A study of death

Front matter

BY ^

HENRY MILLS ALDEN

AUTHOR OP

Preface

Death and Evil, as considered in this work, are essentially one, and belong to Life not only in its manifestation but in its creative, or genetic, quality. Life, in its principle, is not good or evil, mortal or immortal ; but as creative it becomes evil as well as good, and is immortal only as including mortality. This is also true of its creative transformations, in that series which we call its development. It is also, from the beginning, redemption as it is creation. Redemption is creative and creation is redemptive. The fountain is clear, and the stream clears itself.

This is our proposition. It is not new. It was St. Paul's theme. Always it is the spiritual intuition as distinguished from the strictly ethical view of life. James Hinton, writing thirty -five years ago, insisted upon the positive and radical character of evil ; but he excluded sin from this view — a reservation which seems to us unnecessary and which St. Paul did not make. The present work had been practically completed when the four volumes of Mr. Hinton's privately printed MSS. were placed in my hands. Of these volvi PREFACE

urnes, comprising altogether about three thousand royal octavo pages, I have been able to examine only the first. I have found in this so many remarkable resemblances to positions which I have taken that, although the divergencies of view are equally remarkable, I feel under an obligation (such as would have no force in the case of a published workj to allude to the fact. Mr. Hinton lays more stress than I have done upon alternativity in cosmic processes, more, however, with reference to polarisation and the vibratile character of all motion than to the meaning I have had in view in what I have designated as tropic reaction. My idea of the term " Limit " more nearly corresponds to his use of it, though the application is not the same. He thoroughly understood the value of the paradox. Mr. Hinton's treatise is not devoted to any particular theme ; it is meant to represent the history of a mind in its workings toward an interpretation of universal life ; and so many of his propositions are of a tentative character, being subsequently modified and sometimes reversed, that only a critical survey of the entire MSS. would yield the residuum of his thought. Xo one reading his writings can fail to be impressed by the originality and depth of his interpretation or to regret that his life was not spared long enough to enable him to organise his work into special theses upon the subjects treated. He wrote at a time when the Darwinian

PREFACE vii

hypothesis had been but recently broached, yet he anticipated much that has since been the result of patient scientific research. His little volume, entitled " The Mystery of Pain," by which alone he is known to the general reading public, taken in connection with his unpublished writings, convinces me that no writer could have given to the world a work of such philosophic value as he might have prepared on the subject I have undertaken. After all, perhaps there has been no deeper insight shown or more subtle interpretation offered in this field than is to be found in Robert 'Browning's poetry.

Recent science abounds in suggestions of which I have availed most freely. Science discloses redemption in the realm of matter, and helps us to see death in birth and, in all development, the radical disturbance. The course of science itself is redemptive ; lost in its specialisations, its confinement seeks release, and an angel appears in its prison. Even the reptile followed to the end of its course is seen to take to itself wings for ascension. The bee, closely observed, is seen to inject into each cell of honey some poison from his sting which makes the sweetness w T holesome — a venom inherent in the virtue.

In my restatement of cosmic specialisation, following the clues furnished by science, I have sought to emphasise the creative quality of Life in all its transformations and the homely sense of viii PREFACE

things in a living universe : to see that Genesis is Kinship.

In our reasoning, which must be imaginative, our path is through a series of analogues, which cease to be helpful and, indeed, mislead us if they are not themselves transformed in their translation from one order of existence to another. Each successive order in the series of creative transformations is a version or flexion, shown, in due course of the general movement, as a reversion. Then we see that from the first the entire movement is reversion — the turning always a returning — so that the universe reflects Godward. We find that this reversion is conspicuously apparent in the organic kingdom. It is triumphantly manifest in the Christ-life.

But Death and Evil are continued (whatever their transformation) into every new order — even into the kingdom of heaven, being therein lifted into their own heaven, where they are seen for what, in creation and redemption, they essentially are.

Faith boldly occupies the field of pessimism, finding therein its largest hope.

Henry Mills Alden.

Contents

PROEM

PAGE

THE DOVE AND THE SERPENT 3

FIRST BOOK

chap. TWO VISIONS OF DEATH

I. THE BODY OF DEATH 9

II. THE MYSTICAL VISION . 13

SECOND BOOK NATIVE IMPRESSIONS 27

THIRD BOOK

PRODIGAL SONS : A COSMIC PARABLE

I. THE DIVIDED LIVING 65

II. THE MORAL ORDER 133

III. ASCENT AND DESCENT OF LIFE 183

FOURTH BOOK

DEATH UNMASQUED

I. A SINGULAR REVELATION .225

II. THE PAULINE INTERPRETATION 274

III. CHRISTENDOM 2S6

IV. ANOTHER WORLD 318

INDEX . . e 329

PROEM THE DOVE AND THE SERPENT

PROEM

THE DOVE AND THE SERPENT

THE Dove flies, and the Serpent creeps. Yet is the Dove fond, while the Serpent is the emblem of wisdom.

Both were in Eden : the cooing, fluttering, winged spirit, loving to descend, companion -like, brooding, following; and the creeping thing which had glided into the sunshine of Paradise from the cold bosoms of those nurses of an older world — Pain and Darkness and Death — himself forgetting these in the warmth and green life of the Garden. And our first parents knew nought of these as yet unutterable mysteries, any more than they knew that their roses bloomed over a tomb ; so that when all animate creatures came to Adam to be named, the meaning of this living allegory which passed before him was in great part hidden, and he saw no sharp line dividing the firmament below from the firmament above ; rather he leaned toward the ground, as one does in a garden, seeing how quickly it was fashioned into the climbing trees, into the clean flowers, and into his own shapely frame. It was upon the ground he lay when that deep sleep fell upon him from which he woke to find his mate, lithe as the serpent, yet with the fluttering heart of the dove.

As the Dove, though winged for flight, ever descended, so the Serpent, though unable to wholly leave the ground, tried ever to lift himself therefrom, as if to escape some ancient bond. The cool nights revived and nourished his memories of an older time, wherein lay his subtile wisdom, but day by day his aspiring crest grew brighter. The life of Eden became for him oblivion, the light of the sun obscuring and confounding his reminiscence, even as for Adam and Eve this life was Illusion, the visible disguising the invisible, and pleasure veiling pain.

In Adam the culture of the ground maintained humility. He was held, moreover, in lowly content by the charm of the woman, who was to him like the earth grown human ; and since she was the daughter of Sleep, her love seemed to him restful as the night. Her raven locks were like the mantle of darkness, and her voice had the laughter of streams that lapsed into unseen depths.

But Eve had something of the Serpent's unrest, as if she too had come from the Underworld, which she would fain forget, seeking liberation, urged by desire as deep as the abyss she had left behind her and nourished from roots unfathomly hidden — the roots of the Tree of Life. She thus came to have conversation with the Serpent.

In the lengthening days of Eden's one Summer these two were more and more completely enfolded in the Illusion of Light. It was under this spell that, dwelling upon the enticement of fruit good to look at and pleasant to the taste, the Serpent denied Death, and thought of Good as separate from Evil. " Ye shall not

THE DOVE AND THE SERPENT 5

surely die, but shall be as the gods, knowing good and evil." So far, in his aspiring day-dream, had the Serpent fared from his old familiar haunts — so far from his old-world wisdom !

A surer omen would have come to Eve had she listened to the plaintive notes of the bewildered Dove that in his downward flutterings had begun to divine what the Serpent had come to forget, and to confess what he had come to deny.

For already was beginning to be felt "the season's difference," and the grave mystery, without which Paradise itself could not have been, was about to be unveiled, the background of the picture becoming its foreground. The fond hands plucking the rose had found the thorn. Evil was known as something by itself, apart from Good, and Eden was left behind, as one steps out of infancy.

From that hour have the eyes of the children of men been turned from the accursed earth, looking into the blue above, straining their vision for a glimpse of whiterobed angels.

Yet it was the Serpent that w r as lifted up in the wilderness ; and when he who " became sin for us " was being bruised in the heel by the old enemy, the Dove descended upon him at his baptism. He united the wisdom of the Serpent with the harmlessness of the Dove. Thus in him were bound together and reconciled the elements which in human thought had been put asunder. In him Evil is overcome of Good, as in him Death is swallowed up of Life ; and with his eyes we see that the robes of angels are white because they have been washed in blood.

FIRST BOOK TWO VISIONS OF DEATH

Chapter I The Body Of Death

LIFE has gone. There is no next breath, no return of the pulse. No stillness is so blank and void of all suggestion. The sculptured marble, through the arrest of motion, becomes forever mobile ; but here the interruption is final, fixed in a frozen

. . . Finality.

calm. inere is here no poetic caesura, or pause between two strains of the same harmony. The way in which these feet have^ walked has come to a full stop ; of the motions and uses peculiar to this organism as a means of human expression there is no continuance.

This abrupt conclusion begets in us a dull astonishment, as if we were suddenly come against a blank wall, an unyielding, insurmountable barrier. The operations of Nature, the most obvious and the most impressive, being forever recurrent, cultivate in us the habit of expectation, so that we refuse to accept finality. Lulls there may be, dividing pauses, but no absolute conclusion. The thing which hath been is that which shall be, and having the same form and character. The same sun forever rises again, and whatever the change of conditions, this change is itself repeated in the uniform succession of seasons. The disappearance of the individual organism, after its brief cycle, io A STUDY OF DEATH

we scarcely note, since through the succession of generations we are surrounded by the same forms in all their variety ; it is taken to heart only when the ties of kinship or cherished companionship are broken. Then, the first shock having passed — the wonder that one so full of life has come into this blind silence — a great wave bears us backward : we remember, and every memory has its thorn of sharp regret : every thought of w T hat has been is pierced by the arrows of sorrow, as a cloud by lightnings, breaking into a storm of tears, because that which has been can never be again.

Expectation is paralysed by this dull, unanswering silence. There is no response to our love or our grief ; no future for our waiting. We are in no presence ; it is the brutal fact of absence that stares us in the face.

We may not say that the beloved sleeps, for where is this sleeper, who has so suddenly fled that it is left for us to close the eyes and compose the rigid limbs ? Instead of relaxation, as of one weary and brought to rest, there is extreme rigor, as of one entering upon some mighty travail. But this darkness veils not sleep nor the free play of dreams : and from it there is no waking either to work or to weep.

This is the mere body of death, held out to us in its

stark and glacial calm for a moment of tender care.

which for it has no meaning — for our tribute of tears.

to which it is insensible ; for the ritual of

The Aiter-part - ef and faith [n whjch ; can h

of a Mystery. &

no part. It offers no illusion : every door is shut. It is a mute and surd in any human harmony, a senseless contradiction, a brutal negation, an

THE BODY OF DEATH n

irrational conclusion. If it were even dormant, then might we await a transformation, like that of the chrysalis, or like that which happened to this very organism when it emerged from its antenatal sleep. There is indeed to be a change, but not like that. Instead of a new synthesis, wherein, through a dormant larval mystery, an organism climbs into an upper chamber of the House of Life, freshly apparelled for a daintier bridal-feast — instead of this increment of beauty and wonder, we shall see dissolution, a sinking analytic motion, whereby every complexion simulating the proper character and habit of a man shall be obliterated. In this dissolving view all psychical and even all physiological suggestions vanish, and are seen to be impertinent to such processes as belong exclusively to the inorganic kingdom. So alien to humanity is this change that it is offensive to human sensibility and noxious to human health ; and our most pressing concern, after mourning over our dead, is that we may bury it out of our sight.

A primal instinct urges the animal into seclusion at the approach of death, and leads men to cover their faces or turn them to the wall, signifying that here beginneth a mystery not open to outward observation. From the beginning this was the soul's supreme confessional, wherein it repented itself of the world, forsaking all trodden ways, acknowledging their finality and its own utter weariness of them, and was shown the hidden thoroughfare leading to the Father's house.

The mystery has passed before its mere after-part arrests our notice. There is in our staring eyes no more than in those of the dead any speculation that will help us to its comprehension. The gravedigger's philosophy is as shallow and noisome as the work of his hands. All considerations based upon what we see, or think we see, of death are empty fallacies. Hamlet at Ophelia's grave is not more fantastic in considering " to what base uses we may return " than is Claudio when he shapes his fears :

"Aye, but to die and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot ; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling regions of rock-ribbed ice ; To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world ; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts Imagine howling ! 'Tis too horrible !"

To the physicist death is but the exact payment of man's debt to Nature, through the return of so much matter and so much force to that general fund of matter and of force which, in the scientific view, remains in all permutations forever the same unchangeable quantity. But the scales of the chemist or his crucible touch not the real mystery any more nearly than does the gravedigger's spade. And for the most part those homilies wherewith we help out the funereal gloss that we have put upon death have the same open - eyed emptiness and fatuity. Only to the closed eyes is there the true vision.

Chapter II The Mystical Vision

The Angel of Death is the invisible Angel of Life. While the organism is alive as a human embodiment death is present, having the same human distinction as the life, from which it is inseparable, being indeed the better half of living — its Th ^ een winged half, its rest and inspiration, its secret spring of elasticity and quickness. Life came upon the wings of Death, and so departs.

If we think of life apart from death our thought is partial, as if we would give flight to the arrow without bending the bow. No living movement either begins or is completed save through death. If the shuttle return not there is no web ; and the texture of life is woven through this tropic movement.

It is a commonly accepted scientific truth that the continuance of life in any living thing depends upon death. But there are two ways of expressing this truth : one, regarding merely the outward fact, as when we say that animal or vegetable tissue is renewed through decay ; the other, regarding the action and reaction proper to life itself, whereby it forever springs freshly from its source. The latter form of expression is mystical, in the true meaning of that term. We close our eyes to the outward appearance, in order that we may directly confront a mystery which is already past before there is any visible indication thereof. Though the imagination engaged in this mystical apprehension borrows its symbols or analogues from observation and experience, yet these symbols are spiritually regarded by looking at life on its living side and abstracted as far as possible from outward embodiment. We especially affect physiological analogues because, being derived from our experience, we may the more readily have the inward regard of them; and bypassing from one physiological analogue to another, and from all these to those furnished by the processes of nature outside of our bodies, we come to an apprehension of the action and reaction proper to life itself as an idea independent of all its physical representations.

Thus we trace the rhythmic beating of the pulse to the systole and diastole of the heart, and we note a similar alternation in the contraction and relaxation of all our muscles. Breathing is alternately inspiration and expiration. Sensation itself is by beats, and falls into rhythm. There is no uninterrupted strain of either action or sensibility; a current or a contact is renewed, having been broken. In psychical operation there is the same alternate lapse and resurgence. Memory rises from the grave of oblivion. No holding can be maintained save through alternate release. Pulsation establishes circulation, and vital motions proceed through cycles, each one of which, however minute, has its tropic of Cancer and of Capricorn. Then there are the larger physiological cycles, like that wherein sleep is the alternation of waking. Passing from the field of our direct experience to that of observation, we note similar alternations, as of day and night summer and winter, flood and ebb tide ; and science discloses them at every turn, especially in its recent consideration of the subtle forces of Nature, leading us back of all visible motions to the pulsations of the ether.

Mechanism does not escape this trope and rhapsody, being indeed their most conspicuous illustration, since its fundamental principle is that of leverage, whereby there is libration or oscillation, as of a scale or a pendulum, or circular motion as of a wheel. In celestial mechanism the material fulcrum disappears, and there is the invisible centre of motion, of flight and return, through tendencies which seem to balance each other, giving the motion the orbital form.

In the nebular hypothesis Science has presented us a view of the development of the universe from a nebulous expanse, to which, in its final dissolution, it must return. This immense pulsation is the grand cycle, the tropics of which evade all human calculation.

Now all these analogues or phenomenal representations of tropic movement lead us to the apprehension of the trope as proper to life itself ; they are the formal imaginations of an imageless truth. The trope itself vanishes into its invisible ground, and we have no definite expression of it save in its manifestation.

The insistence, however, upon a mystical apprehension is not foreign to science, which demands for its own completeness an invisible world. To account for the communication of energy through cosmic space, the physicist postulates as a medium the invisible ether, the vortical motions of which have displaced what were formerly known as the ultimate atoms. It is but a step from the ethereal vibration to the pulsation of the Eternal Life. We say pulsation, still clinging to an image, to the visible skirts of our expression of what is in itself ineffable, even as the Prophet was placed in the cleft of a rock and so had the vision of a God who had passed by, whose face no man can see. We behold that movement of pulsing life which is manifest, which is in time and which measures time ; the alternate movement, outwardly apparent to us in dissolution only, is a vanishing from our view into a field whither we may not follow with the terms pertinent to existence in space and time — the field of a measureless eternal life. We are at a loss for predicates, and resort to negations. But that concerning which our negation is — that is Being itself, the ground of existence and of persistence, of appearance and of reappearance.

In considering the action and reaction proper to life itself, we here dismiss from view all measured cycles, whose beginning and end are appreciably separate ; our regard is confined to living moments, so fleet that their beginning and ending meet as in one point, which is seen to be at once the point of departure and of return. Thus we may speak of a man's life as included between his birth and his death, and, with reference to this physiological term, think of him as living and then as dead ; but we may also consider him while living as yet every moment dying, and in this view death is clearly seen to be the inseparable companion of life, the way of return and so of continuance. This pulsation, forever a vanishing and a resurgence, so incalculably swift as to escape observation, is proper to life as life, does not begin with what we call birth nor end with what we call death (considering birth and death as terms applicable to an individual existence) ; it is forever beginning and forever ending. Thus to all manifest existence we apply the term Nature (iiaturd), which means forever being born; and on its vanishing side it is moritura, or forever dying. Resurrection is thus a natural and perpetual miracle. The idea of life as transcending any individual embodiment is as germane to science as it is to faith.

Death, thus seen as essential, is lifted above its temporary and visible accidents. It is no longer associated with corruption, but rafher with the sweet and wholesome freshness of life, being the way of

Absolution.

its renewal. Sweeter than the honey which Samson found in the lion's carcass is this everlasting sweetness of Death ; and it is a mystery deeper than the strong man's riddle.

So is Death pure and clean, as is the dew that comes with the cool night when the sun has set ; clean and white as the snow-flakes that betoken the absolution which Winter gives, shriving the earth of all her Summer wantonness and excess, when only the trees that yield balsam and aromatic fragrance remain green, breaking the box of precious ointment for burial.

In this view also is restored the kinship of Death with Sleep.

The state of the infant seems to be one of chronic mysticism, since during the greater part of its days its eyes are closed to the outer world. Its S1 D^th nd lar o er familiarity is still with the invisible, and it almost seems as if the Mothers of Darkness were still withholding it as their nursling, accomplishing for it some mighty work in their proper realm, some such fiery baptism of infants as is frequently instanced in Greek mythology, tempering them for earthly trials. The infant must needs sleep while this work is being done for it : it has been sleeping since the work began, from the foundation of the world, and the old habit still clings about it and is not easily laid aside. In that new field now open to the nascent organism — a field of conscious effort directed toward outward ends — there is exhaustion and expenditure. There must also be a special restoration, and this is given in the regular and measured sleep of the adolescent and adult organism, corresponding to its measured energy. This later sleep differs from that of the infant in that it is the relief from weariness, the winning back of a spent force. In the main — that is, in all unconscious activities — the burden is still borne by an unseen power, but there is also a burden and strain felt by the individual as in some way his own, appreciable in his consciousness and subject to his arbitrary determination — a burden which he may voluntarily increase or diminish. The loosening of the strain he does not thus feel to be of his own ordering. Sleep comes to him as does the night whereto it seems to belong. He may resist it, but it will come, overtaking even the sentinel at his post : or, again, he may court it with all diligence and it shall fly away.

That which we have been considering as the death that is in every moment is a reaction proper to life itself, waking or sleeping, whereby it is renewed, sharing at once Time and Eternity — time as outward form and eternity as its essential quality. Sleep is a special relaxation, relieving a special strain. As daily we build with effort and design an elaborate superstructure above the living foundation, so must this edifice nightly be laid in ruins. Sleep is thus a disembarrassment, the unloading of a burden wherewith we have weighted ourselves. Here again we are brought into a kind of repentance and receive absolution. Sleep is forgiveness.

In some deeper sense sleep is one with death, and is proper and essential to life itself. Life forever sleeps beneath the masque of wakefulness, as it forever dies beneath the masque of phenomenal existence. The more of life, the more of death and the more of sleep. Wakefulness is but partial, and is associated more especially with age than with youth. Sleep, also, as we know it, is partial, not the inmost withdrawal to its chamber of eternal rest. For the recovery of man's strength life gives him this partial release. A saving hand is stretched forth out of the darkness, snatching him from the world and locking his energies in suspense. The world of conscious experience is cut off by a temporarily impassable chasm, as if for the sleeper it had no existence ; and yet it is only the desire for that world which is being renewed in this darkness.

That which we commonly call the dream, whose stuff is borrowed from the daylight, occurs only on the outskirts of the domain of sleep. It has been fancied that in a deeper dream, never registered in conscious memory, there may be a return to the associations of former lives, but this deeper dream — if such a dream may be — imageless and having no outward moorings, must also be inhospitable to reminiscences of any previous individual existence. Though there is a suspension of individual activity, there is still the confinement of individuality itself, whose integrity is never disturbed in any normal condition of life. In hypnotism and insanity there may be a schism or refraction of the individual self, and even, it may be, the resumption of an ancient habit and familiarity — an atavistic reversion — but not in sleep. Hypnotism seems to be a kind of necromancy, whereby the hidden depths of consciousness are brought to the surface at the bidding of outward suggestion. But in normal sleep, whatever response there may be to outward suggestion, there is no displacement of " the abysmal deeps of personality."

Sleep, in this special sense, is, indeed, akin to Death. But he stands this side of the veil, only simulating the offices of his invisible brother, who stands at the very font of Life, the hierophant of the Greater Mysteries — those of the eternal life. Death calls with the voice of Life, calls from the central source to the remotest circumference of the universal life, calls with every pulsation of that life, and is, indeed, if we may use such an image, the return beat of the pulse of the All-Father's heart, the attraction of all being to its centre of rest in that Father's bosom, whatever may be its separate movements in the cycles of Time and Space. Sleep is the hierophant of a Minor Mystery, folding us in his mantle of darkness, renewing the world's desire, recovering Time. Death from within the veil instantaneously and every instant transforms life from its very source, recovering Eternity. Sleep is re-creation. Death is the mighty Negation, whereby all worlds vanish into that Nothing from which all worlds are made, the vast inbreathing of the Spirit of God for His ever-repeated fiat of Creation. Sleep suspends the individuality within its embodiment. Death shows the inmost personality in a divine presence — that angel of each one of us which forever beholds the face of the Father.