Religious Symbolization and Death

 

In this paper I attempt to describe the framework of constitutive symbolism within which death is defined in cultures with a Judeo-Christian background.  One might consider such a framework to be specifically related to the concept of definition of the situation as this has been used in recent theorizing at the level of the general system of action.  My principal reference points will be the Old Testament, especially the Book of Genesis; the Christian development in its Roman Catholic version, especially as symbolized in Renaissance art; and some further changes from that position associated first with Protestantism and then with what some authors might call a "post-Protestant" phase. 

 

            My thesis is that the primary symbolism of death is part of a larger complex of constitutive symbolism - the complex which sociologists and anthropologists have come to call that of "age and sex."  It concerns meanings of the human life cycle from conception and birth through the phases of earthly "living" to death and the problem of orientation to the possibility of any meaningful "after death." 

 

            The life cycle of the individual, however, is inseparable from the problems of reproduction and the succession of generations.  No human individual is isolated in this respect.  Cooperation of persons of opposite sex is an essential condition of reproduction, and one aspect of the meaningfulness of death is to "make room" for the succeeding generation and those yet to follow it. 

 

            The myth of the Garden of Eden, as stated in Genesis, portrays Adam as "the Lord of the creation" who has been created by God "in His own image," where the immortality of Adam is clearly presumed.  The Tree of Life standing in the center of the Garden seems to be the symbol of this immortality.  It is not clear whether immortality was to be extended to other living species.  I presume not, because it is said of animals, before the creation of Adam, that "male and female created He them."  The necessity for both sexes at the creation itself suggests reproduction and, of course, with it the mortality of the preceding generations. 

 

            However this may be, the myth says in an extremely interesting phrase that it was "not good for Adam to be alone"; so God created Eve.  Her function in the Garden was presumably that of companionship rather than reproduction. 

 

80

 

            The existence of Adam and Eve in the Garden was not only free of the

limitations of mortality, but was free of all responsibility - their evety want

was automatically and, one presumes, instantaneously satisfied. This literal

"condition of paradise" was subject, however, to one prohibitory condition

the famous commandment, "Thou shalt not eat of the fruit of the tree of the

knowledge of good and evil," with its accompanying warning that, if the com-

mandment was disobeyed, "Thou shalt surely die." Eve, so the story goes,

allowed herself to be seduced by the wily serpent, and she in turn seduced

Adam. The divine reaction was to expel Adam and Eve from the Garden and to

impose on them not only mortality as punishment but also the two extraordiri-

ary curses - on Eve that woman should bring forth in pain and travail, and on

Adam that man should subsist "by the sweat of his brow," interesting in their

dual reference to childbirth and to work. The French word travail, usually

rendered in English by "labor," has an interesting connotation, because in

English the word "travail" suggests suffering in a rather strong way, even as

contrasted with "labor." In other words, the "human condition" after expulsion

from the garden was conceived as a condemnation to suffering and death with

strongly negative valences attached to "this life." 

 

            If, however, human life was to be conceived as continuing from generation to

generation, the reproductive function became essential, and the roles of Adam

and Eve were no longer simply those of companions but of partners in bringing

about reproduction. It seems quite clear that the sin of Adam and Eve was a

dual one. In the first instance it was that of disobedience. In the Garden they

were subjected to one and only one prohibition: "eating the fruit." This is what

Kenneth Burke refers to as the capacity for the negative on the part of man as a

symbol-using animal, but there is a further connotation beyond mere disobedi-

ence as such. In presuming immortality and "knowledge" together - knowledge

of the meaning of good and evil - Adam was presuming to act as if he were God.

This, I feel, is the most fundamental meaning of original sin. The imposition

of death is conceived as God's crucial assertion that man may not presume to be

God but must accept hi" mortality and all the costs of living the life of a mortal.

Another common Christian phrasing is that the fundamental sin was "idolatry'

of the flesh." 

 

            In the continuation of the myth, the divine anger seems to have been virtually

unappeased, and culminated after a long time in God's decision to destroy his

own creation of living beings on the earth, including humanity. God relented,

however, in the case of Noah, Noah's wife, their sons, and the sons' families,

and he instructed Noah to build the Ark to save his own extended family and the

famous "animals two-by-two." In this connection Noah, who from the divine

perspective was the only "good man" of his generation, became the recipient of

the first covenant with Yahweh. On condition of giving faith and obedience to

the divine commandments, Noah and his issue not only were permitted to exist

after the "~cession of the great flood, but became the nucleus of Yahweh's

chosen people, the vicissitudes of which are well known through the stages of

Abraham and the new covenant with him, the exile, Moses, and the entry after

Moses' death into the Promised Land. 

 

            The fate of the individual was, in classical ancient Judaism, in a sense

absorbed in that of the people of Israel. The primary religious focus was on

the people, including not only its existence and vicissitudes as a corporate entity

but, above all, the Law, observance of which was the divine condition of

 

continuance in divine favor. The people of Israel constituted a kin-based ethnic

group, to which the members' descent from Noah was a primary symbol of

belonging. This may be one main point of entry of the symbol blood into the

Judeo-Christian story. Another particularly interesting feature of the myth with

regard to the Promised Land, is that it was the land of "milk and honey." Milk

surely is a fundamental symbol of feminine nurturance which leads beyond the

purely biological reproductive function assumed by Eve and her successors to

one of nutturant solicitude for the welfare of offspring and - since all members

of the people of Israel were "offspring" in this symbolic sense - for the people

generally. Honey has another symbolic connotation: it is a prototype of an

unproduced food substance found in nature. The availability of honey, then,

is associated with the plenitude of life in the Garden of Eden; it is something

good, not a human product, to be found in the natural environment. Indeed, the

combination of milk and honey may be considered to be a kind of prototype

symbol of material well-being in a human situation. 

 

            It is a big jump to the symbolism of the much later Christian development,

but our concern is not primarily with cultural history, but with the meaning

structure of a symbolic complex. There is a crucial difference between the

relation of God to Adam on the one hand, to Jesus on the other. God created

Adam, but Jesus was "his only begotten son." We may perhaps infer that, by the

vintue of the series of covenants, God has committed himself to the continuance

of the human species - particularly, but presumably not exclusively, to that of

his chosen people. His intervention in the human condition, therefore, could

not, as in the case of the flood and Noah, be for the purpose of continuing

or destroying his creation, but it had to be intervention in the affairs of

humanity as "a going concern." Mary and the myth of the Annunciation is

the symbolic focus of the divine recognition that "cooperation" with humanity

is essential in order to carry out the grand plan. It is in this context that the very

critical symbol blood becomes central as referring to the continuity of the

succession of human generation, which, of course, assumes the death of each

individual person but the continuity of the population through sexual reproduc-

tion - "begetting," to use the Old Testament term. The "blood" of Jesus had

therefore both a divine and a human component, the latter being the blood of

Mary. 

 

            Another crucial symbolic no~ is sounded in the Christ story. In Judaism on

the whole, though Yahweh treated the people of Israel as his ch6sen people, and

protected them and favored them in many ways, his primary concern with

respect to them was their obedience, that is, their observance of the Law he

had imposed upon them. In the Christian story the new note is that of love.

Perhaps the primary mythic statement is, "For God so loved the world that He

gave His only begotten Son." It is noteworthy, of course, that God is said to

have loved not only the people of Israel, but "the world." This sur~ly is a

fundamental anchor point for the universalistic features of Christianity. 

 

            There was a new conception of the relation between the "eternal" and

temporal orders, the divine and the human, in the New Testament. Through

Mary's "Immaculate Conception," the divine became human. Jesus was con-

ceived to be both God and man at the same time. This definition of the situation

al

 

82 Religion and Modern Society            Religious Symbolization and Death 83

 

fundamentally altered the Judaic conception by its potential for upgrading the

status of humanity. Again, in spite of certain tendencies within Hellenistic

Judaism, I think we can correctly say that Judaism was not a religion of the

salvation of the individual in the sense that Christianity has been. Burke has

pointed out that the idea of a redeemer is implicit in the Genesis myth, but how

the role of the redeemer should be conceived, and, in particular, what the

relation of this role to the fate of the people of Israel should be, remaimed an

open question. 

 

            The redemptive event, which was the founding event of Christianity, was

mythologically, we may presume, the sacrificial death of Jesus by crucifixion. It

has been basic to the Christian tradition that this was a real death; it was not, as

would be common in Greek mythology, the disappearance of a divine personage

who had chosen to spend a certain time on earth disguised as a mortal. Jesus,

that is, really died on the cross and had to be "resurrected" in order to reenter

the divine sphere of eternal life. 

 

            It is of course central that the meaning of Jesus' death was symbolized as

giving his blood. Blood, it seems to me, symbolizes a special combination of two

things. The first is what in another connection we may speak of as the gsft of life,

which is expressed in maternity. In the Christian myth Mary was the giver of life

to Jesus, a specially symbolic case of the more general conception of a woman

giving birth to her child. In ordinary usage the word "give" has not been stressed

in this expression, but I think it is symbolically crucial. The human component

of the blood of Christ, therefore, was a gift from Mary, who only in more

extravagant phases of Catholic symbolization has herself been considered

divine. This human component, however, was combined with the divine com-

ponent originatir'~ from the begetting of Jesus by his divine father. In these

circumstances Je~u~,' own death was relativized. The concept death applied only

to the human co~-~ponent, not to the divine. The symbol blood is the primary

focus of the unity of the divine and the human. And this unity is the focus of the

Christian conception of the transcending of death. 

 

            In the act of dying - which was in a very important sense voluntary on Jesus'

part, since Jesus might be said to have provoked the Roman authorities into

crucifying him - there was another component which has Hebrew antecedents

but was profoundly modified in the Christian phase. In the symbolism of the

Last Supper, which was built into the basic sacramental ritual of Christianity -

the Eucharist - not only the blood of Christ but also the "body" of Christ is

symb(~lized by the bread of the Eucharist. The body of Christ, meaning of

course the risen Christ, came to be the symbol for the church conceived as a

supertsatural entity, which came to have the "power of the keys," the capacity to

ele  ~e the fate of the individual human being from the limitations of mortality

and tise other "Adamic" features of the human condition. 

 

            I do not think it is too far-fetched to suggest that the church was symbolically

meant to "identify," in a sense not very different from the psychoanalytic-

sociological use of the word, the ordinary human being with Christ. As a

member of the church, man became part of the "body of Christ." In dying he

thus became capable of giving his life, symbolized by blood, in a sense parallel to

that in which Jesus gave his blood in the crucifixion. There seems to be a deep

duality of meaning here. Death is conceived, on the one hand, to be deeply

traumatic, as symbolized by the suffering on the cross - a kind of a "supreme

sacrifice." At the same time, the death of the human individual is conceived not

merely as paving the way for his own entrance into "heaven" but as a sacrifice

for the redemptive benefit of humanity in general. Quite apart from the meta-

physical problems of what can possibly be meant by "survival" of the individual

after death, I think that this second view of death is a kind of a sublimation, in

the positive sense, of the grimly tragic view of the human condition as defined by

the consequences of Adam's original sin. By the acceptance of the divine

commandments and by the acceptance of Christ as the redeemer, man is not

in principle totally expelled from the Garden, to be dominated by "sin and

death," but has the opportunity to participate in the divine order and not to be

sn the Adamic sense only human. We can say that this represents a major

upgrading of the religio-metaphysical status of man. 

 

            A theme in Western religious history which I have several times emphasized is

that the biblical conception of God's making man in his own image and making

him Lord of the creation was later transformed into the conception of a "king-

dom of God on earth." This in turn implied that human society and personality

could be permeated with a divine spirit and thus in some sense narrowed the gap

between the divine order of things and "the things of this world." What I have

called the relativizing of the meaning of death seems to me to be a central part of

this development. Every human individual's death may thus be seen as a

sacrifice on the one hand, a gifi on the other. 

 

            The human individual's capacity to die in the role of giver of gi~s - most

explicit in the case of a soldier or martyr who "gives his life for his country"' or

"for a cause" - is dependent on three other crucial gifts having preceded Isis.

The first of these was the gift on the part of God the Father of what sometitnes

religiously is called the "living Christ" to humanity - given, it should be noted,

through the process of "begetting." Christ, after all, was God's only begotten

son. And this was a gift to humanityfrom God, not a sacrifice to God on the part

of some human group or individual. It was, moreover, a gift said to have been

motivated by "love" of the world. The second was Mary's gift of life as a man, as

a human being, to Jesus - a gift symbolized in the person of Masy. Thus, the

Christian conception of the human feminine role focuses upon "~ry, Mother

of God," whd has given the human component of the blood whsch could be

sacrificed for the redemption of humanity. The third gift was the sacrificial

death of Jesus, which has frequently been symbolized as the giving of his blood

for our redemption. Within this framework, then, the death of the human

individual can be conceived as a sacrifice for others but also as a gift to others

for the future of humanity. 

 

            The question now arises of what modifications of this predominantly Catholic

definition of the situation should be introduced to take account of i'ie Protestant

development and more recent phases which are no longer predominantly Pro-

testant. 

 

            Before discussing the Protestant phase and what has followed it, let me sum

up what seem to me the four principal steps in the development from the Book

of Genesis to full-fledged medieval Catholicism. 

 

4 Religion and Modem Society            Religious Symbohzation and Death 85

 

            1  It is clear that the original meaning of death was as punishment for the

disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden. The sin, however, was not merely

disobedience but the pretention to the status of divinity, and mortality is the

primay symbol of nondivinity. The imposition of death and the expulsion from

the Garden were linked with the conception that this life should be burdened

with travail. 

 

            2.            With the development of the covenant relationship between Yahweh and

his ch( ~en people, death took on a new meaning. The biblical phrase is re-

ception into "the bosom of Abraham," which may be interpreted to mean that

the dead achieve the honorific status of ancestors (as in traditional Chinese

religion) in the transgenerational collectivity of the people. Mortality is accepted

as part of the generalized human condition with all its limitations but with a note

of special value emphasis on the concept of chosenness. The symbol blood

emerges in the first in~ance as a symbol of ethnic belongingness, not only in

one generation, but in the continuity of successive generations. This continuity

in turn is linked with the special significance of the Law, which was divinely

ordained through Moses. 

 

            3.            In the original Christian syndrome, a major shift took place. There was a

relative disassociation from an ethnic community, and both the spiritual and

temporal fates of the individual acquired a new salience. Human life, with its

continuities, is in a new sense conceived as given. The primary symbol here is

the portrayal of Jesus as the only begotten son of God the Father. God's begetting

of Jesus is quite different from his creation of Adam. It presumes the continuity

of humanity and the human reproductive process. Maty gives Jesus the gift of

life at the human level, and it is the synthesis of the divine element and the

human as symbolized in the Annunciation which qualifies Jesus to be the

redeemer of mankind. In his role as redeemer, by his sacrificial death, "He

gave His blood" for the redemption of mankind. It must be remembered that

blood in this sense was neither wholly divine nor wholly human but a special

synthesis of the two, which transcended the stark dichotomy of divine and

human in the Book of Genesis. 

 

            4.            It seems to be clear then that the primary symbolic effect ofjesus' sacrifice

was the endowment of ordinary humans with the capacity to translate their lives

into gifts which simultaneously express the love of other human beings and the

love of God, reciprocating God's love for "the world." The sacrifice of Jesus by

dying on the cross was therefore conceived in a generalized manner so that all

human deaths could be conceived in sacrifices. The element of sacrifice, how-

ever, emphasizes the negative side, the cost side, of dying, which was so salient

for the crucifixion because of its excruciating suffering. The positive side is the

gift, not Mary's gift of the particular human life of Jesus, but the gift of his own

life by the living, human Jesus. This seems to me to be the primary symbolic

meaning of the Christian conception of death transcended. Death acquires a

transhiological meaning because the paramount component of its meaning is the

giving of a life, at the end of a particular life, to God. It is conceived as a

perpetuated solidarity between the bio-human level, symbolized by the blood

of Mary, and the divine level, symbolized by the blood of Christ. In the ideal

Christian death, one came to participate in the blood of Christ at a new level. 

 

            In the Catholic system, the mutuality of giving as the expression of love was

mediated by the sacramental system of the church and fragmented by particu-

larized absolutions from time to time. In the Protestant version, however, the

sacramental system no longer had this capacity. The "power of the keys" was

eliminated, and the clergy became essentially spiritual leaders and teachers.

Most important, the life of perfection - the life conceived to be both sacrifice

and gift to God, namely, that of members of religious orders - lost its special

status, and every human being, layman and clergyman alike, was placed on the

same level. I think it legitimate, as Weber did, to see this as basically an

upgrading of the status of the laity rather than a downgrading of ~ ~t of the

religious. As Weber put it, "Every man was to become a monk.' 

 

            In one sense, the accent on life in this world was strengthened rather than

otherwise. The Calvinist thought that it was the mission of man to build the

kingdom of God on earth. In this context the whole life of the human individual

was considered a unity, and its basic meaning was that of contribution to the

building of the kingdom, that is, insofar as the individual lived up to religious

expectations. His death then was seen as consummatory, as signaling the

completion of the task for which he was placed in this world. The consummat-

ory aspect, of course, requires divine legitimation, but it also means that dying

becomes in a sense a voluntary act, as it was for Jesus. It is, for example, striking

that a sharp distinction is made between dying a natural death and being killed.

Dying as consummation is beautifully symbolized in the phrase in the Episcopal

funeral service, "His work is done" (also in "Well done, good and faithful

servant"). The individual human being is brought into a ~'pecial kind ofpartner-

ship with God in the implementation of the divine plan for the world. One might

say that the Genesis conception of the life of travail and its bitter ending by

death following expulsion from the Garden has been transformed into the

conception of life in this world as a great opportunity to serve as an instrument

of the divine will in the great task of building the kingdom. One of the marks of

Protestantism is acceptance of worldly life as basically good and of death as the

natural and divinely ordained consummation. 

 

            There is, however, an underlying conflict. This positive and, one might say,

optimistic view of life and death is essentially conditional on fulfillment of the

divine mandate, on actually doing God's will. Fulfillment, however, cannot be

guaranteed. What Burke calls the element of the negative, the capacity to

disobey, is just as characteristic of modern man as it was of Adam. Hence, the

problem of what is to happen to the inveterate sinner cannot be avoided,

because it cannot be guaranteed that sinners will cease to exist. The note of

death as punishment and its symbolic aftermath is always a counterpoint note to

the positive Protestant conception. 

 

            It seems to me that the same basic view of life and death has survived the often

suggested abandonment of the traditional Judeo-Christian conceptions of the

transcendental God. It has survived most conspicuously in Marxian socialism,

which, at least in its Communist version, bears striking resemblances to early

Calvinism. Here, clearly, the basic human assignment is the building of social-

ism. The fate of the individual "soul" after death is clearly thought of differently

than in theistic Protestantism. But I think that the basic pattern is very similar,

 

4,

86 Religion and Modern Society

 

that is, mortality and the other fundamental features of the human condition are

accepted and, therefore, the completion of a total life in the ideal case gives

death a consummatory meaning. 

 

            Recent movements suggest a shift from the Protestant Ethic emphasis on

"work" to a communally organized regime of love, which, of course, links with

the Christian traditions of love at both the divine and the human levels. It is not

clear j".-t how these movements are going to crystallize, if at all; but one thing is

almost certain: that they will share with Puritan Protestantism and Marxian

socialism the conception of the religious sanctification of life in this world. 

 

            We must not forget, however, that the early Christians were eschatologically

oriented: they looked forward to a second coming of Christ and, with it, the day

of judgment and the end of the world as it had existed and been known. Those

who were saved would then enter into a state of eternal life in a new paradise, in

some respects resembling the Garden of Eden, yet different from it. The belief

in some kind of p?eexistent paradise in which man participated has reverberated

through the centuries, especially during the Enlightenment, in Rousseau's idea

of the state of nature. A preexistent state of nature has been dynamically linked

with the conception of a terminal state where all the problems of the tragic

human condition are believed to have been solved. This kind of a utopia, of

course, has been exceedingly prominent in the socialist movement, most nota-

bly in the idea of communism as the end state of socialist societies, guided by the

communist vision of Marxism-Leninism. 

 

            Very similar orientations seem to be characteristic of the movement that I

have elsewhere (1971) called the new "religion of love." Indeed, in its extreme

versions it is suggested that the regime of total love can be set up in the

immediate future. It will, however, have to be a terrestrial regime which cannot

conceive "the end of the world" in the sense in which early Christians used that

phrase. It would mean only the end of the evil parts of the world. A clear

conception of the meaning of death has not yet emerged in these circles. But

there is a fantasy of immortality - a feeling that death, as it has been known since

the abandonment of Christian eschatological hopes, is somehow unreal - that is

attributable to new understandings of the centra~ess of human life. It will be

interesting to follow developments in this area.

 

 

Note

 

This paper is a slightly different draft version of the first part of the article "The

'Gift of

Lfe' and its Reciprocation," of whicb the coauthors were Renee C. Fox and Victor M.

LAde and which was published in Social Research, Fall 1972.

 

 

Reference

 

Parsons, Talcott (1971) "Belief, Unbeh~f, and Disbelief," pp. 2O7~5 in R. Caporale

and A. Grumelli (eds), The Culture of Unbelief Berkeley: University of California

Press.