Prolonging life for ever

Apparently some people are so obsessed with prolonging their life that they have been diagnosed with Longevity fixation syndrome. They get fantastically fit, eat special foods, look for new medicines and read anything that will help them live longer. Some people go even further than this. They look for new developments which might enable them to live for ever on this earth. Through transplants, new gene therapy and brain digitalisation they hope a time will come when the body can be continually renewed, the brain computerised, and death will be no more. But would we really want to live for ever on this earth? In favour of the idea is the fact that life is a gift, and a good gift is worth having for a long time. Moreover, when a person is old, and if they are in good health, they will normally want to live rather than die. I once did a BBC programme on death with an aged cleric who admitted that although he believed in life after death he still passionately wanted to live for a few more years.

This issue this raises some major theological questions, both about the nature of this life and our understanding of the next one. Life as we know it goes through various stages, as Shakespeare so memorably put it: from the infant ‘mewling and puking’ through to ‘the lean and slippered pantaloon’. Take what might have been the happiest period of your life, say the year after you passed your ‘A’ levels before going to university. If you prolonged that period of your life for ever you would miss out on starting a family and building a career. Each stage of life brings new possibilities of development. And would we really want to prolong a healthy, happy retirement for ever? I think we sense it is a stage, to be enjoyed if we are lucky enough to live that long, but a stage which is a prelude to something different. As Richard Holloway said, it is a departure lounge.

There is a purpose in us having only a limited span of life on this earth. If we lived in space and time for ever our life would be boundless and it would be impossible to make anything definite out of it because all time would stretch out before us. An artist has to work within certain limits, the painter with her canvas, the sculptor with her block of wood. It is that limitation, that particularity, which enables them to produce a work of art. In a similar way, the biblical three score years and ten provide us with a kind of canvas or block of stone, a definite space and time, which enables us to become God’s work of art. Ephesians 2.10. We are forced to focus and create something within these definite boundaries.

But what about the next life? How can we avoid thinking about it simply as a kind of extension of this one, only better, as somany cultures have done? Whether it was the Egyptians or the Vikings the rich and powerful have wanted to be buried with all the luxuries of this life so that these could be enjoyed in the hereafter. Jilly Cooper said that her idea of heaven is of her dogs coming to greet her – very endearing – but Jesus suggested it will be of another order of reality altogether and we will be like the angels. (Matthew 22.30). Jesus also said that the pure in heart will see God, and Christians have often thought in terms of a beatific vision, of a reality of such moral beauty that we are transfixed by it. We are taken out of ourselves by what we behold. Occasionally we can have hints of such an experience, perhaps having climbed a mountain and then gazing on a great range all around us, or being so totally engrossed in some creative work so that, as we say, we had not realised that so much time had passed.

This life is a journey and a preparation for something beyond it. What is beyond is not simply an extension of this life, or this kind of life lived elsewhere. It is that in which all things come together, which exists as an end in itself. It is at once static and moving, a state which T. S. Eliot explores so wonderfully in Four Quartets.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

It is entirely sensible to try to keep fit and well so that we may enjoy the years allotted to us. But to try to extend our life for ever is completely to miss the point. This life is both to be enjoyed for its own sake and to be seen as a period of growth into a reality which is an end in itself, what Augustine called ‘the end which is no end’. Life points to the sublime beauty at the heart of the universe in whom we are at once deeply still and fully alive with the cosmic dance; both still and still moving into a deeper communion.

None of this is to take away from the value of this life. This life is a gift to be enjoyed in itself and at the same time a period of growth into the likeness of God, (theosis), the omega to which all things point and lead. We might take the analogy of someone who goes running every day and who enjoys it, and there are many today like this, but who is also a competitive runner and looks to the time when they can win a great race and stand on the winners rostrum. At that point their running comes to a glorious climax. There is nothing beyond this. So with life, it is to be both lived for its own sake and be seen in relation to God, the ground of our being and the goal of our longing. ‘We shall rest and we shall see. We shall see and we shall know. We shall know and we shall love. We shall love and we shall praise. Behold our end which is no end.’ Not perpetual life, but this eternal life.

Richard Harries is the author of The Beauty and the Horror: searching for God in a suffering world. SPCK.