Inhumation as Theophanic Encounter: The Eastern Orthodox Rejection of Cremation

Abstract

I. INTRODUCTION

It is safe to say that cremation has become a common practice among Christians in the West. In the minds of many, such a practice is harmless, even inconsequential or irrelevant, to their Christian faith.¹ In fact, it may even be the moral thing to do, given the high cost and environmental impact of industrialized funeral practices. Such a feeling may be either due to nominal belief or simply unfamiliarity with the Church’s theology and practice down the ages.² The statistics provided by the National Funeral Directors Association [NFDA] demonstrate a rather stark reality. The NFDA 2020 Cremation and Burial Report concluded that 45.2 percent of clients chose burial, while 40.4 percent chose cremation. However, their 2040 projections have those figures at 16 percent burial and 78.4 percent cremation. That is a staggering shift. Of special interest to this essay is the rise in cremation and its correlation with the decrease in religiosity. The NFDA 2017 Consumer Survey showed that the importance of religion in burial decisions and funeral services decreased from 49.5 percent in 2012 to 39.5 percent in 2017.³

These statistics seem to follow general trends of religious decline in the West, as well as the rise of the “nones’ and “dones,” not to mention New Age and Neo-Pagan spirituality. Such a rise is also captured by the NFDA’s note on the increasing interest in “Green Funerals” (biodegradable caskets, formaldehyde-free embalming, and so forth), an interest as high as 53.8 percent. While prima facie it would be bold to claim a connection between this decrease in religiosity and the increase in cremation, my hope is that by the end of this essay, such a connection may prove more plausible than first assumed. Although it is always difficult to determine causality, from an Orthodox perspective, these statistics can only ever point to a spiritual decay in the West that is manifesting itself acutely in one of the crucial areas of human life: death and the treatment of bodies. Moreover, the relative lack of engagement on the topic of cremation in bioethics, which has tended to exclusively treat beginning and end-of-life issues, paired with the special lack of Orthodox voices on the topic, calls for a more sustained treatment.⁴

At its root, cremation is the manifestation of a hetero-doxa, a wrong or heretical opinion, regarding the nature of humanity and its ultimate telos. This heterodox belief, in turn, threatens the very core of the Christian faith, and so humanity in general since it is in the crucified Christ that we behold the Doxa, the Glory, of God. Our own deaths, including our lifeless bodies, are deeply symbolic of our participation in Christ’s own death and resurrection. So fundamental is this symbolism that the Church has down the ages maintained what might be termed a theophanic attitude toward death and the deceased.⁵ If it is in Christ crucified—even lying in the tomb—that we behold the Glory, then we should expect believers’ own deaths to manifest God in the world, a continuous proclamation of the Gospel, an ongoing Paschal encounter: Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death!⁶ We cannot lose sight of the connection in Orthodoxy between right-belief and right-glory.

This emphasis on theophanic encounter in the midst of inhumation is the core of my argument.⁷ To demonstrate it, I offer three interrelated arguments. First, we must attend to the ecclesial experience of death and inhumation in light of the Resurrected Lord, especially in the scriptures and the liturgical services, with particular attention to the funeral service and its connection to Holy Friday and Saturday. After which, it is worthwhile to say something about what I term Orthodox Hylomorphism, that is, the Orthodox anthropological vision of human beings as irreducibly a soul-body unity, including the importance of that unity to our spiritual life now and in the eschaton. Finally, it is necessary to touch on the place of the saints and their relics in the life of the Church as concrete manifestations of that ecclesial experience and hylomorphic anthropology. The condition of the possibility of relics, articulated in the theological doctrine of divine energies, is likewise briefly treated. Only once we see how those three are mutually supporting, can we understand what is meant by this theophanic encounter and why the practice of cremation is wholly contrary to it.⁸

II. ECCLESIAL EXPERIENCE

As a matter of history, cremation is a fundamentally pagan practice. Unlike the Greco-Roman world in which it found itself, Christianity alone affirmed the goodness of the created world and the goodness of the human body, and so exclusively practiced bodily interment, also known as inhumation. Many other philosophical sects considered the body a prison, and the purpose of life is to escape from it.⁹ Some heretical groups, like the Gnostics of various stripes, thought that this universe was the product of an evil God (demiurge) that was distinct from the God of the New Testament.¹⁰ Thus, the Gnostics thought our ultimate destination was non-bodily in a kind of heavenly realm where we would finally escape the darkness of earth and matter.¹¹ Given views like these, the practice of cremation was commonplace in the first and second centuries when Christianity was still a persecuted minority.¹²

Contrary to this view, the practice of Orthodox Christians has always been inhumation, which is inextricably tied to the fundamental belief of the Christian faith: Christ’s resurrection. Christ rose bodily from the grave, transfiguring human nature into a fully spiritual reality—a reality not to be totally opposed to our current bodies; Christ could not only be touched by the disciple Thomas, but his body still bore the wounds of crucifixion, and He was also able to eat with his disciples.¹³ It is in the hope of the resurrection that Christians are baptized, as St. Paul says (Rom 6:3–11). In baptism, we die with Christ so that we too might rise with Christ. Even in the central liturgical act, the Eucharist, Christians remained realists in their radical commitment to the physical reality partaken thereof. It is none other than the body and blood of Christ that is consumed and which transforms the believer.¹⁴

Such a commitment to the bodily reality of Christ, including His resurrection, was confirmed by prophetic readings of scripture, such as Ezekiel’s vision of the Valley of Dry Bones and Job’s words requesting, “may my skin, which patiently endures these things, rise up” (Ezekiel 37; Job 19:25–26).¹⁵ Christ exhorted His disciples with such enigmatic sayings as “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24). Only once the disciples experienced the risen Christ could they understand Him as the “first-born among the dead” (Rev. 1:5) and so see the radical transformation wrought by Christ, not only for humanity and our bodies, but for the whole cosmos: “for the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19). Hence, the Nicene-Constantinople Creed, composed in A. D. 381 at the Second Great Ecumenical Council in Constantinople, and which to this day stands as the profession of faith for all Christians, ends by proclaiming, “I look for the resurrection from the dead, and the life of the world to come.” The experience of the resurrection is truly the beginning and the end of Christian theology and ethics.¹⁶

Yet, the resurrection must be understood in its proper context. It is not merely some miraculous affirmation of Christ’s divinity, nor an add-on to an otherwise penal transaction between the Son and the Father on the cross.¹⁷ Rather, it is the continuation, and ultimate revelation, of the Glory experienced on Sinai by Moses.¹⁸ On Golgotha, cosmic mountains meet and are consummated: Sinai, Zion, and Tabor.¹⁹ While the full ramifications of this are difficult to distill here, the scholar John Behr provides a helpful point of entry,

When Christ said “It is finished” (Jn 19.30), he is not simply declaring that his earthly life has come to an end, but that rather the work of God is now “fulfilled” or “completed.” The divine economy, that is, the whole plan of creation and salvation, told from this perspective, culminates at this point. The work of God spoken of in Genesis, creating “the human [anthropos] in our image and likeness” (Gen 1.26–27), is completed here: as Pilate said a few verses earlier, “Behold, the man” [anthropos] (Jn 19.5). (2006, 33–52)

Hence, the ultimate “locus” of the revelation of who God is, and what it means to be human, is Christ crucified and raised. Now this is not just a protological and eschatological revelation, but an experience open to believers. It is an invitation into that transfiguring reality. Moreover, that transfiguration has a liturgical character. We can already see this in Luke 24:13–35, known as the Road to Emmaus, where the disciples failed to recognize the risen Christ until the scriptures were opened and the bread was broken.²⁰ It is only in the liturgical act of reading the scriptures and receiving the Eucharist that they see Christ, and experience Christ, for who He is.

Of course, the central Christian liturgical celebration is Pascha, or Easter, which is the believer’s approach to the empty tomb and encounter with the Risen Lord. That celebration is anticipated by ritual participation in the entire passion story, including Great and Holy Thursday (Last Supper), Friday (Crucifixion), and Saturday (Tomb). The purpose of this “reenactment” is theophanic. It elicits an ontological reality and not merely some mnemonic moment. Speaking of apocalyptic visions during the second temple period, the scholar Christopher Barina Kaiser notes,

This separation of visionary experience and ritual performance is one of the most serious gaps in our worldview that must be overcome if we are to understand non-Enlightenment cultures in which performance is a primary mode of communal activity. The visions with which we are concerned here were scripted far more than we would expect (even in accounts of ecstatic visions), and the rituals involved were performative in ways we are not used to. There was no gap between them. (2014, 29)²¹

The key concern among ancients was to experience God, and the primary method for doing so was ritual performance or liturgy. Now for there to be the Paschal experience of the empty tomb, there must have been something in that tomb in the first place. It is here that we come to Jesus’ own burial. Jesus is brought down from the cross, wrapped in a linen shroud, anointed with spices, and laid in the tomb.²² If Jesus is the paradigm of true humanity, then even His burial is given to us for imitation as another opportunity to participate in His divine life. This imitation is already present in Orthodox liturgical services, as we see in a moment, which brings to mind the power of the phrase lex orandi, lex credendi: the law of prayer is the law of belief.²³

That Paschal experience extends beyond itself and permeates the entire liturgical year and its various ministrations. In particular, the funeral service for an Orthodox Christian directly echoes the service of Holy Friday and Saturday when believers stand before the tomb of Christ. On Holy Friday, before the Epitaphion (an embroidered cloth with an icon of the dead and supine Christ) is brought from the altar to the center of the church to be venerated by the faithful, the choir sings,

Noble Joseph, taking down Thy most pure body from the Tree, wrapped it in clean linen with sweet spices, and he laid it in a new tomb. (Mary and Ware, 2002, 616)²⁴

Hence, already at the tomb, believers are reminded of the details regarding the burial taking place. After the Epitaphion is laid in the tomb, the faithful approach makes three prostrations and kisses the icon.²⁵ This same act of veneration (except the prostrations) occurs at the very end of the funeral service, doubtless bringing these two experiences together. When our loved ones are placed in the middle of the church, we are in the same liminal space as Holy Friday and Saturday. Christ has died, yet the resurrectional character of His death is never lost, the anticipation and hope of Pascha is near; our loved one has perished, yet the hope of the resurrection reverberates throughout our mourning. As one of the stichos of the Praises during Matins on Great and Holy Saturday suggests, which is sung in front of the tomb,

Thou Who art Life was laid in a tomb, O Christ: by Thy death Thou has destroyed death and art become a fountain of life for the world. (Mary and Ware, 2002, 623)

Psalm 119, the versicle Psalm for the Praises to which these stichera are interspersed, is the same Psalm sung over the body at the funeral service. Once again, the connection between standing before the tomb of Christ and standing before the casket of the deceased is undeniable. There is a masterful tension in the liturgical hymns and scriptural readings throughout these services, which balance the loss of glory and the tragedy of death with the expectation of redemption and new life.²⁶ Yet, these cannot actually be separated. It is not as if our rotting bodies were a hindrance to the experience of God’s Glory; rather, the scandal of the cross is that our rotting bodies are manifestations of God’s Glory! They are theophanic.

To this point, Silviu Bunta has observed something surprising in 2 Corinthians 4. Whereas the RSV has Paul saying, “though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day,” the actual Greek is more forceful. Strong’s Greek Lexicon indicates that the Greek διαφείρω has a stronger sense of “to rot thoroughly.” As a present passive verb, Bunta translates this as “brought to rot.” Hence, Paul sounds much more like the following: “if our outer human is brought to rot, yet our inner human is renewed day by day” (Bunta, 2019).²⁷ Paul’s point, as indicated in what follows in verse 17, is that what corresponds to this being “brought to rot” is the working out in us of “an eternal weight of glory” (αἰώνιον βάρος δόξης). The term glory, doxa, is, again, that same glory experienced on Sinai by Moses, which is now presented, being made manifest, in our own rotting bodies—both while we are alive tending toward death, and after we have in fact died.

It is perhaps the latter claim which proves to be shocking. Is not death, let alone decay and rot, the enemy of God? Yes, indeed it is, but through Christ’s redemptive work, it has been transformed into a vehicle of glory. As Georges Florovsky comments, “He [i.e., Christ] knew that his humiliation was no mere endurance or obedience, but the very path of Glory and of the ultimate victory” (Florovsky, 1976, 101).²⁸ So, too, John of Damascus, in the eighth Idiomela of the Departed sung at the funeral service, says,

I weep and I wail, when I consider death and behold our beauty, fashioned according to the Image of God, lying in the graves disfigured, bereft of glory, not having form. O wonder! What is this mystery concerning us? (Panikhida, 2017, 93)

The experience of the corpse is a multivalent revelation. Our horror reveals the true vocation of humanity and how that vocation has been forfeited by us. At the same time, it is not the possibility of God’s glory which has been thwarted. As the third idiomela states, “our glory will not go with us upon the way.” (Panikhida, 2017, 92, emphasis my own). In the light of Christ, to quote Florovsky again, “death itself is already, as it were, the anticipation of the resurrection. By death God not only punishes but also heals fallen and ruined human nature” (Florovsky, 1976, 108). In which case, because of Christ’s redemptive work death is not only tragedy and punishment, but also purification and anticipation, the opportunity to empty ourselves of human glory and put on the Glory of God. This is the great mystery revealed in our own deaths. It is precisely for this reason that Alexander Schmemann could say that Christians can neither accept the “secular” or “religious” view of death, the former that is death-denying and the latter that puts health in the category of the “miraculous” (Schmemann, 1973, 101). On the contrary, death and dying must be seen as sacramental in themselves, for “in Christ everything in this world, and this means health and disease, joy and suffering, has become an ascension to, and entrance into this new life, its expectation and anticipation” (Schmemann, 1973, 103). Now this is not just true of the process of dying, but rather “in Him death itself has become an act of life, for He has filled it with Himself” (Schmemann, 1973, 106). Even the corpse has become a witness, a martyr, to that believer’s Pascha, or passage, into Christ’s Kingdom.

Therefore, as far as ecclesial experience is concerned, cremation could only ever be a doxastic denial in the fullest sense. It is a denial of the fundamental truth of the resurrection, which is the foundation of the Church itself, and the hope of all Christians, but it is also a denial of the Glory of God, which we are called to experience amidst death and decay, even in our own rotting bodies: the paradoxical manifestation of the tragedy of sin and the hope of redemption. The Church’s liturgical connection between the funeral and the rhythms of Holy Friday and Saturday make this point abundantly clear. Although it may seem shocking, should we really expect something different? As St. Paul recounts regarding his own suffering, “but [the Lord] said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power (δύναμις) is made perfect (τελεῖται) in weakness (ἀσθένεια)’” (2 Cor 12:9). God’s power, his dunamis, has as its telos our salvation, but since the state of humanity is one of corruption and weakness, then that teleology is worked out and manifested through our own frailty, not in spite of it. That is the scandal of the cross, after all. What could be a better image of such a reality than our lifeless bodies placed in the center of the church?

III. ORTHODOX HYLOMORPHISM

The foregoing gives indications to what has sometimes been referred to as the “antinomian” character of Orthodoxy.²⁹ Death and life, shame and glory, sadness and joy, these and many others appear simultaneously throughout the services.³⁰ Yet, antinomian does not mean contradictory, for, at least in this life through the redeeming work of Christ, there is a hidden reality of perichoresis between them, a mutual interpenetration, a symbolic unity. In death we find life, in shame we experience glory, in sadness we discover joy. Jean-Claude Larchet, in his masterful work, Theology of the Body, begins on a similar note, bringing attention to the body as a “locus of contradictions” (Larchet, 2017, 7). The body appears contradictory because, on the one hand, I can speak of my body, thereby making some kind of distinction between myself and my body. However, this is a distinction that does not entail separation, for there can never truly be a my, a me, without my body. Such a distinction would be impossible if I were merely a body, for I would never have any transcendental perspective to speak in the possessive; however, my transcendental perspective is always immanent, if you will, for me is itself conditioned by the body it possesses, both positively and negatively. Positively, in terms of all the experiences open to me due to my body, including the pleasure and joy I can experience by means of my body. Negatively, because there are times when a war appears between myself and my body, as when I struggle against its desires, or it thwarts my will, and so on.

This relationship of union-in-distinction between soul and body is often known as hylomorphism, which is a combination of the Greek hyle for matter and morphe for form, that is, a form-matter unity. Its first articulation came from Aristotle—as far as we know—when he argued that, “the soul must be a substance in the sense of the form of a natural body having life potentially within it. But substance is actuality, and thus soul is the actuality of a body […] that is why the soul is an actuality of the first kind of a natural body having life potentially in it” (Aristotle, 1984, On the Soul, II.1 412a15–412b1). Aristotle’s point was rather simple. We see all kinds of bodies around, but some bodies are alive and capable of self-motion, while other bodies are lifeless. Since things do not cause themselves, then a body which is inherently lifeless cannot give itself life. What accounts for the difference (differentia), then, between animated and inanimate bodies? For Aristotle, and the entire classical philosophical tradition after him, it was psuche (animus in Latin), or soul, which was the form of the body. Hence, unlike the Cartesian picture where the soul is some foreign and autonomous substance dwelling in a body, for Aristotle soul and body are a unity analogous to wax that has had a seal impressed on it.³¹ Hence, Aristotle concludes, “the soul is inseparable from its body” (1984, On the Soul II.1 413a4).

It is a matter of contention whether Aristotle thought the soul was immortal, and most thinkers after him, especially Christians, though he had denied it.³² That issue need not trouble us here. What is important for our purposes is that the Church Fathers adopted the basics of this hylomorphic account, yet defended the soul’s immortality, and used this view to not only bolster the truth of the bodily resurrection but also to deny beliefs contrary to it, such as reincarnation or transmigration of souls.³³ From their perspective, such views could only stem from a radically different understanding of human nature and the biblical witness. St. Gregory of Nyssa’s sister, St. Macrina, in his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, gives a definition similar to Aristotle’s when she says that the soul is “a living and intellectual essence which by itself gives to the organic and sensory body the power of life and reception of sense-impressions as long as the nature which can receive these maintains its existence” (St. Gregory, 1993, 37–37). It is this definition of the soul that leaves out the possibility of a soul inhabiting various bodies, for a soul is always connected to a certain body. Hence, in Chapter 8 of the dialogue, St. Macrina continues,

It is just as if they judged everything to be the same and the nature of all beings to be one, mixed in a confused and undifferentiated association with itself, with no property distinguishing one thing from the other. For he who says that the same entity enters into everything can mean only that everything is one, if the apparent difference of beings in no way hinders the mixing of unrelated things. (St. Gregory, 1993, 90–91)

In this passage, St. Macrina uses precisely the same argument from differentia that Aristotle used to justify the deep unity between soul and body. However, the connection is more pronounced than that. St. Macrina is using Aristotle’s very argument against the Pythagorean view of transmigration. Here is Aristotle,

All, however, that these thinkers do is to describe the specific characteristics of the soul; they do not try to determine anything about the body which is to contain it, as if it were possible, as in the Pythagorean myths, that any soul could be clothed in any body—an absurd view, for each body seems to have a form and shape of its own. It is as absurd as to say that the art of carpentry could embody itself in flutes; each art must use its tools, each soul its body. (1984, On the Soul, I.3 407b19–26)³⁴

What we see here is a mutual relationship between soul and body, between form and matter, as is the relationship between any actuality and potentiality. When we speak of form, we are speaking of the form of something, and not just anything and everything. Thus, it is unintelligible to speak of a soul moving from one body to another, whether it be in different kind of things (i.e., animals or plants) or other human beings.³⁵ My soul (my form) is the soul of my body (my matter) which produces a human being. In the same way, the formal art of carpentry has as its object the matter of wood to produce building materials.

St. Maximus the Confessor, writing three centuries later, dealt with the same issue of the pre-existence of souls and transmigration. He, likewise, appealed to hylomorphism to deny both views and hold forth the truth of the resurrection. Per St. Maximus,

For after the death of the body, the soul is not called “soul” in an unqualified way, but the soul of a man, indeed the soul of a particular human being, for even after the body, it possesses, as its own form, the whole human being, which is predicated of it by virtue of its relation as a part to the whole. The same holds in the case of the body, which is corruptible by nature, but has a particular relation on account of its origin. For the body, after its separation from the soul, is not simply called “body,” even though it will decompose and be dissolved into the elements from which it was constituted, but the body of a man, indeed of a particular man. For like the soul it possesses the form of the whole human being predicated of it, by virtue of its relation as a part to the whole. (2014, 139–41, Ambiguum 7 1101B, emphasis my own)

Perhaps even clearer than St. Macrina in St. Gregory of Nyssa’s treatise, St. Maximus emphasizes not only that soul and body are predicated on the whole, that is, the man, but that they are predicated on a particular man (τοῦ τινος ἀνθρώπου). In other words, we do not just speak of souls and bodies in the abstract, but of certain persons, for example, Paul’s soul and body. What it means to be Paul is not just to be human in a general sense, but to be a certain instance of humanity, what the theological tradition often termed a hypostasis, individual, or person. Once a human being exists, the soul and body are always necessarily related. The definition is one of entailment. To be Paul is simply to have Paul’s soul and Paul’s body. Even when those two things are separated, it is improper to speak of Paul existing in the fullest sense. His soul points to his body, so to speak, and his body points to his soul. It is for these reasons that both St. Gregory and St. Maximus maintain the reality of the resurrection. If God is to grant Paul eternal life, it must entail the immortality of Paul’s soul and body.

How does this issue bear on cremation? In the first place, cremation, and the ritual practices that often follow it (such as scattering ashes), often betray a non-resurrectional vision of human nature. It treats the body as an afterthought. The real person is gone, now it is time to destroy the unused vehicle to mark the return to the Great Ocean of Being. It either has a monistic tinge to it (a drop of water returning to the sea) or a transmigration hue (the soul will return as a different body). This leads to the second problem: it does not treat the body as fundamental to the identity of the person in question. The body is denied its symbolic and theophanic value as an opportunity to encounter not just the deceased person as they enter Holy Saturday, but the Glory of God acting in and through their own being “brought to rot.” In both instances, the reciprocal relation between soul and body is denied, a relation which is constitutive of the human person as such. The truth of this reciprocal relation grounds the reverence of the body, and the act of bodily reverence is itself a dogmatic expression.

IV. SAINTS, RELICS, DIVINE ENERGIES

Although we have already gleaned part of this point from our treatment of scripture and the liturgy above, with a hylomorphic view of human nature in place, we can also see another fundamental aspect of traditional Christianity: saints and their relics. For the Orthodox, one obvious experience that demonstrates the hylomorphic reality is the experience of the miraculous among relics. We see this reality in the scriptures themselves. In the Old Testament, a dead man is thrown on Elisha’s bones and comes back to life (2 Kings 13:21). In the Gospels, people are brought before Christ and are healed merely by touching the hem of his garment (Matthew 14:35–36; Mark 6:56; Luke 8:43–44). In the Book of Acts, people brought into contact with Peter’s shadow are healed (Acts 5:15–16). Likewise, handkerchiefs and aprons that touched Paul’s body were imbued with power to cure the sick (Acts 19:11–12).

This experience of relics, and the practice of collecting them, is extant in the earliest Christian sources. The Martyrdom of St. Ignatius of Antioch speaks of the holy remains of the saint, wrapped in linen (note the connection with Christ’s burial!), and valued as an “inestimable treasure” (Anonymous, 1885, 131, Chapter 6). Likewise, the Martyrdom of Polycarp recounts that

We took up his bones, which are more valuable than precious stones and finer than refined gold, and deposited them in a suitable place. There, when we gather together as we are able, with joy and gladness, the Lord will permit us to celebrate the birthday of his martyrdom in commemoration of those who have already fought in the contest and also for the training and preparation of those who will do so in the future. (St. Ignatius, 2006, 254, Chapter 18)

In this passage, we glean something crucial. Not only did the earliest Christians collect these relics, but they celebrated liturgical services wherever they were kept, both honoring the victory of the deceased and perceiving these relics as granting strength to those who might undergo similar trials. This practice is continued to the present, where relics are sewn into the antimension—a piece of consecrated cloth with a bishop’s signature—which is a sign of having the bishop’s authority to perform the services.³⁶

That God continues to act through believers, in their trials and even in their post-mortem bodies, is a continuous theological theme in ancient Christianity. St. Athanasius of Alexandria, writing in the fourth century, argues for the veracity of Christianity by reference to the martyrdom of believers,

That death has been dissolved, and the cross has become victory over it, and it is no longer strong but is itself truly dead, no mean proof but an evident surety is that it is despised by all Christ’s disciples, and everyone tramples on it, and no longer fears it, but with the sign of the cross and faith in Christ tread it under foot as something dead. (2011, 107–09, On the Incarnation 27)

So much is this the case, St. Athanasius argues, that we see it even among the young boys and girls who eagerly take up lives of rigorous asceticism (2011, 109, On the Incarnation 27–28). Yet, St. Athanasius’ point is, again, not merely mnemonic, as if to say what we are witnessing in these champions of faith is a helpful reminder of what Christ did back then. Rather, Christ’s presence is ontologically real in the believer, so much so that Christ is conquering death in them right now, “So also, with death being despised and trampled down since the saving manifestation of the Savior in the body and the conclusion of the cross, it is clear that he is the Savior, being revealed in the body, destroying death, and daily displaying the trophies against it in his disciples” (St. Athanasius, 2011, 111, On the Incarnation 29). The bodies of believers, in other words, are thoroughly theophanic, revealing Christ and destroying death in the present. This theological vision is present in one of St. Athanasius’ most famous works, The Life of Antony. The whole purpose of that work is apologetic, a continuation of what one finds within the pages of On the Incarnation. St. Antony is the ideal spiritual warrior, who through his ascetic heroism has made Christ incarnate in himself, and thereby crushed the devil and death anew. As St. Athanasius recounts,

And he who vaunted himself against flesh and blood was turned back by a flesh-bearing man. Working with Antony was the Lord, who bore flesh for us, and gave to the body the victory over the devil, so that each of those who truly struggle can say, It is not I, but the grace of God which is in me. (1980, 34, Life of Antony 5).

In this passage we have a perfect account of synergy, the cooperation between God and man. More importantly, however, we see through these passages a more dynamic understanding of incarnation. God is continually becoming incarnate in believers, not just in the first century. But how is this possible? In the Eastern tradition, stretching back to St. Paul, the answer was that through the divine energies believers can participate in the divine life without becoming divine by nature.³⁷ Nathan A. Jacobs, in analyzing the differences between East and West on the topic of revelation, has the following to offer on what it means to partake of these energies,

For example, the operative powers of fire include heating and lighting, and these energeiai can be communicated to metal. In this communication, the metal participates in the nature of fire (via its operative powers), but the metal remains metal […] Yet, the additional notion that operative power can be communicated from one entity to another proved especially useful in explaining the synergy between human persons and spirit. The apostle Paul laid the groundwork for this in his talk of being energized by God, and thus it became the most natural way of interpreting Peter’s talk of partaking of the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4). Much like metal that is transfigured by its communion with the operative powers of fire, so we are to be transfigured through our communion with the operative powers of God. Such is deification. (2017, 581)

The image of fire heating metal was a standard image in the writings of the church fathers; it proved a potent example for demonstrating the possibility of genuine participation without assimilation to, or absorption in, the nature in question. It is important to stress what we have seen in the work of St. Athanasius, that this participation is none other than Christ’s presence in the believer, and it is being worked out and revealed in the body. Christian spirituality was radically physical, and this extended, as we have seen, to its eschatology. One place where this point is evident is in the work of St. Gregory of Palamas, a fourteenth-century monk famous for his defense of the hesychastic method of prayer and the distinction between divine essence and energy.³⁸ Regarding the participation of the body in spiritual life, Palamas argues,

There are indeed blessed passions and common activities of body and soul, which, far from nailing the spirit to the flesh, serve to draw the flesh to a dignity close to that of the spirit, and persuade it too to tend toward what is above. Such spiritual activities, as we said above, do not enter the mind from the body, but descend into the body from the mind, in order to transform the body into something better and to deify it by these actions and passions. (1983, 51, Triad II.ii.12)

In this passage, Palamas is addressing a criticism which argues that utilizing pleasure or pain or any of the passions would inevitably “nail the flesh to the body,” certainly echoing Plato’s Phaedo.³⁹ Notice that Palamas does not outright deny this, but rather transforms it. Whereas the critic would seem to suggest that being nailed to the body is a bad thing, Palamas says that we actually “draw the flesh to a dignity close to that of the spirit.” The body and the spirit are indeed nailed together, but not downwards toward vice, but upwards toward deity! The mind becomes incarnate in the body, thereby transforming it. This close union between the two means that the body partakes of the same experiences as the soul. Crucially, Palamas is not only affirming the same reciprocal relation we saw earlier in St. Maximus, but all of the bodily practices this entails, such as keeping vigil, fasting, making prostrations, and so forth. This reciprocal relation demands not just reverence of the body post-mortem, but the centrality of the body in the spiritual life here and now. Just a few lines later, Palamas makes the following observation, “Indeed, it inspires its own sanctification and inalienable divinisation, as the miracle-working relics of the saints clearly demonstrate” (1983, 52, Triad II.ii.12). The reality of relics is a mark of the physicality of Christian spirituality, a testament to the deification of the body and its ultimate restoration in the resurrection. What we see in relics is divine energy extending from the soul to the body and out to the world. It is difficult to discern how the practice of cremation could possibly harmonize with this view.

In short, Christian life is physical. We use our body to pray, whether standing, sitting, or kneeling; we fast and undertake ascetic struggle with the body; we receive bread and wine in the Eucharist, along with other physical realities in other sacramental rites.⁴⁰ And that is yet to mention the basic fact that we rely on physical cues and touch to communicate with one another. We can see this physicality in the liturgical services, in their connections between our bodies and the body of Christ in His death and resurrection, and even how our bodies can continue to be imbued with a healing presence (with the requisite grace and sanctity) even after death through our remains. Cremation, therefore, is a denial of this further theophanic quality of the Christian faith: its hylomorphic character, and the experience of that hylomorphism through the continual activity of the dead through their remains.

V. THE DOXAI OF DEATH

Given the startling rise and ubiquity of cremation, and the relative lack of attention it has received in the scholarship, especially among Orthodox, I have here tried to provide a holistic vision of why cremation is unacceptable from an Orthodox perspective. That there are no canons regulating it in the Orthodox tradition, and the fact that Orthodox countries have had the lowest rates of cremation in practice, is a testament to how absolutely foreign it is to an Orthodox worldview. However, as the world continues to embrace what H. Tristram Engelhardt called the “liberal cosmopolitan ethic,” a more sustained and substantial treatment of the topic was called for (2000, 40–44).⁴¹ The purpose of this treatment has been, to quote Engelhardt again, to provide a “canonical and content-full” vision of Christianity that could lend explanatory power to the traditional rejection of cremation (2000, 28–40). One takeaway is to understand that cremation is not some discrete moral act for the Orthodox, wherein one can simply label it permissible or impermissible by some a priori moral code. Rather, cremation has to be viewed as deviating from the positive vision ancient Christianity has for God and humanity in light of the scriptures, the liturgical services, theological anthropology, and the spiritual experience of the saints and their relics. Hence, I have given three primary arguments:

1. Ecclesial Experience: the ultimate article of faith is that Christ has risen from the dead, destroying death by death, and our ultimate hope is participating in that resurrection. This resurrection hope is fundamental to the funeral service, which connects to the Church’s experience of Holy Friday and Saturday. In this context, the experience of death is an antinomy between death and glory, one which is ultimately theophanic: the glory of God revealed in the body “brought to rot.”

2. Orthodox Hylomorphism: human beings are not just souls, nor just bodies, but are a soul-body unity. Neither pre-existent souls nor transmigration of souls can adequately account for, nor make sense of, this deep unity between the two. Only the doctrine of the resurrection is capable of maintaining that to be a human person is to be a body and a soul. As such, our souls are always in relation to our bodies, and our bodies are always in relation to our souls.

3. Saints and Relics: the power of relics and their reverence are attested in the scriptures and the earliest documents of the Christian Church. They are the concrete expression of (1) and (2). They demonstrate that salvation belongs to the body as well as the soul and that Christian spirituality is about uniting the soul and body in a transforming union. They are a proclamation of Christ’s victory over sin and death and a theophanic witness to the world of God’s ongoing salvific activity. Through the concept of divine energies, we can make sense of how our souls and bodies are energized by God and so genuinely participate in the divine.

As can be seen, theophanic encounter runs equally through all three of these arguments. It holds them together; they cannot be separated from one another. The whole purpose of Christianity is to fulfill humanity’s fundamental longing for God: to experience God in this life and the next. The power of Christianity is that it proclaims that experience is universally accessible. All will die. All will rot.⁴² Yet, the power of God is made manifest, especially in this, and so the experience of God is open to even the least among us. Hence, Christians can chant with vigor that hymn sung during Great Compline in Lent, “God is with us, understand all ye nations and submit, for God is with us!”

These three arguments appear to offer compelling reasons for rejecting the practice of cremation, and could likewise extend to other dubious post-mortem practices, such as embalming. In light of (1)–(3), I suggest that Christian burial should be cheap, humble, and reverent, and focused on giving the body over to God in the hope of the resurrection. In ancient times, bodies were often washed, perfumed, and wrapped in a simple shroud by the family and prepared in their own home. The burial took place fairly quickly for obvious reasons. In all aspects, one’s death imitates the norm of Christ’s own burial. The interim period entailed the funeral service and all-night singing of psalms over the reposed by loved ones. A simple casket can be purchased from many monasteries, which are handmade from quality wood, beautiful, and humble in presentation.⁴³ Additionally, it is crucial that pastors and parishes exhort their flocks to take the necessary steps to prevent their own cremation and instead embrace the fullness of the Church’s vision of post-mortem existence. In a culture that has become increasingly successful at hiding the reality of death, and thus making its members overly sensitive to it, or wholly ignorant of it, emphasizing the theophanic quality of the body, even the body “brought to rot,” is key to reoriented death and post-mortem existence in a life-giving and spiritually enriching way. Cremation should always be seen as an immense failure, even a sin (if by sin we mean “missing the mark”), to bear witness to the truths of the Christian faith. In which case, should it occur, it ought to always occasion a sense of tragedy and repentance.

Therefore, to approach cremation, or any topic in ethics, under the paradigm of legal strictures or moral permissibility or prohibition is entirely to have missed the point. For the Christian East, all things come down to the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ, that is, theophany. As realists about their soteriology—the now well-known principle of theosis, the dynamic exchange between God and man—as well as a deep commitment to a theophanic and sacramental view of the cosmos, Christian participation in cremation can only ever be seen as a tremendous failure to be vehicles of God’s grace in this fallen world, coupled with either an involuntary heterodox anthropology or a voluntary rejection of an Orthodox one. A Christian death is doxastic in the fullest sense, entailing the right-belief about the nature of reality and the requisite attunement to, and participation in, that reality which allows the Doxa of God to shine forth into the cosmos. For all the aforementioned reasons, the only Orthodox response to cremation is rejection.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express my thanks to Dr. Matthew Vest and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. The precision and clarity of the thesis were aided tremendously by their efforts. I must also thank my mother, Tonya, who first prompted this research with a pastoral question about post-mortem ethics.

REFERENCES

Footnotes