The Slavery of Death: Part 19, The Denial of Death

In Part 17 we discussed William Stringfellow's analysis of Death and the Powers. According to Stringfellow, the "idol of all idols is death." Death is the force that sits behind the Powers. And recall the diversity of the Powers. A list from Stringfellow includes:

[The Powers] include all institutions, all ideologies, all images, all movements, all causes, all corporations, all bureaucracies, all traditions, all methods and routines, all conglomerates, all races, all nations, all idols. Thus, the Pentagon or the Ford Motor Company or Harvard University or the Hudson Institute or Consolidated Edison or the Diners Club or the Olympics or the Methodist Church or the Teamsters Union are principalities. So are capitalism, Maoism, humanism, Mormonism, astrology, the Puritan work ethic, science and scientism, white supremacy, patriotism, plus many, many more—sports, sex, any profession or discipline, technology, money, the family...

That's a lot of stuff. How is it all connected to death? According to Stringfellow each of these things is a created thing. This echos Romans 1:

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles...They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

The point for Stringfellow is that as created things--products of human activity and thought--the Powers are subject to death. Thus, the morality of the Powers--the "angel" or spirituality of the Powers--is survival, fending off death. Death here is revealed to be the god being served. Consequently, as humans serve the Powers they serve Death. Thus, to be possessed by the Powers is to be enslaved to death. Stringfellow once more on this connection:

Death is the only moral significance that a principality proffers human beings. That is to say, whatever intrinsic moral power is embodied in a principality—for a great corporation, profit, for example; or for a nation, hegemony; or for an ideology, conformity—that is sooner or later suspended by the greater moral power of death. 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.

I think Stringfellow is right in all this, but I think his analysis needs to be deepened. It is true that the Powers, as human products, are corruptible. Thus, to spend a life serving a Power is to serve an idol, a corruptible thing. But this points to a Sisyphean futility rather than to a "slavery to the fear of death," let alone to "the demonic." Stringfellow's analysis points us to Ecclesiastes where all is found to be "vanity of vanities." But how does his analysis connect to Hebrews 2 and the "slavery to the fear of death"?

To connect Stringfellow's analysis of the Powers to "the slavery of the fear of death" I'd like to, finally, bring in the work of Ernest Becker. With this connection we'll have in hand a psychological understanding of what it means to be, in the words of Hebrews 2, all our lives enslaved to the fear of death. More, we'll understand how this enslavement produces the "works of the devil," bringing us full circle back to Christus Victor theology.

Our discussion of Becker will be in two parts. In this post I'll summarize the important points from Becker's monumental The Denial of Death. The Denial of Death with help us understand what it might mean to be "enslaved to the fear of death all our lives." In the following post I'll turn to Escape from Evil, the sequel to The Denial of Death. Escape from Evil will help us understand why this slavery to the fear of death produces the "works of the devil."

Ernest Becker begins his analysis in The Denial of Death by focusing on our need for self-esteem, our craving for our life to be significant and meaningful--to both ourselves and to others. Becker describes this as a striving for heroism, suggesting that “our central calling, our main task on this planet, is the heroic.”

This heroism--a feeling of significance--is achieved by following cultural pathways that mark a life, within any given culture, as both admirable and well-lived:

…this is what a society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call “cultural relativity” is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism… 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. They earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature, by building an edifice that reflects human value: a temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that spans three generations. The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.

For example, I'm an American college professor. This marks out a "hero system" that can give my life significance and meaning. That is, there are various things I can do within his hero system to be "successful" and feel good about myself. For example, I can publish articles and get good student evaluations. Such things mark me as being "good" at what I do and I get, as a result, a self-esteem buzz, a sense that my life "matters." Think of the hero systems you live within. What are the things you'll do today to feel successful and win praise from others?

So far so good. We all strive to be “heroic,” to achieve self-esteem in lesser or greater ways by comparing ourselves to some hero/value system rooted in our cultures. But what is motivating this need for heroism?

Becker argues that quest for self-esteem is fundamentally an attempt to cope with the terror of death: “heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death.” This implies that culture itself, the routes toward heroism, is massively engaged in death denial, the repression of death awareness. As Becker notes, “cultures are fundamentally and basically styles of heroic death denial.”

That's a pretty big claim. To take one example, Becker is saying that the "American way of life" is a defense-mechanism. A hero/value system that helps us cope with and transcend death anxiety

Where does Becker come up with this?

According to Becker, the higher cognitive and symbolic capacities of humans make our workaday lives existentially unbearable. The specter of death looms over all, making a mockery of our life projects. Our primal instincts for self-preservation are brought up short in the face of our cognitive capacities that inform us death is unavoidable. This clash—the instinct for self-preservation with an ever-present death awareness—creates an extreme burden of anxiety that other animals are spared:

The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that’s something else. It is only if you let the full weight of this paradox sink down on your mind and feelings that you can realize what an impossible situation it is for an animal to be in.

This experiential burden threatens madness or despair. How do we make life “count” in the face of death? It is at this point where cultural hero systems step in to provide paths toward death transcendence, a means toward a symbolic (or literal) immortality. Life achieves significance and meaning when we participate in these “greater goods” that can outlive or transcend our finite existence. We can create a life that matters through reaching for symbolic, if not literal, immortality. 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. Children, book and company are all forms of "immortality," a way to living into the future in an effort to "defeat" death.

The upshot of this analysis—that we strive for a heroic existence and that cultural hero systems are helping us cope with the terror of death—is that our identity is being driven by death anxiety.

Here we are at the hub of the argument I want to make. What does it mean to say that we are "enslaved all our lives to the fear of death"? With Becker we are getting a vision of what this looks like. Recall, in earlier posts I said that our fear of death is largely unconscious and neurotic in nature (though, of course, the fear of death can become overt and acute in life-threatening situations). With Becker the mechanics of all this are revealed. Self-esteem, the bedrock of our identity, is revealed to be a form of denial, an existential defense mechanism, an illusion to help us avoid the full force of our existential predicament.

This is why Becker calls human character—our personal route toward self-esteem—a vital lie. Our identity is a lie because it is a fundamental dishonesty, in the moment, about our true existential situation. More, this lie obscures the fact that our self-esteem is borrowed, that it rests upon a cultural hero system. The lie hides the fact that my self-esteem is fundamentally a form of idolatry, a service rendered to the cultural hero system--the principality and power.

But this dishonesty is vital as this daily obfuscation is necessary for the human animal to continue on in the face of death. Again, the existential burden death places upon us is impossible. So culture helps us bear this burden, largely through repression and sublimation, by providing us routes of identity-formation via cultural heroics. Here is Becker on these dynamics:

We called one’s life style a vital lie, and now we can understand better why we said it was vital: it is a necessary and basic dishonesty about oneself and one’s whole situation…We don’t want to admit that we are fundamentally dishonest about reality, that we do not really control our own lives. We don’t want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which support us. This power is not obvious. It need not be overtly a god or openly a stronger person, but it can be the power of an all-absorbing activity, a passion, a dedication to a game, a way of life, that like a comfortable web keeps a person buoyed up and ignorant of himself, of the fact that he does not rest on his own center. All of us are driven to be supported in a self-forgetful way, ignorant of what energies we really draw on, of the kind of lie we have fashioned in order to live securely and serenely. Augustine was a master analyst of this, as were Kierkegaard, Scheler, and Tillich in our day. 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. The defenses that form a person’s character support a grand illusion, and when we grasp this we can understand the full drivenness of man. He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflection. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character, his automatic equanimity.

...

…the armor of character was so vital to us that to shed it meant to risk death and madness. It is not hard to reason out: If character is a neurotic defense against despair and you shed that defense, you admit the full flood of despair, the full realization of the true human condition, what men are really afraid of, what they struggle against, and are driven toward and away from.

...

It can’t be overstressed, one final time, that to see the world as it really is is devastating and terrifying. It achieves the very result that the child has painfully built his character over the years in order to avoid: [character-building hero systems] makes routine, automatic, secure, self-confident activity possible.

Let's go back and reconnect with Stringfellow and the Powers. As seen above, particularly in the first of these three quotes, Becker agrees with Stringfellow: we serve the Powers, we engage in idolatry. But why? What motivates this service? According to Becker, it's the fear of death. We want our lives to "matter." We want our lives to "last." But how? How do we "matter" and "last" in the face of death? Answer: We serve the idols (hero systems) of the culture. The company, the political party, the ideology, the religious denomination, the nation. These idols are "bigger" than we are which tricks us into thinking they are able to last and transcend death. Consequently, if we serve these idols our life becomes "meaningful" and "successful" and "immortal."

So we serve a Power. We pour our lives into the idols--these engines of self-esteem and "immortality"--and feel, on a day to day basis, that we are living meaningful lives. But are we really? Let's remember the message of Ecclesiastes!

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”
What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun?

We can spend our whole lives trying to be "successful." But as Stringfellow has pointed out, death outlasts it all. This is why Becker calls our sense of self-esteem a "lie." I think the Teacher of Ecclesiastes would agree.

This brings us to an earth-shattering conclusion. We are enslaved to the fear of death because our self-esteem is, at root, a defense-mechanism involved in death repression. Ponder that. Think about everything you are currently pursuing in your life that is outside of God. Your dreams, goals, and New Year's resolutions. Think about everything you use to pat yourself on the back, all those things that make you feel good about yourself, or special, or better than others. Maybe you're good at your job. Or your kids are talented. Maybe you have a great marriage. Perhaps you are good looking or are in really good shape. Maybe you're really smart. Maybe your blog gets a lot of page views. Maybe a lot of people "liked" your quip on Facebook.

Think about all those things, all those things that make us feel that our lives are "important" or "unique."

Then read Ecclesiastes.

Suddenly you'll see Becker's point about self-esteem being a lie.

Personal example of this. The copies of my new book arrived. So I brought one home to show Jana and the boys. We were all very happy. Later I said to Brenden, my oldest:

"Brenden, you know what Ecclesiastes says about writing books?"

"What?" he replied.

"Well, of the making of books there is no end."

I wasn't trying to be a downer. This isn't about a morbid self-esteem or an effort at self-mortification. It was about resisting the lie, about realizing that my self-esteem is being seduced on a daily basis by the Father of Lies who uses my fear of death to enslave me with the lure of "significance." I was simply reminding myself that the cultural hero system I live within--the college professor hero system--is an idol. Writing a book doesn't make me matter. Doesn't make me better. Won't make me immortal.

True, writing a book might make be "better" within the hero system as I compare myself to others and reap self-esteem benefits. But this is the devil's trap. It is an example of how my fear of death--the craving to matter and have something outlive me--is keeping me enslaved to sin.

How so? Well, if I get any self-esteem from the book I get trapped in a host of sinful practices. Pride. Jealously. Even depression if no one buys the book. This is why we are describing self-esteem as a defense mechanism. My feelings about the book and its reception make me defensive. Why? Because I need the book. The book makes me feel heroic. And I need that heroism to make me feel that my life counts in the face of death.

To conclude, let's revisit our orienting text:

Hebrews 2.14-15
Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is, the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death.

Reading this text let's think of the dynamics described by Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death. We are enslaved to death because we pursue self-esteem in order to "count" in the face of death. This means that our personhood is saturated with death. Everything about ourselves that makes us feel good, successful, smug, important, cool, worthy, snobbish, distinctive, admirable, or headline-catching is, simply, a lie. A death-denying lie. But a lie we will spend our lives anxiously chasing.