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By Roberto Rivera y Carlo|Published Date: August 08, 2010
Desecration distraction
When he wasn’t busy destroying Venezuela’s economy or risking war with Colombia, Hugo Chavez decided that he was going to solve the mystery of Simon Bolivar’s death.
Mind you, the vast majority of scholars don’t think that the great liberator’s death at age 42 is all that mysterious: he died from tuberculosis while living in exile in Colombia. But Chavez, whose ideology Andres Oppenheimer of the Miami Herald has characterized as “Narcissist-Leninist,” insists that Bolivar was murdered, despite the lack of any evidence. Since Narcissism-Leninism means never having to hear “no!” Bolivar’s body was exhumed in mid-July.
Of course, Chavez’s reasons for desecrating Bolivar’s remains have little, if anything, to do with facts or a search for truth: it’s about diverting attention from his comical-to-the-point-of-criminal mismanagement of Venezuela’s economy.
In a land synonymous with oil, daily blackouts, some lasting four hours or more, are a way of life. He has threatened Polar, Venezuela’s largest and most-loved company, with expropriation despite the company’s reputation as a model employer and its employees’, in whose name the expropriation is ostensibly being threatened, opposition to the government’s plans. Exhuming Bolivar is the Bolivarian equivalent of waving a crucifix at a vampire.
No rest in peace?
Speaking of dead people who won’t stay interred, NPR’s All Things Considered reported that Bolivar “was just one of several notable dead not allowed to rest in peace.” In July, chess champion Bobby Fischer’s remains were exhumed in connection with a paternity suit and the remains of former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were dug up to see if they are the genuine article.
All this exhumation prompted NPR to ask “Is our final resting place no longer that final?” and if not, why. The possible answers ranged from the legal – the Latin phrase corpus nullius in bonis, “the body belongs to no one” – to the scientific: “the greater use of DNA evidence has made exhumations more common.”
One expert even speculated that “because of things like ‘CSI’ and vampire films, et cetera, maybe people are just a little more accustomed to the notion of partially decomposed bodies or just the dead in general, and sort of the taboo [of disturbing the dead] might have begun to erode a little bit.”
A sizable omission
What was missing from the speculation was any mention of the possible role of religion. And when you think about it, it’s a sizeable omission, what my friend Terry Mattingly calls a “religion ghost.”
It’s sizable because religion, far more than anything else, has been the context in which human attitudes towards death have been shaped. By “death,” I mean not only what happens after you die but also what those left behind do with your body. The treatment of human remains is inseparable from our beliefs in an afterlife. That’s why the discovery of Neanderthal burial sites, complete with personal possessions, led anthropologists to suspect that they believed in life after death.
This link between belief and our treatment of human remains is a constant in human history. In about a month I will be in Varanasi, the most sacred city in India. As the Times of London once put it, “Death is an industry in Varanasi.” It’s where Hindus go to die in the hope that that, “at the moment of passing, Shiva arrives to whisper the tarak mantra, the secret of the attainment of nirvana, in [their ear] . . .” They believe that “all those who expire in the precincts of the holy city are destined to escape the endless cycles of rebirth and suffering.”
The iconic image of Varanasi, thought to be the oldest continually-inhabited city in the world, are the cremations along the banks of the Ganges, in accordance with Hindu beliefs about life after death and the significance of the body.
Christianity and the dead
Of course, Western civilization’s beliefs about how we treat our dead weren’t shaped by Hinduism but by Christianity, which has plenty to say on the subject. From its beginnings, one of the ways Christians distinguished themselves from their pagan contemporaries was in their treatment of the dead.
Burial of its dead played a central role in the life of early Christian communities. When they weren’t being persecuted, the most likely point of contact between Christian leaders and Roman officials concerned access to local cemeteries. Concern over access prompted Christians to acquire the right to dig tunnels for burial in the soft stone around and under Rome – thus creating the Christian catacombs.
When leaders of the church in Cirta (present-day Constantine, Algeria) were arrested during the Diocletian persecution, six of the seventeen leaders listed their occupation as “grave digger.”
Thus, Pliny the Younger wasn’t that far of when, in a letter to the emperor Trajan, he described Christians as a kind of burial society.
The key word here (besides “Christian”) is burial. From the start, Christians buried their dead. Cremation was for pagans who didn’t believe in the resurrection of the dead. Christian treatment of the remains of the faithful departed flowed from Christian beliefs: not just the resurrection of the dead but also the Incarnation. In becoming one of us, God sanctified the human body and made our treatment of it a part of Christian piety. Sinning against our bodies became sinning against God.
That’s why, to this day, the Orthodox Church forbids cremation except when it can’t be avoided, such as during epidemics or following natural disasters. While the Catholic Church (regrettably) permits it under more circumstances, it forbids cremation where the act “demonstrate[s] a denial of faith in the resurrection of the body.” (Prompting the obvious question of when voluntary cremation does not demonstrate such a denial. Answer: almost never.) It also prohibits the scattering of ashes or keeping them in your living room next to a bowling trophy.
Christianity’s way of treating its dead went wherever it did and supplanted pagan practices. Not surprisingly, as its influence has waned, there has been a corresponding decline in respect for human remains.
Some of this decline has been subtle: for instance, the ancient Christian custom of burying the faithful departed facing east – in anticipation of Christ’s return – has not only fallen into disuse but is probably unintelligible. The farrago of pragmatism, materialism, pop Gnosticism, and subjectivity that constitutes most moderns’ beliefs makes it difficult for them to understand why it makes it any difference how we treat a person’s remains.
(There have been exceptions and pockets of resistance: during the Russian civil war, a surplus of bodies and a shortage of coffins and grave-diggers led the Bolsheviks to promote cremation as an alternative to Orthodox Christian burial, to which Russian peasants responded “Nyet!”)
Thus, instead of being buried facing east, we are cremated and our ashes are spread over Fenway Park, the Grand Canyon or some other place that was “special” to the deceased. That’s only possible because we don’t really think of these places as anyone’s “resting place.”
Disturbing the remains of Simon Bolivar or your aunt Margaret is no big deal because we don’t believe that there’s anything to be disturbed. To the extent we “believe” in life after death it’s in the whole “Ghost Whisperer walk-into-the-light” sense that bears the same relationship to Christian faith as a filet of fish sandwich at McDonalds bears to real seafood, a distinction so obvious that even a caveman could figure it out.
For more understanding of what it means to be made in God’s image, get the book, Created in God’s Image, by Anthony A. Hoekema, from our online store. Or read the article, “Grave Signs: The Godly Waste of Christian Burial,” by Russell D. Moore.
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