Reading:

The Death of Socrates

At this Crito made a sign to his servant, who was standing near by. The servant went out and after spending a considerable time returned with the man who was to administer the poison; he was carrying it ready prepared in a cup. When Socrates saw him he said, ‘Well, my good fellow, you understand these things; what ought I to do?’ ‘Just drink it,’ he said, ‘and then walk about until you feel a weight in your legs, and then lie down. Then it will act of its own accord.’ As he spoke he handed the cup to Socrates, who received it quite cheerfully, Echecrates, without a tremor, without any change of colour or expression, and he said, looking up under his brows with his usual steady gaze, ‘What do you say about pouring a libation from this drink? Is it permitted, or not?’ ‘We only prepare what we regard as the normal dose, Socrates,’ he replied. ‘I see,’ said Socrates. ‘But I suppose I am allowed, or rather bound, to pray the gods that my removal from this world to the other may be prosperous. This is my prayer, then; and I hope that it may be granted.’ With these words, quite calmly and with no sign of distaste, he drained the cup in one breath. Up till this time most of us had been fairly successful in keeping back our tears; but when we saw that he was drinking, that he had actually drunk it, we could do so no longer; in spite of myself the tears came pouring out, so that I covered my face and wept broken-heartedly – not for him, but for my own calamity in losing such a friend. Crito had given up even before me, and had gone out when he could not restrain his tears. But Apollodorus, who had never stopped crying even before, now broke out into such a storm of passionate weeping that he made everyone in the room break down, except Socrates himself, who said: ‘Really, my friends, what a way to behave! Why, that was my main reason for sending away the women, to prevent this sort of disturbance; because I am told that one should make one’s end in a tranquil frame of mind. Calm yourselves and try to be brave.’ This made us feel ashamed, and we controlled our tears. Socrates walked about and presently, saying that his legs were heavy, lay down on his back –that was what the man recommended. The man (he was the same one who had administered the poison) kept his hand upon Socrates, and after a little while examined his feet and legs; then pinched his foot hard and asked if he felt it. Socrates said no. Then he did the same to his legs; and moving gradually upwards in this way let us see that he was getting cold and numb. Presently he felt him again and said that when it reached the heart, Socrates would be gone. The coldness was spreading about as far as his waist when Socrates uncovered his face – for he had covered it up – and said (they were his last words): ‘Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius.* See to it, and don’t forget.’ ‘No, it shall be done,’ said Crito. ‘Are you quite sure that there is nothing else?’ Socrates made no reply to this question, but after a little while he stirred; and when the man uncovered him, his eyes were fixed. When Crito saw this, he closed the mouth and eyes. Such, Echecrates, was the end of our comrade, who was, we may fairly say, of all those whom we knew in our time, the bravest and also the wisest and most upright man.
From The Last Days of Socrates,
Translated by Hugh Tredennick, Penguin Classics, 1954.

The Undiscovered Country

The title of this address comes from Hamlet’s celebrated soliloquy which begins ‘To be or not to be....’ in which he contemplates taking his own life. He’s asking himself, ‘should I live or should I die?’ and one of the reasons he gives for carrying on living is that no one knows what happens when you die. Death, he says, is an ‘undiscovered country, from whose bourne no traveller returns’. Hamlet’s anxieties concerning death reflect our own. Despite the fact that we live in a culture in which death and talk about death seem to be taboo – less so in Ireland than in England, I might add – no human being above the age of about five is spared those four o’clock in the morning thoughts and speculations, provoked by the loss of a loved one or, increasingly as one gets older, provoked by thoughts of one’s own demise: what happens at death? shall I survive it in some form, or will my consciousness be extinguished like a candle flame? These are not idle questions. I say this by way of justification, in the light of my statement a couple of weeks ago that much of what passes for religious discourse is little more than elaborate speculation, which has little impact on the way we actually live our lives. But the question of life after death does not belong in this category. It is an issue that affects us all, and our conclusions may well influence the way we live: witness the suicide bombers who are motivated, in part at least, by some conviction that they will be rewarded in paradise for their actions. In addition, unlike most areas of theology, there are some empirically testable elements which can be examined rationally and dispassionately by anyone who is prepared to devote some time to the enterprise. However, for all its importance, and despite the fact that surveys show that some 95% of Americans seem to believe in it,* there seems to be a reluctance to deal with the matter in some liberal religious groups like our own. If you look through our American hymnbook ‘Singing the Living Tradition’ you won’t find very much on the topic. There’s certainly no section devoted to it, either in the hymns or the readings, and any references there might be are oblique and brief. Unitarians, for the best part of the 20th century, have tended to ignore the issue, loudly proclaiming ‘We believe in life before death’, as we get on with the serious business of politics and ecology. Our second hymn today, Where is our Holy Church, contains the lines:

This is hardly the paradise envisaged by conventional religious groups. Rather it is a reference to an earthly utopia built by human effort. For most Unitarians, religious concepts like the Kingdom of God and the Resurrection of Christ are meaningless unless interpreted as figurative expressions of secular, ‘this worldly’ concepts. A straw poll conducted among members of the Wakefield Unitarian congregation before I became minister there in 1992, found that not one person had a strong belief in survival of bodily death.

There are exceptions. Ernest Savell Hicks, who was minister of the Dublin congregation for 50 years, from 1910-1962, was a spiritualist, but even he did not bring his spiritualism to the pulpit with any regularity. I, too, have kept my own tentatively held opinion that bodily death is not the end of existence out of my sermons: I have mentioned it occasionally, but in ten years I have never devoted a whole sermon to the topic. The same could be said of other Unitarian ministers and worship leaders: they may have a personal belief in life after death, but, sensing indifference among the congregation, they don’t speak about it too often on Sundays.
Keith Gilley, who was editor of the Inquirer until recently, wrote an article in 1993 expressing the prevailing Unitarian position:
I believe death is the end as far as personal existence is concerned; the only way in which a person survives is in the hearts, minds and memories of the living. When it comes to the question of survival, I am not one of those fanatical doubters seeking always to discredit or deny that belief. I am much more concerned to put a positive emphasis on life, to affirm, if you like, my belief in life before death.
My real concern is how to live fully and well in the here and now. The possibility of survival after death is not part of my real concern, though as a minister I hope I am sympathetic when it presents itself as part of the concern and perhaps the need of others.*
While this may still be the majority opinion, I sense that there is a change taking place. Two years ago, at the General Assembly Meetings in Chester, a talk on Angels under the auspices of the Unitarian Psychical Society (of which I am Vice Chair), attracted over a hundred delegates. This, I think, would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. Perhaps it is the fact that I sense this change or, more probably, the fact that I have myself come near to death in recent years, that I have decided to do an occasional series on life after death, dealing with such topics as:

In order that we can explore this topic together, each service will have some space for ‘talkback’, in which members of the congregation will have an opportunity to express an opinion.
In what remains of this, introductory, address, I’d like, very briefly, to make a few general points.
We often hear from disbelievers that life after death is just ‘wishful thinking’. I’ve never really understood this objection. To begin with, it’s not an argument at all. Whether or not I hope to live beyond bodily death has no bearing on the truth or falsity of the central proposition. And why can’t disbelief be considered a form of wishful thinking? Could it be that the disbeliever is simply unwilling to face the possibility that, after death, he might be held accountable for actions of which he is ashamed? Emotional responses like this from either side of the debate get us nowhere.
A more serious set of objections concerns the fact that emphasis on life after death can distract people from the business of sorting out more pressing mundane problems. This, without doubt, is true. To assume, as many do, that earthly inequities and injustices will be corrected by God in the afterlife gives us an excuse for doing nothing to seek out remedies for ourselves. Similarly, the gross injustices associated with the caste system in India are in some measure caused directly by the prevailing belief in reincarnation: the poor and dispossessed are suffering now in order to pay for what they did in a previous life; the rich are comfortable and healthy because they are being rewarded for virtue in a former life. Thinking like this undoubtedly provides a justification for resigned inertia among the poor and smug indifference among the rich and helps to support a status quo which condemns many millions of people to penury.
In America, belief in the imminent Second Coming of Christ and the ‘rapture’ of the ‘saved’ into heaven has drastically reduced the desire among some ‘born again’ Christians to correct the contemporary ecological imbalances. If Christ is coming soon, they reason, why should we worry about what happens to the earth?
Belief in life after death can indeed have unfortunate consequences. But so can disbelief. Is it not possible that the spiritual malaise which seems to affect so many today, the increasing recourse to antidepressants, drug and alcohol abuse, are in some way a response to the nihilistic philosophies which dominate our culture? Is there not a growing sense of despair coupled with an ‘eat, drink, and be merry’ style of hedonism, both of them a response to the perceived pointlessness of life? Is Macbeth’s tyranny associated with his view that life is ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’? Can we build a compassionate society when a significant number of its members think with Estragon and Vladimir in Waiting for Godot that life can be compared with a woman who gives birth astride of a grave, ‘the gravedigger puts on the forceps, and then it’s night once more’? Conversely, some might argue that we can only build a compassionate society when illusory concepts like life after death are removed from our consciousness and human beings start to appreciate that life is precious because it is fleeting and because it is finite.
The subject is complicated and full of paradoxes. Richard Dawkins observes that many people who believe in life after death and talk about how wonderful it will be seem less than keen to leave this life.* For example, he notes that it is generally people who claim to believe in life after death who oppose abortion and voluntary euthanasia. Just yesterday the Beliefnet.com joke of the day reflected this ambivalence among believers:

Richard Dawkins and those who think like him believe that life after death is a dangerous, distracting illusion which hinders real progress in human affairs. Until we face up to the realities of our own mortality we will get nowhere, he suggests. I am not so sure about his dismissive attitude. Here are three reasons why I think we need to take the subject seriously:
1. Every culture since the beginning of human history has shown signs of a belief in life after death. This could be just evidence of wishful thinking, of course, but it could also indicate that deep in our psyche we know that life continues, and our religious institutions and our burial customs reflect this.
2. Many (but not all) of the great sages of the past have accepted it as a fact. According to Plato, Socrates greeted his death with equanimity because he was convinced his soul would survive the death of his body.
3. For all our considerable scientific achievements, we seem no nearer to explaining the mysteries of consciousness than our more primitive ancestors. If, as some materialistic thinkers suggest, consciousness has a purely physical basis, then it will obviously perish with the death of the body. If, however, consciousness can exist apart from the body, then we need not automatically suppose that it is extinguished at death. Maybe we have too prosaic a view of ourselves. The American writer Annie Dillard says:
We are curious and unlikely creatures.
Things are wilder by far than we think.
And more wondrous than we may
yet have dared to believe.
It seems to me eminently possible that such curious and unlikely creatures should have a curious and unlikely destiny which transcends our brief sojourn on earth.
Rev.Bill Darlison 15th October, 2006
Dublin Unitaian Church