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.Cremation they associ-ated not with hell but with heaven.Fire, some believed, liberated thesoul.53Perhaps because most Americans stood with the traditionalists onthe association of fire with hell, cremationists insisted repeatedly thatfire never actually touched the body.But they also attempted to spreadamong the public more positive images of fire as “the purest of mun-dane things.” When you think of fire, they were saying, think not ofpunishment but of purification, not of the pits of hell but of “the fire ofthe immortals.” Citing the story of Moses and the burning bush, cre-mationists said that fire was a “symbol.of the divine presence.” Andciting the Book of Revelation, they argued that “the world is saved, notlost, by fire.” While opponents associated cremation with the valiant ef-forts of Phileas Fogg to rescue a beautiful girl from suttee in Around theWorld in Eighty Days or with the tragic fire that leveled the BrooklynTheater on the day of the De Palm cremation in 1876, supporters linkedthe crematory flames with the romance of the Fourth of July:FIZZ-BANG! The rockets whizzed aloft,And on they sped with ease.94Birth 1874–1896“I love,” she whispered low to Jack,“Such fiery works as these.”Oh, see that stick in swift descent,It’s fallen on the lawn.“I dote on pyre-otechnics, love;Cremate me when I gone.”54Cremationists and their opponents also viewed the living body, thecorpse, and the self very differently.The notion that the self is both ma-terial and spiritual is, of course, a long-standing Hebrew and Christianassumption.In the early Christian period some gnostics had challengedthis view with the Platonic and Hellenistic claim (informed by a funda-mental mistrust of matter) that the essential self is spiritual and imma-terial, but they failed to gain control of the Church, and their claims be-came heretical.By the nineteenth century the Judeo-Christian idea thatthe self was a psychosomatic unity of body and soul had become formost Americans an obvious truth.From this popular perspective thebody possessed both “a divine tincture” and “an infinite dignity.” It was“sacred flesh” not only in life but also in death.Because a corpse wasthought to be dead only for a time (sown in the earth, it would be har-vested at the end of times as a new and glorious resurrection body), itmade no sense to discriminate sharply between living and dead bodies.(“Human reason refuses to see in the corpse,” one Catholic wrote, “anabnormal condition of the body.”) In life, death, and the afterlife thebody was a temple deserving special care.The self, fragmented by deathinto spirit and matter, would at the end of time be miraculously recon-stituted once again as a body-soul unity.The problem of the body’sdecay would be resolved supernaturally through a miraculous bodilyresurrection.To burn a corpse in the face of these facts was, quite lit-erally, a desecration.55When pondering the living body, the corpse, and the self, cremation-ists worked with very different metaphors.Some, citing Plato, called thebody a tomb that during life holds the pure soul captive in pollutedmatter.Others termed it “a cage in which the bird of Paradise is impris-oned” or “a tangle of wire fence that held the person a prisoner.” Eitherway, the body was more burden than glory, and according to at leastone cremationist it had “no significance in eternity.” Most cremationistswere content to adopt the ancient Christian metaphor of the corpse asseed.But they insisted that if sown in the earth, that seed would bringforth fruit long before Gabriel blew his trumpet.They also insisted thatthe fruit would be toxic not tonic: contagion, illness, and death.ThereResurrection and the Resurrectionists95was therefore nothing sacred about a corpse.The body, wrote ModernCrematist, was merely “the house we live in.essential while here, tobe wisely looked after, but to monopolize neither our thought nor ourendeavor, and surely to be put off when we come to the noble gatewaythat gives entrance to the World of Spirits.” Others, citing Job—“Thouhast clothed me with skin and flesh, and hast fenced me with bones andsinews” (Job 10:11)—dubbed the corpse the “cast-off clothing of [the]soul.” In either case, it was to be stoically set aside at death.Once emp-tied of its immortal inhabitant, the corpse was “a mere habitation ofworms.”56If cremationists had a low view of the living body and the corpse,they had a lofty view of the human person.Most cremationists seem tohave viewed the self as soul-only.The real person was a spiritual entitytrapped during life in a body.The real resurrection occurred, therefore,not at the apocalypse but at the moment of death, when “the bird ofParadise” winged its way to the heavens.The corpse would be made in-corruptible not by God but by technology, and not in the by and by butin the here and now [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.Cremation they associ-ated not with hell but with heaven.Fire, some believed, liberated thesoul.53Perhaps because most Americans stood with the traditionalists onthe association of fire with hell, cremationists insisted repeatedly thatfire never actually touched the body.But they also attempted to spreadamong the public more positive images of fire as “the purest of mun-dane things.” When you think of fire, they were saying, think not ofpunishment but of purification, not of the pits of hell but of “the fire ofthe immortals.” Citing the story of Moses and the burning bush, cre-mationists said that fire was a “symbol.of the divine presence.” Andciting the Book of Revelation, they argued that “the world is saved, notlost, by fire.” While opponents associated cremation with the valiant ef-forts of Phileas Fogg to rescue a beautiful girl from suttee in Around theWorld in Eighty Days or with the tragic fire that leveled the BrooklynTheater on the day of the De Palm cremation in 1876, supporters linkedthe crematory flames with the romance of the Fourth of July:FIZZ-BANG! The rockets whizzed aloft,And on they sped with ease.94Birth 1874–1896“I love,” she whispered low to Jack,“Such fiery works as these.”Oh, see that stick in swift descent,It’s fallen on the lawn.“I dote on pyre-otechnics, love;Cremate me when I gone.”54Cremationists and their opponents also viewed the living body, thecorpse, and the self very differently.The notion that the self is both ma-terial and spiritual is, of course, a long-standing Hebrew and Christianassumption.In the early Christian period some gnostics had challengedthis view with the Platonic and Hellenistic claim (informed by a funda-mental mistrust of matter) that the essential self is spiritual and imma-terial, but they failed to gain control of the Church, and their claims be-came heretical.By the nineteenth century the Judeo-Christian idea thatthe self was a psychosomatic unity of body and soul had become formost Americans an obvious truth.From this popular perspective thebody possessed both “a divine tincture” and “an infinite dignity.” It was“sacred flesh” not only in life but also in death.Because a corpse wasthought to be dead only for a time (sown in the earth, it would be har-vested at the end of times as a new and glorious resurrection body), itmade no sense to discriminate sharply between living and dead bodies.(“Human reason refuses to see in the corpse,” one Catholic wrote, “anabnormal condition of the body.”) In life, death, and the afterlife thebody was a temple deserving special care.The self, fragmented by deathinto spirit and matter, would at the end of time be miraculously recon-stituted once again as a body-soul unity.The problem of the body’sdecay would be resolved supernaturally through a miraculous bodilyresurrection.To burn a corpse in the face of these facts was, quite lit-erally, a desecration.55When pondering the living body, the corpse, and the self, cremation-ists worked with very different metaphors.Some, citing Plato, called thebody a tomb that during life holds the pure soul captive in pollutedmatter.Others termed it “a cage in which the bird of Paradise is impris-oned” or “a tangle of wire fence that held the person a prisoner.” Eitherway, the body was more burden than glory, and according to at leastone cremationist it had “no significance in eternity.” Most cremationistswere content to adopt the ancient Christian metaphor of the corpse asseed.But they insisted that if sown in the earth, that seed would bringforth fruit long before Gabriel blew his trumpet.They also insisted thatthe fruit would be toxic not tonic: contagion, illness, and death.ThereResurrection and the Resurrectionists95was therefore nothing sacred about a corpse.The body, wrote ModernCrematist, was merely “the house we live in.essential while here, tobe wisely looked after, but to monopolize neither our thought nor ourendeavor, and surely to be put off when we come to the noble gatewaythat gives entrance to the World of Spirits.” Others, citing Job—“Thouhast clothed me with skin and flesh, and hast fenced me with bones andsinews” (Job 10:11)—dubbed the corpse the “cast-off clothing of [the]soul.” In either case, it was to be stoically set aside at death.Once emp-tied of its immortal inhabitant, the corpse was “a mere habitation ofworms.”56If cremationists had a low view of the living body and the corpse,they had a lofty view of the human person.Most cremationists seem tohave viewed the self as soul-only.The real person was a spiritual entitytrapped during life in a body.The real resurrection occurred, therefore,not at the apocalypse but at the moment of death, when “the bird ofParadise” winged its way to the heavens.The corpse would be made in-corruptible not by God but by technology, and not in the by and by butin the here and now [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]