Life-Giving Death

Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints

It is said that there are three deaths: the death of the body, the death of the soul, and the death of sin. The death of sin, or dying to sin, is clearly of God. Whereas the death of the soul, since it gives birth to sin, is clearly not of God. As for the death of the body, most say that it is also not of God. But this is not true. Only the death of the soul is not of God. This is spiritual death, truly the death of the soul.

We are the ones who bring spiritual death into being. It is the apron of leaves that Adam and Eve weave for themselves after they succumb to pleasure, when their eyes are opened to their nakedness, and they feel ashamed. God does not make these aprons, because spiritual death is not of God. It is a barrier that we erect between ourselves and God. Wearing our aprons of spiritual death, we flee God’s voice into the dark wood—away from the Truth and into self-deception and self-delusion.

At least, we try to flee. But you cannot really flee, not from God. His voice follows you wherever you go. We can, however, refuse to repent. This is what we do. Just like Adam and Eve, instead of repenting, we blame others and make excuses for ourselves. This is spiritual death.

When God foresaw that we would weave these aprons of spiritual death, he resolved—out of love—to save us. With an eye toward our redemption, he prescribed for us another death: the death of the body. As St Gregory of Nyssa wrote in his Great Catechism: ‘Out of forethought, he who heals our vice clothed men with the power to be dead.’ Being clothed with the power to be dead is what the garments of skin signify, which Adam and Eve are made to wear before they are expelled from Paradise. God himself fashioned these garments for humanity after he had ordained suffering for them as a curse. So, despite what people usually say, the death of the body is indeed of God, just like the death of sin.

God Judging Adam, William Blake, 1795

Clothed in our garments of skin, we experience pain mixed in with the pleasure of the flesh. But this pain, it has been revealed, is a tonic. For who provided the skin for these garments? The Lamb that was slain from the foundation of the world. In a mystery, from the moment God cast Adam and Eve out of Paradise and into the world of time, the world of mere sensory consciousness, into a life governed by flesh, not by spirit—in a mystery, Christ the Lamb becomes flesh, becomes a curse, becomes sin for us. ‘Behold the man,’ God proclaimed after he had cursed Adam with suffering, clothing him in the garment of bodily death. ‘Behold the man,’ proclaimed Pontius Pilate as Christ stood before him, lashed and bleeding, robed in royal purple and sentenced to death—the death that would be, for us, the death of sin.

In Christ, then, bodily death is revealed to be nothing other than the death of sin. He becomes our garment of mortal skin, taking on mortal death itself, so that we might put on his eternal life.

Therefore, God has what St Isaac the Syrian calls an ‘eternal intention concerning death’. In The Second Part, he writes:

Just as, because of sin, he decreed death for Adam under the appearance of a sentence, so in the same way he showed that the sin existed by means of the punishment, even though this punishment was not his real aim. Though he showed it as though it was something which Adam would receive as a repayment for his wrong, he hid its true mystery. Under the guise of something to be feared, he concealed his eternal intention concerning death and what his wisdom was aiming at: that even though this matter might be grievous, ignominious and hard at first, nevertheless in truth it would be the means of transporting us to that wonderful and glorious world. Without it, there would be no way of crossing over from this world and being there.

What was God’s hidden eternal intention? It was that bodily death, when joined to faith in Christ’s saving Passion, should enable us to strip off our aprons of self-delusion and submit instead to the crucifixion of repentance—to the death by which death is put to death, through which we are forgiven. So you see, there are really only two deaths: spiritual death, the death of the soul, which we create through refusing to repent; and physical death, the death of the body, the death of sin, which is nothing other than repentance—and which God becomes for us, transforming death into life.

After all, when our bodies die, our sins die with them. And when, with faith in Christ, this bodily death is lived consciously before the body’s death, it is called repentance. Most men do not live death in that mode. Nonetheless, they do die—and having died in their sins, they have also died to sin. They become dust, returning to the earth. And having become earth again, they can be remade, since it is from the earth that God creates human beings in his image. St Gregory of Nyssa again:

Death has been introduced to human nature by divine providence as an economy, so that, by vice flowing out in the dissolution of body and soul, man might be recreated again by the resurrection—sound, impassible, uncontaminated, and alien to any admixture of vice. In the case of the leader of our salvation, the economy of death was perfected, entirely fulfilled in accordance with its proper aim.

So yes, most men do not learn how to repent in this life. But those of us who have been given the gift of faith must follow ‘the leader of our salvation’ by dying before we die; that is, we must repent. We must live properly, dying daily according to the more perfect mode of the life-giving Cross—beginning with praktikē, the pursuit of virtue. Disciplining the body; putting to death the deeds of the body; crucifying the flesh with its passions and desires; killing whatever is earthly in us—all of this is the death of the body when pursued intentionally in this life, in a spirit of patient endurance. St Issac again:

Because he knew beforehand our inclination towards all sorts of wickedness, God cunningly made the harmful consequences which would result from this into a means of entry to the future good and the setting right of our corrupted state. These are things which are known only to him.

This is the secret: when God cursed us, he actually blessed us, sending his Son to become that curse for us. Christ clothes himself in mortality to strip us of ourselves, so that he can reclothe us in our original, spiritual bodies. This is the full mystery of our mortality, revealed through Christ’s life-giving death.