Stronger Than Death: Immortality and Art

I have a confession to make. Last year, I took an AP European History class, and quite early on in the course, I was struck with a strange burning desire to find my place along with the powerful figures I was reading about. Yes, I wanted to see my name in a history book. Not only did I long to do something important, influential, lasting, but I wanted to be remembered for it thousands of years later. I wanted future generations to read my writing in the same way that I now read Martin Luther’s writing.

In short, I desperately wanted to be immortal.

If you have listened to any amount of popular music in the past twenty years, then you understand that our culture is just as obsessed with immortality as I am. Songs constantly declare our capacity to live eternally, often exhorting us to seize the day and embrace immortality within the moment. Characters in books, from Homer’s Iliad to John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, express the longing to be remembered after death, and so live forever. TV shows and movies showcase characters like the Doctor of Doctor Who and Edward Cullen of Twilight who really do live forever.

We romanticize immortality. We read about it, sing about it, think about it.

But at the same time, our culture harbors an equal and opposite obsession with mortality.

Don’t believe me? Look at The Walking Dead, World War Z, or any of the countless stories portraying zombies. Look at tearjerking novels such as Bridge to Terabithia or The Five People You Meet in Heaven. Look at the countless modern stories portraying death and its consequences.

Often, immortality and mortality are present side by side in these stories. The Iliad paints Achilles’s great quest for immortality while simultaneously describing the deaths of hundreds of Greek and Trojan soldiers. The Fault in Our Stars tells of Gus’s struggle to develop a legacy and also depicts his slow battle against death by cancer. Even Doctor Who’s central character, the Doctor, deals with the loneliness of his immortality.

We are acutely aware of our own mortality. We speak of death often—occasionally with fear, but even more often with a strange kind of reverence and even longing. We acknowledge that death is a form of escape from a world which is brutal and cruel. In the words of Alexander Hamilton from the hit musical Hamilton, we “imagine death so much it feels more like a memory.”

In absence of death, we turn to other means of escape into immortality—and this escape we find in art. The genius J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, had a great deal to say on the subject of stories, particularly fairy-stories, as a form of escape:

“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all…. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.”

Art is at its most beautiful when we recognize the “real world” as a dark and murky prison. Once we come to that realization, anything that is beautiful—anything that lifts our souls up in exultation—anything that fills our hearts with a extraordinary kind of longing—becomes a means of escape from the cell we live in.

            Art is a method of containing and experiencing immortality within a finite reality. The surprising truth is that we are obsessed with mortality for exactly the same reason that we are obsessed with immortality. Immortality is something beautiful but distant, ethereal but remote—and yet somehow, we know by instinct that death is the only means by which we can grasp immortality once and for all. Till then, we can only create little pockets of immortality for ourselves.

            When I listen to beautiful music, I feel immortal. I touch something outside the physical world, something impossible to describe, but something much more real than any tangible object on earth. I experience a joy and exultation that lasts forever.

            The question, then, is if I am capable of touching immortal joy, joy “that lasts forever,” why do I not continue to feel this same joy all the time?

            This is firstly because immortality remains outside of myself. The common misconception concerning immortality is that it is a quality that man is capable of possessing—that somehow, immortality can be contained within the human spirit. The truth is that mortal men are able to touch immortal concepts such as goodness, truth, and beauty, but not to possess them. How can I claim ownership of things which I cannot even comprehend? Music, poetry, art—these are all conduits to immortality, conduits to God. They are not within, but without. I love the music, but I cannot keep it. I experience the joy, but it does not belong to me.

            Secondly, art is only a taste of immortality. I can touch immortality, but I cannot see it. I can imagine immortality, think about it, attempt to describe it, but this side of the grave, I cannot know it. Art gives meaning to finite life by granting us the tiniest taste of infinite life.

            Practically, art has very little purpose, and yet throughout all of human history, art has been a central part of culture. As a poet, I fully acknowledge that the ability to write poetry is a fairly useless skill—but as I was reminded recently by a dear friend of mine, useless things are so often the best things. Rather than sustaining life, useless things—art, music, poetry—make life worth living. They remind us of Real Life.

            Art continuously recalls to mind the essential fact that some things last longer and are more powerful than death. The movie Interstellar provides an excellent example of this concept. Two astronauts, Cooper and Brand, face a choice between two different planets to explore, each of which may end up being the eventual home of the human race. The trouble is that they can only visit one planet, because they have limited resources. Cooper wants to go to the planet which is still transmitting a signal, while Brand wants to go to the planet where an old love of hers was last seen. Faced with all the facts and evidence, Brand delivers a powerful philosophical argument for acting upon her feelings rather than Cooper’s facts:

Cooper: You're a scientist, Brand.

Brand: So listen to me when I say that love isn't something that we invented. It's... observable, powerful. It has to mean something.

Cooper: Love has meaning, yes. Social utility, social bonding, child rearing...

Brand: We love people who have died. Where's the social utility in that?

Cooper: None.

Brand: Maybe it means something more—something we can't yet understand. Maybe it's some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive. I'm drawn across the universe to someone I haven't seen in a decade, who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.

            Brand touches here upon the most mysterious aspect of love—that it is something more powerful, more lasting than any physical thing. It not only “transcends dimensions of time and space,” but it transcends death itself, evidenced by the fact that we continue to love those who have died.

            Love is immortal. Love outlasts utility, practicality, reason. Love endures pain, survives heartbreak. Love transcends death.

            This is why even those who do not believe in God or Heaven are not absolutely afraid of the grave. Even the most avowed disbeliever cannot deny that some things, like love, are stronger than death. Those who do fall into the cynical trap of believing that death is all-powerful eventually fall into despair and even kill themselves—because they cease to believe in immortality.

            So what are we to make of this complex relationship between immortality and mortality, life and death? How do we ultimately reconcile our desire for the beauty of immortality and our fascination with the escape of death?

Death cannot be the final conqueror. But it also cannot be meaningless. It plays a part in the world, a part which brings life and death together.

The significance of death lies in the fact that it is a transition—a pathway from a dream world which we must escape into a real world which is absolutely immortal. For the Christian, death is the servant of immortality. We are free to live and die without fear, because life is a gift from God, and death is a means to life.

1 Corinthians 15 puts it this way:  “When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come to pass: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’”

The Christian walks in an immortal victory. He is not afraid of his own mortality, because to live forever on earth would be a curse—but to live forever in the Real World will be perfection. The Christian touches immortality in life through art, and will know it someday in death through grace.

Art is a dirty window through which we see the light outside. Death is the door through which we finally go outside and revel in that light.

A hero of mine, C.S. Lewis, put it in far more eloquent words than mine:

“Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that's all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet.”

To Know As We Are Known: The Power of Names

            While helping out at a VBS this past Wednesday, I was granted the monumental task of herding a group of nine five-year-old children around to their various stations. They were mostly adorable—but one little boy (whom I shall call Jimmy) had a poor attitude right from the start. Rather than joining in the games, he shook his head obstinately, crossed his arms, and stood in the corner. After a great deal of coaxing, we managed to convince him to play the last game—a game called Cannonball.

            The rules of Cannonball were quite simple. The kids were supposed to sit in a circle and roll the cannonball to one another, saying, “Cannonball to...” and inserting the name of the friend to whom they were rolling the ball.

            Approximately thirty seconds into the game, I discovered that these kids (who had been together in this group for weeks) did not have the foggiest idea what the names of their companions were. For five minutes, each child held the cannonball and froze, searching around the circle, trying in vain to remember someone’s name. This was highly amusing to me, and somewhat mortifying to the kids.

            Later in the morning, when my group went to snacktime, Jimmy once again refused to sit with the rest of the children or eat a snack. Instead, he sat in the corner next to me, put his hood on, drew his knees up to his chin, and sulked.

            We had some time before the next activity, so on a whim (and remembering the game from earlier), I asked one of the girls if she could name everyone in the room. After she tried and quickly failed, I asked some of the other kids if they could do it. Naturally, no one could.

            “Well, I know all your names,” I remarked offhandedly.

            There was an immediate clamor for me to demonstrate this knowledge—so I went around the room, calling each child by name. There was general openmouthed surprise at my capacity to recall each child’s name so easily.

            At the end, I added, “And of course, there’s Jimmy,” and playfully elbowed the little brooding boy next to me.

            I was shocked when, moments later, he took his hood off, looked at me with suddenly bright eyes, and started telling me about what his house looked like. He came and sat with everyone else. He stopped hiding in the corner.

            Jimmy’s attitude wasn’t the only thing that changed—suddenly, the kids all fought to sit on my lap. They randomly gave me hugs throughout the day. I became everyone’s best friend, all because I knew their names.

            Mankind has always understood that names have power. Fairy tales and myths are practically obsessed with true names—the idea that each individual has a true, sometimes secret, name, and this name grants power to the wielder. In Egyptian mythology, the goddess Isis gains power over Ra when she learns his true name. In the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin, the villain is defeated by the knowledge of his true name.

Even in the Old Testament, God’s true name is so powerful that the Jewish people feared to speak it aloud. By the time of Jesus, only the High Priest was allowed to speak God’s true name, and even then, he was only allowed to speak it in the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement. All of Jewish—and indeed Western—tradition is steeped in the thought that every name has significance and power beyond its practical purpose.

Madeleine L’Engle’s novel A Wind in the Door deals chiefly with the power of names. The main character, Meg, meets a team of heroes who intend to save the world from the Echthroi, a mysterious force of evil spirits who destroy people by “X-ing” them, or un-Naming them. One of the characters explains, “I think your mythology would call them fallen angels. War and hate are their business, and one of their chief weapons is un-Naming—making people not know who they are.”

The heroes train for years in preparation for facing the Echthroi, doing seemingly meaningless tasks such as memorizing the names of the stars. But it becomes clear throughout the course of the story that this memorization is essential, because to call something by name is actively to save that thing.

“‘Progo,' Meg asked. 'You memorized the names of all the stars - how many are there?'

‘How many? Great heavens, earthling. I haven't the faintest idea.'

‘But you said your last assignment was to memorize the names of all of them.'

‘I did. All the stars in all the galaxies. And that's a great many.'

‘But how many?'

‘What difference does it make? I know their names. I don't know how many there are. It's their names that matter.’”

According to L’Engle, salvation is associated with the granting of a name. Somehow, calling someone by name saves him. The greatest possible evil is to take someone’s name away, and the greatest possible to gift is to name him.

The classic musical Man of La Mancha, based on the novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, is a poignant picture of this association between salvation and naming. In this musical, an insane man decides to dream the impossible dream and declares himself to be the brave knight Don Quixote. On his journey, he renames every obstacle he encounters as something other than what it is—the inn is a castle, the windmill is a giant, and the poor prostitute Aldonza is a beautiful princess named Dulcinea. Aldonza initially scoffs at Don Quixote’s profession of undying love, and constantly tells him that her name is not Dulcinea. Yet throughout the story, she is slowly overcome by the sincerity and goodness of his fantasy world, which is far more beautiful than the real world she knows.

In the end, after Don Quixote’s death, Aldonza walks away as another character calls after her, “Aldonza!” In response, she turns around and tells him firmly, “My name is Dulcinea.”

This prostitute becomes that which she is not—a beautiful, pure, chaste maiden—through the power of a name. Don Quixote manages to save Aldonza simply by giving her a different name, and by believing in that name.

But what is in a name? How can names hold this much power?

A name is an identity. A true name tells the truth about the bearer, which is why tales like A Wind in the Door and Man of La Mancha show the virtue of calling someone by their true name. Don Quixote did not accept that Aldonza was truly a prostitute—instead, he insisted that she was a beautiful princess. He found her true name, the name that no one else knew. And it changed her.

Like Aldonza, we become what we are called, when we are called by our true names—and that is why salvation lies in knowing a person’s true name.

Each and every one of us longs to be called by name. We are unsure of our identities, confused by our own souls. In the words of the poet Christopher Poindexter, “We are the scientists, trying to make sense of the stars inside us.” We do not know who we really are, and yet in our deepest hearts, we know that we could be saved if we only knew our names.

This is the great paradox of the world—that we must be called by name in order to be saved, but we have forgotten our names and cannot remember them again.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote, “Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful moment we remember that we forget.”

Modern culture’s answer to this question is that you must name yourself. You are what you decide you are—but how can any mere human understand and explain the depths of a human spirit, even if it is his own? This is the question Madeleine L’Engle poses—how can we name ourselves when we cannot even name the stars?

The beauty of Christianity is that it answers this unanswerable question, and it answers it differently from society. Christianity declares that the God of the universe who created you knows your name, and He calls you by this name.

You are what He calls you.

We long for God because we long to be named, to be known, in the way that a painter knows his painting, and a poet knows his poem. We are children who look to our Father to learn our names.

1 Corinthians 13:12 says, “Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.”

To know as you are known—this is the desire of the human spirit. Not to understand the mysteries of the heavens, but to understand the mysteries inside your own heart. Today we can rejoice in the fact that He calls us by name—and someday we shall even know that name.

On that day, the day when we see Heaven, we shall at last know fully, even as we are fully known.

“But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine.’” Isaiah 43:1