation has been silenced. What Aristotle did not explicitly highlight, but which emerges from Plotinus’s mystical metaphysics, is that it is precisely this silence of the intellect beyond death — a kind of psychic death in its own right (though not an “ontological” annihilation) — that constitutes the soul’s contemplative disposition towards the One. In the mysticism of Plotinus, the Aristotelian separated soul who, though immortal, is as good as dead receives a new teleology precisely in its being as good as dead. Mysticism is the practice of total death: not only biological death, as for Plato, but also the psychic might-as-well-be-death of the Aristotelian intellect.

This understanding carried over into the Christian Neoplatonic achievement of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, which in turn went on to exert a profound influence upon widely divergent mystical theologies across the East and West. Dionysius’ mystical writings often advise the reader to abandon both sensible and intellectual operations, in order to rise to the heights of contemplation. This is a radical ascetical practice of detachment, even a practice of both physical and psychic death. Yet such a renunciation is not merely the prerequisite for contemplation; rather, contemplation itself affects the mind in such a way that the latter becomes, as it were, blinded in its very ability to see — so much does the divine essence surpass the ability of the soul to comprehend it:

Trinty, which exceedeth all Being, Deity, and Goodness! Thou that instructeth Christians in Thy heavenly wisdom! Guide us to that topmost height of mystic lore which exceedeth light and more than exceedeth knowledge, where the simple, absolute, and unchangeable mysteries of heavenly Truth lie hidden in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their darkness, and surcharging our blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories which exceed all beauty!

In other words, not only is this act of detachment and death a condition for the attainment of contemplation, but contemplation itself is this death. Dionysius goes on to advise his disciple Timothy to

leave the senses and the activities of the intellect and all things that the senses or the intellect can perceive, and all things in this world of nothingness, or in that world of being, and that, thine understanding being laid to rest, thou strain (so far as thou mayest) towards an union with Him whom neither being nor understanding can contain. For, by the unceasing and absolute renunciation of thyself and all things, thou shalt in pureness cast all things aside, and be released from all, and so shalt be led upwards to the Ray of that divine Darkness which exceedeth all existence. (The Mystical Theology, I.1.)

Thus, according to Dionysius, it is only by this simultaneous abandonment of both body and mind, which is nothing less than a radical practice of death, that the soul might hope to be carried up to mystical union with the God who is “above every essence and knowledge.” What is also notable is that, for Dionysius, this same abandonment of both sense and intellect constitutes nothing less than liberation from the self: “ecstasy in all purity, from thyself and all.” The renunciation of life is thus equated to the renunciation of self, a death in every way, both biologically and psychologically. More than this, it is a kind of self-annihilation, for the God in whom one loses oneself in contemplation is beyond even existence itself, such that Dionysius does not hesitate in many places to say that God is a “Non-Being.” Dionysius thus sets the tone for the whole tradition of Christian “apophatic” theology.

Multiple Christian mystics receive the Dionysian synthesis into their own theological language, while bringing out just those elements of the Dionysian ascent that constitute a profound death of the self. Among these mystics is Saint Bonaventure, the author of the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (The Journey of the Mind into God), a signature text of medieval mystical theology. Bonaventure’s text is rich and complex, and directly cites Dionysius’ profound advice to Timothy regarding the practice of apophatic denial. In Bonaventure, one discovers an orientation to death that is, so to speak, made into an absolute condition of the soul’s journey into God. Christ’s own death upon the cross is the archetype of this absolute death, the historical embodiment of apophatic theology itself, in which the soul is called to participate by its own death to self. Bonaventure states in no uncertain terms that the soul who wishes to see God must learn to love death, by practicing the silencing of its sensible and intellectual faculties in the manner described by Dionysius. Thus, Bonaventure concludes his text:

If, however, you ask how all these things come about, ask grace, not learning; desire, not intellect; the groaning of prayer and not diligent reading; the Bridegroom, not the academic teacher; God, not a human being; darkness, not clarity; not light, but the fire that inflames one totally and carries one into God through spiritual fervor and with the most burning affections. Now this ‘fire’ is God, and God’s furnace is in Jerusalem. And it is Christ who starts the fire with the white flame of his most intense passion. Only that person who says My soul chooses hanging, and my bones death can truly grasp this passion. Only one who loves this death can see God, for it is absolutely true that no one can see me and live.

Let us die, then, and enter into this darkness. Let us silence all our cares, desires, and images in the imagination. Let us pass over with the crucified Christ from this world to the Father, so that when the Father has been shown to us, we may say with Philip: It is enough for us. Let us hear with Paul: My grace is sufficient for you; and let us exult with David, saying: My flesh and my heart waste away; you are the God of my heart, and the God that is my portion forever. Blessed be the Lord forever, and let all the people say: let it be, let it be. Amen. (Itinerarium, VII.6.)

Notably, Bonaventure does not encourage the Christian soul to rely upon the promise of resurrection as a reassurance of continued life after death. Rather, the exhortation is simply to “say with St. Philip: It is enough for us,” and to “hear with Paul: My grace is sufficient for you,” etc. In other words, it is not in the hope of immortality but in the acceptance of our absolute finitude in death, which is our absolute finitude before the infinity of God, that our confidence resides — and only in a Christlike death that the promise of seeing God resides.

The same themes appear again, in perhaps their most radical form, in the mystical teachings of Meister Eckhart, for whom the reduction of the self to absolute nothingness constitutes the essence of detachment. For Eckhart as for Bonaventure, this reduction to absolute nothingness is not merely a precondition of union with God: it is in itself union or even identity with God, since by comparison to the individual soul’s limited being or existence, God is an Absolute Nothingness. Therefore, the soul must itself become nothing, so that it might thereby become God. Or rather, for the soul to return from its “somethingness” to the nothingness that is the ground or “un-ground” of its being is to return to its truest self, where it is one with God in its original nothingness. This entails everything that Dionysius and Bonaventure recommended regarding the purification of the soul from all thinking, imagining, willing, and desiring, such that, in Eckhart’s words, “[man] must want and desire as little as he wanted and desired when he did not exist.” (Sermon 52) In returning by way of this total death of self to who he was when he was not yet created, man returns to his uncreated self, which subsists only in the eternal and uncreated Godhead itself.

It is from the Church’s great mystics that we therefore learn an invaluable lesson regarding how we ought, or ought not, to conceive of the afterlife. The great paradox that emerges in the mystical journey is that the afterlife itself resembles, nay it is death: the total death of the created self, the abandonment of its biological, sensitive, and intellectual faculties, and the return of the self to its uncreated form, its nothingness, in which alone it has already always been one with God. There is no room in this vision of an afterlife to imagine anything like our day-to-day “self-consciousness,” as if heaven were but the continuing existence after death of my familiar self, only a better and holier version of me. As Thomas Merton is reported to have said to one of his novices, “One thing for sure about heaven is that there is not going to be much of you there.” To enter heaven is rather to fall into the vast field of transcendent nothingness that lies hidden at the core of myself, by confronting my utter contingency, and finitude fill in the face, and embracing it.

Of course, in order to do this it is necessary to overcome the fear of death that naturally plagues us. “Of all things death is the most dreadful” (Hegel, Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit.) The ordinary pious Christian might take comfort in the supposition that the beauty of his religion is that it frees him from having to overcome the fear of death, since immortality and resurrection are assured to him (if he lives according to the precepts of his religion). According to this conception, God is a good and merciful God because he permits us to evade the fear of death rather than requiring us to face it full in the face and overcome it. But if what we have learned from the mystics above is to be taken as true, this is a mistake. The attachment to life and to all of one’s faculties — one’s knowledge, imagination, senses, will, passions, desires, etc. — is an obstacle to union with God.

Accordingly, the God who saves us and brings us into union with himself can only be a God who demands that we follow him down the hard path of renunciation of life: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.” (Matthew 16:24-25) By contrast, or rather by the same token, the God who concedes anything to those who remain attached to life is the God who sends them to Hell, where they will forever be released from the necessity of losing their lives or denying themselves — because they will never see God. If the God who permits us to evade the fear of death is a merciful God, then it must follow, as I have written in the past, that Hell is a mercy: it is where people go whom God does not force, against their wills, to lose their lives for his sake. To those in Hell, as well as to anybody in this life who remains attached to life and to himself (and who imagines his salvation as merely the continuation of this life and this self in “glorified” form), the prospect of eternal life rightly understood — as kind of annihilation of the self — would be a truly terrible thing.

But those for whom the self is known to be a burden and an obstacle to union with God look forward to this death, they “love this death” (following the advice of Bonaventure), as their truest liberation and salvation. They can say confidently with Jesus, now and at the hour of their death: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said thus, he gave up the ghost.” (Luke 23:46)