4 Last Things: Death

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

In my last podcast with Bishop Richard Umbers of The Episcopal Podcast, we discussed the topic of eschatology, and in that episode, I attempted to explain the traditional conception of eschatology, which is framed with reference to what are known as the four last things: Death, Judgement, Heaven and Hell.

While I think I was able to provide a compact explanation of these four last things, I came away from recording thinking that I could have done more. Because of this, and also because we are approaching the end of the liturgical year, I decided to expand upon that episode and dedicate a series on these last things.

Over the next four posts, I will draw upon some teaching materials that I used as part of the Studies in Catholic Thought program, dedicated to the training of school teachers teaching Years 11 and 12 (the Australian equivalent of junior and senior high school) within the episcopal province of New South Wales.

So at the risk of sounding stupid: what is death?

At one level, death is one thing that we need not necessarily glean from divine revelation. At a biological level, we know that, given our observation of the life cycle of living things, living things do not live forever. We know that one day, every single thing will have to cease to live. Having said that, we can take our consideration of death beyond the merely biological.

At a cosmological level - that is in our analysis of the universe - there is the possibility to speak about death. We can get some insight by looking at the principle of entropy, which was first formulated by the German physicist Rudolf Clausius in the mid 19th century. The Greek root of this word translates into a “turning towards transformation”. Put more specifically, and perhaps more ominously, it can translate into the cosmos moving from a state of order to a state of chaos, from a state of unity to a state of dispersal. Whilst at the biological level, we can see entropy in the way living things start to lose function as they get older, at a cosmological level, we can see entropy in the way celestial bodies can lose energy the longer they are left alone, and eventually die out.

We can go further still and take our consideration of death to a philosophical and theological level. This is because our reflection on life does not necessarily terminate at the end of natural life. In the leadup to the module on the four last things, I looked at the Greek philosophers’ reminder that each living thing has a soul that animates their bodies. Thus, though bodies may die, there is still a supernatural soul that has a supernatural telos or end that is distinct from its natural end. Just what that supernatural telos is is beyond the ability of our minds to decipher correctly, and so must be given to us through divine revelation. In other words, death is never the end of all things. Rather, it is but a first step into a new life, which we can understand with reference to the other last things. These we will consider in the next three posts.

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