New Hope For the Dead

In the previous post I mentioned a heretic named Gasparo Contarini, the cardinal of Venice in the early decades of the 16th century. His heresy could be labeled as "Mortalism": by Contarini's reckoning the soul died with the body. Thus, no afterlife for the sovereign individual. A short step away from the enveloping void of a Sartre; a sampling of the worst of the Aristotelian concept of either/or. This was different from his sponsored ward, Luther, who claimed that the soul slept until Judgement Day. At least with Luther there was a potential end to oblivion; not so with Contarini. What is interesting to me, despite the volumes of pointless erudition outlining the theoretical particulars, is the lack of what we would call empirical evidence to make these distinctions; distinctions based on the root claim that there is in fact a human soul. Regardless of where you stand on that issue, the scientific age has always posited an inborn justification for banning the idea of an immortal soul. With science you get the presumption that if scientific theory can be supported by the scientific method, then that which lies outside the method's predictions is by nature false. Not surprisingly, the development of this methodology was well financed by Venetian capital. Contarini's advocacy of the mortalism argument has been allied with the presumptions of the scientific method for centuries now, and that presumption is what apparently gave the recently decommissioned mortal Christopher Hitchens some comfort as oblivion approached. Of course that's extremely presumptuous of me- no one can say that facing death as he did provided any more comfort then say what Joan of Arc experienced facing the torch with cross in hand. Even so, death is beyond dispute for all that is living and if you want to assign that to an imperfect creation, knock yourself out. Personally, my own comfort lies in the knowledge that our indisputable subjectivity can never know for certain what lies beyond the mortal transom. Only the dead know for sure. As for Hitchens, I never bought his atheist, or to use his term, anti-deist, rationalizations. Not for me, but for him. Irony being the central plank of his polemical platform, Hitchen's great hero, Thomas Jefferson was, as Hitchens pointed out routinely, a Deist. But, though handsomely paid to argue the contrary, as who would want Hitchens to participate in a panel on consensus building, the key to understanding his anti- religious stance is rather simple, elemental, and very British. His favorite term for countering the grotesque end of the religious opposition- fundamentalism- was that he was fed up with their bullying. For me, that word, bullying, always resonated the fabled prison yard atmosphere of the British school system he was raised in and where he first formed his suspicions that authority was in the business of peddling expedience over verifiable fact. Sensible thinking for a preadolescent, agreed. However, his gift of erudition aside, it seemed the man carried a well preserved resentment with him in his globe trotting spectacle to find a cause to oppose. This preternaturally contrarian nature, coupled with the suicidal addictions, does not profile as a man whose opinion could be trusted. My personal resentment to authority, a presumptive force that by its nature must be contrary to  individual sovereignty, fits well with my dismissal out of hand of anyone who could be so available to the corporate media, even as he willingly played the devil's advocate. But consider: the advocate's rent is assured by his concession to the legitimacy of a rigged court. This buries us further in the example of Contarini, a man as devoted to the falsehood of the Aristotelian dichotomy (which later congeals in the Christian variant of Manichaeism: technically a heresy but a base metal of all Christian argument whether the believer wants to accept it or not) as Hitchens was, which his advocacy for the unjustified war with Iraq clearly illustrates with a fog of irony so opaque as to blind.  (Honestly, one of Hitchen's routines was to rail against the "parties of God" getting their hands on nuclear weapons and making manifest their desire to usher in the apocalypse- how different is that to the cold war jeremiads against commie access to said weapons of mass destruction? And this howl emanating from an atheistic Trotskyite!) So, is there hope in any of this for Hitch 22? Being one who can hardly save himself, let alone advocate for a soul who would proudly have no part in the proceedings, I can' t offer any prayers, if I knew how, or opinion, which I want, for once, to reserve (not being dead and all). What I will conclude, though, is that a man so inherently ironic, or contradictory, or pathologically resistant to consensus as Hitchens was, I don't think there is much for anyone to worry over. I will let the alcohol do that for me. TM 1/1/12