Prologue: In the Beginning -- The Fall

Adam and Eve were created with particular gifts.

The chief gift bestowed on Adam and Eve by God was sanctifying grace, which made them children of God and gave them the right to heaven......The other gifts bestowed on Adam and Eve by God were happiness in the Garden of Paradise, great knowledge, control of the passions by reason, and freedom from suffering and death.

After the Fall, our intellect was darkened; our control over our passions was weakened; and we were no longer free from suffering and death. We are more liable to error, more likely to be led astray by temporal things, and we have inherited an inclination to sin. We were blind, in pain, and subject to the appalling indignity of eventual death.

Now Dr Carroll moves to what might be called the historical perspective. It's not necessary to assent to the distilled doctrine of the Baltimore Catechism in order to see empirically that man, historically, is haunted by death, rather literally. A dog isn't, for instance.

"The first tangible proof of the existence of true man on earth is to be found in the fact that the earliest true men buried their dead. To all animals death is a part of nature -- sometimes to be mourned, as a mother beast will mourn her dead young, but never frightening or uncanny, because for an animal death is the end. But to all men -- except those of our modern age most insulated from reality by sophisticated rationalization -- deaht is a ghastly mystery, a sign of fear..... We think it natural that most men, especially primitive men, should be afraid of ghosts. But what in the world is natural about it? .... We fear the dead because in the depths of our being we feel that they ought not to be dead and might not stay dead; because they remind us of what we would much rather forgot. That some day we will be as they, and because we cannot understand why this should be, and how it will be. ...

The victory of our "last enemy" is assured."

The perceived uncanniness and unnaturalness of death, along with its utter inevitability, is something that he brings up again in the context of some of the ancient civilizations.

“This is an appalling horror; a stinking indignity.”“Christianity does not simply affirm or simply deny the horror of death: it tells me something quite new about it.”

God in the Dock

Freud, for example, wrote: "As an unbelieving fatalist, I can only sink into a state of resignation when faced with the horror of death." He became "obsessed with death, extraordinarily fearful and superstitious about it." Nicholi writes:

"Freud believed that people accepted the religious worldview because of their fear of death and their wish for permanence. Yet 'the terrors of eternal nothingness' preoccupied Freud more than most people--and he remained an unbeliever, resigned to the harsh reality of his worldview."

Lewis, on the other hand, faced his own death with amazingly good humor, writing: "There is nothing discreditable in dying: I've known the most respectable people to do it!" and (in a more serious vein) "If we really believe what we say we believe--if we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is 'a wandering to find home,' why should we not look forward to the arrival?"

“Nothing will reconcile us to the unnaturalness of death. We know that we were not made for it; we know how it crept into our destiny as an intruder; and we know Who has defeated it.”