There are two sorts of people who might be tempted to think of death as a friend: those who think the nature of the human person has nothing to do with the body, and those who think it has everything to do with the body; in short, Platonists and materialists. Protestant theologian Oscar Cullmann summarizes the Platonist’s position in his little book Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? as follows:
Our body is only an outer garment which, as long as we live, prevents our soul from moving freely and from living in conformity to its proper eternal essence. It imposes upon the soul a law which is not appropriate to it. The soul, confined within the body, belongs to the eternal world. As long as we live, our soul finds itself in a prison, that is, in a body essentially alien to it. Death, in fact, is the great liberator. It looses the chains, since it leads the soul out of the prison of the body and back to its eternal home… [T]hrough philosophy we penetrate into that eternal world of ideas to which the soul belongs, and we free the soul from the prison of the body. Death does no more than complete this liberation. Plato shows us how Socrates goes to his death in complete peace and composure. The death of Socrates is a beautiful death. Nothing is seen here of death’s terror. Socrates cannot fear death, since indeed it sets us free from the body. Whoever fears death proves that he loves the world of the body, that he is thoroughly entangled in the world of sense. Death is the soul’s great friend. So he teaches; and so, in wonderful harmony with his teaching, he dies… (pp. 19-21)
Cullman sharply contrasts the death of Socrates with the death of Christ, and Plato’s attitude toward death with the Christian attitude:
In Gethsemane He knows that death stands before Him, just as Socrates expected death on his last day… Jesus begins ‘to tremble and be distressed’, writes Mark (14:33). ‘My soul is troubled, even to death’, He says to His disciples… Jesus is afraid, though not as a coward would be of the men who will kill Him, still less of the pain and grief which precede death. He is afraid in the face of death itself. Death for Him is not something divine: it is something dreadful… He was really afraid. Here is nothing of the composure of Socrates, who met death peacefully as a friend… [W]hen He concludes, ‘Yet not as I will, but as thou wilt’, this does not mean that at the last He, like Socrates, regards death as the friend, the liberator. No, He means only this: If this greatest of all terrors, death, must befall Me according to Thy will, then I submit to this horror. (pp. 21-22)
For the Christian, death, as St. Paul famously put it, is “the last enemy” (1 Corinthians 15:26). And victory over it comes with the resurrection.
Now, Cullmann overstates the contrast between the two ideas referred to in his title. He speaks of “the Greek view of death” when what he’s really talking about is a Greek view, the Platonic view. It is not the same as the view of the Aristotelian, for whom the human soul is the form of the body -- or, more precisely, the form of something which has corporeal as well as incorporeal operations. Hence, while a human being is not annihilated at death -- his intellect, which is incorporeal and operates partially independently of the body even during life, is not destroyed when the bodily organs are -- he persists only in a radically diminished state. That the soul persists as the form of this radically reduced substance is what makes resurrection possible, because there needs to be some continuity between the person who dies and the person who rises if they are to be the sameperson. But until the resurrection actually occurs, it is not the dead person who in the strictest sense survives, but only a part of him, albeit the highest part. As Aquinas says (contra the Platonist), “I am not my soul.” Thus, to Cullmann’s question “Immortality of the soul or resurrection of the dead?”, Christian Aristotelians like Aquinas answer: “Both.”
In a blog post not too long ago, I responded to an objection to the effect that a Cartesian view of human nature (which is a modern riff on the Platonic view) is better in accord with the Bible than the Aristotelian-Thomistic view. The critic in question even quoted St. Paul, of all people, in defense of this claim. In that post I explained at some length what is wrong with this suggestion, and one problem with it is that it cannot account for why death is, in scripture, indeed an enemy, and why St. Paul puts so much emphasis on the resurrection. This is intelligible only if the body is integral to human nature in a way the Platonic-Cartesian view cannot account for. Death is your enemy and resurrection your hope because you are radically incomplete without your body -- so incomplete that there is a sense in which you are gone after death and return only with the resurrection. (Thus does Aquinas suggest that if we were to speak strictly, we would say “Soul of St. Peter, pray for us” rather than “St. Peter, pray for us.”)
The way in which the materialist might see death as a friend is, of course, very different from the Platonist’s way. Indeed, it might seem that the materialist would be even more inclined than the Christian to see death as an enemy, since he rejects even the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the soul -- not to mention the resurrection -- and thus (short of some science-fiction style upload of the “software” of the mind onto a new “computer”) regards death as the end, full stop. (“Christian materialists” would accept the resurrection, but I will put their odd view to one side for present purposes and confine my attention to atheistic materialists.)
But on reflection it is easy enough to see how a materialist might look at death in positive light. If he’s lived an immoral life and is even mildly troubled at the thought that all that damnation stuff could turn out to be true, the idea of annihilation might bring relief. Or, just as atheists often operate with too crudely anthropomorphic a conception of God, so too do they often operate with too crudely this-worldly a conception of what an afterlife would be like. Hence, like Bernard Williams, a materialist might conclude that immortality would be a bore and judge death a rescue from endless tedium. To Cullmann’s two exemplars we could therefore add David Hume, reclining cheerfully on his deathbed, as famously recounted by Boswell.
Then there is the suffering that often attends death. As I noted in a recent post, for Christian apologists of the Neo-Scholastic stripe, it is not just God’s existence but also divine providence which can be known via purely philosophical arguments. Hence, even apart from special divine revelation, we can know that God allows evil in the world only insofar as he draws greater good out of it. These truths of natural theology are crucial to a complete natural law argument against the permissibility of suicide and euthanasia. (See e.g. the account of the immorality of suicide and euthanasia in Austin Fagothey’s always useful Right and Reason.)
To be sure, I think the traditional natural law theorist’s account of the good suffices to show that it cannot be good intentionally to end one’s own life or that of another innocent person, quite apart from questions of divine providence. But even if one sees the power in these arguments, if one is also convinced that there is neither a soul that persists beyond death nor a God who can draw a greater good out of any suffering, the arguments can seem awfully dry and theoretical compared to the intense suffering that can attend death. There will seem to be no upside to enduring the suffering other than respect for abstract principle. Hence the temptation in such cases to regard death as a friend, whose arrival one should intentionally hasten.
As always, the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosopher’s talent for finding the sober middle ground saves the day. The body is integral to you while not being the whole of you. By avoiding both the Platonist’s error and the materialist’s error we see death for the enemy that it is.