Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (21 page)

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Authors: Laurence Lerner

Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Social Science, #Death & Dying, #test

BOOK: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
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Page 52
I cannot believe that a source of happiness such as this will be denied by God to his people. (60)
The Bishop of Ripon and his colleagues limited themselves to discussion, but in America this view of heaven was turned into fiction, most famously by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. In her novel
The Gates Ajar
, published in 1868, a young woman loses the brother to whom she is passionately devoted, and after enduring "that most exquisite of inquisitions, the condolence system,"
9
she eventually finds real consolation from her young aunt Winifred. Winifred's success in comforting her is due not only to her sensitive personality but also to her view of heaven: she assures the heroine that "if there is such a thing as common sense, you will talk with Roy as you talked with him here,only not as you talked with him here, because there will be no trouble nor sins" (51). This is contrasted with the sermon on heaven by the clergyman Dr. Bland, which declares that ''Heaven is an eternal state" where "we shall study the character of God," assuring his listeners that he expects "to be so overwhelmed by the glory of the presence of God that it may be thousands of years before I shall think of my wife"at which point, we are told, "poor Mrs Bland looked exceedingly uncomfortable" (44). The moment seems worthy of Dickens; and Phelps takes her view of heaven even nearer to the edge of parody when she inserts a conversation between children, in which Winifred's daughter insists that she is going to have little pink blocks made out of the sunset clouds when she gets to heaven: "P'r'aps I'll have some strawberries too, and some ginger-snaps,I'm not going to have any old bread and butter up there" (114). Her mother defends this as the best way of leading children towards a positive view of religion, and although the book was a best seller it attracted, not surprisingly, some stern clerical disapproval.
10
That this cosy view of heaven was widespread in the nineteenth century is shown by Colleen MacDannell and Bernhard Lang in
Heaven: a History
, which documents not only the widespread assurances that one will be able to meet one's friends and relations in a heaven full of nursery treats for children, military service in India for working men, and a gentlemanly Christ to perform introductions, but also notes the scorn of some religious thinkers (and some satirists) for what Mark Twain called "a mean little tencent heaven about the size of Rhode Island."
11
And lest we think it was an Anglo-Saxon eccentricity, I here quote Aries' observation, based mainly on French sources, that "in the nineteenth century everyone seemed to
 
Page 53
believe in the continuation of the friendships of life after death." He finds examples of pious deaths among young girls and children, along with uplifting family groups gathered round a dying child, represented not only in writing but on Italian tombs.
12
If we read this material with post-Freudian eyes, we can suggest that the argument these apologists give as the strongest support for their belief can also be seen as its greatest weakness: the fact that it fulfils our deepest wishes.
The renewal of Christian acquaintance, at the coming of Christ, is a thought which corresponds with the best wishes and emotions of the human heart. And shall this hope prove to be but a delusion? No, this cannot be.
13
Religious ideas are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent wishes of mankind. It is characteristic of the illusion that it is derived from men's wishes. It would indeed be very nice if there were a God, who was both creator of the world and a benevolent providence, if there were a moral order and a future life, but at the same time it is very odd that this is all just as we should wish it ourselves.
14
As so often happens with subversive theories, Freud's attack on religious belief turns out to be virtually a restatement of one of its traditional defenses. The Bishop of Ripon and his collaborators believe in an afterlife for the very reason that Freud uses to undermine their beliefand they say so!
15
And there is another, and some may feel a profounder, reason for rejecting the comfort offered by these assurances that we shall recognize our loved ones in heaven. In the most powerful and disturbing account of grief I have come across, C S Lewis wrote: "Don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion, or I shall suspect that you don't understand." A lifelong bachelor, Lewis had married a woman from a totally different background at the age of fifty-eight, and after four years of intense and (to him) astonishing happiness, she died of cancer: he then wrote, and published anonymously,
A Grief Observed
, in which he dryly dismisses "all that stuff about family reunions 'on the further shore' pictured in earthly terms."
16
The positive side of this is Lewis' conception that communion with God will be unimaginably different from any individual experience we have known. Lewis was not a mystic, but in this claim he has all the mystics on his side.
 
Page 54
Mystical writingthe attempt to articulate direct experience of communion with the divineis faced with the problem that such experience is ineffable, and linguistic strategies are therefore necessary to confront the paradox of expressing it. The two main strategies have been the use of imagery and the negative way. Imagessometimes accompanied by an admission of their inadequacyattempt to give at least an analogy for the experience. Much the commonest are images of light:
It is a great thing, an exceeding great thing, in the time of this exile, to be joined to God in the divine light by a mystical and denuded union. This takes place when a pure, humble and resigned soul, burning with ardent charity, is carried above itself by the grace of God, and through the brilliancy of the divine light shining on the mind, it loses all consideration and distinction of things and lays aside all, even the most excellent images; and all liquefied by love, and, as it were, reduced to nothing, it melts away into God. It is then united to God without any medium, and becomes one spirit with Him, and is iron changed into fire, without ceasing to be iron. It becomes one with God, yet not so as to be of the same substance and nature as God. Here the soul reposes, and ceases from its own action; and sweetly experiencing the operation of God, it abounds with ineffable peace and joy.
17
This is not offered as an actual experience of heaven, for no earthly creature, not even Louis de Blois, has been to heaven and returned to "the time of this exile" to tell of it. It is offered as the experience of prayer, which is the nearest we can come to communion with God. This excerpt from Louis's
Spiritual Mirror
is characteristic mystical writing, using not only the image of light but also that of metal heated in the fire to convey the idea that the soul admitted to divine communion both is and is not identical with the godhead. The idea is conveyed through images, but at the moment of most intense communion the soul "lays aside all, even the most excellent images": here Louis adumbrates the opposite method, the use of negatives, of denials that this unique experience is like anything earthly, which results in a series of paradoxes. Associated especially with St. John of the Cross, this strategy is most familiar to English readers through Eliot's
Four Quartets:
>
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.

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