Coronovirus, death and spiritual opportunity

My local Catholic church seems to have decided to give up the Mass for Lent. Just in case the parish succumbs to you-know-what.

Our stoup has been drained of the Holy Water, in case the assumed spiritual benefits of touching it are neutralised by the plague that might be incubating within it. The Communion wine remains untouched on health and safety grounds. Now just think about that. We Catholics take that wine to be, on consecration, the literal blood of Christ. Our Bishop has decided that it may nevertheless carry within it some set of contingent attributes — in the form of Covid-19 — which might prove lethal. To put it in the language of the Catechism, its substantial form might be that of Our Lord. But its accidental form might “carry you off”.

As for the “sign of peace” — all well and good, but just don’t get too close to the person next to you.  

The Mass is the highest form of Catholic worship, one in which we encounter the Lord himself in real and not symbolic form. It now seems that it is being re-ordered in terms dictated by the secular advice of the chief medical officer.

It’s easy to poke fun at this (that’s why I’m doing it). As a friend of mine asked the other day: why should any practising Catholic be bothered about the prospect of suffering or death? Surely the central tenet of the Christian tradition is that we live long enough to bank sufficient spiritual credit so as to, at a time of His choosing, excuse ourselves from this vale of tears and take up permanent residence with the Saints? If you are secure in your faith, why worry about happens to this transient thing that happens to count as your “body”? Why fear death, if by “death” we mean merely physical annihilation?

But this isn’t a central tenet of the Christian tradition. Indeed, the question assumes a version of Platonism: the idea that there is some ontologically fundamental distinction between ourselves as souls and ourselves as bodies. Death, for the Platonist, is a sort of liberation: the body dies and the soul is thereby released.  A kind of metaphysical “Prison Break”. But this is not the Christian view. To insist that Christians should have no interest in their physical health is to commit what the Church Fathers described as the Gnostic heresy.

St Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Church, was clear on this: a person is not a soul trapped within a body, keen to break free. Personhood is a metaphysical commingling of body and soul. In the Christian tradition, the soul doesn’t “escape” the body on death, but is held in divine trust until that future re-unification. For God, all creation is good, and that includes the material bodies which are animated by our souls in a situation of mutual dependence. 

The (Anglican) theologian NT Wright has pointed out that what is important, to the Christian, cannot be life after death, but life after life after death. And life after life after death can be understood only in terms of bodily resurrection. The appropriate Christian attitude towards our bodily selves is therefore one of reverence. Your body is a gift, and illness is to be avoided in just the same way as we should prevent the desecration of all that is consecrated.

As St Paul put it: The Lord poured his treasure into earthen vessels. The vessels must, ipso facto, be treated as proper objects of gratitude.

So, what of the wider, secular culture? To the extent that coronavirus is presenting itself as a spiritual, and not merely physical, threat, what is the character of that threat? What is its most obvious manifestation?

The answer is that it is causing a disturbance in the collective soul: one which we call “fear”, in conjunction with a certain belligerence in the face of the laws of epidemiology. We are so used to the idea that we can shape our lives in ways which make no room for risk that we react to the recalcitrance of the natural world with a stubborn astonishment. As if the natural order is there to be conquered, instead of respected. 

People have become used to a Newtonian relationship between their decisions and what follows from them. We choose x and, ceteris paribus, we expect y to follow. But this virus has reconfigured the analogy in the direction of quantum mechanics. There is no decision we can make which will be importantly connected to anything which happens to us, individually or collectively, in the next fortnight. All is chaotic and unpredictable.

The Christian attitude to death is, as suggested above, not always coherent. But the secular attitude is worse than incoherent: it’s to treat the inevitable as if it were a utility bill that you can put in a drawer and then forget.

Death may not always be a good thing, but an awareness of our mortality necessarily is. The person who lives moment to moment in full acceptance that this might be her last breath is privileged; a bit like the member of Alcoholics Anonymous, who lives “one day at a time”, is privileged. The privilege is this: that you can learn to live each day as if it’s a distillation of your whole life. The proper attitude towards your future death is to embrace it as an intensification of the best way of living now. 

In the “Comic Relief” episode of The Office, David Brent says at one point: “Who says famine can’t be fun?” The comment is egregious; it’s funny precisely because it is crass. Famine, like all suffering, is never fun and is always terrible. But it doesn’t follow that it’s not valuable. If suffering is unavoidable — and in this life, it surely is — then we have an obligation to seek the best in it.

This virus will have existential consequences. But “existential consequences” can be of two types: one form threatens extinction, and for too many people this is what the crisis will amount to.

But maybe this illness, awful as it is, encourages a new way of thinking about illness. Perhaps it will encourage us to look again at the spiritual benefits of an awareness of death. In which case, coronavirus might also be an existential opportunity.

Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked that “death is not an event in life, we do not live to experience death”. But it doesn’t follow that the awareness of our finitude cannot provide the basis for a more refreshing way of living.

That said, I hope you all stay safe.