"I expect the resurrection of the dead"? Psychological or ontological request?

1. Import

While tracing the historical course of Christianity, it is natural for the student of the contradictions and confrontations between the Church and the world to pay close attention to the famous speech of the Apostle of the Gentiles at the Pnyx,

The Athenian listeners were captivated by the unprecedented message of the Gospel, until reference was made to the resurrection of Christ, "and when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, while others said, "We will hear you again about this."

Today, twenty centuries later, we do not seem to have overcome the initial difficulty of meeting the Divine Revelation and the human spirit, as is clearly outlined during their first contact in Athens. One of the most basic objections that human thought raises against religion is related to the problematic of death and we could summarize it in the following aphoristic formulation: Religion is a human construct, which is built on the human fear of death and is based on the creation of restorative but illusory paradises.

The question we are called upon to answer, as already formulated in the title of this work, is now clear: Is the Christian belief in the expected resurrection of the dead a human invention, intended to alleviate existential anxiety in the face of the inevitability of death, or is it a truth whose ontological dimensions transcend any kind of utility, even if this is unconscious or seemingly necessary, even as an illusion?

Is the fear of death really a capable and necessary component for the foundation of religion? And also: does Christian teaching contain elements that could overturn the supposed rational demystification of the religious phenomenon?

2. The fear of death as a cause of faith

The century we live in is characterized by the compulsive effort to justify the ambitions of the 19th century, namely to discover and document with scientific methods the universal laws that govern human behavior. Within the framework of this mentality, the belief is formed that death—the awe and fear in the face of the inevitability of human mortality—is one of the creative causes of religion.

Among the exponents of these views and the shapers of the epistemological assumptions that supported the anthropocentric, anthropogenic and utilitarian version of religion are undoubtedly two powerful figures of our century, K. Marx and S. Freud. K. Marx's perception of religion as the "opium of the people" — that is, as an illusion-producing tranquilizer of human anguish — is well-known and there is no need to dwell on it. However, it is worth recording a formulation of his, which more strongly emphasizes the correlation that he considers to exist between religion and the fear of death: "The abolition of religion as an illusory happiness of the people is necessary for their real happiness. The demand to renounce illusions about its nature is a demand to renounce a situation that needs illusions. The critique of religion is therefore, in embryonic form, the critique of the valley of sighs, the halo of which is religion."

Freudian theory does not seem, in general, to be far from this perception. Freud assumed that man, coming into contact with the tragedy of death and unable to face it, "invented" for reasons of psychological balance imaginary ways, that is, religious beliefs, so that he could mentally balance between his realistic acceptance and his psychological denial.

Does the Orthodox Christian position towards the fact of death justify the sociological, psychological or even religious perceptions that seem to be consistent with the treatment of faith as the result of psychological defense mechanisms against death anxiety?

We believe that if one were to observe the language used by Orthodox theological discourse when it refers to the problem of death, one would, at the very least, be more careful in generalizing its conclusions regarding the psychologically utilitarian version of faith. The realism and objectivity of our theology leave no room for either denial or embellishment of the most tragic characteristic of human existence.

We only need to look back to the most indisputable and timeless text of Orthodox theology on death—the funeral service—to ascertain the realism and suffering in the face of the “terrible hour of death.” Who would speak of a religious-type denial of the event and its tragedy in the face of formulations such as: “I mourn and lament when I think of death, and I see lying in the graves the beauty that was created in the image of God, shapeless, inglorious, without kind; Oh, the wonder! What mystery has become of us? How have we surrendered to corruption, and been united to death?”

One could of course claim that these are lyrical expressions of the past, which do not fully agree with current perceptions. It is a fact that some theological views are often presented as self-evident, such as that death is automatically overcome thanks to the immortality of the soul, or sometimes that spiritual improvement — "perfection" through the cultivation of virtues and through the observance of natural or divine law — can be a way of overcoming death. These are classic religious-type arguments, which in their depth express the pious version of Western pragmatism. However, it is obvious that they ultimately justify the theory of psychological necessity as a causal factor of religiosity.

Modern Orthodox theology does not seem to differ—how could it be?—from the spirit of the funeral service, but it clearly differs from the “religious” arguments we mentioned above.

According to a modern theologian, for example, "Neither the 'moral' nor the 'judicial' solution can provide the overcoming of death... No, death is not defeated by any of these; what is defeated by them is the preoccupation with the problem of death, that is, the consciousness of the tragedy and unacceptability of death is defeated. Piety creates people who are not moved, who are not indignant; because there is death, either because they resort to the belief in the immortality of the soul in order to console themselves and be consoled, or because they absolutize morality to such an extent that they believe that immortality is gained by virtue."

Therefore, another adds: "We must eliminate all ideologies and all religions, including all forms of degenerate Christianity, since to this day they have not enabled us to live a comprehensive solution to our existence. The most serious flaw of every ideology and religion is that they despise the only truly essential question of life, which is none other than the question of death."

We could therefore reverse the anti-religious positions, claiming that the intellectualized approach to death by the socio-philosophical or psychological intellect is much more conducive to the denial, repression or hopeless rationalization of the most tragic event of human existence than our ecclesiastical Tradition. This is also proven by the cultural denial of death that characterizes modern Western culture with negative psychological consequences, which we could summarize under the term “pathological mourning”.

However, we need to seek our responsibility in cases where deviations from our genuine Tradition justify open-ended challenges. “From the fermentation (meaning the world with Christianity) emerged the good of democracy, the limitation and de-sacrifice of politics, the importance of dialogue and respect for others, the increasing clarification of human rights, of which the most precious is freedom of the spirit. But here we have a deviation: the piety and moralism of Christian populations brought about the denial of God, of an “avenging God”. The denial of everything transcendent followed. After this, how is it possible to establish the transcendence of the person? The “death of God” entails the death of man.”

The above-mentioned forces us to abandon the oversimplified, as it turns out, approach of faith as a result of a psychological need in the face of death anxiety and pushes us towards a more thorough investigation of things. How intense and clear are the contrasts between theology and the science of psychology? And also: is what is presented as a confrontation necessarily a point of difference only, or are there points of convergence that cannot be made visible within the generalised schemes of ideologically-based conflicts?

3. The overcoming of death as an ontological demand

In Freud's work —apart from the general points we have mentioned— we also encounter some particular aspects, which are of great interest in relation to our subject. The substratum of Freudian thought is characterized by a dualism, within the framework of which the basic and dominant instinctual forces that he initially admitted were the instinct of pleasure (libido) and the instinct of self-preservation (self-preservation), as opposing tendencies. The aim is the final balance between them, as the forces of self-preservation modify or even inhibit the libido based on the principle of reality testing.

In May 1920, the father of psychoanalysis published his work “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”. With this text, Freud takes his thinking even further, introducing for the first time his theory regarding the existence of an instinct that opposes the life instincts, and which he calls the death instinct or drive. Thus, a more complex understanding develops around the nature of the two aforementioned instincts (libido-self-preservation), for which he now expresses himself in a more philosophical way, using the Greek terms “eros” and “thanatos”. In a letter to Einstein (Vienna, September 1932), he writes characteristically: “According to our hypothesis, human instincts are of only two categories: those aimed at preservation and unification – which we call “erotic”, precisely in the sense in which Plato uses the word “Eros” in his Symposium, or “sexually”, with a deliberate extension of the popular understanding of “sexuality”, and those aimed at destruction and murder and which we classify together, such as aggression or the instinct of destructiveness”.

The extensions of the theory lead to conclusions that constitute a challenge to the epistemological model of the time and of the modern era. If the death instinct is inherent in human nature, expressed as a force directed against oneself, then it is nothing more than a force that leads to "an insurmountable tendency of regression that aims to restore the most organized forms of life to the least organized, equalizing all differences of levels and reducing the animal to the inanimate".¬ This is a natural tendency

regression to lower levels of organization of life based on the principle of homeostasis, assuming the assumption that living organisms originate from inorganic matter and therefore tend to return to it.

A modern psychoanalyst, commenting on Freud's text: "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", characteristically observes: "When he speaks of a demonic force or demonic power we may not have a problem with it, because obviously there are dark destructive forces at work in our inner world. But, when he refers to a different perceptual framework and speaks of a biological instinct that leads to a return to an inorganic state, this creates much greater difficulty for us." It is obvious that the greatest difficulty arises when, in the extension of the theory, the need to accept the assumption that organic life comes from inorganic life becomes apparent.

We thus reach a pivotal point. The initial approach, in which the religious phenomenon is understood simply as a response to the psychological demand of fear of death, now moves into greater depth, as the priority of ontological reflection emerges.

When the Orthodox Church speaks of death, it refers to predicates even more provocative than the Freudian hypothesis of the death instinct and return to the inorganic or Heidegger's hypothesis of "being-towards-death". For Orthodox theology, man was created, built, from absolute nothingness "out of nothingness" and by extension "the threat of death is the threat of nothingness, of absolute nothingness, of "not being", that is, of returning to the pre-creational state. And this threat is permanent for the created, it is not overcome by any power inherent in its nature. By nature we are born dead, biologically we die from the moment we are born, and the whole world as a created thing decays in existence and exists in decay".

Man is created, that is, mortal, subject to the possibility of complete and absolute annihilation, and from this awareness emerges the realism of our Tradition, as we outlined it in our previous references. However, the created can only survive if it comes out of itself, if it is bound and related to something uncreated, and the only uncreated is the uncreated God.

Christ is not the savior of the world because he offered a moral model or a teaching for man, but because he himself is the incarnation of the overcoming of death. In the God-human form of Christ, the created and the uncreated are united – the Divine and the human nature are united in the way that the Fourth Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon teaches us: “inseparably” and “indivisibly”. If this union were not “inseparably” and “inseparably”, freedom would be abolished, the preservation of the special identity, of the otherness between the lover and the beloved would be destroyed. If it were not “inseparably”, there would be a distance, a partial separation, between the created and the Uncreated. However, every “distance” between God and man brings death, teaches Saint Chrysostom. "Without love, that is, ecstasy from the self-sufficiency of being to a movement of unity with the "other" and ultimately with the truly "other" (the Uncreated), there is no immortality."

Our theology of death begins in reverse, not from an understanding of death, but from an understanding of the meaning of the Resurrection. "Resurrection of Christ" first "beheld", then we can ask directly: "Where is your center, death? Where is your victory, hell?".

Our Church was built with its foundation on a tomb. It did not dogmatize based on nebulous theories about reincarnations or the postmortem appearance of its founder. On the contrary, it saw “Him already dead” on the cross, without the slightest inclination to embellish or question the event. It heard Him deliver up the Spirit and from the side of the corpse, which the soldier had pierced, it saw that “immediately blood and water came out”. It saw it, it experienced it painfully and it “testified with a loud voice, and its testimony is true, knowing that it speaks the truth…”.

We, the Church, knew well that God died, before the fact became an intellectual invention of the wise men of the world. But we also know that He died “for the life of the world.” One must dare to question every psychological, ideological or even religious refuge that falsely comforts the experience of mortality; to dare to abandon oneself to the feeling that our life “has approached hell” and to risk—like the myrrh-bearing women—approaching His tomb. Only then can the “discovery” that God died be complete, when we also discover that “the stone is rolled away” from the door of the monument. That “Christ is risen and life reigns.”

4. Conclusions

In the face of the pain of death, the solution is not psychological denial of the event, nor an apparent acceptance that conceals the loss of hope. “Brothers, I do not want you to be ignorant about those who are asleep, so that you may not grieve, just as others do who have no hope.” What, then, should we not be ignorant of? “For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep through Jesus.”

Now we can answer the original question. Our expectation of resurrection from the dead is not a mystical response to a request for psychological relief from the anxiety of death, nor an opiate anesthesia for our near-death agony. Our expectation is based on the irrefutable testimony of the empty tomb, on the awareness that Hades was condemned. On the certainty that death was defeated after the unconfused and indivisible union of created and uncreated in the theandric person of the Lord Jesus, His voluntary death on the cross, His descent "into the lower parts of the earth" and His three-day resurrection.

"Christ is the 'savior of the world' not because he was sacrificed on the Cross, thus eliminating the sins of the world, but because he 'rose from the dead, trampling down death by death'." The West (Roman Catholic and Protestant), which saw the problem of the world as a moral problem (violation of a commandment and punishment), made the Cross of Christ the epicenter of faith and worship. But Orthodoxy continues to emphasize the Resurrection as the center of its entire life, precisely because it saw that the problem of creation is not moral but ontological, it is the problem of the existence (and not the beauty) of the world, the problem of death."

So let us put it clearly: If our faith is a psychological refuge, if our Christian hope is limited only to this life, then we are the most pitiable, the most miserable of all people.

Perhaps it is time for our preaching to rediscover its lost center of reference, and then, instead of all that was mentioned above as an answer to the question we posed at the beginning, the phrase of the apostle Paul will suffice: "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith is also in vain."

(Father Adamantiou Avgoustides, "Boasting in Sickness", Armos ed., pp.31-43)