On Cosmic Heroism
By Geertje Else Wiersma and Rev. Charles C. Navle | January 13, 2023
Our minds, our dreaming nature, can put us anywhere, even journeys to the stars themselves and to times past and times to come. That we can love and hate; that we have feelings, feelings which wrap around, feed, and are fed by reason; that reason and feeling, so enmeshed, can create and destroy; that we can envision our own end time and have thought and all the marvelous and horrid things thought makes possible —all these render us puzzlements, perplexities, very symbolic creatures, if not (though some may disagree) creatures with a dimension of the spiritual or, if you prefer, a certain non-material or unearthly nature. However, our biology reminds us ad nauseam that we are defecating, urinating, catabolic creatures, whose bodies are nourishment for microbes.
This presents an ontological dilemma: Our symbolic nature in tension with our biology. How might we encounter life without suppression and perpetual panic? Can we grow into authentic and self-actualized beings? Are we inescapably locked inside the terror of the terminal? Need we forever lose ourselves in euphemisms which serve little more than to imply death does not happen —words like wake, entering into rest, slumber-room, departing or passing away? —as if these words cancel the fact of death. Must we seek solace in exaggerated religious and romantic notions? And, why has death become so fearsome, anxiety-ridden, violating, and untidy? These are a few of the questions to which Ernest Becker responds in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death.
We have formulas for triumphing over the limitations of life. We might call them our character —or, better still, private strategies for dealing with mortality. Most of these schemes fail because their methods remain fixed within the limits of purely human coping systems —that is, they stay grounded in earthbound promises and strategies which cannot deliver what we ultimately want. Schemes such as psychotherapy, acquiring wealth and power and reputation, extraordinary dependence on others, and youth culture —these, however clever, at best serve to postpone confronting the reality of mortality. Who escapes despairing over death? Who are those truly spirited individuals able to live authentically, the ones who triumph over their physical limitations as creatures who must die?
Dr. Becker believed to become more than prisoners of despair and denial involved a heroic leap to some kind of supra-psychological state, to a psycho-spiritual state of mind. He refers to these people as Knights of Faith, as those sufficiently brave to turn over the meaning of life to a belief in the ultimate goodness of Mystery which some, even Ernest Becker himself, might call God or the Mystery-Behind-Mystery, or the Unknowable-Power-of-the-Universe. Knights of Faith seem capable of metaphysical reaches beyond the material and the temporal —in fact, reaches beyond reality itself. Yet this modern world, repeatedly encouraging dependency upon the physical but not upon the metaphysical, makes it difficult for us to look beyond the senses—beyond what one can see, hear, smell, taste, and touch—into the realms of mystery, the poetic, and the spiritual.
If some kind of excessive dependency (called ‘transference’) is inevitable—that is, the need to place one’s safety in promises and protections outside the self (and apparently it is)—then those who refuse to transfer their ultimate safety to others but choose, instead, to transfer to the Mystery giving rise to the universe become the ones able to avoid the perils of repression, denial, anxiety, and guilt. Further, they believe themselves in the grasp of the unknowable goodness and mercy of Mystery which, again, some call deity. Psycho- analysis promises this same unrepressed, guiltless, and hopeful life. But, its promise, thought Becker, is fallacious and unachievable because it cannot tell us we want to know.
We cannot experience everything and break the bonds of the human condition. We are not gods. We cannot see beyond mortality and discover what human beings have always wanted to discover when they ask: “If I must die, what will happen to me after death?” Or, “Am I just gone, totally and irreversibly gone, forever?” Nor can therapists set themselves free from fear because they are no less limited, mortal, and unknowing than we. Neither psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, nor any other science can give us what we want: Immor- tality.
All this thinking led Becker to suggest, for the sake of human well-being, we begin to reach beyond the limits of science and psychology. And it was for this reason he saw a need for the science of psychology and the metaphysics of religion to cooperate with one another, to reach out in dialogue for joint responses able to give women and men reason to have hope in the worthwhileness of living, to have some other vision of destiny than decomposition.
How can we be fully human without perpetual panic, without funereal euphemisms, anxieties, guilts, denials, and fears? In short, can we handle in a dignified way our organic creatureliness whose bodies must die? Can we formulate a psycho-religious strategy correcting and enriching how we think and how we fear? Becker’s book takes us to various points of view – Freud’s, Rank’s, and Kierkegaard’s:
“Sigmund Freud saw human fate sealed; humanity was locked in its biology, resulting in the sexual motive becoming the locus of most human difficulties. His assessment proved brilliantly correct , but only with respect to those unable to escape their own biology by reaching toward the Beyond. Sigmund Freud himself could not deal with death effectively. Indeed, he remained terrified of it all his life. The great Otto Rank, of Freud’s inner circle, felt there was something mysterious about life which psychology ought to understand. He sought to remove mystery from mystery which, of course, is not possible, else there would be nothing unknowable in the universe. In the end, he could not himself handle the unknowable; his psychotherapeutic method proved ineffective in dealing with death. Why? —because Otto Rank could not admit the reasonableness of a transcendent mystery. He died depressed. Søren Kierkegaard, a Danish theologian living before Freud and Rank, went beyond them both. His academic credentials enabled him to argue for the concept of transcendence. Some would call Kierkegaard the father of the fusion of psychological and religious reasoning. He considered the ‘why’ of human behavior from a psycho-theological perspective and discerned that the absence of a belief in the transcendent rendered life futile and tragically limited.”
Becker, a Jew, concluded that Christianity and, likely, religions in general were more dead than alive, and seemingly incapable of helping humanity cope with death and dying. But, rather than proceeding only with psychology, he chose to use the teachings of Søren Kierkegaard to bridge the gap between psychology and religion. Like Kierkegaard, Becker came to understand that answers were not as important as questions. He believed we could find an acceptable response to the problem of death when we considered the science of human behavior together with the realm of the transcendent. When human beings fail to acknowledge the transcendent, they do not possess the emotional capacity for meaningful corrective and coping behavior. Mystery and transcendence must, therefore, be an assumption of faith. If ‘Beneficent Mystery’ authors life, then living unafraid and unrepressed is not only possible but the fact of death need not be determined bad.
Human beings have two possibilities from which to choose: Either this organic world teeming with life has positive meaning or it has negative meaning. We have before us hope or hopelessness, optimism or pessimism. Just how we choose to view the universe and our role in it is critically germane. If you understand anything at all from this essay, understand this: The fact of death cannot be altered by any security-promising system in the world, neither by science, nor by psychology, nor by institutional religion. For us to cope with death, even to see death as a natural good, we will be obliged to reach beyond the limits of human reason into the metaphysics of the unknowable, or so Becker writes, not as a theologian but as a scientist of human behavior. As complicated and obscure as this thought may strike you, if we do not transfer to, or place our trust in, ultimate and mysterious goodness, we have little left but despair, fear, and pessimism.
To press on with this line of thought, Becker saw in the decline of institutional religion the rise of science taking over the responsibility for providing answers to the great questions about life and death. Today, thousands study psychology and become therapists but not theologians, counselors but not priests. However, psychology cannot provide reasonable responses to ultimate questions. It is unable to respond adequately to inquiries predominately metaphysical or religious in nature. Science is limited by its own lack of a transcendent point of view.
And, regarding the fact of death, the worm at the core of human existence and the uninvited guest at the banquet of life, science encounters a wall over which it cannot climb —a wall built from the stones of its refusal (or inability) to believe in (or to reason the possibility of) transcendent mystery, which, once considered, provides new dimensions for human thought and meditation. With Becker’s assumption, one can more clearly see why he worked for an ongoing communication between psychology and religion.
We will require optimistic faith in ultimate goodness if ever we hope to break through the wall blocking us from perceiving more deeply our true nature. And breaking into the realm of faith rather closely parallels what Becker means when he speaks of Cosmic Heroism and Knights of Faith. Without this escape and without trust in an other than human power, we remain hopelessly neurotic and dependent upon human models (therapists, spouses, parents, dominant power figures, etcetera) to save us from fear, fruitless defense mechanisms, and from the inescapable fact of mortality.
Transferring security and hope to human beings, however powerful they may appear, fails to solve the twin problems of denial and fear of death. Why? —because human role models, however great, however drop-dead desirable and charismatic, also die. Cassius Clay will not forever flit about like a butterfly and sting like a bee, and Princess Grace crashed and died on a mountain road in her husband’s realm. All the schemes of men and women to keep us ultimately safe ultimately founder on the rocks of futility. Without courageously rooting trust in Mysterious Transcendence, we stay fearful and grounded in that which cannot itself escape unending fear of death. Transferring one’s safety to mystery is what Becker calls a Knight of Faith: the courage to slay the dragon of mortality. Mystery-Itself, therefore, becomes the one and only Cosmic Hero deserving our ultimate trust.
There is significant difference between religion and faith, which I will discuss more fully at another time. For now, think of religion as an institutional system with prescribed sets of teachings and think of faith, more than not, as private beliefs and spiritual thoughts.
Geertje Else Wiersma
Professor Emerita of Sociology at Salem State University, Salem, MA. Born and educated in the Netherlands, she received her PhD from Wageningen University. Dr. Wiersma published in the field of family sociology. From 1976 through 2006, she team-taught with her husband, Charles C. Navle, a course titled: “On Death and Dying.”
Rev. Charles C. Navle
After graduating from the College of Wooster and Harvard Divinity School, he took his vows in the early 1970’s and spent twenty-five years as a parish minister and executive director of his church’s shelter and feeding programs for the hungry and homeless. Along with his ministry, he taught Sociology at Salem State University, Salem, MA. After he retired from his professional life he became a writer, both of prose and poetry. He died in August, 2022.