Brian Visaggio takes a remarkable comic book cover and moves into a meditation on zombies and vampires as fearful reactions to the reality of the Resurrection. I’m not sure I entirely agree, although I sort of do. Let’s see if I can work out just what the heck I think.
Thomas Browne once declared that he was not so much afraid of death as ashamed of it, and I think there may be something similar at work in cases such as Brian mentions. We are right, I think, to find the idea of death intrinsically awful, for it is an aberration brought about by the Fall. The trouble is that our right instincts in this direction only seem to carry us so far; we are in tune with Our General Parents enough to find death deplorable but not quite enough to envision their lives as they were before death hit the scene. Some days I think we couldn’t picture it if we tried, so thorough has the corruption been. It’s almost as if there were a sixth sense that we’ve lost, or a way of seeing that we no longer have.
Living our lives on, as it were, a darkling plain, even those who profess the faith sometimes have trouble really believing from one moment to the next that all that we are and have been will not ultimately be swallowed up in the final, blasphemous absurdity of death. That is, they have trouble articulating this or convincing themselves of it even though everything we do must be predicated on a conviction in the resurrection of the body and indissolubility of the soul, even when no such conscious conviction is present. This is true even in atheists, or at least in such atheists as profess values or meaning or the desirability of some things over other things. Nietzsche was right about the abyss and its crippling power, and I’m beginning to think that he may be the only man who ever took his own ideas seriously–an ironic thing indeed for one who famously declared that the last Christian died on the Cross.
But death cannot be properly hated without anthropomorphizing it. We do this often with the figure of Death, the great Reaper, but even this is too much suggestive of the afterlife, the continuance and the higher things of which we are so skeptical. The only answer, then, is to instead bestialize death, bringing it to life as a series of ravening fiends. Different visions of the poetry of death are played out in the different monsters we’ve concocted. Those who see death as a sort of hideous, self-destructive seduction towards which we are drawn have their vampires; those who see it as the loss of the chemical mind and the triumph of putrefaction have their zombies. Even the ghost is only a shadow burned onto the world by the inescapable light of doom.
When considering the Resurrection of the Body, on the other hand, it is tempting to see it fearfully through similar lenses. Thus, I think, the contrast between the risen Christ and the risen Lazarus is a highly instructive one. Though Jesus bore the glorious wounds His body was so real and beautiful and new as to be almost unrecognizeable. Lazarus, by contrast, came creaking out of his own tomb still wrapped in the shrouds, the stench of decay all about him and by any account quite disturbed by the experience. While Jesus’ disciples greeted Him with astonished joy after the Resurrection, Lazarus’ friends could only look on in a sort of shocked horror. The bodies are too different for the reaction to be the same.
That’s the trouble with the Resurrection of the Body, at least in these circumstances; because we cannot rightly comprehend ourselves perfected the risen body is inconceivable, but the reanimated body–however saturated in fear and dread and misunderstanding–is not. We’re convinced that we will have to put on Lazarus when we really, as ever, we will rather need to put on Christ.
