Basic context
The cosmic situation
Time
Study of the relevant evidence shows the menace of death as the basic cause of soteriological concern and action. Salvation from disease or misfortune, which also figures in religion, is of comparatively lesser significance, though it is often expressive of more immediate concerns. But the menace of death is of another order to humans because of their profound personal awareness of the temporal categories of past, present, and future. This time-consciousness is possessed by no other species with such insistent clarity. It enables humans to draw upon past experience in the present and to plan for future contingencies. This faculty, however, has another effect: it causes humans to be aware that they are subject to a process that brings change, aging, decay, and ultimately death to all living things. Humans thus know what no other animals apparently know about themselves—namely, that they are mortal. They can project themselves mentally into the future and anticipate their own decease. Human burial customs grimly attest to a preoccupation with death from the very dawn of human culture in the Paleolithic Period (Old Stone Age). Significantly, the burial of the dead is practiced by no other species.
The menace of death is thus inextricably bound up with the human consciousness of time. In seeking salvation from death, humanity has been led on to a deeper analysis of its situation: a person’s subjection to time is the true cause of the evil that besets him. The quest for salvation from death, accordingly, becomes transformed into one for deliverance from subjugation to the destructive flux of time. How such deliverance might be effected has been conceived in varying ways, corresponding to the terms in which the temporal process is imagined. The earliest known examples occur in ancient Egyptian religious texts. In the so-called Pyramid Texts (c. 2400 bce), the dead pharaoh seeks to fly up to heaven and join the sun-god Re on his unceasing journey across the sky, incorporated, thus, in a mode of existence beyond change and decay. A passage in the later Book of the Dead (1200 bce) represents the deceased, who has been ritually identified with Osiris, declaring that he comprehends the whole range of time in himself, thus asserting his superiority to it.
The recognition that humankind is subject to the inexorable law of decay and death has produced other later attempts to explain its domination by time and to offer release from it. Such attempts are generally based on the idea that the temporal process is cyclical, not linear, in its movement. Into this concept a belief in metempsychosis (transmigration of souls) can be conveniently fitted, for the idea that souls pass through a series of incarnations becomes more intelligible if the process is seen as being cyclical and in accordance with the pattern of time that apparently governs all the forms of being in this world. The conception has been elaborated in various ways in many religions. In Hinduism and Buddhism, elegantly imaginative chronological systems have been worked out, comprising mahayugas, or periods of 12,000 years, each year of which represents 360 human years. In turn, 1,000 mahayugas make up one kalpa, or one day in the life of the creator deity Brahma, and span the duration of a world from its creation to its destruction. After a period of quiescence, the world would be re-created by Brahma for another kalpa. The purpose of this immense chronological scheme was to emphasize how the unenlightened soul was doomed to suffer an infinite series of incarnations, with all of their attendant pain of successive births and deaths. In the Orphic texts of ancient Greece, the human destiny to endure successive incarnations is significantly described as “the sorrowful weary Wheel,” from which the Orphic initiate hoped to escape through the secret knowledge imparted to him.
Nature
As an alternative interpretation to this view of humanity’s fatal involvement with time, the tragedy of the human situation has also been explained in terms of the soul’s involvement with the physical universe. In some systems of thought (e.g., Hinduism and Buddhism), the two interpretations are synthesized, and in such systems it is taught that, by accepting the physical world as reality, the soul becomes subject to the process of time.
Concentration on the soul’s involvement with matter as being the cause of the misery of human life has generally stemmed from a dualistic view of human nature. The drawing of a sharp distinction between spirit and matter has been invariably motivated by a value judgment: namely, that spirit (or soul) is intrinsically good and of transcendent origin, whereas matter is essentially evil and corrupting. Through the body, humans are seen to be part of the world of nature, sharing in its processes of generation, growth, decay, and death. How the soul came to be incarcerated in this corruptible body has been a problem that many myths seek to explain. Such explanations usually involve some idea of the descent of the soul or its divine progenitor from the highest heaven and their fatal infatuation with the physical world. The phenomenon of sexual intercourse has often supplied the imagery used to account for the involvement of the soul in matter and the origin of its corruption. Salvation has thus been conceived in this context as emancipation from both the body and the natural world. In gnosticism and Hermeticism—esoteric theosophical and mystical movements in the Greco-Roman world—and the teaching of St. Paul the Apostle, deliverance was sought primarily from the planetary powers that were believed to control human destiny in the sublunar world.
Human responsibility
The idea that humans are in some dire situation, from which they seek to be saved, necessarily involves explaining the cause of this predicament. The explanations provided in the various religions divide into two kinds: those that attribute the cause to some primordial mischance and those that hold humanity itself to be responsible. Some explanations fitting the latter category also represent humans as the victim of the deceit of a malevolent deity or demon.
Because death has been universally feared but rarely accepted as a natural necessity, the mythologies of many peoples represent the primeval ancestors of humankind as having accidentally lost, in some way, their original immortality. One Sumerian myth, however, accounts for disease and old age as resulting from the sport of the gods when they created humans. In contrast, the Hebrew story of Adam and Eve finds the origin of death in their act of disobedience in eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, forbidden to them by their maker. This causal connection between sin and death was elaborated by St. Paul in his soteriology, outlined in his Letter to the Romans, and forms the basis of the Christian doctrine of original sin. According to this doctrine, through seminal identity with Adam, every human being must partake of the guilt of Adam’s sin, and a child, even at birth and before it acquires the guilt of its own actual sin, is already deserving of God’s wrath for its share in the original sin of humankind. Moreover, because each individual inherits the nature of fallen humanity, he has an innate predisposition to sin. This doctrine means that a person cannot save himself by his volition and effort but depends absolutely upon the saving grace of Christ.
Wherever a dualistic view of human nature has been held, it has been necessary to explain how ethereal souls first became imprisoned in physical bodies. Generally, the cause has been found in the supposition of some primordial ignorance or error rather than in a sinful act of disobedience or revolt—i.e., in an intellectual rather than a moral defect. According to the Hindu philosophical system known as Advaita Vedanta, a primordial ignorance (avidya) originally caused souls to mistake the empirical world for reality and so become incarnated in it. By continuing in this illusion, they are subjected to an unceasing process of death and rebirth (samsara) and all of its consequent suffering and degradation. Similarly, in Buddhism a primordial ignorance (avijja) started the chain of “dependent origination” (paticca samuppada) that produces the infinite misery of unending rebirth in the empirical world.