Vile Bodies and Mass Media Chantries

Abstract

Since the end of the last Ice Age about ten thousand years ago, one hundred billion people have died. Death would therefore seem to be fairly common and indeed benign, because life on earth would be somewhat crowded and fractious if all of those billions had insisted on living. Yet Christianity, as the introductory quote from Saint Paul shows, has never been able to regard human death as normal (let alone benign!) and has placed the death of the individual right in the middle of great doom-laden cosmologies and fates, of dread myths of Origin and primal Offence, of the exploding end of worlds and of the small, unique and solitary littleness of each individual man and woman. Christians can no longer simply die. The very act of dying is seen as proof of sin and as the occasion of particular vulnerability to judgment and punishment for sin: original and shared, personal and acquired. A religion in which the inevitably indeterminate stories and theories of Origin and End, Death and Creation, Innocence and Corruptibility (stories which are indeterminate enough on their own, never mind when all mixed up together!) are so deeply interrelated, not surprisingly produces a view of individual death characterised by the mobilisation of terror, anxiety and indeed, of anger and violence.

By one man sin entered into the world and death by sin: and so death passed upon all men for all have sinned.

(Romans 5,12)