Life and Death

The following is another excerpt from papers at the Templeton Symposium in Chicago, 1993. The following remarks were made by Longdon Gilkey, who teaches religion at Georgetown University and University of Virginia, in "Nature as the Image of God: Reflections on the Signs of the Sacred."

The unity of life and death in nature sets for humans the corresponding spiritual task of uniting life with death. Nature's being is not so opposite from the human's existence as we had supposed: our deepest questions and nature's most mysterious patterns are in some strange way correlated. Both are grounded in power, life and order, buoyed up by the prospects of value, and now burdened with disorder, pain, suffering, death and despair. What are we to make of all this? In nature these patterns issued in the appearance of life and its meanings; the 'story' of the nature of the dialectic of life and death "issued in the appearance and increase of values evident in animal and human existence... Apparently one cannot create, receive or accept values without on the other hand, creating, receiving and accepting death...
Thus the religions of karma and transmigration, Hinduism and Buddhism, seek a level of "life" and of meaning beyond the intertwined wheel of life and death... Needless to say, modernity, secular and religious alike, has been so enthralled with the infinite possibilities of values and meaning within this life that they resolved the dialectic by ignoring it, in effect by forgetting death and despair, and so seeking here and now life without death and value without negation, being without non-being. This has not worked either; it tends... to encourage despair rather than courageous consent when the negative appears. Even more it overlooks the need, even the requirement of sacrifice, of self-sacrifice as well as self-discipline, if value is to be created and preserved.
On the very highest level we know that we cannot live truly and with integrity unless we are willing to die. No value can be defended, much less embodied in history, without the willingness of life to sacrifice itself for that value. And life withers and shrinks as it proceeds unless it can consent with acceptance and even with acknowledgment to the coming of that death. Life must have dignity if it is to have and create value; but a life has no dignity if it cannot accept its own death with courage.