Barry's Blog

Woody Allen once opined, "I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want to be there when it happens!"

Despite all of the attempts by modernity to harness "eternal youth," (cosmetics, cryonics, etc.) and to stave off the inevitable via science and other stratagems, death is the one fact of life, actually one of the few facts of life, that we can count on. Peter Kreeft suggests that Pascal saw death as one of the key proofs of man's wretchedness: "Death is the most unsentimental of facts: simple, decisive, businesslike. Therefore Pascal's pensees on death are also unsentimental, simple, decisive, and businesslike. There is no nonsense, no evasion, no 'nuancing,' no little mental two step about death..."

Listen to Pascal:

"Anyone with only a week to live will not find it in his interest to believe that all this is just a matter of chance. Imagine a number of men in chains, all under the sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of others...This is an image of the human condition." (#326, 434)

"The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever." (#165)

Peter Kreeft uses the powerful image that life is like we are each locked in a car (our bodies) rushing furiously down a hill (time) through the fog (ignorance), and unable to see ahead, over rocks and pits (wretchedness). The doors are welded shut, the steering works minimally, and brakes are no where to be found on the car! Our only certitude is that all the cars sooner or later go over the edge of the cliff (death). He asks, "So what do we do? We erect billboards at the edge of the cliff, so that we do not have to look at the abyss. The billboards we call 'civilization.'"

Kreeft suggests that our "solution" is arguably the biggest part of the problem, and offers five possible solutions to the conundrum of death:

1. Don't look at it. Look the other way. Be an ostrich and hide our heads in the sand. Stay diverted...

2. Look at it with a heart dulled by pop psychology. "Accept" it. Go gentle into that goodnight...

3. Look at it and despair, like the existential nihilism of a Sartre or Camus. Highly admirable honesty, mind you, but quite unlivable.

4. Look at it and put your hope and faith in science to conquer death by technology, cryonics, or artificial immortality via genetic engineering. This is nothing new, as it is a faith as old as Renaissance alchemy and occultism. But this would be not Heaven on Earth but Hell. Think about it.

5. Put your faith in God, in Christ, in Resurrection.

"Pascal eliminates all other contenders. The problem itself eliminates all other contenders. Death kayos all the philosophies; only Christ kayos death."

"If we have only hoped in Christ for this life, then we are of all men most to be pitied." Paul to the Corinthians,1 Corinthians 15:19.