The Weariest River

 Sir Thomas Browne's classic essay on "Urne-Buriall" (an antiquarian and proto-archaeological disquisition on a set of funerary urns found in rural England, which leads its famously polymathic author into a set of larger philosophical and theological reflections on the theme of mortality) concludes, as it would have to do (in Browne's era) with a restatement of orthodox Christian teaching on the future state. But there are some who have found in the essay hints, perhaps, that its author did not in fact repose entire confidence in this teaching. 

The German author W.G. Sebald, who discusses "Urne-Buriall" extensively in his unclassifiable prose work, The Rings of Saturn, speaks of the essay's emphasis on "the indestructibility of the human soul, which the physician, firm though he may be in his Christian faith, perhaps secretly doubts." (Hulse trans.) Sebald nods to the passage in which Browne observes, "It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no future state to come, unto which this seemes progressionall[.]"

This is only one of several places in which Browne seems to contemplate the possibility of a future annihilation of existence—but to reject it solely on the grounds that such a conclusion would be too depressing to allow. There are echoes in this of the famous passage from Paul: "[I]f the dead rise not, then is Christ not raised;/ and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins./ Then also those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished./ If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable."

All such arguments, of course, disclose the potential truth of the very thing they seek to deny. It is in this one moment in his letters that Paul seems to contemplate the possibility that Christian teaching is, after all, founded on a falsehood. He rejects this conclusion because it would be intolerable—it would make a mockery of the faith and of the people who have gathered to promote it. But this, of course, is not actually an argument against it. And by discussing it, Paul allows in the very thought he seeks to banish. In his similar passages, was Browne likewise admitting the very conclusion he most dreaded? 

Possibly. Browne may indeed have doubted the future resurrection of the flesh even as he sought to affirm it. He writes, for instance, of how trying it must have been for pagans to show courage and sneer in the face of death, when they could not even rely in doing so on the promise of a better life in the hereafter. "[U]nto such [...]," he writes, "it must be more than death to dye, which makes us amazed at those audacities, that durst be nothing [....] Certainly such spirits as could contemn death, when they expected no better being after, would have scorned to live had they known any."

Is there not, in that passage, perhaps a trace of admiration, for the pagans who defied death without even a hope of a blessed state to come? Is there not in it a hint even of autobiography? This is only one place of several in which Browne writes with sympathy of the nonbeliever Epicurus—who—he declares—though his teachings may have been wrong, nonetheless managed to live far better than many whose teachings were right, and the question of whose potential confinement in a circle of Dante's hell is, therefore, "a quaery too sad to insist on." 

Even as he laments the fate of the "virtuous heathen" philosopher, however—who remains confined to the torments of hell together with all the other "souls who denied their immortalities," Browne still cannot deny orthodox teaching on this matter. He must still believe, much as it evidently pains him to do so, that some are resurrected only to be damned to eternal torment—and that all those who doubt the very possibility of their own resurrection must be among them. Browne writes that, on that day, "many who feared to dye shall groan that they can dye but once [...] and annihilation shall be courted." 

In other words, as Byron once put it, the orthodox Church teaching that Browne cannot escape still insists that some must "be damned/ For hoping no one else may e'er be so[.]" Thus for all the great seventeenth century polymath's sympathy and humanity, he still cannot actually avoid embracing a creed of extreme cruelty. The God of the Christians is, after all, unique among the beings of mythology in being infinitely cruel, and infinitely vindictive. No matter how many millennia he is supposed to persecute the damned, it is still apparently never enough to satiate his wrath. 

And it is perhaps here, rather than in his doubts as to the truth of the resurrection, that Browne betrays the true seed of doubt. Maybe, just maybe, where he really questions the truth of Christian teaching is not that he fears the promise of future resurrection may prove false, but that he fears it might be true. After all, if the God of the Christians really is planning to bring back some of those who now safely slumber in the Earth, only to persecute them for an eternity of ages—that is surely an infinitely more horrifying prospect than the threat of non-existence. "Annihilation" should indeed, then, "be courted." 

If the God of the Christians really did create human beings knowing all the while that some of them would be destined for an eternity of torment and damnation, then it was an act of infinite malice to create them in the first place. It would surely have been better for our species, in that case, never to have been created at all. Of course, it would be better for those fated to future damnation not to have come into being in the first place; and surely it would have been better for the blessed too—for what salvation worthy of the name could be enjoyed exclusively, while other souls were left wailing outside?  

Thus, we would have to conclude—if orthodox Christian theology were true—that "Sleep is good, death is better," as the poet Heine once wrote, "But best of all is never to have been born." Heine here was echoing a line from Job, perhaps, which Browne discusses as well. "[T]he most tedious being," Browne writes, "is that which can unwish it self, content to be nothing, or never to have been, which was beyond the male-content of Job, who cursed not the day of his life, but his Nativity[.]" Is there not in this passage, once again, a hint that Browne entertains the very thoughts he seeks to disavow? 

Perhaps what Browne realized, then, was that the true horror lay not in the prospect of future annihilation, but rather in the thought that the resurrection of the flesh might actually occur. It is not the prospect of our future non-being that should terrify us, but the thought that we will be dragged out of our posthumous slumbers, and that a vindictive persecuting deity will harrow our flesh unto eternity even beyond what suffering he was able to inflict while we yet lived. Perhaps, as Lucretius argued, it is the doctrine of personal immortality that induces in us a false fear of the gods—not the prospect of its denial. 

Perhaps we should not dread the fact that the resurrection is false, therefore, but celebrate it. Perhaps we should say, with Swinburne, that we "thank [...] whatever gods may be/ [...] That dead men rise up never" and "That even the weariest river/ Winds somewhere safe to sea." Perhaps we should find solace, not terror, in the fact that all that is, must have an end, and that—just as each individual consciousness did not exist through the endless eons that preceded it—so it will return to non-existence after death. Perhaps we should be grateful that, as the old saying goes, this, too, shall pass away. 

As D.H. Lawrence aptly wrote: 

And if there were not an absolute, utter forgetting [...]

and a silent, sheer cessation of all awareness

how terrible life would be!

How terrible it would be to think and know, to have consciousness!

But dipped, once dipped in dark oblivion

the soul has peace[.]