How did Christianity respond to the attitudes of pagan philosophy towards death?

It was inevitable that Christianity should confront many pagan attitudes, and especially their attitudes towards death. Pagans thought of death as annihilation, a fate that befalls a person and destroys him, putting an end to his life forever. At the time when the Lord Christ came into the world, most of the gentiles saw death as a dreadful thing and did not believe that there was a life after death. Here are some inscriptions discovered on ancient tombs:

“Fortune makes many promises, but keeps none of them.

Live for the present day and your hour, for nothing else is really ours.”

“Live joyfully while you live. Life is but a little thing. Presently it begins, gradually grows stronger, and then gradually disappears.”¹¹⁵⁷

There were pagan philosophers who did believe in a life after death, but it was a life without joy, a kind of eternal sleep associated with the darkness of the earth. No one can escape from the hands of gods filled with anger.¹¹⁵⁸ For them, death was the destruction of all life. Those who desired death desired only to be rid of the troubles of this life; they did not expect a new life, but merely an existence without vitality or joy.

Greek philosophies opposed the notion of a body rising from the dead for one reason or another. The followers of Plato and Plotinus utterly rejected the concept of a bodily resurrection and considered the matter to be unworthy of discussion. Instead, they envisaged humanity to be spirits without bodies, thus depriving the person of his personal identity and individuality, and leading to an attitude that denigrates the flesh as a despicable thing of which the immortal spirit wishes to be free. Strangely enough, some of them say the spirit is purified by being rid of the flesh and by forgetting the tragedies it endured during its union with the body; and yet, they also thought that the soul does return again to the tragedy of life in a body. However, the Greek philosopher Porphyry — a leading Neoplatonist of the third and early fourth centuries — was one philosopher who rejected this idea of reincarnation of the spirit, the return of the soul to another body, because it would mean a return to the tragedies of the body and its life.

The Church’s rejection of this gloomy attitude is evident in inscriptions found on Christian tombs, which touch upon the promise of the heavenly life while still on earth. These

1156 See Boniface Ramsey, Beginning to Read the Fathers (Paulist Press, 1985): Ch. 12. See also Fr. Tadros Yacoub Malaty, The Fathers of the School of Alexandria ( Aba’ al-Madrasa al-Iskendireya , Arabic), 1980; Costi Bendaly, The God of Contemporary Atheism (Ilah al-Elhad al-Mu’asser, Arabic), Al-Nour Publications; and Bishop Youannis of Gharbia, Heaven: An Orthodox Christian Perspective (Coptic Orthodox Diocese of Los Angeles, Southern California, and Hawaii - St. Paul Brotherhood, 2021) Kindle Edition.

1157 Both inscriptions quoted in Boniface Ramsey, Beginning to Read the Fathers (Paulist Press, 1985): p. 213.

1158 See Boniface Ramsey, Beginning to Read the Fathers (Paulist Press, 1985): p. 214.

inscriptions often express the peace and fellowship that will be enjoyed by the deceased in the eternal, glorious kingdom. There is no trace of the bitter curses usually found on pagan tombs. Rather, most Christian inscriptions are along the lines of: “May you live in God! Rejoice forever!” It is quite rare to find in these inscriptions any sense of the bitterness of sorrow or the pain of loss.¹¹⁵⁹