ABSTRACT
One familiar way of thinking about death is to deny it. There has been a thick strain of such denial in the narrative of Western culture. In the ‘received’ Plato,1 we begin from the assumption of an eternal and immutable formal order-the Realm of Forms. We then confine death by defining it as a kind of change that attends only the material aspect within the Realm of Appearance. In this Platonic model, the enduring identity of the human being-the immortal soul-is guaranteed by its affinity to what is Real. The particular human being might ‘die’ in the sense of undergoing accidental changes, but her essential ‘human being-ness’ is underwritten by the immutable ‘form’ of the human being, and its relationship with a transcendent principle that, in the interpretation of the Church Fathers, becomes the creator deity. Such a world view establishes life and death as dualistic categories in the sense that life stands independent and unaffected by death. The analogy is that life and death are as God and world, where the latter category is a temporary and imperfect reflection of the former. The human experience is stabilized and provided a cultural horizon by metaphysical and supernatural assumptions such as an immortal soul and a realm beyond.
