On Death

The last of the Earthsea Trilogy, Ursula LeGuin's The Farthest Shore is perhaps the one that shows the most of her Buddhist theology (is it called theology when its Buddhism?).

Her thoughts on death as conveyed in her novel are very interesting and offer some important insights as well as some questionable ones. So she emphasizes the importance of death and sees the central problem (at least the central problem of the novel) as the effort to overcome death. This involves denying life. Moreover, for LeGuin, it is necessary to realize the connection between the body and the soul as well as between death and life. I think this is absolutely true. We can see this in Spe Salvi, when Pope Benedict writes,

“Perhaps many people reject the faith today simply because they do not find the prospect of eternal life attractive. What they desire is not eternal life at all, but this present life, for which faith in eternal life seems something of an impediment. To continue living forever—endlessly—appears more like a curse than a gift. Death, admittedly, one would wish to postpone for as long as possible. But to live always, without end—this, all things considered, can only be monotonous and ultimately unbearable.”

Death, then, is necessary. We are immortal beings, but also mortal (we don't continue living forever in just the same way we are living now. Rather, we must pass through death (and purgatory!) or some equivalent experience that changes us (here I'm thinking of Enoch and Elijah and those who are still alive when Christ returns).

LeGuin goes wrong when she sees the afterworld as some place in which all of our shadows grow, while our bodies remain forever on earth in the great cycle of life--the sense that death is the end of us and that only the cycle of life can we find our immortality. She gets right, however, the tension that death is both bad and necessary. It is something that we must both avoid and embrace (in the sense that we realize our mortality and do not seek eternal life on earth). This urge to live forever on earth at the expense of everything else leads us to embrace things like stem cell research and to shun things like cigarettes and chocolate milk. Moreover, this belief that life is the ultimate good prevents us from seeing that there are things that are more important than life, things that are worth dying for. I think that only when we love certain things enough to be willing to die for them are we living in any full sense of the word.

LeGuin writes (getting it right and getting it wrong):

"You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose. ... That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, ad our humanity, does not endure. It changes; it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself? Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the light of sunrise and sunset, to buy safety for yourself--safety forever?"

What we must lose, we will find again. Granted, we will find it in Christ. But our telos is not only the happiness of the universe, but also our individual happiness (through the community).