The Slavery of Death

by Richard Beck

This understanding of sarx fits well with the Orthodox understanding of ancestral sin. Where Western Christianity has tended to interpret sarx as a depraved and congenital “sin nature,” the Orthodox see sarx as mortality—our corruptibility and perishability in the face of death. And it’s this vulnerability, Paul explains, that makes us susceptible to sin. The idea here is that we are less wicked than we are weak.

Nor is there much debate about how our vulnerability to death makes us fearful, paranoid, and suspicious creatures and that these fears promote a host of moral and social ills.

As vulnerable, biodegradable creatures in a world of real or potential scarcity, we are prone to act defensively and aggressively toward others who might place our survival at risk.

That is why the natural social condition of mankind is war—if not explicit, armed hostilities, then a perpetual state of anxious readiness in preparation for conflict. Even the Bible recognizes this tendency.

Why is there violence in the world? Because of a desire motivated by want, lack, and scarcity—whether it be real, potential, or simply perceived scarcity. “You desire but do not have, so you kill.”

Because of death, man must first attend to the necessities of life in order to stay alive. In this struggle, self-interests are unavoidable. Thus, man is unable to live in accordance with his original destiny of unselfish love.

man “subjects himself to anything in order to avoid dying,”

Wow

He who fears death is a slave and subjects himself to everything in order to avoid dying. . . . [But] he who does not fear death is outside the tyranny of the devil. For indeed “man would give skin for skin, and all things for [the sake of] his life,” [Job 2:4] and if a man should decide to disregard this, whose slave is he then?

Girard often describes mimetic rivalry as a process of triangulation, with two people desiring (through the imitation of the other) the same object.

Without the perspective that sees evil as a dark force that stands behind human reality, the issue of “good” and “bad” in our world is easy to decipher. It is fatally easy, and I mean fatally easy, to typecast “people like us” as basically good and “people like them” as basically evil.

in our quest for meaning and significance in the face of death we idolatrously come to serve, and are thus enslaved by, the principalities and powers—those institutions, vocations, ideologies, or lifeways that hold out the promise of durability and immortality.

Psychologically speaking, in the words of Chrysostom, the one who does not fear death is found to be free, “outside the tyranny of the devil.”

Basic anxiety is the anxiety of biological survival, the anxiety of our fight-or-flight response, the anxiety associated with vigilantly monitoring threats in our physical environment. Basic anxiety is connected to the survival instincts we have as biodegradable animals in a world of real or potential scarcity. The logic here, as we’ve noted, is fairly straightforward: in the face of survival threats, our self-interest intensifies. And if the situation becomes dire, violence breaks out.

Feelings of insecurity, low self-esteem, obsessions, perfectionism, ambitiousness, envy, narcissism, jealousy, rivalry, competitiveness, self-consciousness, guilt, and shame are all examples of neurotic anxiety, and they all relate to how we evaluate ourselves in our own eyes and the eyes of others.

This reticence to dwell upon death is symptomatic of what Geoffrey Gorer has called “the pornography of death,”20 the sense that death has become an illicit subject, too unseemly for public discussion or reflection. Death, like pornography, should be hidden from view.

Every residence was both a hospital and funeral home. Just about every female child had served as a hospice nurse. Just about every male child had helped dig a grave.

Over a hundred yeas ago the leading causes of death were communicable diseases and infections, but today, in the industrialized world, the leading causes of death are degenerative diseases of old age like heart disease and cancer. This shift has profoundly altered our experience of death. Basically, we’ve come to expect to live to a ripe old age. Given this expectation, when death comes sooner we experience a radical disruption, as if something has gone wrong.

In an attempt to manage or reduce our anxiety, we are driven to embrace distractions, entertainments, and comforts. The illusion of a deathless society can only be maintained by a vast industry of such distractions and entertainments.

I think that serious religious use of the lament psalms has been minimal because we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. We have thought that acknowledgment of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith, as though the very speech about it conceded too much about God’s “loss of control.”

The cultural expectation to be “fine” is at root an ethic of death avoidance:

Life, life, and more life—that is the only horizon within which these Americans want to live. Epidemics of sickness, economic disasters bringing mass starvation, social violence and disorder threatening at every street corner—if any such things were to happen, then death would no longer be outside of life, be accidental to life. Then, the American venture of nice homes, clean streets, decent manners, and daily security would prove to be false.

In contemporary American culture our slavery to the fear of death produces superficial consumerism, a fetish for managing appearances, inauthentic relationships, triumphalistic religion, and the eclipse of personal and societal empathy. These are the “works of the devil” in our lives, works produced by our slavery to the fear of death.

It doesn’t matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning.

“heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death.”

For example, my life is deemed meaningful because my children outlive me, or I wrote a book, or I helped the company have its best quarter of the year. Child, book, and company are all forms of “immortality,” ways to continue living into the future in an effort to “defeat” death.

More, the lie hides the fact that our self-esteem is fundamentally a form of idolatry, a service rendered to the cultural hero system—what the Bible calls a principality and power.

They saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his “courage to be” from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat, and the fetish of money and the size of a bank balance.

Basically, for a hero system to “work,” for it to give us a sense of security and permanence in the face of death, we need to experience it as absolute, unassailable, true, eternal, transcendent, and ultimate. This belief is threatened when we come into contact with cultural outsiders who espouse different values.

In his study on the origins and psychological roots of human evil, the psychologist Roy Baumeister has observed that most of the violence in the modern era can be attributed to the idealism found in national mythologies and ideological movements.

Briefly stated, being set free from the slavery of the fear of death will necessitate a confrontation with the principalities and powers—a battle fought primarily around issues related to identity, self-esteem, and the pursuit of significance.

We typically experience this force as demands for our service, along with our moral and spiritual allegiance and loyalty, which the Bible generally describes as idolatry.

Make work your monument, make it the reason for your life, and you will survive your death in some way. . . . Work is the common means by which [people] seek and hope to justify their existence while they are alive and to sustain their existence, in a fashion, after they die.

The regulating idea for the ancients seems to be this: manifestations of physical (generally political) power were manifestations of spiritual power.

Corporations die. Nations die. Ideologies die. Death survives them all. Death is—apart from God—the greatest moral power in this world, outlasting and subduing all other powers no matter how marvelous they may seem for the time being. This means, theologically speaking, that the object of allegiance and servitude, the real idol secreted within all idolatries, the power above all principalities and powers—the idol of all idols—is death.

And nothing much has changed. Before we consider the ancients superstitious and blinkered, we should note that we moderns similarly conflate the political and spiritual in how we sacralize the political realm. For us, God and country tend to be two sides of the same coin. Further, we also sacralize market economies, where the “invisible hand” is an all-knowing and benevolent god seeking our well-being. To question the “wisdom” of the market is to question a divinity. As it says on our currency: “In God we trust.”

That is, while we might not fear death on a day-to-day basis, we do fear being a failure in the eyes of others (or ourselves). But failure here is simply a neurotic manifestation of death anxiety, the fear that at the moment of death we won’t have accomplished enough to have made a permanent and lasting difference in the world.

If we are to love each other fully, we must be able to say “no” to the principalities and powers in order to say “yes” to others. In other words, we must be willing to sacrifice priorities like personal “success” and “significance” in order to love.

Putting in a sixty-hour workweek won’t make our lives matter any more than if we turn down the promotion.

Some of us learn only at the end of life, looking back on all of our sacrifice—a lifetime of neglecting loved ones and lives of service in order to serve a principality—and wondering, “What was it all for?” Unfortunately, many never learn the lesson at all.

But there is a lie at the root of the language of excellence. The lie is that excellence—striving to be the best, or even merely better—assumes that we are gods, creatures immune to death. Excellence assumes that we are not, in fact, finite creatures with finite resources of time and energy.

Excellence is here revealed to be a euphemism for sacrifice and idolatry.

Because our worldview is the source of our significance and self-esteem, we want to defend it from the criticisms of out-group members.

cope with the anxiety, we rush to defend our worldview and become dogmatic, fundamentalist, and ideological in regard to our values, culture, and way of life. We embrace our worldview as unique and exceptional, as superior to other worldviews, which we deem inferior, mistaken, and even dangerous. This mindset begins the process in which out-group members are denigrated and eventually demonized, sowing the seeds of violence.

But need really does exist, and sacrificial love will quickly bring it to the surface. We find that when we give, what we give isn’t always replenished. This truth is what marks love as love, as something more than mere exchange, as an act of grace. The account books are not balanced. Love gives gifts and makes sacrifices and expects nothing in return.

Both strategies are attempts to create and form an identity by possessing something. I am who I am because of what I own or control. Very often these possessions are material, like income and all that it can purchase.

Jesus’ treasures, to borrow from the Sermon on the Mount, were stored up in heaven. Consequently, Jesus was not motivated by the fears, worries, and neuroses that motivate us. Jesus feared nothing. He was competitive with no one, aggressive toward no one. And why? Because Jesus’ identity was formed in a way that liberated him from the slavery to the fear of death.

According to Thurman, for those with their backs against the wall the gospel provides “profound succor and strength to enable them to live in the present with dignity and creativity.”

In this world the socially disadvantaged man is constantly given a negative answer to the most important personal questions upon which mental health depends: “Who am I? What am I?”

Overall, I would argue that this experience of feeling beloved as a child of God, along with the accompanying experience of relaxation, even in the face of both psychological and physical threat, is diagnostic of the eccentric identity. Some people might, for biblical or theological reasons, prefer the word peace over relaxation,70 but I like the word relaxation.

Paul points to the eccentric, kenotic identity of Jesus as the solution to the problems of love in the Philippian church. The Christians in Philippi were operating out of an identity of possession, an identity characterized by grasping and clinging. They were motivated by “selfish ambition” and “vain conceit.” Note their desire to possess—their impulse to hold onto status, influence, esteem, reputation, and power—and how it became their route toward self-definition, self-esteem, personhood, and identity.