Originally Published in the Englewood Review of Books
“Once more into the fray, into the last good fight I’ll ever know, live and die on this day, live and die on this day.”
-John Ottway from The Grey
“There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens:
a time to be born and a time to die,”and a season for every activity under the heavens:
-Ecclesiastes 3:1-2 (NIV)
Christopher Hitchens never met a cow so sacred that he would
not gleefully serve it medium-rare with a glass of red wine (or more-likely
scotch), if the mood struck just right.
As a journalist, he endeavored to explore, unravel, and critique the
largely unchallenged parts of society.
In doing so, has taken on Christianity and religion as a whole, the
Pope, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, and even dear Mother Theresa in his short work Missionary Position: Mother Theresa in Theory and in Practice. For some, he has been on the radar for quite
some time as an author, speaker, and avid spokesman for atheists. For others, his name has only recently
cropped up with the much hailed release of his series of essays entitled Arguably and his posthumously released
memoir on the process of dying from cancer, Mortality. It is the latter that I would like analyze
and respond to in this article.
Many Christians have balked at his abrasive approach to
faith and his heated debates with those pro-religion. As a Christian, I became interested in his
thoughts on death and dying as related to his own experience and what this
would look like for somebody who does not believe in any kind of higher power
or afterlife. In fairness to his
experience, I wanted to read the book from a point of listening and
understanding rather than with defense or critique. In addition, I have read through parts of his
great Atheist manifesto, God is Not
Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,
to better understand his worldview.
Mortality is Hitchens attempt to starkly and actively view and participate in his own death, unfettered by the trappings and hopes of religion. In fact, in God is Not Great, he attributes the popularity of religion to a fear of death. “Religious faith is, precisely because we are still-evolving creatures, ineradicable. It will never die out, or at least not until we get over our fear of death, and of the dark, and of the unknown, and of each other.[1] He often referred to this experience as “living dyingly.”[2] Even the cover, the title mortality in plain white contrasted against a black background with his name in gray, emits an air of uncompromising stark challenge to the reality of life and death.
The chapters in the book represent the chronological advancement of his cancer and the various issues that arise with continued medication, loss of function, and grappling with Mortality, all a part of living in what he called “Tumortown.”
Mortality begins with Hitchens recounting the experience of discovering that he may have some kind of cancer. “I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death. But nothing prepared me for the early morning in June when I came to consciousness feeling as if I were actually shackled to my own corpse.”[3] From there he describes traveling to the hospital and the various tests that showed he had esophageal cancer, which would spread to the lymph nodes and eventually invade his entire body. This was eighteen months before he would eventually succumb to the ravaging effects of cancer.
Throughout the book Hitchens takes the reader on a journey, in
his own fashion, of dealing with the self-consciousness of losing faculties and
abilities once precious to you, like growing hair on your upper lip and being
able to speak. He addresses the
Christian reaction to his cancer, which ranges from a vengeful “God is smiting
you” response to prayer groups, whom he largely rejects because he, as an
atheist, does not believe in the efficacy of prayer. He also talks about the etiquette of
correspondence between those who reside in Tumorville, sickness, and the shadow
of death, and those of us who cannot empathize with this experience, and how
both sides have a lot to learn about passing off the burden of responsibility
to one another. And in the final chapter
we are treated to unfinished sentences and paragraphs that he never got to
craft into a cohesive whole.
To understand Hitchens’ approach to death then, one must understand his approach to life. Among many other things, he spent a great deal of time combating proponents of faith and religion, especially the Christian religion. Hitchens, as described in God is Not Great, was a lifelong atheist from an early age. At one point, he goes so far as to say that he is not an atheist, but an anti-theist. His work was not centered on co-existence with or tolerance of religion, but rather in reputing, disproving, and ridiculing it. As a progenitor of the modern atheistic movement, Hitchens provides in God is Not Great a pseudo-manifesto for himself and his fellow free thinkers to their objections to religious faith: It propitiates the creation myth which makes man servant to some higher power, that it is the cause and result of sexual repression, and that it is just “wish-thinking.”[4] He also asserts that ethical living is certainly possible without religion while in the same token religion has spurred the faithful towards immoral lifestyles, “in ways that would make a brother-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow.” [5] According to Hitchens, religion is a man-made phenomenon,[6] and man, not God, is the creator. “God did not create man in his own image. Evidently it was the other way about.”[7] This creation, then, has “so retarded the development of civilization.[8] In subsequent chapters, then, he uses historical violence as proofs that religion is a catalytic force for crimes against humanity.
As an example, Hitchens talks about Abba Eban, a diplomat
from Israel, who on a visit to New York noted the ease in which the Irael-Plaestinian
debate could be solved. He remarks to
this: “And so it would have been,
decades ago, if the messianic rabbis and mullahs and priests could have been
kept out of it. But the exclusive claims
to god-given authority, made by hysterical clerics on both sides and further
stoked by Amrageddon-minded Christians who hope to bring on the Apocalypse
(preceded by the death or conversion of all Jews), have made the situation
insufferable, and put the whole of humanity in the position of hostage to a
quarrel that now features the threat of nuclear war. Religion poisons everything. As well as a menace to civilization, it has
become a threat to human survival.”[9]
Admittedly, I struggle with the vicious tone of his
argument, and yet, I cannot help but agree with him on some points. History, viewed from a certain lens, does
paint a bleak picture of the social efficacy of religion. Beyond the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition,
9/11 and the Jonestown massacre, religious sentiments inspire everyday attitudes
of racism, sexism, homophobia, and a general sense of dividedness between
people with differing points of view.
And Christianity, a religion founded on the law of Christ that says to
love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself, is the chief of
sinners.
That being said, I disagree with his basic definition of
religion. Hitchens sees religion from a
popular, well accepted point of view, that groups of people who claim to have
faith in some kind of lifestyle, law, or higher being and turn their lives
towards that faith are religious. This of
course includes both theistic religions, such as Judaism, Islam, and
Christianity, as well as atheistic religions, such as Buddhism and
Confucianism. He also assumes that
religion is an entity separated from other outside influences such as state and
national power, and that any motivations towards violence and other forms of
oppression were founded in the religious beliefs rather than an outcome of
syncretism with national or patriarchal values. Furthermore, using William Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence, I would
assert that one cannot define religion without including other typically
non-religious entities such as nationalism and patriotism.
In the book, Cavanaugh undertakes a veritable Goliath of a
project: challenging popular modern
thought that religion in the public sphere is dangerous because it encourages
violence, as evidenced in history. And
one might wonder how one man could tackle all modern “opponents” of religion
who would cite that history reveals its violent tendencies. Cavanaugh, however, asks a simple question
and cuts down popular arguments at their roots:
what is religion? Can anyone
properly define religion? And if they do
offer a concrete description, then how does one separate religion from
secular? He painstakingly searches
through the foremost scholars who argue on this subject and reveal how, at one
point or another, their theses fail because they assume that religion is just
“understood.”
Cavanaugh also addresses historians’ inability to separate
religion from politics, economics, etc. in history, and in fact exposes the
subversive revisionist history that occurs when one posits that the idea of
secular even existed prior to the modern age.
And so, in the third chapter of the book, Cavanaugh
addresses the myth of wars of religion, which incidentally are used as the
primary source material for arguing that religion is inherently violent, while
the secular society is not. He does so
by arguing that “the myth of religious violence is inextricably bound up with
the legitimation of the state and its use of violence.”[10] Religion, therefore, is not the great
“poison” in society because it is not the source of all evils. It certainly has been used in the name of
violence, but religion cannot be separated from state, from personal desires
for power and money, and therefore cannot be the sole blame for the problems of
the world.
That being said, Christians’ reactions to Hitchens cancer certainly do not prove that their God is indeed a God of love.
Hitchens shares in Mortality
this online entry from a “Christian” responding to the announcement of his
cancer. I warn that this anonymous
contributor would make Pat Robertson proud.
I realize that this is a long quote but for the sake of Christians who
do not wear condemnation as a badge of honor, it needed to be known that not
all who claim to follow Jesus subscribe to this retributive garbage, neither do
we all believe that suffering is a natural outpouring of God’s wrath upon those
deserving sinners.
Awesome.
I do not deny that amongst my fellow believers, there are those that wish to make their point through assuming to understand the will of God; and yet, I know of enough children who have died of cancer to recognize that the advent of this disease is not directly proportionate to the level of blasphemy in one’s life. But again, no wonder Hitchens holds a grudge against religion.
In a subsequent chapter, Hitchens writes on the etiquette
rules of how the living interact with those in the process of dying. Oftentimes to attempt to reach out to or
relate to others we try to empathize with stories, which, to Hitchens, is our
“attempt to cover the awkwardness in diplomatic relations between Tumortown and
its neighbors.”[12] In that same manner, Hitchens feels that it
is necessary for the sick person to show restraint in his or her sharing with
others.
I would agree that, in the Western world especially, we do
not know how to let others die graciously.
With all of the advances of modern medicine coupled with the ability to
live far beyond what our body was meant to handle, we do not know how to accept
death as a natural conclusion to life or how to ease others into this
acceptance. We are fixers and
storytellers, and so to fix we tell our own stories, hoping that somehow their
conclusions might inspire others. And
all the while we are imposing ourselves onto others. Death has become so taboo that we cannot
navigate it from either side of the hospital bed.
Diana Butler Bass, in her book A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story,
contrasts the way that modern society reacts to death versus the way that the
medieval church faced it.
“
As I sit here, editing this article and re-watching the Liam
Neeson thriller, The Grey, I cannot
help but reflect upon the similar approaches to death between Christopher
Hitchens and John Ottway, Liam Neeson’s character. In the movie, a plane taking workers from an
oil rig in remote Alaska to Anchorage crashes in the vast, desolate wilderness,
and the survivors are forced to defend themselves against the elements and a
pack of wolves as they attempt to travel to safety. Ottway, an atheist, makes a plea with God to
show him some sort of sign that He is watching.
When no response is given, Ottway gives up and resolves to finish on his
own. At the movie’s denouement, Neeson
squares off against the leader of the murderous wolf pack who had killed the
rest of his companions with only a knife and several shards of broken glass
taped to his hands as weapons. As the
two stare into one another’s eyes, readying themselves to lunge, Neeson recites
the poem at the top, “Once more into the fray, into the last good fight I’ll
ever know, live and die on this day, live and die on this day.” He faced his death with a cold hard stare and
a steel resolve, refusing to allow himself the comforts that religion might
have offered.
Unlike in our society, where we hide it, death surrounded medieval people. They had few hospitals, and so churches, poorhouses, and homes handled the dying and the dead. Death was not a distant prospect at the end of a long, healthy life. It was integrated into ordinary experience. Medieval life was transitory, a journey through this world that often ended too soon and too abruptly. Death was often violent and unexpected. Extended death, through illness and in one’s own bed, was actually a blessing. Death was part of everyday life; medieval people considered their deaths regularly.”[13]
With this context in mind, the medieval church was more
readily equipped to dialogue with death and the dying, rather than attempting
to “make everything okay” through empathy and casseroles.
Hitchens, in making his point, though, criticizes another recent
author who attempted to discover meaning of life and death through positive
reflection upon dying of cancer: Randy
Pausch. Of Randy
Pausch, a college professor and author of The
Last Lecture, Hitchens writes: “It
should bear its own health warning: so
sugary that you may need an insulin shot to withstand it…It ought to be an
offense to be excruciating and unfunny in circumstances where your audience is
almost morally obliged to enthuse.”[14]
In the same way that the uninitiated “healthy” should not
try to impose their own feelings upon the sick, the sick should not capitalize
on their experience through the sympathies of others. Of course in establishing this segregated
society, the sick are alienated and the healthy are not given the opportunity
to learn of the dying experience, whether or not one views it while wearing
“sugary” lenses.
In the fifth chapter, Hitchens talks about the painful
experience of losing his voice. For a
man who made a great deal of his living through public speaking, this was a
particularly nasty side effect of cancer.
To Hitchens, writing was only one component of his work, one that did
not yield nearly the same impact without his ability to speak as well. In talking about all of the painful medical
procedures that he had to go through to address his cancer, Hitchens writes
that “What do I hope for? If not a cure,
then a remission. And what do I want
back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.”[15]
Some of his final thoughts, Hitchens addresses one of the
most common aphorisms that both the sick and the healthy subscribe to when
considering any kind of illness, malady, or stress: whatever doesn’t kill you makes you
stronger. To this, Hitchens
responds: “In the brute physical world,
and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could
kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.”[16] He discusses Nietzsche, the author of this
quote, and notes the irony in his own
life that when he contracted syphilis, the disease only proved to rot his mind
rather than strengthen his resolve, and so his experience negated his own
philosophy.
As I sit here, editing this article and re-watching the Liam
Neeson thriller, The Grey, I cannot
help but reflect upon the similar approaches to death between Christopher
Hitchens and John Ottway, Liam Neeson’s character. In the movie, a plane taking workers from an
oil rig in remote Alaska to Anchorage crashes in the vast, desolate wilderness,
and the survivors are forced to defend themselves against the elements and a
pack of wolves as they attempt to travel to safety. Ottway, an atheist, makes a plea with God to
show him some sort of sign that He is watching.
When no response is given, Ottway gives up and resolves to finish on his
own. At the movie’s denouement, Neeson
squares off against the leader of the murderous wolf pack who had killed the
rest of his companions with only a knife and several shards of broken glass
taped to his hands as weapons. As the
two stare into one another’s eyes, readying themselves to lunge, Neeson recites
the poem at the top, “Once more into the fray, into the last good fight I’ll
ever know, live and die on this day, live and die on this day.” He faced his death with a cold hard stare and
a steel resolve, refusing to allow himself the comforts that religion might
have offered.
In that same way, Hitchens gritted his teeth, stared death
in the eyes, and lunged fists forward.
Nowhere in the book does he turn to religion as a sedative, as he feared
may happen, though at certain points he allows a bit of fear and humanity to
gleam through his hardened exterior. And
he left the world his legacy, a bleak, unflinching look at mortality. Yet I wonder in all of this, what did
Hitchens really accomplish? What can one
learn from his encounter with death?
Certainly we can treat cancer patients with greater kindness and dignity
and attempt to love others as ourselves, even if the “other” happens to be a
militant anti-theist. But there is no
happy ending, no hope; there is nothing but earth and darkness, cold and
nothingness.
For me, as much as I appreciate understanding his mind and
experience, I cannot accept that the beauty of this life flares out into
ashes. Nor would I suggest this to
others suffering from fatal illnesses.
Because I cling to hope found in religion, that humanity was created
with the purpose of loving God and this world and restoring it back to some
semblance of peace, that we can see evidences of the truthfulness of this faith
in creation, history, reason, and Scripture.
And that death does not have to be greeted with a cold hard stare, but
rather, it can be welcomed as the conclusion to our journeys here on earth and
the entrance into our promised life with God in eternity.
Bibliography
Bass, Diana Butler. A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story. New York:
HarperCollins, 2009.
Cavanaugh, William T.
The Myth of Religious
Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots
of Modern Conflict. New York:
Oxford University Press, 2009.
Hitchens, Christopher.
God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York:
Twelve, 2007.
Hitchens, Christopher.
Mortality. New York:
Twelve, 2012.
[1] Christopher
Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion
Poisons Everything, (New York: Twelve, 2007), 22.
[10] William
T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious
Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009),
124.
[13] Bass,
Diana Butler Bass. A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story, (New
York: HarperCollins, 2009), 118.
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