The Christian account of human death is a story of bodies and souls. Bodies are given the lives they have by their souls. Their souls are their lives, what animates them. Bodies, however, are mortal, and eventually die, resolving into corpses. When a body dies, its soul separates from it and continues to live, but now in discarnate form, without a body. Souls cannot die: they are immortal. Eventually, at the general resurrection, every discarnate soul is rejoined with the corpse of the very body it had been separated from at that body’s death, giving it new life. Such resurrected bodies are immortal. They won’t again cease to live by being separated from their immortal souls, and so their resurrected state is their final state.

The body in this account is always fleshly, and therefore always extended in space and time, as is proper to bodies. But in one phase of the story it’s mortal, living toward its death, which brings it to an end. As with all deaths, that of the mortal human body isn’t lived through. The issue of that death is a corpse. In the last phase of the story, however, the same body is resurrected and then lives immortally, no longer ordered by and to death, no longer ever to die. The soul, by contrast, is always immortal. But it, too, lives differently in different phases of the story. It’s embodied, enfleshed, in two of them, as provider of life to one and the same human body, which is initially mortal and finally immortal. Between those phases, the soul lives discarnately, separated from any body.

This Christian account contains two prodigies: separated souls and immortal bodies. They’re prodigious because mortal embodied souls—what we are now as human creatures here below—have no experience and no more than a formal understanding of such things.

As to bodies. Everything we know of bodies, which is a good deal, shows them as mortal. The thought of an immortal body is for us like that of a play without a final curtain; we can, or we think we can, give some formal content to the phrase, but what the phrase indicates is closed entirely to our imaginations. We’re in the position of actors on stage who’ve only ever been that, and for whom therefore the stage is the world, trying to see into the lives of those offstage, non-actors, spectators, living lives different in kind from ours. We can’t do it.

Something similar is true for separated souls. Souls, so far as we know them, are embodied, incarnate; they are the lives of bodies. To speak of one that isn’t, but which lives and thinks and senses and moves discarnately (“Moves?” “In space and time?” Those activities, surely, belong to bodies) is also to speak of a prodigy beyond our imaginative capacity.

This account, with its two prodigies, is nevertheless fundamental Christian doctrine. It’s the common property, with minor variants, of all Christians. It forms imagination, piety, sentiment, and liturgy, and is, among other things, central to Christian habits of dealing with corpses. Death appears in it as a transient condition, and so the account is typically presented by Christians as hopeful: yes, your mortal body will die, as will those of your loved ones, but that is neither the end of you nor of them. You will all, eventually, be forever reunited with your bodies and your loved ones. The corpse rotting in the grave or reduced to ash in the fire will live again, the soul separated from its body will rejoin it forever, and every tear will then be wiped away. So Christians say.

There’s an invisible thread in the fabric of this story, which is the figure of the human person. Many Christian thinkers say, though it isn’t a matter of doctrine, that human persons are embodied souls. It follows from this that when a human body dies and its soul separates from it, neither the corpse nor the discarnate soul is a human person. The corpse lacks a soul, the soul lacks a body, and human persons need both. Lacking either, they don’t exist. According to the Christian account, each human, during the period between the death of her mortal body and the rejoining of that body with its soul at the general resurrection, is definitively absent from the world. It has died and is dead, and what remains of it are its traces, chief among which are a corpse and a separated soul. This condition, in the case of Jesus, is what the stripping of the altars on Holy Thursday anticipates and mourns; until Sunday, the world lacks Jesus, though his traces are present.

The two traces, corpse and discarnate soul, are different from one another in many ways, clearly, but they share one essential feature: they are not the person. No trace is the same as what it’s a trace of: the fox’s footprint in the snow isn’t the fox; the manuscript of Great Expectations isn’t Charles Dickens; the relics of a saint, powerful though they may be, aren’t the saint just because they belong to the saint’s corpse or accoutrements. Neither is the saint’s soul the saint—it yearns for the body it’s been separated from, and so is radically incomplete. It isn’t the person it was because it isn’t a person at all. It’s, at most, a successor to or inheritor of this or that feature of the person who once lived as the body it animated, and will eventually do so again.

Christian practice ordinarily deals with the absence of the human person from the world following the death of the body by occluding the fact that discarnate souls are without their bodies, and by minimizing the difference between discarnate souls and persons, even to the extent of erasing that difference altogether. This happens, for example, in Dante’s Commedia, where the souls of the damned in hell and those of the saved, whether in purgatory or heaven, are shown as persons—and often, though not without uneasiness on Dante’s part (both the one in the poem and the one who wrote it), as bodies. It happens, too, in most Christian interactions with the dead, where they’re imagined and talked to and represented and invoked and given gifts as if they were embodied, as if they were still human persons who aren’t here but are somewhere.

But, according to Christian doctrine, they’re certainly not embodied, and it’s consonant with Christian doctrine to say that, for this reason, they aren’t persons either. The gulf is deep between them and us—they are different in kind. There are also questions about the sense that can be given to location, being somewhere in space and time, if you lack a body, as separated souls do.

The difference in kind between discarnate souls and embodied persons doesn’t apply to immortal bodies. They, like us with our mortal bodies, are human persons. But a thick veil of ignorance falls between us and them, thick to the point of impenetrability, in some respects thicker than that between discarnate souls and human persons. That’s because of the distention in time and space that belongs to mortal bodies, the kind we have and are. Such bodies have location, beginning, and end, and the end of each is its death, which removes it from any location in the world. Most living bodies are killed by others (bacteria, viruses,
beasts of prey, enemies), some by deprivation of essentials (water, air, food, warmth), and some by convulsions of inanimate force (storms, floods, fires, earthquakes). Those that avoid deaths of these kinds are ended by senescence. None avoid death.

This state of affairs affects everything about the lives of mortals. Reproduction, for instance, sexual or otherwise, has death as its necessary condition. Were there not inevitable death, there would be no need of reproduction. The cycles of birth and of death aren’t separable from one another at the level of species or clade, and largely not at the level of the individual either.

There’s also the temporal trajectory of all mortal life from birth to death. Every living body, human and not, follows such a trajectory, which can be represented graphically as a bell curve. On the upward slope the body grows and gains capacity; on the downward it senesces, losing capacity and withering until it reaches the low point on the curve, where it flatlines. Before a living body comes to be it is absent from the world. Likewise after its death. At every point between, its mode of action in the world is responsive to and conditioned by its position on the bell curve. This is a matter of physiology: a human child of three or so can scarcely avoid running to get from place to place, while an old one of eighty cannot do the same with anything but a stiff walk. This is the physiological presence of mortality in life. It’s unavoidable. It orders every moment of the lives of all mortals, as much on the upward curve as the downward. It enters so deeply into the human sense of what it is to be a living body, and therefore a human person, that we cannot get outside it imaginatively.

For persons capable of life in the social as well as the material order of the world, the physiological bell curve is responded to and integrated with social scripts. The young (otters, humans, foxes, birds) learn scripted forms of play, and sometimes language. As they mature and gain capacity, their respective social order prescribes rules and roles for them, to which they ordinarily respond by acceding to the rules and inhabiting the roles. There are always detailed local scripts in every social order for such activities as production, reproduction, the uses of violence, differentiation of friend from enemy, cuisine, art, and ornament. All these are indexed and responsive to the physiological bell curve, for which age is a crude indicator. Young love, late style, age of consent, eligibility for conscription, pensioning off—all have their place on the curve leading to mortality.

Social life, like physiological life, is therefore instinct with mortality. This is not exactly the presence of death in life; it is the presence of mortality in life—the sense of an ending, close or far, for each of the living individually and collectively. That sense orders the physical life of each organism and the social lives of all.

That sense also orders what we can imagine. For us, bodies are always placed in space and time, and their temporal placement involves a terminus ad quem as much as their spatial placement involves an incapacity to bilocate. Faced with the thought of a body without a terminus ad quem, mortals—Christians as much as others—at once avert their gaze from that feature of it and begin to take it as a mortal body. Mortals cannot see immortal bodies, and so they remake them imaginatively into mortal ones in such a way as to guarantee their invisibility. This means that Christians cannot see their own futures, in which they will all be, according to the Christian account, immortal bodies. Those bodies, that future, are on the other side of a veil impenetrable to mortal gaze.

It seems, therefore, that bodies without death and souls without bodies—the prodigies necessary to the Christian account of human death—can’t be seen by embodied mortals. Attending to this feature of embodied mortal life has effects upon how the Christian life is performed. It has those effects by showing some states of affairs with clarity.

First, it shows that you will die. Not that your body will die, though of course it will (the Christian script has nothing to say about this other than what everyone already knows), but that the person you are and the person you take yourself to be—the two are almost certain to be very different—will die. Your corpse and your separated soul appear in the script only as your traces, and since there’s nothing else of you to be found after your death, it’s vividly apparent that you won’t survive your death. You will, for a while, come to nothing. The world will go on for a while, perhaps a very long while, without you.

The second state of affairs shown clearly by the Christian death-script is like the first: all other embodied persons who have died, including the saints, have been ended by death. They too have not lived through their deaths. What remains of them is what will remain of you once you have died: a corpse (some relics, perhaps) and a separated soul, until the general resurrection.

Your removal from the world by death, along with that of your loved ones, appears starkly and uncomfortably when you attend to the Christian death-script as written. This may take away, or at least dilute, the comfort that assurance of resurrection is ordinarily seen to provide. Yes, you’ll eventually reenter the world, when your discarnate soul is rejoined to your body, and when you do, you’ll live eternally. But that probably won’t happen quickly. And if, as seems to be the case for some, the thought of the world without you is fearful, the Christian script won’t alleviate that fear. That is among the reasons why Christians tend to ignore the part of the script that denies identity between your discarnate soul and you. It’s more comfortable to gloss over it by representing discarnate souls as really very like those whose souls they are. But acute discomfort with death, in particular with the extinction of the self it brings, resonates with other aspects of the Christian tradition—for example, with the agony of Jesus at his own death, and the realism with which the liturgies of the Triduum depict the real absence of Jesus produced by his death. Grace can be cheap, as can comfort. Attending to the fact that the person you are will die and thus be extinguished makes comfort more expensive and the contours of our mortal life clearer.

There is a third state of affairs made evident by close attention to the Christian death-script, but it’s harder than the first two to see clearly. It is that separated souls are veiled from you. They are traces of persons, but you can’t see how it is with them, what the disembodied life they have seems like to them. What are memory or desire or pain for them, fleshless as they are? How does it seem to them to yearn for a body they lack? Some formal answers can be given to questions such as these—that, for example, the passions and memories of the discarnate are appropriate to their kind—but nothing of substance. Discarnate souls are as imaginatively, tactilely, sonically inaccessible to us as the first person of the Trinity, the set of all sets, and the content of the dreams of an octopus.

Realizing this inaccessibility of the dead makes some ordinary features of the Christian life more difficult than they are when discarnate souls are shown to us with bodies and all that goes with them. That is true for devotion to the saints. It isn’t that this must vanish altogether. Christians can still love the saints, admire them, request favors from them, and so on. But it will become difficult to imagine them, to interact with them by way of phantasms, which is what images of them must be, since they are discarnate. So considered, the saints become mysterious, whereas, in much Christian piety about them, they are not. Christian doctrine holds that saints experience beatitude and that they can intercede with God for those among the living who ask their favor. That remains possible. But those attentive to saints’ opacity—and to the fact that they are not, for a time, persons—will frame petitions to them with a degree of puzzlement. It is as if one were imploring a postulate or a chimera, not as if one were imploring a person.

But one aspect of devotion to the saints will assume greater significance than it ordinarily has. That is, the conviction that they, too, are incomplete, not yet perfected, yearning for something not yet given. They lack bodies, and they want them; they know—in some sense of knowing that remains opaque—that until they have them, their beatitude isn’t what it will be. This is what the Christian script requires, and awareness of it on the part of those who petition the saints makes it possible, even inevitable, that Christians will find their devotions to the saints threaded with empathy. That is almost impossible for those who stick to the more comfortable readings of the script, which occlude the dissimilarity between separated souls and persons, as well as the lack and the yearning entailed by that dissimilarity.

Hardest of all to accept is the fourth state of affairs, which is that resurrected bodies are also impenetrably veiled from you. They’re persons, and you’ll be one of them. But the only things you can see and say about what they’re like and what it’s like to be them are the formalities the script provides. Each of them is a human person, substantively identical with some person who has died and been resurrected; each is immortal; and each lives with an appropriate degree of intimacy to the God who made them. That’s it. All you can add is that every element of what it now seems like to be you, tied as it is to the arc that connects natality to mortality, is lacking for them.

They can’t, for example, remember what it’s like to suffer pain. That’s because they’re without pain, and remembering pain involves, in complex ways, its re-presentation. If it doesn’t, then it’s indistinguishable from propositional knowledge that such-and-such happened in the past, which the resurrected may have, but which is nothing like the memories that connect you to your own past, which are full of the feel of pain and sin and mortality. They must also lack the intensity of desire for, and love of, a beloved that is given by awareness of mortality. This means that you, when resurrected, will have none of the convoluted and textured particular loves for other persons you have now. That’s because those loves are, in their particularity, alive with remorse and hope and frustration, implicated with misprisions of both the beloveds and yourself. You have no experience of particular loves that are not like that—of loves not shadowed by death or concomitant desires for possession, not fearful, not in any way predicated upon lack. Again, you can state formalities about such loves, but they are otherwise a closed book.

Once resurrected, you will have been gathered into the heaven of deathless embodied life, which is untouched by the whimperings of the sick animal, even as you will then know that you were that sick animal, and are now transfigured. Your resurrected self doesn’t and can’t remember what it was like to be you. You can’t and don’t anticipate what it will be like to be your resurrected self.

Performing the Christian life in the shadow cast by these opacities is different, therefore, from performing that life in the warm light of a vision of eternal life that shows your future resurrected self as very like what you are now, and that shows your death as if it were effectively lived through because your separated soul is also very like you now. The differences are of emphasis, mostly: produced by what’s attended to and what ignored, what’s emphasized and what downplayed. But there may be one difference that goes deeper. It has to do with the significance of the inner life for persons.

Suppose that your inner life is everything that seems to you to make you who you are—all the seemings that collectively constitute the phantasms of your experience. These are what philosophers call qualia, events and patterns that have an experiential feel. What the color blue seems like. How it feels to be loved. The touch of an icy wind on your exposed skin. The sense of a triumph in argument. The texture of a disappointment, or a hope. The taste of chilled Sancerre on a hot day. And so on. Most human persons take these to be important, even to be the marks of their identity, what makes them who they are rather than someone else. Our inner lives, which are also a kind of theater, with characters and entrances and exits and incidents and events and drama, aren’t always with us. They vanish altogether in dreamless sleep, and are often absent at other moments, particularly when we perform in a deeply habituated way (we speak local courtesies in a language we’re fluent in, we walk a route we’ve walked a hundred times before, we respond to the idiosyncrasies of the coffee grinder as we have every morning for years). And sometimes our inner theaters are extraordinarily intense, as when we’re embarrassed, or frightened, or remorseful.

The Christian death-script implies that whatever the inner theater of resurrected immortal persons is like, it is very unlike that of mortal embodied persons. If we add to this another claim proper to the script—essential, in fact, to the grammar of Christianity—which is that you, when resurrected, will be the same person you are now with the same body you have now (never mind what exactly this “same” does and does not mean), then it follows that, in the Christian script, the inner theater is not what provides identity to persons. The texture of what it now seems like to be you is not what makes you who you are. That sense of yourself has, to intensify the point, nothing at all to do with who you truly are.

Embracing this conclusion would reconfigure the Christian performance in a thoroughgoing way. It would direct the gaze of Christians away from how it seems to them to be themselves (a dreary object of contemplation: always and relentlessly greedy, impoverished, unsatisfiable, violent) and toward the God they worship. It would make it possible to see the inner theater as a contingently emergent property of the kind of creature a human person is by making it impossible to see it as constitutive of our identity. We would then see that this inner theater gives the human person no more glory than a spandrel gives a Gothic arch. And this would open the way for Christians to consider the sense they have of themselves as, perhaps, an effect of the Fall that our resurrection will remove. But those are topics for speculative thought; they do not belong to Christian doctrine and I have not argued for them here. The Christian death-script only opens the way for us to consider them, just as a performance of the Christian life in light of that script opens the way for a life lived free from slavery to all the seemings we now experience as our selves.

Ceasing to attend to the inner theater and looking instead at the Christian story of death would place Christians where they belong: in the open before their God, unshielded, mortal, living creatures among others, sharing with those others a death that extinguishes them and about which they can say, in the words of Leon Wieseltier, “This is not all there is, but this is all there is of this.”

This article was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.