Image above: The Holy Women at the Sepulchre. 15th Century icon in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
This article was first published in The Tablet 5/12 April 1980
You are dead and your life is hidden with Christ in God
It is generally recognised that the resurrection is the central mystery of the Christian faith, but the exact significance of this is not always realised. Jesus is said to have appeared after his death to his disciples and his tomb to have been found empty, but Christian faith does not rest on these stories: for those who believe they may serve as sufficient evidence for the resurrection, but for those who do not believe they will always be open to question. Christian faith rests on the transforming experience of the apostles, which enabled them to declare with St Peter: “Let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made him Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.” It is the same for us today. To be a Christian is to believe that God raised Jesus from the dead and that he is now alive for evermore. The stories of the empty tomb and the appearances may service to confirm our faith, if rightly understood, but they are not the basis of it. Faith is an illumination of the mind, which enables us, as it did the apostles before us, to recognise God in Christ and to be able to say with full assurance, Jesus is the Lord.
It is important to notice that the apostolic faith was expressed in these terms: not that Jesus was God, but that “God raised him from the dead.” The belief that Jesus was God, though no doubt implicit from the beginning, was a later development of theology. The danger of this mode of expression is that it tends to put Jesus on the side of God and not on the side of man. The resurrection thus appears as a unique event without any parallel, as though it affected Jesus alone and not us also. But St Paul is emphatic that the whole point of the resurrection is that it is the sign of our resurrection. “If there is no resurrection of the dead,” he says, “then Christ has not been raised.” This gives the right perspective on the resurrection. It is the point at which human nature breaks through the barrier of sin and death and enters into life in God. Sin has brought about the separation of man from God and has led to disintegration and death. The resurrection is the sign of the reintegration of humanity and its restoration to immortality.
The idea that man is created for immortality and that he must die if he wishes to live is found in almost all ancient religion. It is the central teaching of both Buddhism and Hinduism. According to the teaching of the Buddha the life of man on this earth is characterised by impermanence (anitta), by sorrow (dukka), or a radical unsatisfactoriness, and by insubstantiality (ânatta), that is, an absence of any unchanging ‘self’ or substance. The only way to salvation, that is to peace and happiness, is to die to this world and to the apparent self and to enter nirvana, the state which is beyond this world and free from its three characteristics. In Hinduism no less than in Buddhism the death of the ‘ego’ with its appetites and passions and desires is no less demanded. This is illustrated by the story of the young man Nachiketas in the Katha Upanishad: who goes down to the realm of Yama the god of death, to learn the secret of life beyond death. In modern times it can be seen in the story of Ramana Maharshi, the great sage of South India, who underwent a kind of mystical death through which he came to realise the state beyond death. It is said that as a young man, studying in the American school in Madura, he suddenly had an overwhelming conviction that he was going to die, so he surrendered himself to death. He allowed his body to become stiff and stopped breathing, and then said to himself” Now this body is dead, am I dead?” At that moment he underwent a mystical death and realised with complete conviction, “I am not this body, I am that eternal Spirit (Atman).” From that moment till his death in 1950 at the age of 70 he never ceased to be aware that he was not the body, but that eternal spirit.”
How are we to judge such an experience? Surely it is very close to the experience of St Paul, when he wrote: “You are dead and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” For St Paul the Christian life was essentially a sharing in the death and resurrection of Christ. So he wrote in the letter to the Romans: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptised have been baptised into the death of Christ? We were buried with him in baptism into death.” What sort of death does he man? Here, I think, we must turn to the very interesting psychology of St Paul. For him man was composed of body, soul and spirit. This psychology was retained by the early fathers of the Church like Irenaeus and Origen, but later it gave place to the body-soul psychology which derives from Aristotle. The psychology of St Paul is much more profound and is in perfect harmony with the psychology of the East. According to this system of psychology man has a body or physical organism, which unites him with the whole physical universe. He has also a soul, or psychological organism (a ‘psyche’), which consists of the different faculties, sense, feeling, memory, reason and will. But beyond both body and soul is the spirit, the ‘pneuma’, which is the point of his communion with God. The fall of man was a fall from this point of the spirit into the state of the natural man, anthropos psychikos as distinct from the spiritual state of the anthropos pneumatikos. It is the natural man, the anthropos psychikos, who has to die, if man is to return to the state of the spiritual man, the anthropos pneumatikos.
It is the experience of this state beyond the body-soul complex, which is the object of all Hindu and Buddhist spiritual practice, But a problem arises as to the exact nature of this spiritual state. The Buddha refused to say anything definite about it. He spoke only in negative terms. It is nirvana, the ‘blowing out,’ or ceasing to be of our present mode of consciousness and an awakening to a transcendent state, a state which is ‘not born, not become, not made, not compounded.” But he would not say more than this. He knew that words and concepts can always mislead and that the state has to be experienced, if it is to be known. So he taught the ‘eightfold noble path’ to reach nirvana and left it to each one to find the truth for himself.
The Hindu is much more positive. For him the final state is the realisation of the Self, the Atman, which can be translated the Spirit. Again it is a state which transcends our present mode of consciousness, but it is characterised as saccidananda, as ‘being-knowledge-bliss.” In other words it is a state of pure consciousness of absolute being in perfect bliss. But the question arises: What is the relation of the individual soul to this supreme Spirit? Does the individual soul disappear in the final state or does it become part of that absolute being? Different views have been held within Hinduism about this, and perhaps it can never be answered adequately, because in this state we transcend the normal state of human consciousness to which our words and concepts apply, and no words can ever describe that supreme reality. The Upanishads speak of it as ‘that before which words turn back together with the mind/”
Yet words and concepts can tell us something about this supreme mystery, can point towards an experience of which we can have glimpses even in this world. The doctrine of the resurrection helps put this in perspective. The stories of the appearances of Jesus after the crucifixion makes it clear that the body of Jesus did not belong to this world: it was not governed by the ordinary laws of matter. It could appear and disappear at will and in the end, it was seen, according to Luke’s account, to disappear into a cloud. This means that the body of Jesus in the resurrection was a ‘spiritual body.’ In other words both body and soul had been transformed by the Spirit within, so that they were no longer subject to the present conditions of matter and consciousness but were wholly controlled by the inner life of the Spirit. This shows us that the body does not simply cease to be, as is often suggested in Hindu ad Buddhist thought, but that it is transformed. St Thomas expressed this very well when he said that the ‘accidents’ of the body, its outward appearance, its conditioning by time and space are all changed, but the ‘substance’ the reality, of which the ‘accidents’ were only a temporary manifestation, remains. In the same way the soul of Jesus did not disappear in the resurrection. His disciples recognised him for the person whom they had known. But the soul, the psyche, underwent no less profound a change. It was also transfigured by the Spirit. As St Paul says, the “first Adam was a living soul, the second Adam was a life-giving spirit.” This in turn shows us the destiny of mankind. Both soul and body are destined to be transformed by the indwelling Spirit, so as to lose the limitations of our present mode of existence and consciousness and to experience a new mode of existence and consciousness, in which the human being participates in the being and consciousness of God.
Thus the Christian experience of the resurrection, as recorded in the New Testament, gives some indication of the final state of man, to which we are all moving. Yet we have always to acknowledge that we are in the presence of a mystery, which is beyond our comprehension. The Buddha’s reticence about the final state has a value for us. It teaches us to recognise the limitations of our knowledge. As St Paul also was to say: “Eye has not seen nor ear heard, neither has it entered into the heart of man to conceive what God has prepared for those who love him.” Perhaps the mystery of the resurrection can help us also to give an even more profound meaning to the great saying of the Svetasvatara Upanishad: “I know that great Person of the brightness of the sun beyond the darkness: only by knowing him one goes beyond death, there is no other way to go.”