‘Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death! And to those in the tombs he has given life’: this is the constant theme, in the Eastern Church, of the Easter celebration, the ‘feast of feasts’. ‘The day of Resurrection! The Passover, the Passover of the Lord! From death to life … Christ our God has brought us over… Now, all is filled with light, heaven and earth and the places under the earth. All creation celebrates the Resurrection of Christ, on whom it is founded.’
The Resurrection signifies the victory of life in its wholeness over death and hell, and offers this victory to all. And we know that death, from the point of view of the Bible and the Fathers, is not simply the end of life, nor is hell simply a spiritual state beyond the grave. Both belong to our fallen condition, with its contradictions, its deep anxiety, the slavery that surrounds it in a world where everything is external to every other thing, and especially humanity to itself. Death and hell are fallen time, the cruel time of Baudelaire’s ‘Clock’, the time that wears us out, turns us into machines and destroys us. Death and hell are fallen space, the space that separates and imprisons. Even the logic of this world is fallen, because it always opposes or confuses. Finally, and above all, hell, in the words of the bitter philosopher, is other people, and the hatred of me for myself which turns me and myself into strangers and rivals. And despite so much tenderness and beauty – for the world, fallen as it is, is still God’s creation – there is the unavoidable separation and the riddle of nothingness. The riddle by whose alchemy every revolutionary movement, every political or cultural crusade, however necessary, ends in nothing. It is as though we were fighting for justice and well-being on board a great ship, only to discover that it is sinking.
God did not create death. He, the Living, created human beings to enjoy the fullness of life. But that could only be free participation in divine existence, for ‘God alone has immortality’ (1 Timothy 6.16). Death came into the world and has become an ever-present shadow because humanity turned away, and continues to turn away, from the Living God. Because we are afraid to die we hope to escape by taking refuge in a life of falsity and lies, so the power of death is extended further. Humanity boasts itself of this world, thinking to make it its kingdom, looking to the world for security while enslaving it to ‘vanity’, that is to say to emptiness. Humanity cannot annihilate itself because it is still created by God, animated by the divine breath. But, although it lives because of God, it does not wish to live for God; and in itself it is nothing. Its very life is a ‘dead life’ and its soul, after physical death, survives in a phantom half-life; the Bible knows nothing of any poetry of the ‘immortality of the soul’.
Death is therefore fundamentally against nature, and there is a sense in which death is always murder since it strikes against an existence intended for eternity. Death is the perversion of freedom, conferring on nothingness a paradoxical reality, making it parasitic on being, which God created for fullness. We can therefore understand Christ’s description of the devil as ‘father of lies’ and ‘a murderer from the beginning’ (John 8.44-45). Lying is to prefer one’s creaturely nothingness to the Truth which is God. And murder is the intrusion of death, ‘for the wages of sin is death’. Not the destruction of the creature, for God is faithful, but its condition against nature: not nothingness but monstrosity.
~Olivier Clement, On Human Being: A Spiritual Anthropology
