In Search of Good Soil: An Exhortation to Christian Vitalism for Young Men
Τοῦ λόγου δ’ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζῶσιν, οἱ πολλοὶ ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν.
—Heraclitus, I. p. 77, Fr. 2 (DK 22B2)
The Old Testament is replete with references to the soil. This begins in earnest in Genesis 1, when God began to create everything in the world by speech:
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light (1:3)
And God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters”…And it was so (1:6)
And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so (1:9)
And God said, “Let the earth sprout vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed”…And it was so (1:11)
And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night…And it was so (1:14–15)
And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” (1:20)
And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so (1:24)
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” (1:26)
In every day of creation, God speaks and an element is created. This is true for every part of creation, from the largest galaxy supercluster (called Quipu, which is 1.3 billion light years across and contains 200 quadrillion solar masses) to the smallest (a quark probably the size of a Planck length, 1.6 x 10-35 m). God speaks, and everything is.
In Genesis 2, however, we get a bit more information about creation. Nothing is given there which we do not already expect from our careful reading of Genesis 1 besides what we read in verse 7: “The Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” Man alone is formed from a pre-existing material—literally, the “dust of the ground.” The Hebrew word עָפָר simply means “dust, earth, soil in any form.” God reminds Adam of this in Genesis 3:19: “for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Abraham understands this as well when he says, “Behold, I have undertaken to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes” (18:27; cf Ps 103:14; Job 8:19; 10:9; Eccl 3:20). God tells Abraham that his descendants will be like “the dust of the earth” (13:16; 28:14; cf Num 23:10; 2 Chr 1:9). Dust too is a sign of mourning, of lamentation for wrongdoing, as in Joshua 7:6 (cf Is 2:10, 19; Ezek 27:30; Job 2:12; Lam 2:10). Those who oppose God are returned to dust: “He gives up nations before him, so that he tramples kings underfoot; he makes them like dust with his sword, like driven stubble with his bow” (Is 41:2). Again, he says, “I will bring distress on mankind, so that they shall walk like the blind, because they have sinned against the Lord; their blood shall be poured out like dust, and their flesh like dung” (Zeph 1:17; cf Pss 18:42; 72:9). And yet God has great plans for the dust out of which man is made: “Your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise. You who dwell in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a dew of light, and the earth will give birth to the dead” (Is 26:19; cf Dan 12:2). No matter where we go in Scripture, we are reminded of dust. It is, quite literally, the stuff out of which we are made. We are the only thing God formed by hand, the only thing into which he breathed “the breath of life.” This is what the theologians call the imago Dei (צֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים), the closest thing to which God may be compared in this world.
The prototypical and highest image of God, however, is his Son Jesus Christ, as Paul says, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col 1:15), and “He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature” (Heb 1:3). To be made in God’s image does not preclude being made of dust, even after death. In the “new heavens and the new earth” (Rev 21:4; cf Is 35:8–9), we do not cease to be human, nor do we cease to be dust. Paul teaches us this in 1 Corinthians 15. Our resurrection body is not significantly different from the body we now have, but it is radically distinct with its own kind of glory.1 “As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven” (1 Cor 15:48) is not a denial of our future dustiness. Rather, it is looking forward to a life which has been totally and completely transformed by the Spirit of God—a fully Spirit-filled life.
Now we have the biblical framework for this significant insight. There is an old legend that, during Roman triumphal processions, a slave would whisper the phrase memento mori into the ear of the emperor or general riding in his chariot. In the moment of his greatest glory, the warrior was reminded of his eventual death, his eventual return to dust.2 While this story is likely untrue, the Greeks and Romans were acutely aware of the fragility of this life and their own mortality.3 This began with the pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus, who trained himself for this life by frequenting tombs and the houses of the dead.4 Socrates says that philosophy is “about nothing else but dying and being dead” (Phaedo 64a), and Marcus Aurelius reminds us to “consider how ephemeral and mean all mortal things are” (Meditations 4.48.2). A widespread Roman saying often inscribed on gravestones was a message from the dead to the living: tu fui, ego eris, alternatively written as fui quod sis.
The early and Medieval Christian church developed this same theme in its art, architecture, music, literature, and theology. The Medieval churches which dot the landscape of Europe today are filled with images of skulls, crypts, and clocks. The first image behind the altar is not Christ crucified, which many churches built today use, but Christ the Judge at the Second Coming. This keeps death always before your eyes. This is typified by the 1399 Latin-language French virelai Ad mortem festinamus:5
Vita brevis breviter in brevi finietur, Mors venit velociter quae neminem veretur, Omnia mors perimit et nulli miseretur. Ad mortem festinamus peccare desistamus. Ni conversus fueris et sicut puer factus Et vitam mutaveris in meliores actus, Intrare non poteris regnum Dei beatus. Ad mortem festinamus peccare desistamus.
In 912, Notker the Stammerer wrote an early version of a Gregorian chant which became widely used in the 1300s known as Antiphona pro peccatis. Thomas Cranmer translated the most important part into English and used it at the service for the burial of the dead:6
Media vita in morte sumus quem quaerimus adjutorem nisi te, Domine, qui pro peccatis nostris juste irasceris? Sancte Deus, sancte fortis, sancte et misericors Salvator, amarae morti ne tradas nos.
Remember that you are dust. And yet while we are dust, we find ourselves in a unique position to manipulate the other dusty things of the earth. This is part of the image of God in us. God did not create the world and abandon it. Instead, he takes the dust of the earth and fashions it into his highest creation. When that dust rebelled against him, God punished the dust by condemning it to death. And yet in this brief and momentary life, God has given us great purpose for living: “We have colonized a hostile planet, and we must stanch every opening where cold and dark might pour through and destroy the false climates we make, the tiny simulations of forgotten seasons beside the Euphrates, or in Eden.”7 The Vitalists are correct in one thing: this life is good, and we have a moral responsibility to live well in this life. However, they misunderstand the place Christianity has in this life. We are image-bearers of God, called to follow our Lord Jesus. As he transformed the earth so we too transform the earth. As he was an agent of the new creation so we too are agents of the new creation, for it is in us that God intends to remake the world.
Our work, then, is not in vain. Learning theorems, history, literature, and languages is not a frivolous pursuit but God’s calling on your life. This is how you bear the image of God in a broken world. Though the Medieval Christians looked forward to death, this was not a moment of despair but a moment of great triumph. For our hope of the blessedness of the life to come shapes our present moment and our every day, knowing that we live in light of eternity. The daily decisions we make, however great or however poor, shape us into becoming the kinds of people fit to receive the kingdom as children of the Father or those who say to him “Lord, Lord,” and who hear those chilling words, “I never knew you.” Death brings an earnestness to your life. Our death should not give way to despair (for how short are our days!) but rather to great life, to full living, and above all to courage.
Act while you have the time. Our institutions are increasingly infantilizing us, inundating us with rules about safety, etiquette, decorum, and security. The safetyism of Europe after the War has crept its way into the American ethos, taking a nation that was once defined by its frontiersmen into a nation of cowards and passive receivers of what we feel like we deserve. Our twenty-sixth president believed that the true founders of America were not Thomas Jefferson and James Madison but Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, the mythologized settlers and pioneers of the very edge of the civilized world. This is the impetus which drove American expansion in the 1900s, culminating when we planted our flag on our Moon.
This is living in the present in light of the future with memory of the past. While we are aware of them, knowing we have not built what came before us (“For what do you have that you did not receive?”), nor embracing the nihilistic and atheistic despair of death, but we can live only in the present. We are slaves to neither the future nor the past, as American poet T. S. Eliot reminds us:8
And right action is freedom From past and future also. For most of us, this is the aim Never here to be realised; Who are only undefeated Because we have gone on trying; We, content at the last If our temporal reversion nourish (Not too far from the yew-tree) The life of significant soil.
Eliot reminds us of the importance of act. Those who stop trying remain the defeated; those who despair at the futility of their lives are never content and never plant anything lasting. Our “temporal reversion” nourishes significant soil. The yew-tree is symbolic of eternal life. Rather than functioning as passive receptors of information and of entertainment, take glory in God’s work in you as an agent through whom he intends to usher in his kingdom.
In his poem memorializing the young who died in the Great War, “For the Fallen,” Laurence Binyon says,
But where our desires are and our hopes profound, Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight, To the innermost heart of their own land they are known As the stars are known to the Night; As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust, Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain; As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness, To the end, to the end, they remain.
A final example from Tennyson’s “Ulysses.” Tennyson imagines an aged Odysseus, returned to his throne on Ithaca for many years after the events of Homer’s Odyssey. He remembers his time on “the ringing plains of windy Troy” and when he was “always roaming with a hungry heart.” He is prepared now to leave “the sceptre and the isle” to his son Telemachus. For an elderly Odysseus, what remains? He says, “Death closes all: but something ere the end, / Some work of noble note, may yet be done, / Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.” Odysseus is no stranger to greatness; his glory is established forever. And yet he is not content to waste away in his old age, saying that he must find one last great adventure before he dies. According to later Greek myth, this is exactly what he does, seeking the Pillars of Hercules, the stone boundaries at the Strait of Gibraltar which mark the known world from the unknown—from the tame safety of home to the glorious victory of the unknown: “for my purpose holds / To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars, until I die.” And this adventure must go on, even in death: “It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: / It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles, / And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.” And those of you who have seen Skyfall should know the significance of this passage:
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
In a credo misattributed to Jack London, Ian Fleming gives us the philosophy of James Bond in a memorable verse: “The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”9 Remember that you will die, and that God has given you a specific purpose for while you are on this earth.
When we have hope for our good life to come, we can better endure the evils of this life because we know the reward that awaits us. Even though all are in misery, the righteous face an additional struggle unknown to the world; namely, living as the righteous. But even in all the miseries of this life, we have a foretaste of the goodness of the life to come: the natural utility and beauty of our bodies, and of creation more generally, are so great even now; how much more, then, in the life of the world to come! This is the key question: “What good things are we going to receive in that kingdom, since we have already received Christ’s death for us in pledge of them” (22.24)? The answer: God himself, for, “This vision is being saved for us as the reward for faith” (22.29). Our free will will be bound to freedom, and therefore to the praise and glory of God (as the Puritans teach us, non posse peccare). At this point, when we see God, we will inherit “the kingdom prepared for [us] from before the foundation of the world” and the sabbath rest of God, for “our end is to reach the kingdom that has no end.”10
In “Under which Lyre,” English author W. H. Auden gives us advice on how we may maintain our sanity in a world gone mad:
Keep well the Hermetic Decalogue, Which runs as follows:– Thou shalt not do as the dean pleases, Thou shalt not write thy doctor's thesis On education, Thou shalt not worship projects nor Shalt thou or thine bow down before Administration. Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon World-Affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit With statisticians nor commit A social science. Thou shalt not be on friendly terms With guys in advertising firms, Nor speak with such As read the Bible for its prose, Nor, above all, make love to those Who wash too much. Thou shalt not live within thy means Nor on plain water and raw greens. If thou must choose Between the chances, choose the odd; Read The New Yorker, trust in God; And take short views.
N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 345–350.
See Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2007), 85–92. For early reference to this practice, see Discourses of Epictetus 3.24.
It is worth mentioning that the central conflict of the Iliad is about this very idea. Is there a way that the Greek heroes, particularly Achilles, live forever though they die? It is notable Paris does not share this concern, for he stays behind the walls of Troy while his brother Hector is brutalized and the men of Troy die for his momentary pleasure.
Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 9.7.38.
Life is short, and shortly it will end; Death comes quickly and respects no one, Death destroys everything and takes pity on no one. To death we are hastening, let us refrain from sinning. If you do not turn back and become like a child, And change your life for the better, You will not be able to enter, blessed, the Kingdom of God. To death we are hastening, let us refrain from sinning.
In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased? Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death.
Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (New York: Picador, 2013), 93.
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1971), 45. In Norse folklore, the evergreen yew-tree symbolizes death as the gateway between the physical and spiritual world. In Christian contexts, the yew-tree is planted near cemeteries to symbolize the afterlife of the eternal soul; see William Andrews, ed., Antiquities and Curiosities of the Church (London: William Andrews & Co., 1897), 256–278.
Ian Fleming, You Only Live Twice (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964), 152.
Augustine, De civitate Dei 22.21–30.
Photo credit: "Jesus, on a throne, teaches his apostles" (Traditio Legis), a paleochristian mosaic (late 4th century), originally belonging to an Ancient Roman imperial mausoleum, now become the Cappella di sant'Aquilino chapel in the Basilica di San Lorenzo Maggiore in Milan, Italy. Picture by Giovanni Dall'Orto, May 18 2007.