Others That Die: Psyche
As mentioned in a previous post, the University of Notre Dame plans to hold the latest installment of its Theology at the Beginning of the Third Millenium series of conferences, this time on the theme of eschatology.
Currently, I am only doodling a few points, with the aim of integrating them into the final paper closer to the date. One of these points concerns the first of the four last things, namely Death.
Normally, when someone refers to death, people’s minds immediately go to the most common notion of death, namely biological or physical death. However, because of the nature of the abstract that I submitted, my intended focus will not be on this type of death. As I found out, there is more than one way to die.
This was best put by Romano Guardini in his The Last Things. In his section on death, reference is made to what he calls “literal death” or “biological death”, which he defines as “the failure of the constructive powers to maintain themselves”.
I found this to be a fascinating point because this then shed light on other areas in life in which there can also be a “failure of the constructive powers to maintain themselves”, and so other ways in which a person may die. In this vein, Guardini makes reference to two other types of death a person may experience.
The first is what he calls “pyschological death”. Guardini defines it in this way:
A man may put up a defense against death, as everything in alive has to defend itself, and yet not resist it in his heart. In the end he will no longer wish to live, He finds no satisfaction in living. Life is not worth the trouble…the psychical nature is ever in the process of dying.
Childhood, in a way a complete life in itself, perishes to make way for youth, and youth comes to an end at maturity. Life as a whole is not a uniform sequence. It consists of diverse and self contained forms, and each must give way that the next may find a place. So different are these various portions of our lives that often we cannot think ourselves back into our own past. Or one may go back to some cherished experience - a landscape, a book, a friend - and find that we no longer respond to it. Something has died…
He wills to live, but he wills also to die. It is the will to die which manifests itself in that puzzling inclination people have to cause themselves pain, to alienate their friends, to injure their own work. All such unintelligable behaviour is a form of psychological dying.
In next week’s post, we will consider another kind of death in which constructive powers are no longer able to maintain themselves.
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