A Study of Death

THE two words which Mr. Alden placed on the title-page of his previous book, God in His World, namely, An Interpretation, might fitly have been used to characterize his new treatise, A Study of Death;¹ for the significance of the study is in its aim at interpreting elemental facts and relations in various manifestations through nature and humanity. It would be a bald and misleading judgment which should dismiss Mr. Alden’s speculation as merely reiterating in elaborate phrase the eighteenth - century dictum, “ Whatever is is right ; ” yet his aim throughout a subtle and suggestive course of reasoning is to penetrate the mystery, and resolve the apparent antagonism of good and evil, life and death, into their essential harmony ; to interpret the violent contrasts in nature and history so as to render them necessary to a comprehensive unity. Whatever exception one may take to single expressions, it is impossible to miss admiration for the bold sweep of thought which gathers in its progress numberless phenomena of the physical and the psychical world, and bears them along to a triumphant conclusion in the justification of a divinely human order.

In giving the title which his book bears, Mr. Alden does not mean to limit the scope of his inquiry to a single, even the consummate form of evil in its appearance. Apparently, he emphasizes the word “ death ” for the purpose of stating in the most inclusive manner the problem with which he has to deal. The reader need not therefore draw back from the work as if he were invited to a study in morbid anatomy. The author strikes a keynote in the closing sentence of his preface when he says, “ Faith boldly occupies the field of pessimism, finding therein its largest hope,” and this courageous spirit so pervades the whole study that the book is a pæan, and not a miserere.

The poetical element in the seer or interpreter is not lacking. Indeed, though there is a studious attempt at precision of statement, as if the author foresaw he would be called mystical and vague, the very nature of the statement to be made compels a poetical form, for the Strain of the argument is on the creative, constructive side of nature. Thus the proem is a bit of rhetorical prose, in which the antithesis of the dove and the serpent is made to prefigure the contrasts that are to occupy the reader’s thought. And throughout the book a rhythmical cadence falls on the ear, as if the pulsations of life could be interpreted best in a chant. This is not strange when one considers how the deepest tones in theology are heard in the great hymns of the Church, and how when one inclines one’s ear close to nature there is heard the throbbing of the pulse. We speak of this because we do not think Mr. Alden’s style is an assumption, and the style itself becomes thus a witness to the sincerity of the thought. There are passages which strike upon the ear with an increasing sonorousness, as when, after delineating the Hebrew type with its first significant exemplar in Abraham, he closes with a comparison which brings out the transcendent illustration of the type in Jesus : —

“ The peace which the Hebrew loved, the longing for which led him inland while the adventurous Phænician sought the mastery of the sea — that rest besought by the Psalmist, such as the dove seeks in its flight: these stand out in pathetic contrast against a troubled career of fiery trial and chastisement. It is just such a contrast that impresses us in the personal life of Jesus, between the serenity of Galilee — that charmed circle of security from which he sends forth his defiance to Herod — and the fretful tumult, the cruel hostility of Jerusalem. The deepening of capacity is for the larger inclusion of pain and strife, as well as for that of a heavenly peace ; and so it was in the divine life of the Son of Man, who had not where to lay his head, who took the stings and arrows of every enmity, and who not merely suffered evil and death, but included all evil and all death, so that his rising again might stand against all falling. He descended into hell, so enlarging the scope of that descent that it emerged in heaven. Before him, neither in pagan nor Jewish thought was such emergence conceived as possible, just as before him the mortal issue was not seen as life.”

The reader is repeatedly held by passages of singular beauty, and the beauty is involved in the thought, and not simply decorative. Yet perhaps this feeling for beauty is in nothing more manifest than in the use made of scientific fact. With a delicacy of suggestion which is remote from formal application of scientific discovery, Mr. Alden presses into the service of his argument accepted truths of biology, and more than once lifts an apparently unrelated phenomenon into the widest, most significant relations. There is throughout a definite course of interpretation, beginning with inorganic matter and ascending to the domains of the human spirit; but though science is invoked for the demonstration of incidents, it is the poetic penetration of the facts which gives them their value in the argument.

But it is time to convey to the reader some notion of the development of thought in this book, though one who has just read it is disposed to linger over the attributes of the presentation. The work is divided into four books, the first being entitled Two Visions of Death. In a short chapter headed The Body of Death, the cold nakedness of the visible fact at the end of life is predicated, and no concealment is made of its most repellent characteristics. “ 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.” The physicist computes the exact account which is kept by nature with man, but he does not touch the real mystery, any more than he can state the essential properties of life. And yet science presses near the truth when it makes the continuance of life to depend upon death, and thus in a second chapter, entitled The Mystical Vision, a series of illustrations direct attention to those great laws of action and reaction which comprehend the known movements of nature, pulsation, day and night, sleep and waking, and finally even a visible and 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.” Pressing the analysis of physiological sensation, the pulsation is forever beginning and forever ending, and the kinship of death and sleep establishes still more intimately the nature of death as a renewal of life. A physical analogue may be cited : “ The body which Death leaves behind is surrendered to that inorganic chemistry which was formerly in alliance with the more subtle actions and reactions of a distinctively human life, and to the physical bond of gravitation which was once the condition of its consistency, but which now brings it to the dust. Are we any more mystical than Newton and Laplace in our conviction that Death as a part of the higher life is its unseen bond — the way of return to its source ? ” And if Death may thus be accounted as a primal fact of life, Evil also may be included in the same category, its appearance veiling a reality which lies deeper than our experience can fathom. “ Even Sin, which is the sting of Death, must have its reconcilement with eternal life. We turn from the raggedness, the vileness, and the emaciation of the Prodigal, and regard only the unseen bond which brings him home, while we hear a voice saying, This my son was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found.”

The second book is entitled Native Impressions, and is an attempt at reconstructing primitive humanity in its attitude toward death. The reader is aided in this task by a brief criticism of the artificial naïveté of Poe and Maeterlinck, which by contrast makes more clear the true simplicity of the childhood of the race, in which the dead were mightier than the living, and the invisible furnished larger occupation for the imagination. The backward look was dominant, so that even tenses are confused, the Hebrew making the past to serve as the prophetic, and the downward look was the natural one when the gaze was toward origin. “ What amazing stupefaction of abysmal slumber must have still held in suspense all the proper activities of manhood in a being who looked down to his God ; who confounded the divine life with that of every living thing, looking indeed upon the lower animals, and even upon trees and stones, as somewhat nearer divinity than was himself ; as if he must reverse the stages of his own antenatal evolution, in order that through the mediate series he might find the way to Him who was the Most Low ! ” The earliest spiritual lore for the primitive man was from the education of sleep, and thus came to him an impression of Death also as a way into the presence of the eternal. Again, in his backward look, his ancestors were to him a living reality, and the tribal bonds in which he was included familiarized him with associations including the gods themselves. The very gods were mortal, and thus to his early apprehension the passage from life to death and death to life was constantly going on. It may be remarked here that though this primitive man is a reconstruction by the author out of the scattered materials offered by anthropology, he is avowedly hypothetical, and is but a tentative sketch.

Having thus taken into account the fact of death and its apprehension by humanity in its least reasoning and most instinctive condition, Mr. Alden proceeds to what may be taken as the second great division of his subject, in which he essays to uncover the movement of death and life, first in the phenomena of the natural world, and then in the disclosures of historic humanity. He entitles his third book Prodigal Sons: a Cosmic Parable, and in the first chapter, The Divided Living, he starts out with what at first looks like a play of words. Postulating creation as something from nothing, a definition hopelessly unsatisfactory, he defines death as that which brings to naught, and thus a term for the source of life. But the truth which he seeks to formulate with all the energy of his speech is the action of the centripetal and centrifugal forces throughout the universe. The planetary movement of the earth itself is in large the story of the prodigal son. The ingenuity of this application is merged, for the reader, in the splendor of the tale ; for the earth becomes, in the narrative, a sentient creature, and long before the parable is ended one is entranced by the noble imagination which has so extraordinarily linked together the cosmic and the individual. Throughout this entire chapter, and the other two of the book, The Moral Order, and Ascent and Descent of Life, this parable recurs from time to time in suggestive phrases, but it is pursued through many forms of life and through the development of man from infancy to age. We cannot refrain from quoting a single passage in the chapter The Moral Order, in which Mr. Alden seeks to find a deeper consciousness underlying the experience of the prodigal:

“ If our exile were real, if we could really leave the Father’s house, if by some chasm Time were divorced from Eternity, and if human existence were wholly experimentation, consciously regulated, and in its entirety determined by arbitrary choice on a rational plan, — as from partial aspects it seems to be, — then indeed might we pray for absolute annihilation. In this view, the moral order would be a system of inextricable confusion. If we can believe in such separation of humanity from its Lord that our life is hidden elsewhere than in him, then is inevitable that other belief, formulated in the extreme rationalistic specialization of dogma, that there are dread realms of unutterable woe forever excluded from the divine presence and from the operation of divine laws and uses. If the material is separated by an impassable chasm from the spiritual, then may we accept the dualism of the Manichæist, or adopt the skepticism of the biologist, who asserts that matter only is eternal, and that the entire realm of life is but a fleeting moment of cosmic time, a shuddering pulsation that for an instant disturbs the monstrous and heartless mechanism, an alien dream as inexplicable as it is transient. If his rectitude, his formed character — that outward integrity which he builds up for himself — is at its very best man’s only blessedness, then is his experience vain ; if that whereof he is ashamed or that of which he is proud, if what he consciously shuns or what be consciously seeks, be the full measure of his evil or of his good, then, in the superficial jaggedness of the things wherein he is entangled, is his destiny the most trivial of inconsequences, the ultimate caprice.

“ Not thus is he to be accounted for, and never in the depths of his spiritual being has he thus accounted for himself — as if he were a fragment of the world, appearing suddenly upon the ocean of existence, moved this way and that by varying winds and currents and by the whims of his own variable and nearsighted intelligence, and then as suddenly submerged beneath the waves. He never had a spiritual philosophy which did not make him one with the Eternal — which did not make him the measure and explanation of the world rather than the world the measure and explanation of him — one in which the scope of his evil and of his good did not embrace all evil and all good. In him alone did life awake and think and speak, but not thus did he forego his share in the eternal silence. Whatever his forfeit, it compromised the universe, and engaged all the powers of the universe for his redemption. No transaction could in its scope be too far-reaching to be commensurate with his eternal interests.”

The closing book bears the title Death Unmasqued, and is occupied with the disclosure through human history as specialized in Hebrew life, preëminently through the person of Jesus, whose revelation is interpreted by Paul, and through the developments of Christendom. It will be seen that our author has passed from the realm of nature into that of humanity, and the reader who has followed the course of the argument in the nature of things has now the opportunity of testing it by the witness of history and his own experience. Many will find this portion of the book the most intelligible, since it is the most concrete. It is in effect a brief philosophy of history, and contains frequent luminous comments on the course of human development. Its interest for some will be in the ingenious resolution of seeming evil into real good. Mr. Alden’s optimism is unfailing because his confidence is centred on unescapable reality, and that reality, as the reader discovers, is imbedded in the universal order. The large field of his vision discourages a too minute criticism of parts, and the poetic beauty of the presentation leads one away sometimes from the close inquiry of the reason. Indeed, the argument throughout is veiled rather than explicit. The reader who comes armed with scientific or theologic formulæ rarely finds these objected to ; rather, he is in doubt how he can use them himself, since this writer, with his constant recourse to life in its unformulated manifestations, meets him, not with weapons, but with “ lamps within pitchers.” A Study of Death will stimulate thought, for it brings a large imagination to bear upon the mystery of life.