Response to Christopher Hitchens By Michael VanZandt Collins

Posted on September 2nd, 2010 | Filed under InterViews

A response to this interview with Christopher Hitchens.

For me, it is very difficult to compartmentalize the concept of mortality as an “end of life” issue. Furthermore, to isolate such a subject leads one to overlook not just the inevitability but also the fruits of death. There is the commonplace religious view of death that is endorsed through the ages even by the likes of Jack Kerouac. As his alter ego Ray Smith, Kerouac tells his Buddhist compatriot, “death is the reward.”  In his explicitly Catholic view, after our earthly suffering we arrive at a place of fulfillment. He says that any preconceptions of eternal damnation are the product of “some hysterical monks who didn’t understand Buddha’s peace under the Bo Tree or for that matter Christ’s peace looking down on the heads of his tormentors and forgiving them.” Death ushers in a reign and ethos of love. However, is religion necessary to accompany death and to reach one’s fulfillment? The French author, Marcel Proust, for himself thought that death should be handled as a commonplace element of every human life and every day, whether “surrounded” by death at the moment or not. Human nature once confronted with the prospect of impending death often activated a person to face life with ebullience and urgency. Otherwise, humans have a tendency to lapse into complacency, a false belief of one’s immortality.

Death is not to be sought in and of itself but for the change that it produces. The understanding and acceptance of death brings one to a spirit of loving-kindness, as Kerouac references in Buddhism and Christianity. Hopefully, each individual death enacts a process of self-transformation, regardless of one’s “belief.” Of course, no religion has a monopoly on this subject and, likewise as Proust demonstrates, it is not an explicitly religious genre. In his book The Gift of Death, Jacque Derrida, a Jewish philosopher, observes that an “experience of responsibility” is produced as a result of “one’s absolute singularity … [through] one’s own death. Death,” he continues, “is very much that which nobody else can undergo or confront in my place. My irreplaceability is therefore conferred, delivered, ‘given,’ one can say, by death.” And so, from a position of one’s own singularity, an individual is called to responsibility, and this, in Derrida’s opinion, is the true domain of religion. All other religious claims are to be considered mystagogic and even wayward. As his thesis states, “The gift of death would be this marriage of responsibility and faith.”

In my view, belief becomes differentiated from non-belief at this level, whether one professes the possibility of self-transformation or actualization. To a certain extent, whether religion is “necessary” is a matter of semantics. For many, religious language helps to encapsulate and articulate emotional and spiritual growth for many individuals during moments of transcendence. Yet, belief can does not need to have such an expression. Whereas, Hitchens believes that any “conversion” on his part would be tantamount of “foxhole foolishness” and the result of a chemical imbalance, those who have belief are the ones who embrace “internal change” – a dreaded phenomenon for Hitchens – as an essential movement of human existence.