The Denial of Death: What is the Heroic Individual?

We come at last to the final chapter of Ernest Becker's work, The Denial of Death. I have found that each successive marginal commentary of mine has become longer and longer, as his argument became more and more complex.

For the sake of reference, here are the links to the other posts in the series, each of which focussed on one chapter of The Denial of Death. I did not see fit to comment on every chapter of the work, but I think I have got enough of Becker's own argument in for anyone reading the posts in order to be able to follow along; of course the best thing to do, if his thesis interests you, is to read the book for yourself.

1. Styx in Denial
2. The Terror of Death 
3. Existential Dualism and You
4. Human Character as a Vital Lie
5. The Nexus of Unfreedom
6. Becker's Heroes
7. Rank Neurosis

Now we'll proceed straight to the commentary. This post will be much more like the first of the series, for I think, at this point, that not many more of Becker's own conclusions need to be cited at length.

The Denial of Death: Rank Neurosis

When last we left Ernest Becker and The Denial of Death, he had just finished going through the various 'solutions' we humans have arrived at to cope with what I think Becker would accept as being called the 'dualistic dilemma', or, to use one of his more colorful metaphors, the problem that we are 'gods with anuses'. Ironically, his chronicle of solutions begins with the fact that in the modern era we had rejected the 'religious solution', and ends with the insight - reached, apparently, much earlier by the psychoanalyst and former disciple of Freud, Otto Rank - that, all of the other 'solutions' having been tried and found wanting, we are back to the religious one.

The Denial of Death: Becker's Heroes

In my series on The Denial of Death, I did not comment on those chapters of the book which focussed on Becker's analysis of individual writers (namely, Søren Kierkegaard or Freud), because they constituted supporting arguments for Becker's thesis, rather than continuing his analysis of human motivation and behaviour.

In this latest post on The Denial of Death, however, I am going to look at Becker's treatment of psychoanalyst Otto Rank, a disciple of Freud, whom Becker lionised in the introduction to the work. In this chapter (entitled 'Otto Rank and the Closure of Psychoanalysis on Kierkegaard'), Becker appropriates Rank's work with respect to his own project of discovering how (he says) we try to fulfill our most basic desires. This chapter has a lot to say about what kind of loci Becker argues are appropriate for transference in order to secure the kind of 'creative projection' and 'life-enhancing illusion' which, as we saw at the end of the last chapter, were, Becker claimed, necessary for human flourishing. I am, therefore, going to comment upon it. It also has a lot to say about what aren't suitable objects of transference. I should mention that Becker refers frequently to Kierkegaard in this chapter, but since he doesn't cite his work, I don't have much to say about Becker's use of him. In any case Becker doesn't really have much to say about Kierkegaard, as we shall see.

On we go.

The Denial of Death: The Nexus of Unfreedom

This is the next post in my series of marginal commentaries on The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker.

If this is the first time you have seen a post on The Denial of Death, here are the links to the previous posts in the series:

The first; the second; the third; the fourth.

Also, in summary, Becker's primary assertion is that the knowledge that we are creatures whose fate is to die is too much for us to bear; therefore, we do one of two things: either we attempt to be causa sui, as it were self-caused - that is, we try to make our own immortality project - or, either when the former project fails or from the start because of our lack of courage, we allow ourselves to be swallowed up in the cultural norms for heroism and immortality. For Becker the problem of the knowledge of existence and of death is a problem of heroism.

Before I begin the marginal commentary, let it be said that Becker has come up with some impressive chapter headings: that for this chapter (the seventh) is 'The Spell Cast by Persons - The Nexus of Unfreedom'; another good one is that for the fourth chapter, 'Human Character as a Vital Lie'. I guess those are really the only two that stand out on their own, but 'The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard' stands out, too.

The Denial of Death: Human Character as a Vital Lie

First, here are the links to the previous posts on The Denial of Death:

Styx in Denial
The Terror of Death
Existential Dualism and You

Second, note the label on this post of 'profanity'.

Third, this post, which will cover the fourth chapter of the book (the title of which being whence I got the title of my post: 'Human Character as a Vital Lie'), will be the last I write on The Denial of Death for a while. It is a lot of work to comment upon a book of this nature, and the posts have been getting longer and longer as I have been going along. We could all use a break from so heavy a subject; on the other hand, it is quite appropriate for Holy Week.

The Denial of Death: Existential Dualism and You

First, some housekeeping: the links to my previous posts on Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death are here and here. You do not have to read these in order, of course; but you may find it helpful. Also note the 'profanity' label; Becker uses some straightforward words from time to time, and as his use of them often illustrates what he is trying to say, I'll be quoting him.

The third chapter of The Denial of Death (entitled 'The Recasting of Some Basic Psychoanalytic Ideas') focusses on key psychoanalytic concepts, some of which you may be familiar with, including the Oedipus complex and anality. Becker re-casts these concepts, moving them from out of the Freudian framework of sexuality (since for Becker sexuality is not the basic anxiety) and, following Norman O. Brown (from whose work Becker draws upon heavily in this chapter), putting them in a more existential framework.

In case you are wondering, I have been more or less commenting upon the book marginally as I read it. So after two chapters of Becker arguing about the importance of the fear (or terror) of death, it came as a bit of surprise to me when he seems to change course in the third chapter and argue, or so it seems to me, for something behind even the terror of death. Perhaps he returns to it later in the book.

A summary of Becker's argument in this chapter follows after the break; for now, suffice it to say that I find what he has to say here less convincing than what he had to say in the first two chapters.

The Denial of Death: The Terror of Death

As I wrote at the end of my last post on The Denial of Death:

Becker is going to explore the relationship between the idea of heroism, which he considers to be the driving force of human activity and social life, and the fact of death.

In the second chapter of the book, Becker's first step is to try to show that one of the motive forces of heroism is humankind's fear of death:

[O]f all things that move man, one of the principal ones is his terror of death. ... [H]eroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death. We admire most the courage to face death[.] [p. 11]

The Denial of Death: Styx in Denial

Is the title of this post a clever riverine pun with regard to the book I will be commenting upon? And am I allowed to use 'riverine' in this fashion? You decide!

This is going to be a post of marginal commentary on a book which is, apparently, one of the most influential of the twentieth century, at least in terms of psychology. Since I want to be able to comment in depth, I will be looking at this book over the course of a number of posts, rather than try to get everything in all in one go.

The book in question is The Denial of Death, by Ernest Becker. The book won the Pullitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1974, which, as it happens, is the year Dr. Becker died: he won the award for the book posthumously. What a coincidence, eh? And my 'Canadianism' leads me to another interesting fact: Dr. Becker taught at Simon Fraser University (in Burnaby, B.C.; the school's diminutive is, happily, 'SFU').

Why did I choose this book? It was recommended to me to read during CPE, as I came to acknowledge that I have a certain amount of anxiety about death. Who doesn't? I think it will help me get through the book if I have a forum to write about it as I go along. I'm not sure what I am going to learn from it, but it should be an interesting read.

I probably won't write posts about every part of the book; we shall see. The edition I shall be quoting from or referring to is the paperback edition published by the Free Press in 1973.

The Four Pages: The Sermon

This is the text of a sermon I wrote according to the method of the 'four pages' which I have been trying to explicate in the past little while. I preached the sermon on Sunday, December 5 (the second Sunday of the liturgical season of Advent), and my chosen text was Matthew 3.1-12, which is the gospel reading for the day according to the lectionary.

I will include a checklist which is added as an appendix to Wilson's The Four Pages of the Sermon, as well as links to the rest of the posts in this series. The checklist is an aid to help evaluate the sermon (it is found in the book on pp. 261-2). Indeed, any sermon, whether it uses Wilson's method or not, can be evaluated by these criteria, because every sermon may contain material from each of Wilson's figurative pages. It is a matter of identifying whether what is heard or read belongs to one or another page. Should you wish to comment on the sermon, don't worry about trying to answer all of the questions raised in the checklist; if you like you needn't refer to it at all. However, it may be useful in evaluating the sermon according to the criteria Wilson has in mind.

First, to bring them to the forefront, the theme sentences I composed for each page for the purpose of writing an unified sermon.

Page One: The people of Israel needed to repent to be God's people.
Page Two: We need to repent to be God's people.
Page Three: God chose the people of Israel to be his people. [This is also the theme statement for the sermon as a whole.]
Page Four: Jesus chooses us to be his people.

The Four Pages: Grace in the World

Here I will be covering the last of Wilson's 'four pages', the page which focusses on God's action in our contemporary situation, with regard to the need identified way back when we were working on the unity of the sermon. In Wilson's discussion, it is 'grace in the world'.

My final post on the 'four pages' will be the sermon which I composed following this method, however imperfectly; so you will all have a chance to see for yourselves something of what it looks like in practice.

The Four Pages: Grace in the Bible

Continuing my discussion of Paul Scott Wilson's method of sermon composition, which he calls 'the four pages of the sermon', we turn to the topic of the third page (which Wilson calls Page Three), which is 'grace in the Bible'. The last two pages, you may recall (summarised here), dealt with 'trouble', the first as it is revealed in the Biblical text, the second as we find it in our contemporary situation (in whatever context).

This 'trouble' consists, in the sermon, of one thing, one aspect of life in the world which is harmful or which places the burden on us to change (either ourselves, our society, or the world).

I will explore what 'grace' means as it applies to the third page in more detail in this post, but in short it refers to the action God is taking (and, on page three, has taken, in or behind the Biblical text) about the 'trouble' of the first half of the sermon. Since for Wilson the proper object of the sermon is God and one of the most important tasks of the sermon (for Wilson) is to inspire hope and a sense of mission in its hearers, and to do so theologically, then it is appropriate for the focus of a sermon to be what God has done and is doing (and for Christians, has done and is continuing to do through the death and resurrection of Jesus).

The Four Pages: Trouble in the World

This is the next post in a series on writing sermons according to the method outlined by Paul Scott Wilson in The Four Pages of the Sermon. Before I get to this post's topic, you may want to see what the previous posts in the series were about.

Sermon Composition as Making a Movie
Ensuring Sermon Unity
Trouble in the Bible

The first two posts talked about the reason for using this method and the first major step in writing the sermon; the next four deal with each individual 'page' of the method; the last will be the sermon I wrote following this method, with requests for people to analyse it according to the method and see how well it does and - this is perhaps most important - where it falls short and could use improvement. I should point out that I preached the sermon on Sunday, December 5, so it was a real sermon for a real audience (congregation, to be more accurate); it was not only an exercise for fun.

On to the topic for this post, which is the second 'page' of Wilson's method, the page which deals with 'trouble in the world'.

The Four Pages: Trouble in the Bible

Update: Well, I'd hoped to finish this stuff last week for Sunday, but writing the actual sermon kinda had to take priority, for obvious reasons. Based on the reactions I got after preaching, with some in-depth discussion with the folks, I can say that Wilson's method of four pages works. I should send that guy a card.

Anyway, the first of the four figurative pages is, according to Wilson, 'trouble in the Bible'.

The Four Pages: Ensuring Sermon Unity

The first thing the preacher needs to do, according to Wilson, is, on Monday, to ensure that the sermon is unified. The mnemonic device for this is the sentence The Tiny Dog Now Is Mine, although I suppose any sentence whose words begin with those letters (TTDNIM) will do.

On Monday, then, the preacher's task is 'to identify: one text from the Bible [on which] to preach; one theme sentence arising from that text; one doctrine arising out of that theme sentence; one need in the congregation that the doctrine or theme sentence addresses; one image to be wed to the theme sentence; and one mission. [words in bold in the original; pp. 35-6]'

Let's look at this in more detail.

The Four Pages: Making Movies

I'm looking forward to next Sunday, the fifth of December, for I will have the opportunity to preach the sermon at my church that day; it has been a while since I last preached.

During the course of my theological studies, I learned a method of sermon composition called the 'four pages', set out in a book called The Four Pages of the Sermon (published in 1999 by Abingdon Press) by Paul Scott Wilson, who teaches preaching at Emmanuel College, one of the affiliates of the Toronto School of Theology.

I have found this method to be most useful in the writing and evaluation of my own sermons, in that I find I am more likely to say something worthwhile (this is not always immediately evident) and I find that when I receive feedback about my sermon, it is more likely to reflect what I actually said.