Prayer for the Lived Truth of Creation, Endo's Jesus, & Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich

A PRAYER FOR THE LIVED TRUTH OF CREATION

I offer this prayer based on quotes from the conclusion to Ernest Becker's, The Denial of Death New York: Free Press, 1973, 1997, pp. 282-285. I propose that one may pray it to whoever or whatever one holds most sacred or greatly values.

After the prayer, in a second section below, I quote Becker on Christianity and offer a critique based on ideas from Sushako Endo's novel, _The Life of Christ_.

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A PRAYER FOR THE LIVED TRUTH OF CREATION

May we stand among those who breathe, think, feel, speak, and act in "the lived truth of creation...in a condition of relative unrepression." May we honestly assess "our true puniness in the face of the overwhelmingness and majesty of the universe, of the unspeakable miracle of even the single created object."

May we know the world as it "probably appeared to the earliest men on the planet and to those extrasensitive types who have filled the roles of shaman, prophet, poet saint, and artist." May we share "[w]hat is unique about their perception of reality...that it is alive to the panic inherent in creation...a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing others apart with teeth of all types...and then excreting...-- not to mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in 'natural' accidents of all types: an earthquake...automobiles...a tidal wave...Creation is a nightmare spectacular."

Make us of those who know "that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation, of the grotesque, of the rumble of the panic underneath everything...with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow.." Let us be willing to ask if " -- with Rilke -- that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow."

Let us keep alive this "human sensitivity" that contributes to "the heroic in their urge to victory...our struggle incorporating the maximum of experience." Let us honor the truth that, "[t]he urge to cosmic heroism is sacred and mysterious and not to be neatly ordered and rationalized by science and secularism."

Let us remember our heroic dedication." Let us find "new heroisms that are basically maters of belief and will, dedication and vision." so that we may be healed by an all-embracing beyond...[and] grounded in healthy repressions and toward explicit immortality ideologies, myths of heroic transcendence."

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Ernest Becker's ideas in the light of Sushako Endo's Life of Jesus

Becker writes of Chritianity: "In a word, man's cosmic heroism was assured, even if it was as nothing. This is the most remarkable achievement of the Christian world picture: that it could take slaves, cripples, imbeciles, the simple and the mighty, and make them all secure heroes, simply by taking another step back from the world into another dimension of things, the dimension called heaven...Christianity took creture consciousness -- the very thing man most wanted to deny and made it the very _condition_ for his cosmic heroism." (Denial of Death, p. 160)

While I appreciate the penetrating insight of Becker's assessment of Christianity's transforming power, one needs, in order to understand the transformation of the disciples and later the same in the lives of every Christian, not one step further back into a vague abstraction ("the dimension called heaven), but deeper into the particular person of Jesus Christ and what transpired between him and the apostles and disciples through the stages of the crucifixion (during which most of them having wavered now betrayed their master in different ways and degrees) and the culminating event of the resurrection. In and around both these poles of the sequence of Jesus' comic heroism, lies Jesus' unconditional love and forgiveness for these disciples who abandoned him. Sushako Endo in his novel The Life of Jesus (Tuttle, 1972) evokes this reality with great persuasive power and more explanatory precision. For Endo, it was specifically Jesus' forgiveness and unconditional love inspite of betrayal and abandonment that in a sense "shocked" them into greater love and bolder courage to go out and witness to the power and love of the risen Lord and his message. (See my review of Endo's novel The Life of Jesus at my blogsite: http://christbhakta.blogspot.com

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A Review of Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich in the Light of Ernest Becker's Ideas

Our era gives us Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie. Tolstoy's 19th-century novella (about 84 pages) The Death of Ivan Ilyich reminded me of Albom's book, but it is Tolstoy, the narrator who supplies the reflections of wisdom, at least until the last scene, when Ivan Ilyich comes into his own as what Ernest Becker calls a "cosmic hero," an idea I shall take up later. Ivan Ilyich is a court official who loves his work, but not his wife. They live a bland and bourgeois life, though at one point they struggle economically. Everything turns and changes when Ivan Ilyich experiences physical illness, a deep pain in his left side and slowly comes face to face with the reality of the onset of his death.

Although Tolstoy's writes from implicitly Christian perspective, he includes only minimal references to Christianity. But by the end, Tolstoy's novella is a decidedly religious testament. In chapter 11, the second-to-last chapter, Tolstoy presents a scene in which a priest, at the request of Ivan Ilyich's wife, hears Ivan Ilyich's confession and delivers the sacrament. After receiving the sacrament, Ivan Ilyich, though not a religious man, enters into a state of hopeful optimism and even begins to think he might become cured. He becomes transformed briefly into a man who vigorously asserts his hope and intention to live.

As the twelfth and last chapter opens, Tolstoy introduces his powerful quote (that Cynthia Bourgeault cites in her book Mystical Hope -- see a review at http://christbhakta.blogspot.com) that describes the experience of riding in a train while another train is passing and how it creates a shift in perception. Tolstoy writes that by that analogy in experience, Ivan Ilyich experienced a similar perspective shift in which he both accepts, but also conceives of reaching beyond death. Tolstoy writes of this event that transpires an hour before Ivan Ilyich's death:

"What had happened to him was what one frequently experiences in a railway car when one thinks one is going forward but is actually moving backward, and suddenly becomes aware of the actual direction.
"Yes, [Ivan Ilyich says] all of it was simply not the real thing. But no matter. I can still make it the real thing -- I can. But what is the real thing?" Ivan Ilyich asked himself and suddenly grew quiet." (Chapter 12)

Then as his son grasps his hand, another revelation dawns:

" 'At that very moment Ivan Ilyich fell through and saw the light, and it was revealed to him that his life was not what it should have, but that he could still rectify the situation. 'But what is the real thing?' he asked himself and grew quiet listening. (Chapter 12)

And as he expresses concern that they should not be tormented by watching him suffer and his family leaves his bedside new insights arise:

"And suddenly it became clear to him that what had been oppressing him and would not leave him suddenly was vanishing all at once -- from two sides, ten sides, all sides. He felt sorry for them, he had to do something to keep from hurting them. To deliver them and himself from this suffering. 'And the pain?' he asked himself. 'Where has it gone? Now then pain where are you?'

Increasingly Ivan Ilyich moves into acceptance and transcendence. He accepts the pain and at the same time finds he has been released from the fear of death:

He waited for it [his pain] attentively.
'Ah, there it is. well, what of it? Let it be."
'And death, where is it?'
He searched for his accustomed fear of death and could not find it. Where was death? What death? There was no fear because there was no death.
Instead of death, there was light.

And Ivan Ilyich says as his last words: " 'Death is over,' he said to himself. 'There is no more death." " (Chapter 12)

I would like to explore the line in this final passage of Tolstoy's novella: "There was no fear because there was no death." The cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker proposes that the fact of death and our anxiety about it is the pivotal point around which we spin and weave a world of symbols. We implement symbolic systems because this uniquely human realm of symbolic construction seems to grant us the potential to outlast our physical mortality.

After taking the sacrament, Ivan Ilyich takes in many aspects of his wife's presence and experiences the realization that "--all these said to him: 'Not the real thing. Everything you lived by and still live by is a lie, a deception that blinds you from the reality of life and death." (The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Chapter 11)

Becker maintains that we create symbols, "symbolic action systems," and "immortality projects," all to experience an everyday transcendence over our bodily fate to die. Our symbolic world represents our freedom and our possibilities which we use to suppress the necessity and fatality of our animal body's fate of death. Becker suggests the ultimate symbolic system, the quintessential immortality project or ideology is religion.

Becker thinks that we especially create symbolic "immortality systems" by transferring and projecting onto another person (or symbolic figure) our noblest and most heroic ideals. (Often this process also drives romantic love, but it also shapes religious experience: people effect transference & projection onto the Buddha, Muhammad, Husayn, Gandhi, Christ, etc.). Becker admits and argues for the fact that acts of transference can be constructive, or as he calls them "creative projections," so that even if it includes elements of illusion it's at least what he calls a "life-enhancing illusion" (Denial of Death, p 158).

During his own death-bed interview, Ernest Becker told Sam Keen: "But I don't think one can be a hero in any really elevating sense without some transcendental referent like being a hero for God, or for the creative powers of the universe. The most exalted type of heroism involves feeling that one has lived to some purpose that transcends oneself. This is why religion gives him the validation that nothing else gives him...." ("Beyond Psychology: A Conversation with Ernest Becker (1974)," in The Ernest Becker Reader, p. 221)

One illustrative quote from Becker on the role of the hero in religion, perhaps also describes Tolstoy's purpose and meaning in writing his ending to Ivan Ilyich as he did:

"[H]eroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death. We admire most the courage to face death; we give such valor our highest and most constant adoration; it moves us deeply in our hearts because we have doubts about how brave we ourselves would be. When we see a man bravely facing his own extinction we rehearse the greatest victory we can imagine. And so the hero has been the center of human honor and acclaim since probably the beginning of specifically human evolution." ( The Denial of Death, pp. 11-12)

Describing the role of the hero and heroism in religion and society, Sam Keen describes Becker's view in these words:

"Society provides the second line of defense against our natural impotence by creating a hero system that allows us to believe that we transcend death by participating in something of lasting worth. We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrificing ourselves to conquer an empire, to build a temple, to write a book, to establish a family, to accumulate a fortune, to further progress and prosperity, to create an information-society and global free market. Since the main task of human life is to become heroic and transcend death, every culture must provide its members with an intricate symbolic system that is covertly religious. This means that ideological conflicts between cultures are essentially battles between immortality projects, holy wars." (p. xiii)

"Becker, like Socrates, advises us to practice dying. Cultivating awareness of our death leads to disillusionment, loss of character armor [as in Wilhelm Reich's work], and a conscious choice to abide in the face of terror. The existential hero who follows the way of self-analysis differs from the average person in knowing that he/she is obsessed. Instead of hiding within the illusions of character, he sees his impotence and vulnerability. The disillusioned hero [the existential hero] rejects the standardized heroics of mass culture in favor of cosmic heroism in which there is real joy in throwing off the chains of uncritical, self-defeating dependency and discovering new possibilities of choice and action and new forms of courage and endurance. Living with the voluntary consciousness of death, the heroic individual can choose to despair or to make a Kierkegaardian leap and trust in the 'sacrosanct vitality of the cosmos,' in the unknown god of life whose mysterious purpose is expressed in the overwhelming drama of cosmic evolution." (pp. xiv - xv)

This remind us of how much more integrity and humility Ivan Ilyich experiences and exemplifies when death confronts him It slaps him awake from his miserable and compromised bureaucratic bourgeois life, and his miserable marriage, and catapaults him into a life with real depth and meaning, even if he must also endure pain, humiliation and sadness. It is at least an authentic life. And in Tolstoy's narration, at the end, Ivan Ilyich, while bathed in light, proclaims, "There was no fear, because there was no death." (Chapter 12)

The website of the Ernest Becker Foundation, http://faculty.washington.edu/nelgee/ features an excellent essay (at the link "Lectures") by Glenn Hughes on Socrates's art of practicing dying, "The Denial of Death or the Practice of Dying (or: 'Tasting Death'), accessible at this link: http://faculty.washington.edu/nelgee/lectures/default.htm Hughes takes the quoted idiom of "tasting death" from Martin Luther. This is a very important essay since it focuses on a tangible dimension of Socrates life that underscores the reality of Socrates's teaching. Some Sufi lineages include Socrates among the great teachers of Sufism. Hughes's essay complements and expands on the Prophet Muhammad's hadith (prophetic saying): "Die before you die." ("Mutu qabla an tamutu.")

With ideas that concur with Tolstoy's narration, Ernest Becker introduces The Denial of Death by writing:

"The prospect of death, Dr. Johnson said, wonderfully concentrates the mind. The main thesis of this book is that it does much more than that: the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity -- activity designed largely to overcome the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying it in some way that it is the final destiny fr man. "

Becker explains the everyday transcendence that shapes all human endeavor as a "hero system" that is ultimately religious:

"What I have tried to do in this brief introduction is to suggest that the problem of heroics is the central one of human life, that it goes deeper into human nature than anything else ... Society itself is a codified hero system, which means that society everywhere is a living myth of the significance of human life, a defiant creation of meaning. Every society is thus a 'religion' whether it thinks so or not..." (The Denial of Death, p. 7)

Tolstoy wrote a number of very explicitly Christian writings, certainly some in short story form, some maybe in essay. CCEL (Calvin College Ethereal Library) includes these among Tolstoy's works in its virtual library. Among Euro-American writers, Tolstoy's and Theroux's writings guided Gandhi's thinking. Gandhi's commune in South Africa was called the "Tolstoy Commune."

Although Ernest Becker may not have included Ivan Ilyich's example in his work, I hope that here i have shown that Tolstoy's context underscores the theories of Ernest Becker on the central role of death-anxiety in the formation of self and culture.