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I justified that in my text by arguing that insofar as the war against death had been a moral crusade, I felt fully entitled to draw morals from it.
This preface, understandably, dismayed those critics who had already urged me to be more dispassionate. Some academic reviewers were content to condemn the new volume without even bothering to inspect the rest of the commentary, although that sector of the book was no longer than the equivalent sector of the second part and seemed to me to benefit from a rather more fluent style. It is, of course, possible that the reviewers were put off by the abundance of the data collated in support, which was indeed fearsome.
Other critics complained of my commentary that the day of “mute text” was dead and gone and that there was no place in the modern world for arguments whose primary illustrations resolutely refused to move, but I disregarded them as mere fashion victims. The imminent death of unembellished text had been a
Unlike many of my contemporaries, whose birth into a world in which religious faith was almost extinct had robbed them of all sympathy for the imperialists of dogma, I proposed that the great religions had been one of the finest achievements of humankind. I regarded their development as a vital stage in the evolution of society, considering them as social technologies whose use had permitted a spectacular transcendence of the former—tribal and regional—limits of community.
Faiths, I suggested, were the first instruments that were capable of binding together different language groups, and even different races. It was not until the spread of the great religions, I pointed out, that the possibility came into being of gathering all men together into a single common enterprise.
I was not recklessly incautious in offering these observations. I took care to regret that the principal product of this great dream had been two mille
I had already examined, in the first part of my history, the implications of the fact that one of the most common pre-Crash synonyms for human being—derived, of course, from the ancient Greek—was mortal, and that the term had continued to carry even greater significance once the prospect of emortality was in sight. Now I examined the implications of the the most common Latin-derived synonym for human being: individual
To describe humans as “undivided ones” is to take it for granted that death divides, and that the mortal part of humanity is neither the only nor the most vital part. This blatant fiction, I suggested, was the most powerful of all the weapons deployed by primitive mortals in their psychological war against death. Whereas other historians of my own day thought it a hastily improvised crutch, I saw it as an item of field artillery, parent of the heavy ca
My comparative analysis of the great religious traditions was, I hope, reasonably evenhanded. I tried to pay appropriate compliments to all of them. Inevitably, the summation that attracted the most criticism, in a world that was still host to more than four million self-proclaimed Buddhists, three million Jews, two million Hindus and nearly three hundred thousand followers of Islam, was that of Christianity—the only great religion to have been officially declared extinct.
To tell the truth, I was particularly fascinated by the symbology of the Christian mythos, which had taken as its central image the death on the cross of Jesus and had tried to make that one image of death carry an enormous allegorical load. I was entranced for a while by the idea of Christ’s death as a force of redemption and salvation: by the daring pretense that this person had died for others.I extended my argument to take in the Christian martyrs, who had added to the primal crucifixion a vast series of symbolic and morally significant deaths. This collectivity of legends, I suggested, ought to be regarded as a colossal achievement of the imagination, a crucial victory by which death and its handmaiden, pain, were dramatically transfigured in the theater of the human imagination.
I was somewhat less impressed by the Christian conversion of the idea of death as a kind of reconciliation: a gateway to heaven, if properly met; a gateway to hell, if not. It seemed to me to be less ambitious as well as less original than the central motif of the crucified Christ. The idea of absolution from sin following confession, particularly the notion of deathbed repentance, seemed to me to be a tolerably daring raid into the territories of the imagination previously ruled by fear of death, but later confusions imported to the mythos along with the idea of God’s grace were an obvious spoliation. Even so, Christian eschatology had served its purpose, and whatever its imperfections the various versions of that eschatology had been at least as effective as those of its rival faiths.
This entire collectivity of legends, I proposed, ought to be regarded as a colossal achievement of the imagination: a crucial victory by which death and its handmaiden, pain, were dramatically transfigured in the theater of the human imagination. The fact that Christianity was now extinct was, I suggested, eloquent testimony to the efficiency with which it had done its work. In a world that had tamed and all-but-conquered death, its carefully calculated absurdities had no utility whatsoever.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Perhaps paradoxically, the majority of my critics were no better pleased by my account of the defects of Christianity than my account of its strengths. Few of my fellow historians were able to accept my view of religions as systems of psychological armaments, and their refusal even to board my train of thoughts robbed them of all sympathy for its subsequent stations, let alone its terminus. Many of them were quick to point out that it was what I applauded in Christianity that had sealed its doom on the world stage.
My critics were, of course, correct to argue that it was the ridiculous emphasis of most Christian sects on personal salvation and the imminence of apocalypse that had ensured their redundancy after the Crash. The relative success of the Eastern religious traditions in a world of putative emortals was probably ensured by their reference to a much greater timescale. I was in better agreement with conventional theory when I admitted that even true emortals could derive valuable psychological comforts and benefits from the attempt to think in terms of 4,320,000,000-year-long kalpas and 311,040,000,000,000-year-long mahakalpas, but my attempt to track the corollaries of this thesis soon departed from the common track and lost the grudging sympathy that the argument had briefly gained.
The fundamental ingenuity of the Eastern traditions could, I suggested, be seen as a brilliantly simple inversion of the key move in the Western traditions. In the West, the aim of the “individuar’ human was to win for his death-resistant element the privilege of a happy immortality. In the East, where the notion of human-as-individual never took root, the aim was not to acquire immortality but to escape it. Buddhism refused belief in a soul or “person,” asserting as an axiom that there is no permanent state underlying the ceaseless flux of physical and mental states, and that death is merely a transition between incarnations. Hope was directed toward the eventual a