Littell's Living Age/Volume 126/Issue 1621/Two Views of Annihilation

From The Spectator.

TWO VIEWS OF ANNIHILATION.

Professor Clifford, in replying to the rather tenuous argument of the authors of the "Unseen Universe" for a spiritual world, in the new number of the Fortnightly, expresses in keen language his scorn and weariness of the effort of intellectual men to hold fast to any remnant of Christianity or of spiritual belief. "My brothers," he says to the authors he is addressing, — and when a Carlylese layman addresses any body as his brothers, in the vocative case, we are at once aware that he is endeavouring in his largeness of heart to console them by this candid admission of the fraternal tie for being worth very much less both intellectually and spiritually than they had ventured to hope, indeed, that he is pitying them for their delusions, and trying to make it up to them in the only way he can, by acknowledging, in spite of his own freedom from such delusions, his kinship to them all the same, — "that which you keep in your hearts, my brothers, is the slender remnant of a system which has made its red mark on history, and still lives to threaten mankind. The grotesque forms of its intellectual belief have survived the discredit of its moral teaching. Of this what the kings would bear with, the nations have cut down; and what the nations left, the right heart of man by man revolts against day by day. You have stretched out your hands to save the dregs of the sifted remnant of a residuum. Take heed, lest you have given soil and shelter to the seed of that awful plague which has destroyed two civilizations, and but barely failed to slay such promise of good as is now struggling to live amongst men." That is a somewhat dark oracle in itself, as indeed, is a good deal of the remainder of Professor Clifford's essay; but to those who have read it, it will, at least, be clear that amongst the "seed of that awful plague which has destroyed two civilizations" must be reckoned the belief in God and the belief in immortality, — an immortality with the natural and, as the essayist admits, healthy desire for which, as it exists in almost all the members of civilized races, he deals very curtly and cavalierly indeed. "Longing for deathlessness," he says, with that authority of tone which belongs to him, "means simply shrinking from death:" —

If we could think of death without shrinking, it would only mean that this world was no place for us, and that we should make haste to be gone to make room for our betters. And therefore that love of action which would put death out of sight is to be counted good, as a holy and healthy thing (one word whose meanings have become unduly severed), necessary to the life of man, serving to knit them together and to advance them in the right. Not only is it right and good thus to cover over and dismiss the thought of our own personal end, to keep in mind and heart always the good things that shall be done, rather than ourselves who shall or shall not have the doing of them; but also to our friends and loved ones we shall give the most worthy honour and tribute, if we never say nor remember that they are dead, but, contrariwise, that they have lived; that hereby the brotherly force and flow of their action and work may be carried over the gulfs of death, and made immortal in the true and healthy life which they worthily had and used. It is only when the bloody hands of one who has fought against the light and the right are folded and powerless for further crime that it is kind and merciful to bury him, and say, "The dog is dead." But for you noble and great ones, who have loved and laboured yourselves not for yourselves, but for the universal folk, in your time, not for your time only, but for the coming generations, for you there shall be life as broad and far-reaching as your love, for you life-giving action to the utmost reach of the great wave whose crest you sometime were.

That says, we suppose, though in language somewhat disguised by its eloquence and its archaic style of enthusiasm, that it is healthy to be so absorbed in life as to forget annihilation; that it is healthy to forget that good men are dead and gone, and to recall them only in the good they have left behind them; that it is natural to dwell on the fact of death only in connection with people whose activity was mischievous, in which case it is a healthy and consoling triumph to remind oneself that "the dog is dead,"—but that while all living force is apt to dwell in imagination on future forms of energy, the wish for a personal life surviving the energy of the body and brain is a morbid and distorted hope, of which wise men will take care to divest themselves as soon as possible. The desire for immortality, says the professor, so far as it is sound at all, is due simply to the abundance of our vital energy which cannot imagine non-existence:—"The martyr cannot think of his own end, because he lives in the truth he has proclaimed; with it and with mankind he grows into greatness, through ever new victories over falsehood and wrong. But there is another way [of excluding the image of death]. Since, when men have died, such orderly, natural, and healthy activity as we have known in them and valued their lives for, has plainly ceased, we may fashion another life for them, not orderly, not natural, not healthy, but monstrous or super-natural, whose cloudy semblance shall be eked out with the dreams of uneasy sleep, or the crazes of a mind diseased. And it is to this that the universal shrinking of men from death, which is called a yearning for immortality, is alleged to bear witness." Clearly in the only sense in which it is of any significance to use the phrase, here is in Professor Clifford's mind no such thing as a natural or healthy dread of annihilation, though he admits, in place thereof, a natural and healthy indisposition to anticipate the end of living and glowing energies. It is the attempt to picture a life different from the present, beyond the present, which to him is essentially hysterical and unhealthy. There is nothing good and true in ourselves which has not its sphere in this present life. What affects to be unsatisfied and out of proportion here, is only the sickly part of us, not the healthy.

It is curious to contrast with this enthusiastically expressed view of personal annihilation as the adequate and natural end of all human energy, the eloquent denunciation of the doctrine of an even partial annihilation which Mr. Baldwin Brown has just delivered in five lectures to his congregation at Brixton,^[1] as a doctrine not only untrue to the gospel of Christ, but even insulting to the natural religion of humanity. Professor Clifford will feel it an indignity, we fear, to be compared with any man whose chief occupation it has been and is to preach faith in Christ to mankind; but yet Mr. Baldwin Brown seems to us to have the advantage of Professor Clifford in the simplicity and manliness of his eloquence,—besides that, to our minds, he knows very much better the difference between what is genuine and what is hysterical in the heart of man. The special object of Mr. Baldwin Brown's lectures is to confute a school that has lately sprung up, both in the Established Church and out of it, which preaches in one form or another that Christ offered immortality only to those who believed in him and obtained new life in him, and that for all others is reserved the fate of an annihilation which is as much due to the operation of natural laws as is the annihilation of the lower animals. Of course, this new form of doctrine is due in part to the horror felt for the old teaching about eternal punishments, in part also to the impression made on the minds of students of the Bible by a few passages here and there which seem to point to the final extinction of all evil spirits in spiritual death. But Mr. Baldwin Brown rejects the doctrine with a wholesome heartiness. He rejects it partly because it would introduce a doctrine of caste into Christianity, and put the broadest possible gulf between the elect souls with eternal life in them, and the souls in whom no such seed of life had been planted. "In place of a great human family of sorrow, struggle, and aspiration, amidst which, as the brother of the poorest and the saddest, the Saviour moved, they give us a few godlike, lofty forms,—or say that they give us, men complain that they cannot see them,—endowed with a nature that cannot perish, and like unto the angels, moving about as the Brahmins of creation, amidst innumerable creatures who look like them, speak like them, love like them, but are perishing pariahs born from the dust. To me this is simply a horrible picture of the great world of men." And so, no doubt, it would be to Professor Clifford. Both thinkers alike, the believer in annihilation and the believer in immortality, would have nothing to say to a doctrine which divides men into castes radically distinguished from each other. Only while one of these finds his principle of brotherhood solely in this life, and ridicules the notion of looking for it to an unimaginable life beyond, Mr. Baldwin Brown finds it in the spiritual life, to which Christ gives the law, and of which Christ presents the type.

We think the issue between them, as regards, at least, the view of immortality and annihilation, might fairly be said to turn on this,—whether or not Professor Clifford is right or wrong in saying that "longing for deathlessness means simply shrinking from death." If it does, the brotherhood of man is a brotherhood born of keen but temporary sympathies, and cemented by the prospect of a common annihilation. If it does not, the brotherhood of man is a brotherhood born of the common glimpse and participation of something which is infinitely beyond us, which never does get itself adequately shadowed forth at all in this life, and which instead of dying out of us, as human intensity begins to fail and human activity to dwindle, only becomes the fuller and brighter, because it does not depend on us at all, but on a greater life which is in ours, though not of ours. According to Professor Clifford, it is the human vitality in us, and that only, which protests against the image of death. According to Mr. Baldwin Brown, it is the divine light, often waxing as that vitality wanes, which renders the conception of annihilation not only frightful, but unnatural,—and the more unnatural, the less there is of ourselves, and the more there is of that which is not ourselves, to light up the gloom beyond. Unquestionably the belief in immortality should wane with waning life and energy, if Professor Clifford's view were true. It is nothing but the shadow of our own abundant activities and affections, and should fade as those activities diminish and those affections sober down. The very opposite seems to us to be the truth. The life of youth and energy is the light which puts out the stars. "If light can thus deceive," said Blanco White, "wherefore not life?" The "longing for deathlessness" is so far from being a "shrinking from death," that it is a growing yearning for that which in life we have never really possessed, though we have tasted it. It is a longing which deepens as the gladness of human faculty fails, which survives the keenness of the sense of beauty, the purity of scientific enthusiasm, the intoxication of human power,—for it is a longing which is fixed upon God, and which is fed by God. For our own parts, we believe that the brotherhood of the negative scientific creed, the creed whose only immortality springs from the stream of consequences which flow from your actions,—an immortality which seems to us quite as accessible to the wicked as to the good, and quite as likely to be enjoyed by the one as by the other,—in short, the brotherhood in energy here and in nothingness hereafter,—is a sort of brotherhood which will not make brothers, but will rather make very suspicious and mutually distrustful allies. The brotherhood of Christ, on the other hand, is a brotherhood in the Head of which we are mere members, in the fire of love of which we are but the coldest sparks, in the holiness of which we are but the penitent worshippers,—and that is a brotherhood which cannot easily fail, even while the heart beats high, and still less when the pulses begin to sink, and the last frost to steal upon us.

1. The Doctrine of Annihilation in the Light of the Gospel of Love. By James Baldwin Brown, B.A. London: Henry S. King and Co.