Andrew Kania explores the meaning of death: "Existential questions are at the heart of all religious faith; yet without these being personally asked and answered, an individual's spirituality cannot progress beyond that of mere religious membership … the existential question clearly requires that we place our lives within the sad context of our own physical mortality in order to complete our soul's joyful journey to immortality."

Andrè Malraux

Andrè Malraux in his novel, Days of Hope (L'Espoir, 1937), illustrated how great moral questions are asked during times of war of those caught up in the eye of war's torrent and the tide of war's wake. Days of Hope is set in the Spain of the early twentieth century, a time of that nation's civil war, where brothers were killing brothers, and all the fibres which held Spanish society together were rapidly being pulled apart; moral thread by moral thread. In such an atmosphere, one would cheer the warm running of a neighbour's blood, who months previous would have shared with you in the basking of some Mediterranean sunset, or thrill at the death of an enemy youth, who only a little while ago, seated beside you, enjoyed a meandering bus ride along an unsealed track.

One character of this novel, Ximenes, although fighting for the communist insurgents, devoutly maintains his Catholic faith. A brilliant soldier and leader, his comrades-in-arms silently deride him, yet Ximenes, despite this pressure, still falls to his knees in front of statues and says his prayers. Another of the generals, Manuel, contrasts Ximenes. Manuel has completely lost belief in God, and cannot fathom the religious devotion of Ximenes. Manuel has become an atheist, but he still longs to believe in something which can rationalize the confusion, hatred and chaos of war. As the story develops Malraux depicts a scene wherein a further character, Moreno, a man who had been a prisoner of Franco's forces and who had escaped the firing squad, enters into a discussion with Manuel. Moreno explains to his comrade how he came to terms with the question about God and the presence of an after-life. In the words Malraux gave Moreno: "A man can put up with everything; can even go to sleep knowing it wastes some hours of life before he's shot at dawn; can tear up the photographs of those he loves because he's had enough of sapping his nerve by poring over them; can note with pleasure that he's still jumping in the air like a fox-terrier for another futile peep through the loop-hole in the [prison] wall — and all the rest of it. With everything, I say. What he can't bear is to feel certain that, after being knocked about and trampled on, he's going to be killed. And that after that there's — nothing!" (1968, p.209)

In essence Moreno points to the fact that life has meaning only if there is a God, without whom everything in life has no point, no parameters or framework; without God there is no meaning in death, no meaning in suffering, no justice, no retribution, no hope, in fact, no need to live on. Moreno thus clearly intimates that what kills a man is not death, per se, but the belief that all there is in life is death. As churches are desecrated and burned to the ground, the question which remains in the minds of the insurgents in the novel is whether what is built on the razed ruins has the capacity to answer the most basic needs not only of every Spaniard but of every man and woman.

Malraux's reflection on the events of the Spanish Civil War with all the bitter sweet victories which only fratricide can fully concoct cuts to the heart of the existential question. What is the purpose of life? Is there a God? What happens after we die? These questions are not foreign to people who have had to face death, crises or suffering. A person can live without the best of health, or live in poverty, or live in war-torn buildings, but no rational human spirit can live without meaning. Death demands questions which must be answered by some statement of a meaning to life. As such the spiritual writer, Anthony de Mello S.J., notes in his work, Sadhana (1978), that one important meditation exercise for those seeking spiritual enlightenment is the reflection on one's death. Macabre as this may seem, de Mello asks his readers to participate in this meditation; the facing of personal mortality demands of the individual to seek a higher Meaning, that which transcends the death of the body — God and the spirit.

Existential questions are at the heart of all religious faith…

Existential questions are at the heart of all religious faith; yet without these being personally asked and answered, an individual's spirituality cannot progress beyond that of mere religious membership. Thus it should not come as too great a surprise that Church attendance in affluent nations is low, for wealth, and material possessions have the ability to mask the reality and inevitability of dying. Conversely in times of crisis, church pews are filled, as people realize only too immediately their tenuous status on this planet. In times of abundance, we act as Lord Byron ironically suggested: "Let us have wine and women, mirth and laughter, Sermons and soda-water the day after". However the same poet, who was referred to as "mad, bad and dangerous to know", was not so immoderate not to understand that there are higher forces and principles to which eventually all human beings succumb. We may live in mansions, feeding pets on expensive cuisine, or rejecting the notion of God as an absurdity, or cut the throat of kith and kin in order to achieve political goals, but as Byron writes: "Ecclesiastes said that 'all is vanity'. Most modern preachers say the same, or show it By their examples of true Christianity: In short, all know, or very short may know it". (Don Juan, canto VII, st. 6)

The existential question clearly requires that we place our lives within the sad context of our own physical mortality in order to complete our soul's joyful journey to immortality. For such reasons we should embrace the reality of our mortality, but all the while within the context of what Scriptures teach us; that we live in the world, but are not of it; that we may breathe our last, but our lives go on. As Christians we accept the answer to our existential anxiety, in words from the Gospel of St. John: "For this is how God loved the world: he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life". (John 3: 16, The New Jerusalem Bible)

The awareness of death is life-giving in that it makes each one of us appreciate the value of life and living. The Nobel Prize winner Rabindrinath Tagore sums the issue beautifully when he reminds us in his Stray Birds: "Death's stamp gives value to the coin of life, making it possible to buy with life what is truly precious". By coming to grips with the notion of personal mortality we are therefore able to carry within our hearts a blue-print by which to deal with the topsy-turvy events of life. We make ourselves stronger by discovering at what point we are at our weakest and preparing at this point a spiritual fortress by which to be remain secure. Dag Hammarskjöld would summarize this notion in Markings (Vägmärken, 1963) by saying that: "In the last analysis it is our conception of death which decides our answers to all the questions life puts to us".

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©2008 Dr Andrew Thomas Kania

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