Determining Attitudes of Persons Toward Death

The key element is that resurrection is implied in the finis. "Death was originally the spirit of vegetation," says Frazer, "who was annually slain in the spring, in order that he might come to flavour again with all the vigour of youth. . . . Death was not precisely the dying god of vegetation, precisely also a state-supported scapegoat, upon whom were laid all the evils that had afflicted the people during the past year."2

With stopping point surrounded by so much ceremony in primitive cultures, it is but a short leap from the conclusion and rebirth of agricultural cycles to a culture of human finis that involves death and rebirth as well. The agricultural cycle is personified in the myth of the death and resurrection of the Egyptian god Osiris, but the very(prenominal)(prenominal) structure can be seen in Asian and Christian religions as well. Joseph Campbell cites rites of initiation in Greek culture that concern the death of Demeter's son Plutus, and his subsequent rebirth and return to her, but as her consort: "[I]n those rites of initiation . . . the initiate, returning in considerateness to the goddess mother of the mysteries, became detached reflectively from the fate of his mortal retch (symbolically, the son, who dies), and identified with the principle that is ever reborn, the Being of all beings (the snake father): whereupon, in the world where only sorrow and death had been se

(New York: Penguin Books, 1964), 15.

Williams, Daniel Day. What PresentDay Theologians Are Thinking.

In the modern period, thither has been some recasting of the tension among earthly vivification and the promise of salvation after death as the principal elements of immortality. Williams discusses the position of what he calls the Christian existential philosopher theologians, who have incorporated many elements of modern psychology and philosophical system into their examination of fundamental problems facing mankind.

The views of these theologians concentrate far more on the process of living and confronting the possibility of death rather than on the rules and regulations by which the consequences of mortal death can be overtaken by anticipation of eternal support. According to Paul Tillich, says Williams, who is a philosophical descendant of Soren Kierkegaard, whose meditations on death and anxiety enclose the basis for much modern existential thought, "Man's existence in finitude is existence in 'ontological anxiety.' Death and guilt are, when profoundly understood, the twin symbols of man's two ultimate problems; his anxiety about the 'end' of his life and his anxiety about his spiritual isolation from God. . . . Tillich's theology . . . is a realistic account of how man feels when he has come to the very edge of despair, and can find no meaning in life unless there comes a better disclosure from beyond himself."6 In this view, the modern Christian reaches out to the healing power represented by Jesus, but the Jesus of the modern Christian thinkers differs from the one of the early Christian thinkers inasmuch as for the moderns, there is a reach for meaning in the present life rather than a reach for guarantees about the quality of the afterlife.

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