Fear of death.

— Man, whatever the scale of his social position, from the savage onward has the innate sentiment of the future; intuition tells him that death is not the last phase of existence and that those whose loss we lament are not lost forever. Belief in the future is intuitive and infinitely more widespread than belief in nothingness. How is it possible that there is still found, among those who believe in the immortality of the soul, so much attachment to the things of the Earth, and so great a fear of death?

This fear is an effect of the wisdom of Providence and a consequence of the instinct of self-preservation common to all living beings. It is necessary as long as man is not sufficiently enlightened about the conditions of the future life, as a counterweight to the impulse that, without this curb, would lead him to leave terrestrial life prematurely and to neglect the earthly work that is to serve his own advancement.

Thus it is that, among primitive peoples, the future is a vague intuition, later becoming a mere hope and, finally, a certainty, but still attenuated by a secret attachment to corporeal life.

In proportion as man understands the future life better, the fear of death diminishes; but, at the same time, he understands his mission on Earth better, and he awaits its end with more calm, more resignation, and without fear. The certainty of the future life gives another course to his ideas, another aim to his work; before it, nothing that does not pertain to the present; after it, everything for the future, without scorn of the present, because he knows that the latter depends on the good or bad direction of the former. The certainty of finding his friends again after death, of resuming the relations he had had on Earth, of not losing a single fruit of his work, of growing incessantly in intelligence and perfection, gives him patience to wait and courage to bear the transitory fatigues of terrestrial life. The solidarity between the living and the dead makes him understand the solidarity that must exist on Earth, where fraternity and charity have from then on an end and a reason for being, in the present as in the future. In order to free oneself from the fear of death it is necessary to be able to view it from its true point of view, that is, to have penetrated the invisible world in thought and to form of it as exact an idea as possible, which denotes on the part of the incarnate Spirit a certain development and aptitude to detach itself from matter. In those who are not sufficiently advanced, material life still prevails over spiritual life. Clinging to appearances, man does not distinguish life beyond the body, even though real life is in the soul; once the body is annihilated, everything appears to him lost, hopeless. If, instead of concentrating his thought on the external garb, he directed it to the very source of life, to the soul, which is the real being and survives all things, he would lament less the loss of the body, source of so many miseries and sorrows. For this, however, the Spirit needs a strength acquirable only in maturity. The fear of death proceeds, therefore, from an insufficient notion of the future life, though it also denotes the need to live and the apprehension that the destruction of the body may be the end of everything. It is, moreover, provoked by the secret desire for the survival of the soul, still veiled by uncertainty.

This fear decreases in proportion as certainty increases, and disappears when the latter is complete.

Herein lies the providential side of the question. It was prudent not to dazzle man whose reason was not yet strong enough to bear the prospect, too positive and too alluring, of a future that would have made him neglect the present, necessary to his material and intellectual advancement.

— This state of things is maintained and prolonged by purely human causes, which progress will cause to disappear. The first is the aspect under which the future life is presented, an aspect that might content the little-developed intelligences, but that could not satisfy the enlightened reason of reflective thinkers. Thus, these say: “Since they present to us as absolute truths principles contested by logic and by the positive data of Science, it is because they are not truths.” Hence, the incredulity of some and the doubtful belief of a great number. The future life is to them a vague idea, a probability rather than an absolute certainty; they believe, they would wish it to be so, but in spite of this they exclaim: “Yet, if it should not be so! The present is positive, let us occupy ourselves with it first, for the future in its turn will come.” And then, they add, what, after all, is the soul? Is it a point, an atom, a spark, a flame? How does it feel, see, or perceive? It is that the soul does not seem to them an effective reality, but an abstraction. The beings who are dear to them, reduced to the state of atoms in their way of thinking, are lost, and no longer have, in their eyes, the qualities by which they had made themselves beloved; they cannot understand the love of a spark nor the love we might have for it, and they themselves are content with the prospect of being transformed into monads. Thus is justified the preference for the positivism of terrestrial life, which possesses something more substantial, and considerable is the number of those who let themselves be dominated by this thought. Another cause of attachment to earthly things, even in those who most firmly believe in the future life, is the impression of the teaching given to them concerning it from childhood.

Let us acknowledge that the picture sketched by religion on the subject is not at all alluring and still less consoling. On one side, the contortions of the condemned expiating in tortures and eternal flames the errors of an ephemeral and fleeting life. Centuries succeed centuries and there is not for such wretches even the solace of a hope and, what is most atrocious, repentance avails them nothing. On the other side, the bruised and afflicted souls of purgatory await the intercession of the living who will pray or have others pray for them, without doing anything by their own effort to progress. These two categories make up the immense majority of the population beyond the tomb. Above them hovers the limited class of the elect, enjoying, for all eternity, contemplative beatitude. This eternal uselessness, preferable no doubt to nothingness, is nonetheless of a tedious monotony. That is why one sees, in the figures that portray the blessed, angelic faces in which tedium shows through more than true happiness.

— This state satisfies neither the aspirations nor the instinctive idea of progress, the only one that appears compatible with absolute happiness. It is hard to believe that, merely for having received baptism, the ignorant savage — of obtuse moral sense — should be on the same level as the man who has attained, after long years of work, the highest degree of practical science and morality. Less conceivable still is that the child who died at a tender age, before having consciousness of its acts, should enjoy the same privileges solely by virtue of a ceremony in which its will had no part whatever.

These reasonings do not fail to preoccupy the most fervent believers, however little they meditate. Future happiness not depending on progressive work on Earth, the ease with which one believes that happiness to be acquired, by means of a few exterior practices, and even the possibility of buying it with money, without regeneration of character and morals, give the enjoyments of the world the better value. More than one believer considers, in his innermost conscience, that, his future being assured by the fulfillment of certain formulas, or by posthumous gifts that deprive him of nothing, it would be superfluous to impose sacrifices upon himself or any inconveniences for the sake of others, since salvation is attained by each one working for himself. Assuredly, not all think thus, there being indeed many and honorable exceptions; but one could not contest that the greater number think thus, above all among the little-enlightened masses, and that the idea they form of the conditions of happiness in the other world does not fail to maintain the attachment to the goods of this one, encouraging egoism.

— Let us add further the circumstance that everything in the customs concurs to make one lament the loss of terrestrial life and fear the passage from Earth to heaven. Death is surrounded by lugubrious ceremonies, more apt to instill terror than to provoke hope. If death is described, it is always with a repellent aspect and never as a sleep of transition; all its emblems recall the destruction of the body, showing it horrid and fleshless; none symbolizes the soul disengaging itself radiantly from the terrestrial fetters. The departure for that happier world is accompanied only by the lament of the survivors, as if the greatest misfortune befell those who depart. They bid them eternal farewells, as if they were never to see them again. They lament for them the loss of worldly enjoyments, as if they were not going to find greater enjoyments beyond the tomb. What a misfortune, they say, to die so young, rich and happy, with the prospect of a brilliant future! The idea of a better future only lightly touches the thought, because it has no roots in it. Everything thus concurs to inspire the terror of death, instead of instilling hope. No doubt much time will be needed for man to rid himself of these prejudices, but he will arrive there in proportion as his faith becomes firm, to the point of conceiving a more sensible idea of spiritual life.

— The Spiritist Doctrine entirely changes the manner of viewing the future. The future life is no longer a hypothesis, but a reality; the state of souls after death is no longer a system, but the result of observation. The veil is lifted; the invisible world appears to us in all its practical reality; it was not men who discovered it by the effort of an ingenious conception, it is the very inhabitants of that world who come to describe their situation to us. There we see them in all the degrees of the spiritual scale, in all the phases of happiness and of misfortune; we are present at all the vicissitudes of life beyond the tomb. Therein lies, for Spiritists, the reason for the calm with which they view death, for the serenity of their last moments on Earth. What sustains them is not only hope, it is certainty; they know that the future life is merely the continuation of the present life under better conditions, and they await it with the same confidence with which they await the rising of the sun, after a night of storm. The motives of this confidence lie in the facts of which they are witnesses, and in the agreement of those facts with logic, with justice, and with the goodness of God, and with the intimate aspirations of man.

— Moreover, the common belief places souls in regions accessible only to thought, where they become in a manner strangers to the living; the Church itself places between the one and the other an insurmountable barrier, declaring all relations broken and any communication impossible. If souls are in hell, all hope of seeing them again is lost, unless one go there too; if they are among the elect, they live completely absorbed in contemplative beatitude. All this interposes between the dead and the living such a distance that it makes the separation seem eternal, and that is why many prefer to have near them, though suffering, the dear beings, rather than to see them depart, even for heaven itself. And the soul that is in heaven, will it really be happy seeing, for example, its son, its father, its mother, or its friends burning eternally? n

— For Spiritists the soul is no longer an abstraction; it has an ethereal body, which makes of it a defined being, which thought encompasses and conceives; this is already much for fixing ideas about its individuality, aptitudes and perceptions. The memory of those who are dear to us rests on something real. They are no longer represented as fleeting flames, which recall nothing to the thought, but under a concrete form, which shows them to us better as living beings. Then, instead of being lost in the depths of space, they are around us; the visible world and the invisible world are in perpetual relations and assist one another mutually. Doubt about the future being no longer permitted, the fear of death no longer has a reason for being; we view it with coolness, as a liberation, as the door of life, and not as that of nothingness. [1] Tr. note: See Heaven and Hell, part 1, chapter II.

[2] [See Allan Kardec’s observation in the article: Where is Heaven?]