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Meilaender, Gilbert, 1946 -

Should we live forever : the ethical ambiguities of aging /

Gilbert Meilaender.

p. cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978 -0-8028 -6869 -5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978 -1-4674 -3721 -9 (mobi)

1. Aging — Religious aspects — Christianity. 2. Aging — Moral and ethical aspects. 3. Death — Moral and ethical

aspects. 4. Older Christians — Religious life. 5. Gerontology — Moral and ethical aspects.

I. Title.

BV4580.M45 2013

248.8′5 — dc23

Lewis and renewed 1992 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing

“An Ancient Story” by John Hall Wheelock, first published in the Sewanee Review, vol. 81, no. 1, Winter 1973. Copyright

1973 by the University of the South. Reprinted with the permission of the editor.

Excerpts from “Night Thoughts in Age” and “Song on Reaching Seventy” by John Hall Wheelock. Reprinted with the

CHAPTER ONE

How Shall We Think about Aging?

The anti -aging medicine of the not -so -distant future would treat what we have usually

thought of as the whole, the healthy, human life as a condition to be healed.

The President’s Council on Bioethics, Beyond Therapy

The highest expression of human dignity and human nature is to try to overcome the

limitations imposed on us by our genes, our evolution , and our environment.

Ronald Bailey, Liberation Biology

AS THE NUMBER of our years increases, as we age in that simple chronological sense, we also

age in a more important and profound sense. Gradually but progressively our bodies begin

to function less effectively, and that increasing loss of function makes us more vulnerable to

disease and death. Nevertheless, we should distinguish aging from disease. Unlike disease,

aging is a normal stage of life that seems “built in.” It makes us more vulnerable to d isease

but is not itself pathology. No one dies because his hair turns gray, and the diseases often

associated with old age can occur even apart from aging. Hence, to say that someone died

“from old age” simply means, as biologist Tom Kirkwood puts it, tha t his hold on life had

“become so precarious that, had it not been this particular cause of death today, it would

have been another tomorrow.” 1

Aging might be said to be natural fo r human beings in the sense that it happens to all of us

(unless, of course, we die before getting a chance to age). And while few people seem to relish

growing old, even fewer want to die young, without the opportunity to age. Nor is aging

natural only fo r human beings. All mammals age, and with only rare possible exceptions

(such as the sea anemone), so do all living organisms (though in the wild most of them die

too soon to age). We grow, we experience puberty, we mature — and we age. That is the

course of a healthy human life. If we do not think of the other, earlier stages of our

development as problems to be overcome, and if aging itself is not a disease, then why think

of it as a problem that needs solving?

One reason we hesitate to adopt such a benig n view of aging is, of course, that it seems so

inextricably connected to death. Thus, Lewis Thomas, imagining in one of his elegant essays

that ours might someday be a species free of disease, is quite naturally driven to ask: How

then will we die? And, b y way of answer, he tries to picture how we might simply wear out

without breaking down in any particular way — without, that is, falling prey to any disease.

Aging then becomes “an orderly, drying up process, terminated by the most natural of

events.” 2

The moral would seem to be: Aim to cure or ameliorate the diseases associated with old

age but accept aging itself. Aim not at more years but at better, healthier years. To be sure,

better health will probably mean a somewhat longer average life span, but it will not

necessarily alter the maximum life span for human beings. The result will be platitudinous:

adding life to years, not necessarily years to life.

Sensible as this seems in many ways, it may not “make sense.” If it is good to extend life by

curing illness and relieving infirmity — knocking off age -associated diseases one by one in a

way almost everyone seems to approve — why not also try to slow the aging process itself

and extend life still further? Moreover, if we want to preserve health and overcome specific

diseases, one way to do it would be to retard the process of aging, which is closely tied to

increased vulnerability to illness. Indeed, doing that (were we really abl e) might be a more

effective way of enhancing health than simply overcoming diseases one at a time.

Thus, even if aging — unlike disease — is natural, a part of “the whole, the healthy, human

life,” as the President’s Council on Bioethics put it, 3 as long as we cannot say the same of

disease we may find it hard to argue against work that retards aging and (in so doing)

extends the maximum life span. Though theoretically separate, di sease and aging are

inextricably intertwined in our lives. We seem driven — sometimes, at least, for the best of

reasons — to try to overcome even the limit of years imposed on us “by our genes, our

evolution, and our environment.” 4 Whether doing so is, as Ronald Bailey puts it, the highest expression of our dignity, I doubt. But it is not easy to argue that we should entirely forego

the attempt.

From the start, we need to think a bout how to think about growing old — and, in particular,

how to think not simply of aging but of human aging. This will require that we learn from but

also move beyond what has become the standard way to think about aging. Scholars study

both why we age a nd how we age. The first seems to invite talk about a purpose, the second

about a mechanism. The first is more germane to my inquiry here.

Why do we age? The dominant answer today is that of evolutionary biology, which goes

something like this: We age because nature has relatively little stake in keeping us alive

beyond our reproductive years. Insofar as we may speak of our lives having a point, it is to

be carriers of DNA. Having passed that on to the next generation, we are dispensable. Any

genetic tr ait harmful enough to cause death before the reproductive years will have difficulty

surviving the filter of natural selection. Those who have such traits are less likely to

reproduce, less likely to be effective carriers and transmitters of DNA. And, by c ontrast,

natural selection will have relatively little effect upon harmful genes if those harms appear

only later in life in the post -reproductive years.

Of course, we may continue to hang around for a while after we have produced the next

generation, but as we do we inevitably suffer from genes whose harmful effects manifest

themselves only in those later years. Natural selection having less need to eliminate them,

they accumulate and start to take a toll on us. We begin to experience the effects of a grad ual

and generalized physical deterioration. Because nature’s interest in us all along has been

simply an interest in reproduction, in the transmitting of our genes, it has paid relatively less

attention to maintaining us beyond the years crucial for that t ask. Focusing on reproduction

rather than maintenance, nature has not bothered to weed out changes that make us more

vulnerable to disease and death: a weakening immune system, increasingly brittle bones, a

clogged cardiovascular system, deteriorating sens ory systems. These are part of the natural

process of aging; but, of course, they are also closely linked to a wide range of diseases —

pneumonia, fractures, heart disease, hearing and vision loss.

Tom Kirkwood has labeled this account of why we age the “d isposable soma” theory. 5 The

idea is that, from the point of view of genes trying to transmit their DNA to the next

generation, the body is little more than a carrier and is not made to survive i ndefinitely. It

will eventually die anyway, so not a lot should be invested in sustaining it beyond that

reproductive task. “Disposable soma” is a label worth pondering. It may sound mechanistic,

but it is pervasively marked by metaphors drawn from human e xperience. For example, it is

human beings, not genes, who have a point of view. It is not genes but living organisms that

have purposes and goals. It is human beings, not genes, who care about a “next generation.”

And if the body seems from the perspectiv e of this theory to be disposable, we should

remember what body is being so characterized. It is our body — which is the place of our

personal presence, through which we are linked to our world and to others, apart from which

we can scarcely imagine our ow n continuing identity. “Before I was conceived there was no

me,” philosopher Christine Overall writes, “and no possibility of being a me. Some

philosophers have claimed that my genetic material might have come into being earlier than it did. But even if th is is empirically possible, the me that exists now is the product of the

whole complex of experiences that have occurred since my birth or even since my

conception.” 6 Hence, whatev er the usefulness of the disposable soma theory — and no doubt

it is useful for many purposes — we may wonder whether it is well suited to help us think

about how long it is good for us to live.

It is also instructive to underscore the close connection thi s standard explanation discerns

between aging and reproduction. “The rule, simply stated,” as John Medina puts it, “is this: If

you have sex, you will eventually die.” 7 From the p erspective of the well -being of our species,

there is little reason to devote the body’s energies to tasks of cell repair and maintenance

aimed at sustaining any of us into an old age that extends well beyond our reproductive

years. A favorite example of e volutionary biologists is the contrast between semelparous

species (which reproduce only once) and iteoparous species (which may reproduce

repeatedly). Semelparous organisms generally die after reproducing and, therefore, will not

be around to provide care for their offspring. (They usually produce a large number of

offspring, which compensates for the fact that they will not live to provide care.) If, however,

they are prevented from reproducing, they will live much longer than their normal life span.

Thus , science itself invites us to think about the intertwining of reproduction with length of

life and the relation between the generations.

The same lesson can be drawn from studies of caloric restriction in rodents (and, more

recently, in rhesus monkeys). Indeed, a rather drastic reduction in calories seems to be the

one certain method for retarding the aging process, even if we cannot say fo r certain how it

works. Since the mid -1930s researchers have known that dietary restriction extends life. A

diet containing normal healthy ingredients but with 30 -40 percent fewer calories than usual

has been shown to extend the life span of some mice and rats well beyond that of others

whose food intake has not been so restricted. The standard explanation seems reasonable:

If food is scarce, the body’s energy resources focus on cell maintenance rather than

reproduction, increasing the animal’s chances of s urviving longer and making time for the

animal to reproduce when food becomes more readily available. Delaying reproduction

extends the period of life when natural selection is effective. But, of course, a price is paid:

Caloric restriction is closely tied to delayed puberty and reduced fertility. Moreover, it is not

impossible that we might one day be able to manipulate the genome in ways that regulate

reproduction in order to extend youthfulness and retard aging. At any rate, however we

account for the co nnection, it indicates that aging affects not only individuals or a single

generation; it has implications for the relation between the generations.

If, then, we take the standard account of why we age and try to derive moral advice from

it, one’s first th ought might be: Don’t have children, and I’ll live longer. But that would be to

misunderstand, for nature is focused not on our well -being but on that of our genes. So,

instead, the moral advice that might seem to follow is: Have children, the more the bet ter,

the sooner the better. In that way we can be effective transmitters of our DNA and take our

place in nature’s larger and grander undertaking. If this happens to make life burdensome

for us, we can take comfort in knowing that we have played our part w ell. Indeed, anything

— including living well into old age — that makes us less likely or less eager to have children

seems contrary to nature’s ongoing project. “From an evolutionary point of view, the name

of the game is,” as Robert Arking puts it, “to p lay again (i.e., the whole point of being a

reproductive adult is to pass copies of your genes on to the next generation).” 8 We are disinclined to draw such moral lessons from the account evolutionary biologists

give of why we age — and with good reason. That account may be able to tell us about

changes that have occurred during our natural history, but it cannot tell us whether these

are improvements. The fact that we can and do ap peal to “nature” to support quite different

versions of moral advice should, as Stephen Jay Gould once wrote, “teach us two lessons:

first, that we have a remarkable capacity for self -delusion in projecting our hopes and fears

on nature and re -deriving the m as ‘fact,’ and second, that nature is sufficiently rich and

multifarious to say yes (in part) to any human vision.” 9

In a remembrance of his friend and colleague C. S. Lewis, Nev ill Coghill recounted a

conversation that took place once when he and Lewis were dining with Rector Marett of

Exeter College.

Marett was a man of abundant geniality and intelligence, always ready with friendly

freshets of conversation and new gambits of go ssip to entertain a guest. Presently he

turned to Lewis and said:

“I saw in the papers this morning that there is some scientist -fellah in Vienna, called

Voronoff — some name like that — who has invented a way of splicing the glands of

young apes onto old gentlemen, thereby renewing their generative powers!

Remarkable, isn’t it?”

Lewis thought.

“I would say, ‘unnatural.’ ”

“Come, come! ‘Unnatural’! What do you mean, ‘unnatural’? Voronoff is a part of

Nature, isn’t he? What happens in Nature must surely be n atural? Speaking as a

philosopher, don’t you know” — (Marett taught Philosophy) — “I can attach no meaning

to your objection; I don’t understand you!”

“I am sorry, rector; but I think any philosopher from Aristotle to — say — Jeremy

Bentham, would have und erstood me.”

“Oh, well, we’ve got beyond Bentham by now, I hope. If Aristotle or he had known

about Voronoff, they might have changed their ideas. Think of the possibilities he opens

up! You’ll be an old man yourself, one day.”

“I would rather be an old ma n than a young monkey.” 10

This anecdote, which refers, in fact, to a well -known episode in early attempts to develop

anti -aging therapies, is not only amusing; it is also philosophical ly to the point. 11

We cannot read ethical principles off the accounts given us by evolutionary biologists,

because moral reasoning requires something more complicated. What we need , as Alasdair

MacIntyre once put it, is not only a description of human nature in its “untutored” condition

but also at least some sense of what it would mean for that nature to be fully realized. The

principles that obligate us and the virtues that shape us provide the guidance and direction

we need to move from our natural condition in that first (untutored) sense to our natural

condition in the second (fulfilled and flourishing) sense. 12 This teleological conception of

ethics — in which the imperative makes possible growth from the descriptive to the

attractive — bears similarity to the physician’s work of medical diagnosis. The physician

begins not only with the patient’s symptom s and illness but also with a conception of health

toward which the patient needs to be helped and directed. And the physician’s prescription mediates that movement toward health. When we think normatively about our nature, we

cannot avoid something like t his threefold scheme.

The account given by evolutionary biologists tells us what is “natural” only in the sense

that it happens all around us, and that sense will give us little traction when normative

questions are our concern. “We must,” as the great nin eteenth -century philosopher Henry

Sidgwick once wrote, “give a special precision to the meaning of ‘natural’; since in a sense . .

. any impulse is natural, but it is manifestly idle to bid us to follow Nature in this sense.” 13

Ethics would then become, as T. H. Huxley (Darwin’s bulldog!) himself put it, merely “applied

Natural History,” in which theft and murder may be as natural as philanthropy. 14 But we are

looking for something different, for the natural in the sense of a completion or fulfillment of

our inborn possibilities in ways that contribute to human well -being.

Although talking about “why” we age seems to invite us to think teleologically about the

point or purpose of this natural process, the account given by evolutionary biology actually

avoids all such talk of fulfillment and prescribes nothing. DNA has no aims or purposes, but

we — who are not just collections of DNA — do. Hence, this account is insufficient as a guide

to human aging. It cannot illumine what is natural for us in the distinctively moral sense: how

we ought to live in order to flourish as human beings. What is natural for us in th is sense is

not what happens to us all the time but what is appropriate to beings of the sort we are. And,

therefore, if we want to think about whether an indefinite prolongation of life is in accord

with or contrary to our nature, we will need to reflect in ways that are normative from the

outset. Rather than disposing of the soma, we will need to consider the goods to which our

embodied human nature itself inclines.

Prolonging life might, of course, take several different forms or have several different

meanings. All things, even inorganic materials that are not alive, get older in one sense as

years pass. But they do not age in the way living organisms do. We could perhaps prolong

the life of many inorganic objects by taking great care to preserve them, but it would make

no sense to talk of retarding their aging process. For living organisms, however, it does make

sense to think about both life -prolongation and age -retardation. They are closely connected,

but not identical. Prolonging life for more years , getting older in that simple sense, is not

quite the same as retarding aging.

If the upshot of anti -aging research were that more and more of us — like Jonathan Swift’s

Struldbrugs — lived in a condition of indefinitely prolonged aging or senescence, wha t

Francis Fukuyama has called “the national nursing home scenario,” few would regard that as

a successful outcome. 15 Alas, that upshot is for us no longer entirely a matter for the

subjunctive mood, as if it were still a condition contrary to fact. For many in our society it

has already become the other side — the downside — of our remarkable medical progress.

But well before the marvels of modern medicine, our ancestors recognized the

ambivalence of our thirst for longer life. The author of the sayings in Ecclesiastes — whoever

precisely “Qoheleth” may have been — had no trouble picturing an old man dragging himself

along like a grasshopper, taking no pleasure in his continuing days and years. No wonder

Qoheleth famously said that there is “a time to be born, and a time to die” (Eccles. 12:1 -8;

3:2). 16 Equally powerful is the figure in Greek myth of Tithonus — a mortal man loved by Aurora,

goddess of the Dawn. She asked Zeus to make Tithonus immortal but failed to ask in addition

that he remain forever young. He became, therefore, an old man — unable to move, babbling

endlessly, but unable to die. “I wither sl owly in thine arms,” he says in Tennyson’s famous

poem, and is driven finally to say “take back thy gift.” 17 If such an indefinitely extended life

were the fruit of anti -aging rese arch, no doubt many would likewise pray, “take back thy gift.”

One of the dangers of this form of life -prolongation is, in fact, that it may tempt many not

merely to utter such a prayer but — deciding that if we cannot live well we should not live at

all — to reject the gift entirely. In any case, life -prolongation that is not also age -retardation

is unlikely to offer what we really want.

If, therefore, our present circumstance — in which many people will experience prolonged

and progressive senescence — is undesirable, and if it tempts us to love life less than we

should, we do well to think about other conditions at which we might aim under the rubrics

of life -prolongation or age -retardation. Without taking as our goal any increase in the

maximum life span possible for human beings, we might, for instance, aim at what is often

called “compressed morbidity.” The target here is primarily disease and, only indirectly,

aging itself. The goal is that for (almost) as long as we live, we should live largely free o f

disease and disability. Then, it seems, after a (presumably) somewhat longer life than the

current average life span, we would die — suddenly and rather quickly.

Something like this, it should be apparent, is what many in our society hope for. Live as

long as we can at the peak of our powers — and then just fall off the cliff. We might idealize

it less, however, if we thought about it more. If the idea is that we live, almost up till the end,

a life that is vigorous and relatively free of disease or disab ility, why would we want it to

end? The decline that aging involves is, in a way, a gradual and (at least sometimes) gentle

preparation for the cliff toward which we move. Even now we are especially distressed when

someone dies at or near the peak of his p owers. If we all died that way, would that be an

improvement?

Moreover, it is not clear — or, at least, not clear to me — that we can coherently think

through the image of compressed morbidity. The idea is that we live a somewhat longer and

(until the very end) disease -free life, and then we die suddenly. But we must ask: Die of what?

That is not easy to say. The answer cannot simply be: of old age. To be old is merely to be

increasingly vulnerable to a variety of diseases. If one or another of these is to relieve us

quickly of this mortal coil, we will still have had to age. Bones must still have become brittle,

sensory systems needed for vision and hearing must have deteriorated, our immune system

must have weakened. (Must plaques and tangles have built up in the brain? But then we may

have difficulty distinguishing this vision of life -prolongation from the first, prolonged

senescence.) In short, the longer we think about compressed morbidity as an approach to

age -retardation, the harder it is to picture cl early.

In any case, the thirst for anti -aging remedies is, I think, a desire for something more. It is

a search for methods that — without entirely eliminating the aging process — slow its pace

considerably and thereby extend even the maximum life span. Or , more far -reaching still, it

is a desire for means that will continuously overcome the biological processes of aging by

finding ways to reverse the kinds of change and loss that for now mark our post -reproductive

years. The first of these aspirations — slowing the pace of aging — might leave intact a kind

of life cycle, simply stretching it out over a more extended time period. The second, a more thoroughgoing continual rejuvenation, would not only extend the maximum life span but

would do so in a way that no longer seemed to leave place for stages of life. Each, at any rate,

has in mind an indefinite prolongation of life through retardation of aging.

Why not aggressively pursue such strategies for retarding aging?

Once we are clear that evolutionary biol ogy, which discerns no point or purpose in natural

processes, cannot answer this question, we are free to learn what we can from more modest,

less far -reaching reflection on human nature. Normative thinking cannot, after all, proceed

in complete isolation from what we think we know about the sort of creature we are. Human

beings are characterized by tendencies, by desires, and by limits. If these provide no ready -

made ethical principles, we must at least keep them in mind when we think about what it

would m ean for us to flourish. And even if we bracket entirely talk about cosmic purposes,

we may be able to discern something about the natural ends of human life and what will or

will not fulfill those ends. “Although,” as Larry Arnhart puts it, “the evolutiona ry process does

not serve goals, the organisms emerging from that process do.” 18

Moreover, as Arnhart notes, although evolutionary biology thinks in terms of a natural

selection th at has no purposes, in many other ways modern biology is shot through with such

purposive language. For example, the ability of living organisms to maintain a stable body

temperature and balance of bodily fluids — homeostasis — is a teleological concept. W e

examine not only how this takes place but also why — to what ends — the living body works

to sustain this balance. Likewise, if we ask what the acorn is made for, the answer is in terms

of a natural end: to develop into an oak tree. Or, put more fully, t o fulfill its nature by

developing into a thing appropriate to its kind. To be sure, we find ourselves less confident

— and less in agreement — when we ask a question such as, For what is a human being

made? But this is the sort of question that can begin to push us to think about the meaning

of human aging. It is complicated, moreover, by the fact that human beings are made, among

other things, to act with a freedom that regularly transcends and reshapes limits and

structures that have seemed to be “givens ” in human existence. That freedom, too, is part of

our nature, and it requires that we be cautious when thinking about the meaning of human

aging. This does not mean, however, that we are left entirely without insight.

Thus, for example, when Arnhart list s “twenty natural desires” that are, he says, “so deeply

rooted in human nature that they will manifest themselves in some manner across history

in every human society,” first on his list is the desire for “a complete life.”

Human beings generally desire l ife. Like other animals, they pass through a life cycle

from birth to maturity to death. Every human society is organized to manage the

changing desires associated with this life cycle, which passes through distinct stages

such as infancy, juvenility, adol escence, adulthood, and old age. . . . Although human

beings will risk their lives for a good cause, they generally agree that to be fully happy

one must live out one’s natural life span. 19

Two somewhat different claims are closely united here. Human beings desire life. And they

desire a complete life (understood in terms of the full life cycle). These do not quite come to the same thing. An indefinitely extended life might not be a lif e still shaped by stages

culminating in old age.

Among the twenty natural desires Arnhart thinks we can identify in human beings is the

desire to give and receive parental care. Attending to it shows us at least part of what it

means to have a “complete li fe.” “Parent -child bonding is,” Arnhart writes, “naturally good

for human beings.” 20 This way of rearing the next generation has characterized almost all

human communities and has been rema rkably difficult to eliminate even in small

communities that have intentionally sought to do so. The parent -child bond as a way of

rearing the next generation seems to conform better to our nature than other possible ways.

Under very special circumstances (such as in the kibbutzim) it may be possible for a time to

set aside this bond. Even then, however, as Arnhart notes, the evidence suggests that doing

so is generally experienced as a considerable sacrifice.

Once we begin to attend to the parent -child bon d, or more generally to the relation

between generations, we have begun to think not just of life but of a “complete life” — a life

marked in some way by stages and movement, a life that has shape and not just duration, a

life whose moments are not identic al but take their specific character from their place in the

whole. Moreover, it is difficult to imagine a “relation between the generations” that does not

include aging — coming into being and going out of being. This may stand in some tension

with the th irst for indefinitely more life that most of us sometimes experience, but it is hard

to imagine a characteristically human life without it. And from this perspective, a simple

thirst for more (and more) life might seem to carry an unmistakable whiff of nar cissism, for

it is hard to imagine how we can act responsibly toward the generations that succeed us if

we cling firmly (and desperately?) to our own continued youthfulness. Doing that would

cause us to lose the shape that gives wholeness and integrity to our lives.

To be sure, we ought to be able to appreciate the desire that moves us to cling to life. “A

living dog is better than a dead lion,” Qoheleth says (Eccles. 9:4), articulating succinctly the

thirst for more life. He is not entirely wrong, since, a fter all, only the living can aim at anything

more than living. Nevertheless, to take survival as our primary goal — however necessary at

times in a seemingly Hobbesian world — does not express the full dignity of our humanity.

A virtuous commitment to the indefinite prolongation of life cannot be founded merely on

the narcissistic desire to survive — not, at least, without losing the virtues of a complete life

that has shape and not just duration.

There are complications here, however, that we should not too quickly or too easily unravel.

Perhaps the desire for an indefinitely extended life may have its own virtuous character.

Perhaps it can take root in the virtue of love. Indeed, this is, I believe, the strongest argument

for attempts to retard aging an d prolong life indefinitely. Somewhat to my own surprise, I

find that it makes me hesitant — and should make us hesitant — to dismiss too quickly the

desire to retard aging. Even if there are deep problems with this desire — even if, were the

desire satisf ied, we would lose the kind of wholeness given by the shape of what I have called

a “complete life” — something more than mere narcissism may be at work in this desire. That

something more is the virtue of love. How love might elicit from us a desire to ex tend life is captured beautifully in John Hall

Wheelock’s poem, “Song on Reaching Seventy.” 21 “Shall not a man sing as the night comes on?”

the poet asks. And remembering how — as the quiet of evening descends but before all is

silence — he has heard a thrush “Lift up his heart against the menacing night,” he is moved

to reflect on the sweetness of life.

Oh, now

Before the coming of a greater night

How bitterly sweet and dear

All th ings have grown! How shall we bear the brunt,

The fury and joy of every sound and sight,

Now almost cruelly fierce with all delight.

The delights of the natural world come unbidden to his mind: the sun making its way through

the clouds of dawn; that sun’s light still piercing the clouds at its evening burial; a pool of

rain; the flight of a bat; the cock pheasant’s morning call. “Oh, every sight and sound has

meaning now.”

Still more, he calls to mind those to whom he is closely tied in love — so closely ti ed that

even the thought of his beloved can almost make him afraid. It is like looking at the sun and

being blinded by truth, the truth of a longing that will not be quieted.

Age will look into the face of youth

With longing, over a gulf not to be crossed.

Oh, joy that is almost pain, pain that is joy,

Unimaginable to the younger man or boy.

Thus, “Song on Reaching Seventy” tells of a longing that never disappears, that is never quite

fulfilled — uniting sweetness and heartache.

We might say, of course, that the “joy that is almost pain” and the “pain that is joy” could

not be so rich, ambivalent, and deeply moving an experience were it not that life moves

relentlessly through its stages toward its appointed end. We might say — an d this is a

profound truth not to be forgotten — that were the poet magically to cross back over that

“gulf not to be crossed,” his longing would remain “unstilled.” All true. Yet, we cannot deny

the power of love.

To love another is to affirm that person’ s being and well -being. Not just well -being, but the

sheer goodness of the loved one’s existence. To love another is to say (in Josef Pieper’s

phrase) “it’s good that you exist,” repeating the Creator’s own affirmation. 22 Anyone who has

loved must therefore feel the force of the poet’s concluding plea.

Great night, hold back

A little longer yet your mountainous, black

Waters of darkness, from this shore, . . .

The haunt of love and pain,

Which we must leave, whether we would or not,

And where we shall not come again.

More time — oh, but a little more,

Till, stretched to the limits of being, the taut heart break,

Bursting the bonds of breath. And of course, for anyone who loves, for a s long as he loves, it may continue to make sense

to say, “More time — oh, but a little more.” We should, therefore, be able to understand the

thirst that drives research aimed at retarding or, even, overcoming the aging process. If aging

is, in one sense, built into our nature, the desire to live more (and more) is, in another sense,

equally natural for people formed by the virtue of love.

If, despite the power of such love, there is good reason not to aim at extending our life span

indefinitely, it cannot be that the delights the poet mentions are unworthy of our deep

affection. Nor, I suspect, can we simply assert that all of us must find the virtues of a

“complete life” more compelling than “more life.” It must rather be that there is yet more to

being h uman than the poet has discerned and that the beauties of more life — sweet as they

are — cannot, as St. Augustine puts it, catch the heart and hold it still. It must be that our

freedom to step beyond nature’s limits is itself part of our nature and will not rest content

with more of this life, however long extended. Hence, knowing how endless (and legitimate)

is our thirst for more life, God places cherubim with flaming brands to bar any return to

paradise, lest humankind should eat of the tree of life an d live — more of the same life —

forever. In the end, “more time” would not quench the thirst that drives us to look for ways

to retard aging. We need a fuller conception of our humanity and a deeper and richer

understanding of love — one that is shaped by patience and hope in the struggle to

understand what, really, is good for us.

CHAPTER TWO

Transitional Humanity

It is a loathsome and cruel trick that nature takes such an exquisitely w ondrous creation as

the human brain and imprisons it inside the weak, inefficient, fragile, and short -lived

structure that is the human body. . . . The body you now inhabit, however remarkable it may

be, is not the product of intelligent design. It was not created for any purpose other than

survival and reproduction.

Mike Treder, “Emancipation from Death”

They who wait for the L ORD shall renew their strength,

they shall mount up with wings like eagles,

they shall run and not be weary,

they shall walk and no t faint.

Isaiah 40:31

“IF YOU’RE UNDER age 30, it is likely that you will be able to live as long as you want.” 1 That was

the message Ronald Bailey took away from a longevity summit convened in November 2009.

Bringing together “scientists, entrepreneurs, and visionaries” — all of them dedicated to

achieving indefinite extension of human life within the next few deca des — the summit

included reports on a wide range of possible means to that goal. The desirability of the goal

was, of course, taken for granted.

The idea is to survive long enough to be around when hoped -for technological advances

will make possible indef inite extension of life. Bailey reports that, at the longevity summit,

Ray Kurzweil, one of the visionary thinkers committed to this goal, stated that within roughly

fifteen years we may have advanced to a point where we can add “more than one year of

long evity per year to remaining life expectancy” — thereby getting out in front of time’s

relentless arrow. This is what Aubrey de Grey has characterized as “longevity escape

velocity”: when one’s projected date of death moves farther away rather than nearer. The

same idea is captured in the subtitle of the book Fantastic Voyage, coauthored by Kurzweil

and Terry Grossman: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. 2

For the moment, this means tak ing some rather conventional steps — diet, exercise, stress

reduction — though, to be sure, taking them with intensity. But if we are fortunate, these

steps will keep us in good health into a coming era of biotechnological advance, in which

regenerative me dicine can ceaselessly repair the accumulated damage in our bodies that is

the mark of aging. This repair may take many forms — chromosome replacement,

regenerative medicine using cloned stem cells, drugs that mimic the effects of caloric

restriction or th at lengthen telomeres. Finally, these forms of biological repair may, we are

told, help us survive into a time when the human body as we know it will have become

obsolete — a time in which it will be possible to map the brain and preserve its information

(and, thereby, our identity) in ways no longer dependent on organic bodies, which can then

give way to a “virtual” existence. 3

These hopes and expectations are captured succinctly i n the Transhumanist Declaration,

first drawn up in 1998 and most recently revised in 2009: “We envision the possibility of

broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary

suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.” 4 Were this vision actually to play out in our

history, we would live through a transitional humanity on its way to something that would

truly deserve to be called posthumanity. I confess to doubting the likelihood of at least a good

bit of what is promised by such visionaries, but we will not waste our time if we think about

their hopes. For even if much of this turns out to be a pipe dream, the fact that some among

us — how many I’m not sure — think it desirable is reason enough for us to pay attention.

Wh at we hope for tells us a great deal about who we are.

Some of these attempts to extend life probably fall under the rubric of “enhancement,” a

by now well -worn topic in bioethical discussion of issues such as cosmetic surgery, mood

brightening drugs, and “designer” babies. Once our target becomes not only the average but

also the maximum life span, however, it becomes harder to think that we are simply

enhancing capacities already in place. On the contrary, we are aiming at something genuinely

new, somethi ng hard to contemplate or evaluate with our normal ways of thinking, focused,

as they are, simply on benefits and harms. We are forced to think about the kind of people

we are and should strive to be — about what will truly help us to flourish as human bei ngs.

Most importantly, perhaps, we must come to terms with our nature as organisms, as bodies that limit us in countless ways and limit our days. Is that just an unfortunate (and, we may

hope, temporary) fact, to be overcome first in ageless, organic bodie s and then even in

virtual, inorganic ones? Or shall we say, as the Creator of animals and man does in Genesis,

that this embodied life is “very good”?

Katherine Hayles has captured the idea of posthumanity nicely, characterizing it as assuming

1. that “in formational patterns” (such as those in the human brain) are more

important than their “material instantiation” (in the brain itself);

2. that consciousness is an epiphenomenon caused by and reducible to brain

activity;

3. that the body is our first prosthesis ( i.e., something used by the self rather than

integral to our selfhood); and

4. that there is no essential difference between bodies and computer simulations,

between organisms and mechanisms. 5

Pushed to its limits, the idea is that we should think of the computer as a model for

humanity and think of life itself as (at least potentially) artificial. 6 We ourselve s, therefore,

are essentially patterns of information. For the time being those patterns are housed in

bodies — though, alas, bodies that age — which serve as our prostheses, as artificial limbs

used by our brains. A day may come, however, when the particu lar information pattern that

is you or me can be carried by some new prosthesis, a “body” that, being inorganic, will not

age and will offer us the chance for a kind of immortality. Indeed, if the information stored

in the brain could somehow be extracted and transferred to a computer, we might even

imagine making backup copies of ourselves. This would, in Mike Treder’s words, “really

make us effectively immortal, as we could store copies of ourselves in places all over the solar

system, the galaxy, or, eve ntually, even beyond.” 7

Although I doubt the feasibility of such visions and do not expect them to be realized, I do

not think they are as strange or unusual as one might at first suppose. Already in the first

decades of the twentieth century, visionary thinkers such as H. G. Wells, George Bernard

Shaw, J. B. S. Haldane, and Julian Huxley thought seriously — and optimistically — about the

pursuit of immortality. C. S. Lewis was less optimistic, and his alternative vision pinpoints

the crucial disagreements.

In That Hideous Strength, Lewis envisioned a research institute, the National Institute of

Co -ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), whose research aims, though not its methods,

antici pate visions of posthumanity. 8 The leaders of N.I.C.E. believe that the modern scientific

project of controlling nature has reached a point at which humanity itself must now become

yet another natural object to be reshaped in service of our desires. This project involves the

overcoming of all organic life. Professor Filostrato, a physiologist, looks forward to a day

when, for instance, artificial metal trees will replace living ones . This strikes him as a far

more rational approach. If one tires of a tree in one place, one simply has it moved to a new

location. “It never dies. No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and

mess.” 9 Applied to humanity, the lesson is clear. Organic life, having done its work in producing

mind, is no longer needed. Death must be overcome and reproduction transformed into a

technological project. For Lewis, of course, this i s hardly a desirable future, and N.I.C.E. is

satirized throughout That Hideous Strength. Beyond and beneath the satire, however, is a

serious concern. “Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow

and unquiet grave the old drea m of Man as God.” 10 Over against that old dream Lewis sets a

vision of human dignity that accepts the limits of organic life — including aging and death —

as limits to be affirmed and honored. Human beings are not simply isolated principles of will

committed to indefinite self -transcendence.

The alternatives and the fundamental argument remain much the same today. Since the

time of those visionary thinkers in the early decades of the twentieth century we have

increasingly taught ourselves to think in ways that cohere with transhumanist aims. For

example, it has become quite common (especially in discussions about the beginning and the

end of life) to distinguish between the class of human beings and a narrower class of persons

(who are thought to be characterized by certain capacities dependent upon the higher,

neocortical functions of the brain). If one thinks that way, and if one thinks it is persons that

really matter, one might say with Rolan d Puccetti that “conquest of death” requires

“indefinite prolongation of neocortical function.” 11 For without such function, Puccetti thinks,

one’s continued existence would have n o value.

The catch is, of course, that for now a body is required to sustain those brain functions,

and that body will grow old and, eventually, die. “But must we have bodies?” Puccetti thinks

not. “[A]n intact human brain kept in vitro but nourished by a properly oxygenated and

glucose -supplied blood flow mechanically pumped into it through the severed arteries could

support conscious life.” 12 (This is exactly the stage of technological e xperiment to which

N.I.C.E. has advanced in Lewis’s story.) Of course, such an isolated brain, though it could have

memories of its past (bodily) history, could have no future — could not continue to act and

engage the world — unless it had some prosthesis , some new “body” through which to carry

on exchange with its surrounding environment. But if this were a material body of the sort

we now inhabit, it would still age and die. Hence, Puccetti is drawn to hope for something

different. “The idea of escaping the evolutionary limitations of our present bodies by having

our brains transplanted at postmaturity into bodies which, being inorganic, do not age or

deteriorate, has a prima facie attractiveness about it.” 13

This vision of personhood draws on deeper roots in the modern liberal tradition, which

has taught us to think of ourselves as possessing rather than being a body. “Although,” as

Katherine Hayles notes, “in many ways the posthuman dec onstructs the liberal humanist

subject, it . . . shares with its predecessor an emphasis on cognition rather than

embodiment.” 14 And, as Francis Fukuyama observes, Immanuel Kant believed that the moral

norms authorized by his ethical theory would apply not just to human beings — embodied

creatures of a certain sort — but also to any and all rational agents. 15 The body both locates

and, simultaneously, limits us. Desire is bound to time and place, to the nature of organic life,

and cannot be entirely free. It becomes apparent, therefore, that the desire to live forever is,

in fact, a desire to be located “every where and nowhere.” 16 The modern alternative, which

Kant so brilliantly developed, unfetters desire and focuses on the freedom of disembodied

will to realize itself over against al l the ordinary marks (sex, kinship ties, stages of life) of

human, personal identity. But the target of transhumanists is not simply death. More precisely, the target is death

we have not chosen. The introduction to the Immortality Institute’s reader, The Scientific

Conquest of Death, puts it succinctly: “The mission of the Immortality Institute is to conquer

the blight of involuntary death.” 17 Thus, the philosopher John Gray gets i t just right when he

says: “The pursuit of immortality through science is only incidentally a project aiming to

defeat death. At bottom it is an attempt to escape contingency and mystery.” 18 Not to be in

control, to suffer the limits of a fate we have not chosen — that is the enemy. The goal of

indefinite life -extension is not so much in service of particular loves or projects as it is in

service of one indefinitely expansive desire — to become agents who are not at the mercy of

forces beyond our own control, in particular, the forces of decline and decay that are built

into the very nature of organic life.

This desire draws us into thinking of ourselves in a way that misses import ant aspects of our

humanity. The posthumanist vision begins with a thoroughgoing commitment to

materialistic reductionism, in order, then, to reimagine human beings as immaterial — as

utterly disembodied. We are, according to this view, what our brains do. Mind and personal

identity are located in the pattern of information housed in the brain, and our memories and

emotions are simply the behavior of its nerve cells. Having reduced mind to that, we can then

imagine the possibility of transferring it to a co mputer program, where the “self” would

remain in entirely immaterial form.

Philosopher Alva Noë has noted that this way of thinking supposes that consciousness is

a process internal to the brain in the way digestion is to the stomach, and he vividly captur es

what this means for our conception of humanity: “What are we then? If the truth be told, we

are brains in vats on life support. . . . Our skulls are the vats and our bodies the life -support

systems that keep us going.” 19 I will follow him here in noting three closely related reasons

why this way of thinking about the identity of human persons cannot be adequate.

Brains in vats with bodies for life -support systems, for whom consci ousness is more like

digestion than dancing, cannot have our experience of being purposive agents in the world.

For, as Noë puts it, consciousness is something we achieve; it is the way we live in and

respond to our surrounding world, not something that ju st happens to us or in us. Human

beings — in fact, living organisms generally — are not simply mechanisms but are relational

from the start. Even so simple a being as a bacterium can be understood only when we

“appreciate its integrity as an individual age nt, as a bearer of interests and needs.” It “has a

world; that is to say, it has a relationship with its surroundings.” 20 Hence, rather than thinking

of a bacterium as just a place where physical and chemical processes take place, we have to

discern “its primitive agency, its possession of interests, needs, and point of view” — which

is to say, its “incipient mindfulness.” 21 Su rely, then, the more complex organism that is a

human being is not simply a mechanical process to be understood in terms of physics and

chemistry alone. Even if one eliminates all teleology from the universe and supposes that our

world and its evolutionary history have no purpose, it seems to have produced living beings

who do have purposes and who act as agents in the world.

A second way to come at this same point is to remind ourselves that it is not the brain that

thinks, though we may often talk in ways which suggest that it is. After all, we also often talk as if we see with our eyes, when, in fact, it is the living being who sees, not simply a pair of

eyes. More than a century ago, William James already noted that we should not think of the

brain produ cing thought in the way a teakettle produces steam. Rather, James suggested, we

might think of how the keys of an organ allow wind to enter its pipes, producing “the voices

of the various pipes,” but the keys do not produce the wind itself or the sounds. 22 Or, to take

an analogy offered by philosopher Stephen Clark: If we damage the internal workings of a

television set, the programs shown will be affected. That does not mean, howev er, that it is

the television that is generating those programs. 23

As sight is not located in the optic nerve, so thought is not located in the brain. Hence, Noë

argues, when we picture the brai n as somehow examining its own contents in order to

process that information (and, in effect, think about itself), we tacitly smuggle into the

picture something else, some subject that transcends itself. But that’s what consciousness is!

“The mind is not i n the head,” and the self -conscious, self -transcending subject is constantly

engaging with, living in, and responding to the world around him. 24 There, and not in the

brain’s nerve cells, is the thin ker.

Finally, suppose we thought it possible to upload into a computer the pattern of

information that constitutes our brain, thereby preserving our identity in a new form. In

thinking that way, we adopt toward ourselves and others a position of detachment — as if

“we” simply were, without remainder, a physiological pattern of behavior that could be

observed and charted. But this is a theory that cannot be lived. We cannot think about

ourselves or others from that detached standpoint while simultaneously sh aring life with

them as we do. To see this, we need only imagine the impossibility of loving another person

while, at the same time, trying to think about ourselves loving them. Lover and beloved share

a world, and in that world they know each other as min dful persons, not as patterns of

behavior. “Like the baby in relation to her mother, we are involved with each other. It is our

joint cohabitation that secures our living consciousness for each other.” 25 To suppose that we

could preserve our identity in the form of a computerized pattern of information is to adopt

toward ourselves the kind of detached standpoint that loses this living, bodily engagement

with the world that simply is the mindful self. H ence, we cannot coherently think of ourselves

in the way the posthumanist project recommends.

These epistemological failings should spur us to anticipate related moral failings. If the

transhumanist project were the only route to more life, to an indefinitely prolonged

existence, the price of success might be the loss of our humanity. Even on purely naturalistic

grounds we might wonder whether the indefinitely extended existence for which

transhumanists hope does not lose important aspects of a cha racteristically human life — in

particular, its shape and contours. To have parents, as we all do — or to be the parent of sons

and daughters, as many of us are — is to be embedded in a series of temporal relationships

that involve not only coming into bei ng but also going out of being. The relation between the

generations shapes a life in which moments of time are not simply identical. Some are more

“moment -ous” than others, giving to life a trajectory that has a beginning, middle, and end.

Thus, our lives have a narrative shape, making our experience something other than a

succession of bare, momentary presents. This means that growing old is not just a matter of biology; it has social, psychic, and religious dimensions. The philosopher Larry Temkin

makes this point in an arresting thought experiment: “As things stand today, the physical,

psychological, and experiential gap between a grandmother at 60, a mother at 35, and a

daughter at 9 is enormous. But the physical, psychological, and experiential gaps be tween a

grandmother at 10,060, a mother at 10,035, and a daughter at 10,009 would be practically

inconsequential.” 26 Memory and anticipation have their primary bodily location in o ur

connection to our parents and our children, and it is hard to know what human experience

would look or feel like — or whether it would really be human experience — were our lives

not embedded in the bonds that produce stages within life and give the who le of it a narrative

shape.

One very old way of depicting that shape is to picture life as a banquet, with a succession

of courses through which one proceeds — and also, to be sure, having a stopping point

beyond which the banquet cannot be prolonged witho ut destroying its pleasure. Both host

and guest at such a banquet must be able to acknowledge limits — recognizing that, while

these limits may suffuse the end of the banquet or even the whole of it with a touch of fragility

and sadness, they cannot destro y its goodness. Consider David H. Smith’s depiction of the

good host.

A couple invite friends to dinner. Food and drink are pleasant; the conversation bubbles.

The good host is hospitable and courteous to his guest, no matter what his shifts in

mood. But there comes a time when the party “winds down” — a time to acknowledge

that the evening is over. At that point, not easily determined by clock, conversation, or

basal metabolism, the good host does not press his guest to stay but lets him go. Indeed

he may have to signal that it is acceptable to leave. A good host will never be sure of his

timing and will never kick out his guest. His jurisdiction over the guest is limited to

taking care and permitting departure. 27

When we think of life as such a banqu et, a death that comes neither too soon nor too late

— neither when the banquet is just getting started nor long after all have eaten their fill —

may be thought fitting. It is, at least, recognizably human in a way that posthumanist visions

may not be. Mo reover, this picture of a complete human life, with its acknowledgment and

even affirmation of human limits, will have an undeniable nobility that is displayed in

patience, humility, and gratitude. Daniel Callahan offers a nice example that captures the

be auty in such patience.

I once heard someone’s elderly grandfather described as a man of great energy and

activity who, as he aged, had to live, because of illness and aging, within a smaller and

smaller physical radius. Yet, even as that radius narrowed, f irst to the yard he could not

leave, then to the house he could not leave, then to the room he could not leave, and

finally to the bed he could not leave, he adapted to each smaller world, making of it with

good cheer whatever was possible. An imaginative flower arranger I once heard said

that the secret lies in learning how to work with the material at hand, not longing for

flowers not available. He then demonstrated what he meant by fashioning a wonderful

arrangement from roadside weeds. 28

Thus, patience to run the course of life’s banquet need not be simply resignation. It can, at its

best, make possible genuine freedom even within the necessities that constrain us. One aspect of our nature is, however, missing from such a vision of life’s banquet: namely,

the eros that longs for God. Grounded in our freedom to transcend the natural course of

organic life, this eros suggests a sense in which the banquet of life is never quite compl ete.

When human life, in all its limits and vulnerability, remains open to the divine life, we can

begin to see the power and meaning of the virtue of hope, which is quite different from

transhumanist optimism about the future. Hope’s ground is, to take up theologian David

Kelsey’s term, “eccentric.” 29 It looks for completion not to the natural course of life, nor to the

achievements of human progress or history, but to the genuinel y creative and re -creative

power that is God’s.

“We are the creature that hopes,” Hugh Heclo writes. 30 The importance — perhaps the

necessity — of hope for human life has long be en known. The Victorian painter G. F. Watts’s

Hope depicts a blindfolded woman holding a broken lyre on which only one string remains;

yet, that one string is evidently intended to evoke hope in those who view the painting, hope

that there is music still t o be made. 31 Watts is, of course, drawing on classical mythology’s

depiction of Pandora’s jar, in which only hope remained after she had released into the world

the evils inside. W hatever precisely the myth means — and it may mean many things — hope

can help us to flourish only if it is something other than mere expectation, optimism, or

confidence. What we hope for tells us a good bit about who we are.

Confidence in progress has ma rked the modern period. The French philosophe Nicolas de

Condorcet, one of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment, memorably expressed this

confident expectation in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind.

(It is one of the i ronies of history that he had to complete it while hiding from leaders of the

Revolution, which had begun to devour its children.)

We feel that the progress of preventive medicine as a preservative, made more effective

by the progress of reason and social order, will eventually banish communicable or

contagious illnesses and those diseases in general that originate in climate, food, and

the nature of work. It would not be difficult to prove that this hope should extend to

almost all other diseases, whose mo re remote causes will eventually be recognized.

Would it be absurd now to suppose that the improvement of the human race should be

regarded as capable of unlimited progress? That a time will come when death would

result only from extraordinary accidents or the more and more gradual wearing out of

vitality, and that, finally, the duration of the average interval between birth and wearing

out has itself no specific limit whatsoever? 32

The historian Carl Becker famously argued that, despite some obvious differences, there was

significant continuity between a faith such as Condorcet’s in a good ending and the hope a

thirteenth -century thinker such as Thomas Aquinas had for future salvati on. 33

Where Becker was struck by continuities, we might, though, be more impressed by

differences. Enlightenment thinkers such as Condorcet placed their hope not in God but in

futu re generations of humanity — in, that is, more of the same. “Posterity would complete

what the past and the present had begun.” 34 This is not a minor difference, for the hope in

po sterity was a confidence in human capacities and possibilities — in the expectation that we ourselves could overcome the fragility and vulnerability of human life. That sort of

confident expectation about our future historical accomplishments loses somethi ng that was

once central to — and may still be needed for — the virtue of hope.

St. Thomas distinguishes between a comprehensor and a viator. A comprehensor possesses

— and cannot lose — the happiness he desires. A viator, by contrast, is always and only o n

the way to that desired end. Hence, we can hope only for what is not yet a permanent and

present condition. Hope is possible only for those for whom life, however long, always seems

less than complete — “those who are still en route” (in viatoribus). 35

En route to what? How we answer that question makes an enormous difference in how we

understand hope. For Aquinas — as for the Christian tradition on which he drew — what

human beings hope fo r is a lasting union with the God who has shared our vulnerability and

overcome it. Only the beauty and goodness of this God can catch the heart and hold it still,

answering its deepest desire. Such Christian hope for beatitude is not a desire for more of

this life, wonderful though it is; nor is it a desire even for a “complete life,” however precisely

we picture its shape; nor is it a desire for any human or posthuman future that we ourselves

might fashion. Only if we were to stifle the human eros for God could we suppose that an

extended longevity of our own making could ever lead us to imagine that we had arrived at

the desired goal.

The relentless temporality of human life means that we are always incomplete, always in

viatoribus, always on the way. Hop e is the virtue that sustains us on the way toward the

divine beauty and goodness — protecting us against a presumption which supposes that any

of us could here and now become a comprehensor, as if an indefinitely extended earthly life,

whether organic or virtual, could quench our longing. And protecting us also against despair,

against the temptation to make of our vulnerability a virtue. Hope moves us to desire

something more than life’s banquet, sumptuous as it may be, something other than just

indefinit ely more of the same life, and something more than the achievement of “longevity

escape velocity.” It enables us to wait for the strength to run and not be weary, to walk and

not faint — a strength no research project can produce and which can only be rece ived as a

gift.

CHAPTER THREE

Hoping to Live Forever

A reasonably endowed, reasonably well -intentioned man can walk through the world’s great

kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.

Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

Further up and further in.

C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle

ONE OF THE ironies of our cultural circumstances is that at the very same time when research

proceeds on many fronts aimed at retarding aging and extending life indefinitely, others

argue that an immortal life would be an undesirable life. And, of course, if their a rguments

are persuasive, we would have good reason to draw back from the project of anti -aging

research.

To be sure, we are not the first to puzzle over such conflicting impulses. George Bernard

Shaw wrote a cycle of plays called Back to Methuselah: A Meta biological Pentateuch. The first

of the plays is set in the Garden of Eden and titled (unsurprisingly) “In the Beginning.” In it

Adam learns from Eve news that she herself had gotten from the serpent — namely, that they

need not live forever. And he respon ds with relief and delight:

What! Eve: do not play with me about this. If only there may be an end some day and yet

no end! If only I can be relieved of the horror of having to endure myself for ever! If only

the care of this terrible garden may pass on to some other gardener! If only the sentinel

set by the Voice can be relieved! If only the rest and sleep that enable me to bear it from

day to day could grow after many years into an eternal rest, an eternal sleep, then I could

face my days, however long th ey may last. Only, there must be some end, some end: I

am not strong enough to bear eternity. 1

Later in the play Adam expresses a similar sentiment to Cain, who, having killed his brother

Abel, asks his parents who invented death. And Adam replies:

Be reasonable, boy. Could you bear to live for ever? You think you could, because you

know that you will never have to make your thought good. But I have known what it is

to sit and brood under the terror of eternity, of immortality. Think of it, man: to have no

escape! To be Adam, Adam, Adam through more days than there are grains of sand by

the two rivers, and then be as far from the end as ever! I, who have so much in me that I

hate and long to cast off! Be thankful to your parents, who enabled you to hand on your

burden to new and better men, and won for you an eternal rest; for it was we who

invented death. 2

It is worth noting t hat Adam does not wish to die immediately; indeed, he decides to live

for one thousand years before dying. Nor does he want human life to cease. But it is the

species, not the individual, for whose survival he hopes. As Eve says to Adam, “You may die

when I have made another Adam. Not before. But then, as soon as you like.” 3 She recognizes,

it seems, the close connection between reproduction and death.

Shaw’s “Metabiological Pentateuch” envisions possibilities akin to what we now call

transhumanism and hopes for a future in which the human species, surviving indefinitely,

becomes something like pure mind. As Shaw put it in a postscript written twenty -five years

after the first publication of the p lay cycle, “Immortality is natural, death only an artifice to

make it bearable as a burden and get rid of its garments of flesh as they wear out.” 4 But any

immortality Shaw was willin g to hope for required, in William Irvine’s words, “the somewhat

cheerless universality of pure thought.” 5 Life as we now experience it would, he believed, be

unutterably tedious w ere it to extend indefinitely. To live forever as we live now would be

not paradise but a curse — “analogous to the experience of severe insomnia,” as the

philosopher Christine Overall puts it. 6

More recently, the case against living forever — in particular, the argument that to do so

would be tedious and boring — has been made by various thinkers, perhaps most notably

the philosopher Bernard Williams. To attend to his argument is to see that there is no

metaphysically neutral ground from which to discuss whether an immortal life could be

satisfying. We cannot know what we think of attempts to retard aging or prolong our lives

indefinitely unless we know what a human being is and w hat it would mean for human

beings to flourish.

In “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” Williams begins by

reflecting on a play by Karel Capek about a woman named Elina Makropulos. 7 At age 42 she

had been given an elixir by her physician father, and as the play unfolds she is now 342 and

facing a momentous choice. Because each dose of the elixir gives three hundred additional

years of life, she has come t o the time when she must decide whether to drink it again and,

so to speak, renew the contract. She refuses and, as a consequence, dies — reasonably

enough in Williams’s view. “Her unending life has,” he writes, “come to a state of boredom,

indifference an d coldness.” 8

Whatever might be fulfilling for other sorts of beings, there can, Williams thinks, be no

good reason “for living eternally a human life.” 9 Human lives are limited in a variety of ways,

giving to each of us a distinct character. And even if the range of possible experiences is

enormous, not all such experiences can be satisfying or fulfilling for someone whose

chara cter has taken a particular shape and form. Becoming a person of a certain sort does

not only mean growth and expansion of one’s possibilities; it also means closing some doors

precisely in order to step through others. To be someone, I must eschew the att empt to be

everyone — and, being someone in particular, I can no longer take interest in just anything,

however good it may be in principle. That is the heart of Williams’s argument.

This is a claim worth thinking about from several different angles. Is it true, in the first

place, that a finite human being, whose character has taken a certain form and shape, must

eventually run out of things or experiences that engage his interest? Charles Taliaferro, also

a philosopher, has distinguished “time enclosed go ods” from “non –time enclosed goods.” 10

The enjoyment of the former depends in part precisely on the fact that they do not last

forever. Taliaferro’s example: a meal. However good a nd pleasurable the meal, it would lose

its value if continued indefinitely. The meal has a sequence of courses (as we think of life

having stages), and its goodness requires that we pass through those courses and complete

the meal. Hence, no meal, however sumptuous, could delight us forever.

That is true of any single meal. But, of course, if we allow ourselves certain beliefs, we may

imagine an endlessly extended existence in which there is, as Taliaferro puts it, “a great,

perhaps indefinite variety or al teration of time enclosed goods.” 11 Indeed, Williams’s concept

of boredom seems fundamentally mistaken. As Steven Horrobin notes, “We are not bored

simpliciter. Boredom without refere nce to something we would rather be doing is

meaningless.” 12 That is to say, being bored with some good or other presupposes continued

interest in and desire for another of the ind efinite variety of goods to which Taliaferro refers.

I myself am not even certain that indefinite variety is needed. Must being a person of a

distinct character (as Williams puts it) subvert our capacity to appreciate — time and again

— the beauty of sunri se, the tranquility of twilight, the marvel of a child’s first steps, or the savoring of a good story? If such goods begin someday to bore us, perhaps the problem is

that we have not yet fully developed the sort of character a human being ought to have or be.

If we find them tedious, it may be not that these experiences have failed us but that we have

failed them. That is a possible rejoinder to Williams.

Still, that response may not take seriously enough his insistence that we think through

what it means t o be limited in the ways that human beings are. Perhaps we are so constituted

that even life’s beauties and delights cannot indefinitely and fully engage us. That may be.

What follows from that, however, is not so clear. It could mean simply, as Williams s upposes,

that human beings are not meant to live forever. Or it could mean that these beauties and

delights are meant less to fulfill our desires than to invite us through and beyond them to

some yet more satisfying good. Thus, any Augustinian would happil y grant that finite

beauties cannot bear the whole weight of the heart’s longing, for they are shafts of the divine

glory intended to direct our desire to what Taliaferro calls “some singular non –time enclosed

good” — that is, to draw us to God. 13

The 1993 movie Groundhog Day amusingly draws its viewers into a world in which TV

weatherman Phil Connors relives a seemingly endless string of February 2nds, and, given

that endless successi on of days, develops an amazing number of skills — pianist, ice sculptor,

French speaker. A viewer may at first suppose that Phil finds meaning in his seemingly

endless life because he never runs out of things or projects that engage his effort and interes t.

But we should notice that the remarkable expansion of Phil’s interests and abilities is actually

grounded in one aspect of his character that remains unchanged — his desire to win the love

of Rita, the producer of the news show on which he appears. His self remains focused, and

the question about the possibility of indefinitely continued growth becomes, therefore, the

question whether Rita is an object of love so all -engrossing as to make possible the infinite

expansion of Phil’s interests.

A fundamental premise of Williams’s argument that immortality would necessarily be

tedious is his belief that there is no such object; and, of course, this is far from a

metaphysically neutral belief. “Nothing less will do for eternity,” he writes, “than something

that makes boredom unthinkable. What could that be? Something that could be guaranteed

to be at every moment utterly absorbing? But if a man has and retains a character, there is

no reason to suppose that there is anything that could be that.” 14 Before we are done, we will

have to contemplate the possibility that Williams here rejects.

If an endlessly prolonged existence might have, as Christine Overall puts it, the feel of “severe

insomnia, in which, having been awake for seemingly endless hours without respite, one

feels tired of being aware and exhausted by being oneself and wants only the nothingness of

unconsciousness that is afforded, temporarily, by sleep,” 15 it may be that the problem it poses

for us would be better described as exhaustion than as boredom. That offers a related but

slightly different spin to the idea that the finitude of our capacities gives each person’s life a

distinct character.

This approach, argued in careful detail by Overall, suggests that a person physically

enabled to live forever would — if truly human — still be limited in various ways and, in

particular, limited in brain capacity. There fore, at some point in his endless existence he might well have used to the full all the capacities his brain and body had to offer. “Because of

the body’s finitude, the body’s constancy, so to speak, the immortal would eventually exhaust

the capacities to do, to learn, and to experience new things that were within the scope of his

particular body. Although the repetition of old familiar activities would still be possible for

the immortal, the problem is that even if he had extraordinary abilities and intel ligence,

every activity he undertook would eventually be ‘used up.’ ” 16

From this perspective, the problem of a never -ending human life is not best described as

boredom, since, aft er all, repeated activities and experiences of interest would still be

possible. The problem is simply that they are endlessly repeated activities and experiences.

No room remains for growth and development.

Is this really a problem? Here again, I suspect, we can see how any discussion of the

desirability of an endless human existence is embedded from the outset in normative claims

about what is or is not truly desirable. For example, Overall reports with favor — but to my

horror — how “many elderly people with whom I have discussed the longevity issue

emphasize that one of the extraordinary gifts of their years after retirement is the

opportunity to learn a variety of new things.” The point of living longer for them is to become

“more than we’ve ever been b efore” — to continue to grow. 17 To which I can only say that if I

thought the price of retirement were that I had to continue to grow in countless new ways, I

would simply keep on grading student papers and forego the Social Security checks.

We need an argument to show that endless growth, constant new achievements and

accomplishments, is more desirable than regular repetition of certain enjoyable experiences.

This does not mean, of course, that endless repetition of enjoyable experiences is sufficient

to satisfy the human heart; it means only that for some of us it may be more attractive than

an endless treadmill of accomplishment. But whether we prefer the image of continued

growth or that of endless repetition of enjoyable experiences, Overall is right to discern a

deep problem here — a problem that she calls an “axiological double bind.”

It arises quite naturally. Perhaps some of us are attracted by the idea of endless growth

and accomplishment. Perhaps others of us think we could endlessly enjoy certain repeated

experiences. Or perhaps some of us, focusing less on ourselves, might simply believe that the

virtue of love (which says to the loved one, “It’s good that you exist”) prov ides a sufficient

reason for continuing to live. In any or all of these circumstances, we seem on our way to

aiming at a kind of immortality. If a point need never come at which we would feel we had

used up life’s possibilities for growth, lost the capacit y for enjoyment, or wearied of love, we

seem committed to the value of an indefinitely extended human life. Yet, continual growth

or indefinitely repeated experience seems incompatible with the picture of life as having

stages, or as like a meal with a fix ed order of courses, which moves through its trajectory to,

at some point, its end. Thus, Overall argues, an immortal life may not seem “to be a

recognizably human life” — and we find ourselves in that axiological double bind. 18 To live

forever, not to be constrained by the limits of finite human bodies, is to be godlike. So if we

have good reason to want to live forever, we may be wishing — or striving — to be something

other than human beings.

And we are back to the same fork in the road. It could be that human beings are not meant

to live forever. Or it could be that we’re not meant to live this kind of life forever, that part of

the point of this life is to draw us on to somethin g still more fulfilling. Either belief would be

a way of coming to terms with the axiological double bind.

There remains yet a third angle of vision from which we could find reason to wonder

whether a distinctively human life should go on forever. Martha Nussbaum has argued at

length that many of the virtues we value most get their point precisely from the limi ts of

human life — and, in particular, of course, the limit of mortality. Hence, she suggests, “the

removal of all finitude in general, mortality in particular, would not so much enable these

values to survive eternally as bring about the death of value as we know it.” 19

Greek culture did us the service, she thinks, of carrying out “the thought experiment” of

imagining what life would be like for immortals — that is, for the Olympian gods. And the

first thing to see about their life, she says, is that “they cannot have the virtue of courage.” 20

This impossibility will, she believes, also have implications for o ther virtues. If I cannot be

harmed, I cannot risk everything for someone I love.

While Nussbaum’s point is, strictly speaking, true about the Olympians, its reach may be

less than we at first suppose. Human beings might, for example, conquer disease and m aster

the aging process and thereby learn how to live an indefinitely extended life — but without

becoming invulnerable to enemies. To remain eternally young is not the same as being

bullet -proof. Moreover, there are circumstances that do not involve the t hreat of bodily

harm, much less death, but that still require courage. For example, articulating and defending

a widely unpopular view, because one believes it to be true, may threaten loss of reputation

or friends and require a good bit of courage.

Nussba um realizes this, of course. She sees that by “reimporting” into a heavenly eternal

life pains and disabilities that approach but fall somewhat short of mortality, we may carve

out a place even there for virtues such as courage and sacrificial love. “But t hat is the point:

the further mortality is removed, the further they [the virtues] are.” 21

It is indeed the point. And we are reminded yet again that there is no single, metaphysically

neut ral conception of immortality for us to evaluate. After all, the only conception of heaven,

of an everlasting life, in which Christians have any stake is one where the Lamb who was

slain is now enthroned. Perhaps the Olympians, at no risk of being harmed, can have no place

for the virtue of courage, but where the Lamb reigns the courage that produced such a

heaven is not forgotten but is endlessly honored. We have, therefore, no reason to accept

Nussbaum’s contention that in heaven there is “no loving frien d whose love is such that he

risks everything on account of his friend.” 22 Quite the opposite, in fact. Mortality, courage, and

the love of friends have been “reimported” into this heaven, since the risen Christ still bears

bodily the nail prints in his hands. But so has the triumph of the Lamb been reimported. The

courage that is no longer needed for battle remains for splendor. And if we insist that,

mortality having been overcome, the pat hos and nobility of courage cannot really be present

in this heaven, what is that but to insist that we would rather honor ourselves as fragile and

vulnerable than honor the triumph of the Lamb?

What should be evident by now, I hope, is that the desirabi lity of living forever cannot be

analyzed in the abstract, apart from the thick webs of belief in which ideas of immortality are

embedded. There is no single concept of immortality, and I will therefore take up the

question specifically in Christian terms. Christians have thought of the promised eternal life in two somewhat different ways — as a “beatific vision,” and as a “new heaven and new

earth.” From the perspective of these possibilities, boredom could be our fate only in hell.

Bernard Williams had fo und, we remember, no reason to suppose there could be anything

or anyone “that could be guaranteed to be at every moment utterly absorbing.” There is, I

suppose, no indefeasible argument to persuade us that he is wrong and that, say, Dante’s

Paradiso is ri ght. Nonetheless, if the search is on for an utterly absorbing object, some may

find in Dante’s classic depiction of the vision of God a deeper truth than Williams seems able

to imagine (or, perhaps, hope for).

If we are made by and for God, then we cannot for a moment understand ourselves — or

the other good things of our world — apart from the relation to God. We cannot gain a

detached or neutral standpoint from which to see and know ourselves whole. The self that I

am is known, finally, only to God — and , hence, in Augustine’s famous formula, that self is

continually on the way, drawn out of itself, until it rests in God. To care rightly for our own

existence is, therefore, impossible apart from that love which says to God, “It’s good that you

exist.”

Eve ry created good that we experience and love may finally fail us, may lack the power to

be an utterly — and indefinitely — absorbing object of our love. Perhaps, taken alone and

isolated as no created goods should be, they would finally be “used up” and cou ld no longer

engage our attention; perhaps, loving them in isolation, we would one day end in boredom.

Perhaps, as a character in Wallace Stegner’s The Spectator Bird puts it, having walked

“through the world’s great kitchen from end to end,” we might then “arrive at the back door

hungry.” 23

But the restless heart is not hungry simply for more of the same, for an indefinite

prolongation or development of the life we now experience. The delights of this life, even

though they are not all -absorbing, are hints that something else — something qualitatively

different and not just a quantitative extension of our present experience — is available, even

if there is no guarantee that we will find or attain it. The language of “beatific vision” is one

way in which Christians have characterized that qualitatively different existence whose

goodness can never be exhausted.

One who has been drawn through Christ into the mutual giving and receiving in love that

constitutes God’s life will have found the face of beauty — that utterly absorbing face — of

which all other beauties are intimations. “There,” as Augustine writes, “we shall be still and

see; we shall see and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise.” 24 The inclination to

adore, which is inscribed in our very being, will have found its proper object. And, as Carol

Zaleski suggests, “adoration cannot be boring, for one is gazing at the face of the beloved, and

the face of the beloved is inexhaustible.” 25 A love of adoration that would be misguided and

idolatrous if directed toward any oth er face here finds the One it has been seeking. Williams

is right to suggest that a human being will have a distinct and limited character, which he

then takes to mean that the attention of such a distinct person could not be indefinitely

captured without tedium by anything or anyone. Unless, we might respond, unless one

feature of that distinctively human character is that we are created to enjoy the presence of

God and cannot be adequately characterized apart from that end.

We should, though, be clear abo ut one important point: The restless heart longs to live

forever because it longs for God — not vice versa. To live an indefinitely prolonged life but

never to see God, to be always on the way but with no telos that gives a point to the journey, might be p leasant in many ways, but it could not satisfy the heart’s deepest desire. Perhaps,

of course, nothing can. Perhaps Christians deceive themselves, and there is only the journey

and our attempts to prolong it and keep it interesting and engaging.

If so, our options will be clear. We may pursue an indefinitely prolonged (but, in the

technical sense, “pointless”) life, with its possibilities for love and delight. Or we may prefer

a life whose limits give it shape and form, like a banquet of many courses that m ust —

precisely in order to be the good thing it is — come to an end. Were those our only

alternatives, we might be hard pressed to say which is more to be desired.

And, of course, even if Christians do not deceive themselves, it is possible to say no to t he

beatific vision: to decline the call of the restless heart and prefer an indefinite prolongation

of life as we know it or a limited life whose trajectory moves ineluctably through decline to

death. One need not adore — need not be still and see, see and love, love and praise. We have

already noted how Nussbaum seems to prefer heroic virtue in the face of vulnerability to the

vision of a God who has taken that vulnerability into his own life, overcoming and

transforming it. Although she sees this as an af firmation of human bonds of love and

friendship, if those bonds cannot be fully and properly human unless brought into relation

with God and thereby transformed, hers becomes a prescription not so much for acceptance

of vulnerability as for heroic defiance of reality and a refusal to love human beings in the

truth of their created reality.

From a rather different angle, the philosopher Jay F. Rosenberg, analyzing Williams’s

arguments, comments at one point: “It has always struck me that most traditional

con ceptions of Heaven are notoriously vague about what one who was (ostensibly) fortunate

enough to get there would actually be doing there. They seem to posit that one’s ‘eternal

reward’ would consist in just being there, ‘in God’s presence.’ But to judge by received

accounts, God wouldn’t even be an interesting conversational partner.” 26 Passing by the

flippancy, which will have to find one day its own answer, the charge of vagueness is

understandable as an initial reaction, but not as a considered one. Whatever we may say

about Williams’s belief that boredom must eventually result, even our ordinary earthly loves

are often so absorbing and engaging that we eagerly desire “more time” for them. Adam, in

Shaw’s “Metabiological Pentateuch,” did not want to live forever, but he did settle upon the

nice round figure of one thousand years. If our ordinary human loves are so engaging, it is

far from clear why God should not be an infinitely i nteresting conversation partner, even if

the chumminess of the image does not capture very well what the experience would actually

be like.

The language of beatific vision — of endlessly fascinating attention to the presence of a loved

one — is not the o nly way Christians have spoken of what it would mean to live forever with

God. They have also spoken of — and hoped for — a “new creation” and a resurrection of the

body, though a body that rides time and is not ridden by it. Of course, Christians do not

exactly offer an argument for the possibility or likelihood of this. They simply believe it has

already once happened. Thus C. S. Lewis recounts “the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever

knew” once saying to him, “ ‘All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It

almost looks as if it had really happened once.’ ” 27 The risen Jesus becomes the promise — a kind of down payment — that the new creation

will come in God’s good time. As Georges Florovsky, the great Eastern Orthodox theologian,

wrote, “From henceforth [that is, after the resurrection of Jesus] every disembodiment is

temporary.” 28

It is not easy to picture a life that is both endless and endlessly appealing. (Very probably

fewer readers have been captivated by the Paradiso than by the Inferno or the Purgatorio. )

Among the most engaging depictions of such an endless life is The Las t Battle, seventh and

last of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. Readers — both children and adults — who have

made their way through the first six of the Chronicles are likely to have learned to love Narnia

as much as do the children who have been drawn out of our world into Narnian history.

When Narnia is under mortal attack, as it is in The Last Battle, they may want to echo words

Jill speaks to Jewel, the Unicorn. “ ‘Oh Jewel — wouldn’t it be lovely if Narnia just went on

and on — like what you said it has been?’ ” 29

In response Jewel does not, like Bernard Williams, argue that it would be boring to live

forever; but, still, he knows better than simply to endorse Jill’s understa ndable desire. “ ‘Nay,

sister,’ answered Jewel, ‘all worlds draw to an end; except Aslan’s own country.’ ” And when

night falls on Narnia and the children and Narnians are driven through the stable door, they

find themselves in a world of sunlight and colo r, mountains and waterfalls — a world in

which everything that was good and beautiful in Narnia seems somehow to have survived

and to be even “more real” than it had been in Narnia itself. They are, in fact, in Aslan’s world.

“It is,” Lewis writes,

as hard to explain how this sunlit land was different from the old Narnia, as it would be

to tell you how the fruits of that country taste. Perhaps you will get some idea of it, if

you think like this. You may have been in a room in which there was a window that

looked out on a lovely bay of the sea or a green valley that wound away among

mountains. And in the wall of that room opposite to the window there may have been a

looking glass. And as you turned away from the window you suddenly caught sight of

that sea o r that valley, all over again, in the looking glass. And the sea in the mirror, or

the valley in the mirror, were in one sense just the same as the real ones: yet at the same

time they were somehow different — deeper, more wonderful, more like places in a

story: in a story you never heard but very much want to know. The difference between

the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country:

every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more. 30

And Jewel, stamping his hoof on the ground, cries out the Augustinian truth: “ ‘This is the

land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we

loved the old Narnia is that i t sometimes looked a little like this.’ ” 31

The rallying cry in that world — the rallying cry of the book’s last chapters — is “further

up and further in.” The children and the Narnians go running t hrough winding valleys and

up steep hills — up waterfalls, even — meeting countless characters from the earlier stories,

many of whom they have known only as almost legendary figures. This new world is, Mr.

Tumnus the Faun tells them, “ ‘like an onion: exc ept that as you continue to go in and in, each

circle is larger than the last.’ ” 32 At the heart of this endlessly expanding world is, of course,

Aslan himself, drawing them into a story “which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is

better than the one before.” 33 Of course, there are mysteries here, and there is no hope of understanding them or feeling

their force unless we are prepared t o meet them halfway. The idea of a risen human body,

which rides time and is not ridden by it, is surely strange. Yet, as the philosopher Stephen

Clark notes in his reflections on science fiction and philosophy, “resurrected beings are not

‘the same’ becau se they have ‘the same body’: their bodies are the same because they are.” 34

And they are only because their existence — and resurrected existence — is God’s

handiwork.

When week a fter week throughout the world Christians confess (in the words of the

Apostles’ Creed) their belief in “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting,” it is

strange to suppose we should talk in the abstract about whether a never -ending life would

be tedious or would be less desirable than one in which we remained vulnerable, as if there

were some neutral conception of such a life on which all agree. There is not. Any conception

of immortality worth exploring must be embedded within a larger and ri cher context of

belief and practice. “We live,” as Stephen Clark writes, “between uncomprehended

immensities, at the mercy of whatever powers stalk the night. Theists may believe, by faith,

that there is a light beyond the darkness. At least that faith mak es sense. The mere conviction

that the darkness is itself bright day makes none at all.” 35

CHAPTER FOUR

A Generative Life

[N]or would there be any reason, why any man should desire to have children, or take the care

to nourish and instruct them, if they were afterwards to have no other benefit from them, than

from other men.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Each of us comes into a wo rld that has been prepared for us by our predecessors. While

generosity is appropriate throughout life, it takes on a distinctive character in old age. More

and more, one works for a future that others, not oneself, will enjoy.

Edward Collins Vacek, S.J., “Vices and Virtues of Old -age Retirement”

ONCE WE HAVE produced the next generation, or passed the age when we might have done so,

nature does not seem to work very hard to keep us alive. Hence, built deep into our biology

is a close connection between re production and aging. Moreover, as we have already seen,

the one method that almost surely works to extend the life span — caloric restriction —

exacts a price of reduced fertility or infertility. Here, too, there appears to be a connection

between reprodu ction and life span.

We can, it seems, work to secure our own future, or we can commit ourselves to our

children and others of their generation. We may try to avoid this dilemma by taking comfort

in the fact that, as evolutionary biologists remind us, to r eproduce is to pass on our genes to

the next generation and in that sense to survive and be a winner in the game of life. I doubt,

though, whether this is the kind of survival for which most of us hope.

I have borrowed the term “generativity” from the work of Erik Erikson, who may rightly

be called “the father of all life cycle studies.” 1 We have no term especially apt for naming the

virtue that makes us ready, even eager, to produce those who will replace us and to sacrifice

ourselves on their behalf. “Generativity” will have to do. One might, of course, argue that this

willingness is not virtue but, simply, animal instinct, and perhaps to some degree it is. But

Thomas Hobbes did not seem to think that a sufficient explanation. He could think of no

reason why parents should have or nourish children apart from the benefits they would gain

from their offspring, and only in this way could he make sense of the command that children

should honor their parents. 2

Erikson delineates eight stages of the life cycle, in each o f which, he believes, a person

needs to acquire certain strengths that make possible growth and development. He

characterizes generativity, the seventh stage, as “primarily the interest in establishing and

guiding the next generation.” 3 He does regard it as, to some degree, an instinctual power

undergirding the various forms of selfless caring that adults undertake. Generativity is more

than that, however, for it must be formed and shaped. As he himself notes, the etymological

history of the term “virtue” has to do with a kind of strength “by virtue of” which we are

enabled to act powerfully and effectively. 4 Thus, when an analyst says that a patient has

improved, he has in mind “an increase in the strength and staying power of the patient’s

concentration on pursuits which are somehow right.” 5

There may, of course, be many ways in which we enact this concern to care for and guide

the next generation. 6 Not only reproduction and parental nurture, but also the teaching o f

needed skills or transmitting of a culture’s system of meaning are included in the virtue of

generativity. But the most obvious — and perhaps the most demanding — expression of

generativity is having and rearing children. Erikson observes on more than on e occasion that

human beings need to teach the next generation, whether through the obvious form of

parental nurture or in countless other, less immediate ways. His concept of “cogwheeling” is

“the idea that the needs of the young and those of adults inter lock, activate one another, and

propel each other through the life cycle. One should think of this less as a calculated exchange

and more as an intermeshing of gears that are finely tuned to fit one another.” 7 Only through

such care for the next generation can we avoid self -absorption. “Individuals who do not

develop generativity often begin to indulge themselves as if they were their own one and

only child.” 8

We should never underestimate just how demanding such care is. It is demanding not only

in the obvious claims it makes upon our time, our energy, and our resources; it is also psychologically demanding in th at it asks us to expend ourselves generously on behalf of

those who will replace us. As Edward Vacek puts it, “More and more, one works for a future

that others, not oneself, will enjoy.” 9 It is hard to imagine any greater disciplining of — or,

perhaps even, attack upon — our tendency toward self -absorption. Our desire to extend and

secure our own future is, to some degree, in conflict with our need to teach the next

generation and to leave behind us something of worth.

Here, as so often when we think about aging, it becomes clear that the several goods we

desire may be unable to coexist. Whatever the gain might be of retarding aging and extending

life indefinitely, doing so could un dermine the relation between the generations that shapes

and defines so much of our life. Consider the following report of a conversation between

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Johann Eckermann:

“From the letters I have written in that period,” said Goethe , “I can see quite clearly how

one has in every age in life certain advantages and disadvantages in comparison with

earlier or later years. For instance, in my forties I was about some things as clear and

clever as I am today, and in many respects even bet ter; but now in my eighties I have

yet some advantages which I would not exchange for the ones I had then.”

“While you are saying this,” [Eckermann] said, “I envisage the metamorphosis of

plants, and I understand very well that one would not like to return from the period of

bloom to the time of leafing, nor from the stage of seed and fruit to the time of blossoms.”

“Your simile,” said Goethe, “catches my meaning perfectly. Take a well -lobed, mature

leaf,” he went on with a smile, “do you think it would lik e to go back from its freest

unfolding into the oppressive closeness of the cotyledon?” 10

Perhaps, of course, some of us will consider the trade well worth making. After all, human

beings are considerably more complicated organisms than plants are. Like other animals and

unlike plants, we are not rooted in place; characterized by perception, desire, and movement,

we transcend naturally given limitations to a much greater degree. Sti ll more, the human

animal is marked also by a capacity for reflection, a capacity that brings with it creative

possibilities for transforming natural limits. 11 However we sort out and rank the several

goods at which such a creature might aim, we do need to recognize that they are to some

degree incompatible. We cannot have both an indefinitely extended life span and the virtue

of generativity, for the whole point of retarding aging is that we do not want to be replaced.

Although scholars include in Erikson’s seventh stage the task of “letting go of those people

and things that have been generated and cared for,” 12 it is also instructive to note a certain

tension between generativity and the inevitable need to disengage somewhat as we age.

Aging requires the patience — both with ourselves and with our world — to acknowledge

the limits of what we can do for thos e who come after us and replace us. On the one hand,

therefore, we cannot simply grasp for more — and, indefinitely, more — life without risking

the manifold ways our lives are enriched by the relation between the generations. But, on

the other hand, simpl y affirming the goodness of the life cycle also seems inadequate. It offers

no guarantee, after all, that our generous care for those who succeed us will have any lasting

significance. I suspect that the virtue of generativity needs something more than it can itself

provide. What generativity needs is a hope that is grounded in more than the relentless

continuation of the life cycle. 13 It needs a transcendent ground, the confidence that our care for the next generation will have lasting significance, and that whatever is incomplete in our

care will be completed by the God whose very being is truly generative.

Biology teaches us that we may have to choose between age -retardation and a generative

commitment to the next generation. But biology cannot tell us what to choose or on what

basis to choose. Perhaps in an age when there was little we could do to extend the maximum

life span, it might have seemed that we could simply read off f rom our biological nature the

importance of the virtue of generativity. That age is fast fleeting, however, and our capacity

for technological transformation of human nature will no longer allow us to take for granted

an ongoing cycle of generations. Thus, as the philosopher Richard Sherlock puts it, “On the

one hand, nature counsels against dramatic increases or changes in life [span], and on the

other, our natural attachment to life combined with our natural creativity and inventiveness

leads us to pursue and possibly achieve a dramatic increase in our longevity — which we

were supposedly counseled against by nature itself.” 14

When nature gives us such mixed messages, it should be no surprise to find that some will

prefer an indefinitely extended life to embeddedness within a cycle of generations (and the

aging it necessarily entails). This seems to me worth our attention and concern, but others

see little cause for worry. Thus, Sus an Jacoby characterizes Leon Kass’s idea (though it is

hardly an idea peculiarly his) that “people would be less likely to have children if the average

life span increased significantly” as “[o]ne of Kass’s weirder scenarios.” She thinks it “odd to

suspect that human beings would stop wanting to reproduce simply because they thought

they might live to 100 or 120 rather than 80.” 15 Over against her intuitions we might set Larry

Temkin’s view that “speaking for myself, I think it would be terrible if I came to regard my

mother or daughter, not so much as a mother or daughter, but as a peer.” And Temkin — in

a comment that captures ni cely the complex relation between life -extension and the virtue

of generativity — notes how odd it would be if such long -lived folk did, in fact, continue to

reproduce: “I, for one, don’t relish the prospect that if only I lived long enough, I might no

lon ger care about, or even remember, my first set of children.” 16

Jacoby is, however, relatively unconcerned. “None of the scientists involved in aging

research,” she writes, “have be en talking about delaying puberty — the only imaginable

scenario in which either sex or reproduction could be put off, for the vast majority of people,

much beyond the fertility window that now extends, roughly, from the mid -teens to the early

forties.” 17

“Susan Jacoby,” one wants to say, “meet Stanley Shostak, author of Becoming Immortal. ”

Shostak has a plan, or at least a vision, of how we might go about producing immortal human

beings by using both cloning and stem cell therapy prenatally. Neither, taken alone, can really

provide immortality. Cloning simply replicates an organism but cannot sustain the life of a

particular individual indefinitely. And stem cell therapy, while it may rejuvenate an

organism, cannot do so forever and simply delays the inevitable denouement. Put them

together, however, and Shostak thinks we may be able to produce people who are equipped

with a never -ending supply of embryonic stem cells that can rejuvenate their bod ies. The

idea is that, as early as possible in embryonic development, we would replace the embryo’s germ cells with a cloned blastocyst that would be a permanent generator of embryonic stem

cells, a never -ending resource for bodily regeneration.

In biologi cal development as we know it now, individual human beings are mortal; they

age and die. But the DNA of their germ cells passes from one generation to the next and is in

that way immortal. “From the point of view of biologists,” as Shostak puts it, “achiev ing

immortality depends simply on reversing these roles, creating an endless flow in the somatic

line at the expense of the germ line.” 18 We should be clear about what this means. It means

producing people who, in order that they may be effectively immortal, must “be sterile and

remain at a preadolescent age forever but otherwise appear and be perfectly normal.” 19 I find

it hard not to flag the word “otherwise” so casually inserted into that sentence — as if one

could be indefinitely preadolescent but, apart from that minor technicality, “perfectly

normal.”

Still, we understand the point. In human development, as we ordinarily think of it, the aim

is to become a sexually mature adult who is capable of producing the next generation —

thereby starting the whole process over again. But this is a kind of development that is

predicated on the opposite of individual surviva l. It requires that one generation give way to

the next, and it defines maturity in just such terms. Thus, if we want not an endless round of

individuals living out the life cycle but, rather, immortal individuals, we must cease to aim at

maturity understo od in its ordinary sense.

Shostak invites us to see such a shift — “grabbing life” at the prepubescent stage and

preserving it there — as desirable.

This means preserving human beings at a stage before they are completely developed

and mature but at which life is full of excitement, experience, learning, adventure, and,

above all, meaning. Imagine a pre -adolescent, at the physiological age of about eleven,

living forever! Such individuals would be close to adulthood and capable of living a

relatively fulfil ling life, enjoying life and contributing their creativity to it, albeit not

reproducing. Immortal, these human beings would be forever young, never fully grown

or sexually mature, but never aging. 20

One wonders what a gathering of middle school teachers would have to say about this

proposal. To be sure, Shostak does not necessarily suppose that everyone should be

immortalized by being permanently juvenilized in this way. But we could, he thi nks, at least

produce some individuals who, because they did not reproduce, would be well suited to live

in a world with limited resources and, because so long -lived, would have the wisdom to deal

with problems as they arise. Nevertheless, he also seems to regard a permanently healthy

and youthful life as desirable in itself. Such people will be intellectually creative and “in a

perpetual learning mode.” 21 A world of these immortals “will be fill ed with intellectual

excitement and dedicated to creative enterprise.” 22 One wonders, though. If Erikson was right

and human beings have a need to care for the next generation, just how fulfilli ng — how fully

human — will such a life be? We might, at any rate, remind ourselves of Goethe’s alternative

vision, his suggestion that “a well -lobed, mature leaf” would not want “to go back from its

freest unfolding into the oppressive closeness of the co tyledon.”

Shostak himself sees some of these issues. In fact, he reflects in quite interesting ways on

how the experience of time might be changed for immortals produced in the way he

envisions. “Instead of ‘living by the clock,’ time will be immaterial fo r the immortals. It will be infinitely accessible, neither running down nor running out.” Such immortal creatures will

be able to give little sense to a term such as “lifetime.” They will experience many different

moments, but these moments “will not be re called in seriatim, akin to the passage of time.” 23

Perhaps Shostak exaggerates what the experience of these immortals would be like, but

imagine living in such a constant present, having little experience of past or future. How shall

we characterize such a life? Is it a godlike existence? Is a desire for this the engine driving

this program? Or, since we are thinking of human beings, should we have in mind a

naturalistic analogue of the life of resurrected believers in heaven — minus, of course, any

shared object of their love and praise? If so, then, at the very least, anyone drawn to such a

project of indefinite life extension should not find the hope of religious believers to be silly

or stran ge. And believers have the advantage — or so it seems to me — of not supposing that

this transformation could be the product of their own unaided insight and technical

expertise. As in politics, so also in science, hope for a gift that comes only through d ivine

power is made immanent, the work of our hands. I am not inclined to call that progress.

Whatever we may think of these metaphysical reflections, the implication for earthly life

as we know it is clear, and Shostak sees it with clarity. If we wish to eliminate aging, we must

also eliminate sex and reproduction. In a world in which the human life span has been

indefinitely extended, there will be little place for what I have called the virtue of

generativity. For that virtue is grounded in the successio n of generations, in the fact that

those whom we generate are not simply our descendants but also our replacements.

We cannot yet even begin to carry out the program of juvenilization that Shostak

envisions; perhaps we never will be able. But, as I noted e arlier, were the day to come when

we could, when our creative power over nature’s givens had been developed that far, nature

itself could not teach us whether such an “advance” was to be desired. For, would it really be

an advance? Larry Temkin directs our attention to a prayer used on the Jewish Day of

Atonement, spoken to comfort those who had lost loved ones, and offering an alternative

vision of what is desirable: “If some messenger were to come to us with the offer that death

should be overthrown, but with the one inseparable condition that birth should also cease;

if the existing generations were given the chance to live forever but on the clear

understanding that never again would there be a child or a youth, or a first love, never again

new persons w ith new hopes, new ideas, new achievements; ourselves for always and never

any others — could the answer be in doubt?” 24

Both the succession of generations nourished by the virtue of generativity and the free

creativity that seeks to overcome the need for that succession belong to our nature.

Embedded by our finitude in time, we seek in our freedom to transcend it. A freedom that

knows no limit may, however, begin to look more destr uctive than creative. That is why the

qualitatively different life for which Christian believers have hoped has not been thought to

be in any sense simply an extension of this life — or the product of human ingenuity. As the

gift of God, a new creation, it means being drawn into the life shared by Father, Son, and

Spirit. If we long for something more than an endless succession of generations, that is the

condition toward which Christian hope should be directed. In the meantime, perhaps we

should be more co ncerned to produce and nurture the next generation than to extend our

own indefinitely.

Because nothing is obvious here, however, we might ask ourselves a simple question: Why

have children?

Among the most noteworthy answers in our tradition is that give n by Diotima to Socrates

and recounted in his speech in praise of love in Plato’s Symposium: Longing for immortality,

love desires to create. The best we mortal creatures can do to perpetuate ourselves, the

closest mortal beings who are not divine can come to immortality, is to ensure “that there

will always be a younger generation to take the place of the old.” 25

Of course, Diotima (and Socrates) finally envision a transformation o f this creative impulse

from love of bodies (where it is given a particular location) to philosophical love of the form

of all beauty wherever it appears. Yet, moving as the speech of Socrates is, I doubt whether

this is the right way to account for the de sire to have children, for it is far from clear that the

self -spending impulse to create life out of love’s embrace is really an attempt at self -

perpetuation or the fruit of our desire for immortality. I suspect that Aristotle, as always

lower to the groun d than Plato, comes closer to the truth when he focuses on the imperatives

of our animal nature. “Male and female must unite for the reproduction of the species — not

from deliberate intention, but from the natural impulse, which exists in animals generall y as

it also exists in plants, to leave behind them something of the same nature as themselves.” 26

We might even say that Aristotle here discerns in nature the divine blessing enunciated in

Genesis 1, that plants and animals are to bring forth each “according to its kind.”

To be sure, it is also true that in the Genesis account human reproduction accor ding to its

kind is not left simply to animal impulse. The divine word directed to humankind, “be fruitful

and multiply,” is not only blessing but also command. Evidently there is meaning and

significance to be found in human procreation and the succession of generations to which it

gives rise. We might, therefore, set aside a search for what motivates human beings to

reproduce themselves and ask instead what deeper purposes in human life are served when

we have children. And when we seek to articulate thos e purposes, the three kinds of virtue

that the Christian tradition has characterized as “theological” — faith, hope, and love — may

offer clues.

The faith that it is worthwhile and good to pass life on to the next generation is grounded

in a sense of grati tude for our own life. That anything — ourselves included — should exist

at all, that there should be something rather than nothing, is a mystery. G. K. Chesterton,

remembering an occasion when the sons of his elderly grandfather were criticizing the

Gener al Thanksgiving in the prayer book on the ground that many people had little reason

to be thankful for their creation, recalled his grandfather’s reply: “The old man, who was then

so old that he hardly ever spoke at all, said suddenly out of his silence, ‘ I should thank God

for my creation if I knew I was a lost soul.’ ” 27

Before the sheer wonder of existence we must simply bend the knee. That bent knee is

nicely depicted and evoked in The Children of Men, a novel by P. D. James, set in Great Britain

in the year 2021. When the story opens, we learn that no children have been born anywhere

in the world since 1995. All males have, for reasons unknown, become infertile, and, hence,

the gift of life cannot be passed on. P. D. James helps us feel what such a world would be like

by presenting it through the eyes of an Oxford historian, Theo Faron. Fascinated with a young

woman named Julian, Theo allies himself with a small movement to which she belongs, a

revolutionary group aiming to overthrow the dictatorship ruling Britain. But such political means and goals are put to the side when Julian becomes pregnant (by a priest, Luke, who is

also a member of their group).

Julian needs to avoid det ection until she has given birth, and so they turn to Theo for help.

Coming by night to their hiding place, he needs to be convinced that she can actually be

carrying a child. Placing his hand on her abdomen, he feels the child kick, and Julian tells him

to listen to its heartbeat.

It was easier for him to kneel, so he knelt, unselfconsciously, not thinking of it as a

gesture of homage but knowing that it was right that he should be on his knees. He

placed his right arm around her waist and pressed his ear against her stomach. He

couldn’t hear the beating heart, but he could hear and feel the movements of the child,

feel its life. He was swept by a tide of emotion which rose, buffeted and engulfed him in

a turbulent surge of awe, excitement, and terror, then receded, leaving him spent and

weak. 28

Gratitude for the sheer wonder of life, faithfulness to the gift we have been given, is at the

heart of human procreation, and it is a rathe r different thing from just hanging on to the gift

and attempting to perpetuate our own life indefinitely. Paradoxically, this may become

clearer to us only as we age, only as we are no longer moved simply by the “natural impulse”

to leave behind something of the same nature as ourselves that Aristotle discerned. Indeed,

Age is the hour for praise,

Praise that is joy, praise that is acquiescence,

Praise that is adoration and gratitude

For all that has been given and not been given. 29

Faithfulness to the life we have received, however long or short, requires that we see gift and

grace at the heart of our existence, that we develop the capacity for praise “for all that has

been given a nd not been given.”

If faithfulness looks to the past, hope looks to the future. When, in gratitude for the life we

have been given, we generate others like ourselves, when we help to nurture and educate

them, we are acknowledging and accepting a world tha t we cannot entirely control or

master. Hence, having and caring for children does something not only for those children but

also to and for us. It trains us in virtue. There is, we should not forget, a fundamental

difference between a desire to reproduce ourselves or produce an heir and a hopeful spirit

willing to give birth to those who will one day replace both us and our projects.

This does not mean, of course, that we should be utterly passive before the next

generation. The children we produce we also rear, nurture, and civilize. We pass on, as best

we can, a way of life that is distinctively human. But if we are looking to the future in hope,

we pass it on, not simply on our own authority or as one final attempt at mastery, but with

confidence in God’ s continued commitment to his creation. Our care and nurture of the next

generation should be in service of wisdom, not power. Thus, the psalmist writes:

I will utter dark sayings from of old,

things that we have heard and known,

that our fathers have told us.

We will not hide them from their children,

but tell to the coming generation the glorious deeds of the L ORD , and his might,

and the wonders which he has wrought.

He established a testimony in Jacob,

and appointed a law in Israel,

which he commanded ou r fathers

to teach to their children;

that the next generation might know them,

the children yet unborn,

and arise and tell them to their children,

so that they should set their hope in God.

(Psalm 78:2 -7)

We cannot guarantee our children’s future or the f uture of children more generally.

Therefore, it is only with hope in power greater than our own that we can give life as freely

as we have received it, that gratitude can give rise to generosity.

Faithfulness looks to the past, hope looks to the future, an d love delights in the present —

not just in one’s own existence but also in the relation between the generations that marks

each present moment. Only thus can we be freed from the tendency to grasp the gift of life

and keep it for ourselves. The deepest m eaning of a gift, after all, is that it should not be

grasped too tightly. It should be received and enjoyed, but passed on.

Drawing on the legendary account of how Atalanta lost a race because she was distracted

by several golden apples tossed by her suit or, Hippomenes, who was thus able to defeat her

and gain her hand, C. S. Lewis pictures the constant exchange that love involves:

The golden apple of selfhood, thrown among the false gods, became an apple of discord

because they scrambled for it. They did not know the first rule of the holy game, which

is that every player must by all means touch the ball and then immediately pass it on.

To be found with it in your hands is a fault; to cling to it, death. But when it flies to and

fro among the players too s wift for eye to follow, and the great master Himself leads the

revelry, giving Himself eternally to His creatures in the generation, and back to Himself

in the sacrifice, of the Word, then indeed the eternal dance “makes heaven drowsy with

the harmony.” 30

Lewis here directs our attention to what Christians regard as the deepest ground of love: the

mutual self -giving that marks the divine life of Father, Son, and Spirit. Well before scholars

such as Marcel Mauss and Lewis Hyde had explored the complexity of gift exchanges,

Christians worshiped a God in whom from eternity the Father gives all that he is and has to

the Son, and the Son offers that life back to the Father — a giving and receiving that take

place in the bond of love, which is their Spirit.

Our aim in life should not, therefore, be simply to perpetuate ours indefinitely. Indeed, to

cling to it is death. The first rule of this game of life is, enjoying it, to pass it on — to establish

a succession of generations. In this way, by a kind of analogy, our life images the divine life

even here and now, as, learning the first rule of the holy game, we give way to those who

come after us. It turns out that the generative life is the only real alternative to the sort of

self -enclosure that makes no room for mutual love and that in fact is death. Why have children? Why should or need there ever be a generation other than our own

generation? Because the generative life, the relation bet ween the generations, is a school of

virtue in which we learn grateful faithfulness to the gift of life we have received, generous

hopefulness for those to whom we hand on that gift, and the love that freely gives what it has

freely received. Shaped and fo rmed in this school, we may come to see in our own lives that

“age is the hour for praise.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Patience

Our stories work best when they have an ending. As we surf the Internet, we’re in danger of

forgetting this basic truth. With hypertext, endings are irrelevant — because no one ever gets

to one. Reading gives way to surfing, a meandering, peripatetic journey through a maze of

threads. . . . If Jane Austen could see what her bo ok Pride and Prejudice has become on the

World Wide Web, she would faint dead away. In the first five sentences, there are four

invitations to go elsewhere.

David Shenk, The End of Patience

Be patient, therefore, brethren, until the coming of the Lord.

Jam es 5:7

ON HIS WIDELY read blog, known as “Instapundit,” Glenn Reynolds often links to stories

reporting on possible advances in scientific technologies aimed at age -retardation and life -

extension. And having linked to such a report, Reynolds regularly the n adds his own very

brief comment: “faster, please.” His is a kind of impatience with the psalmist’s description of

our life as “threescore years and ten,” or perhaps “by reason of strength fourscore”; for, even

if fourscore, those years “are soon gone, an d we fly away” (Ps. 90:10).

To set our modern thirst for indefinitely extended life over against the psalmist’s

acceptance of life’s limits suggests that reflection upon patience may be a fruitful angle from

which to consider the project of age -retardation . How might the virtue of patience guide our

thinking? On the one hand, patience seems to involve a kind of hopeful anticipation that could

move us to seek an indefinitely extended life span. But, on the other hand, patience also

suggests a capacity to per severe and to accept ills that cannot be avoided, an attitude that is

unlikely to move us to Promethean attempts at extending life. So we might wonder what, if

anything, would be the point of a virtue such as patience if our lives were extended well

beyond that biblical limit of fourscore years. Would patience still matter — or, perhaps,

matter even more? Would we still need patience and need to cultivate it in ourselves and in

others?

To be sure, it is hard to imagine a human life anything like the one we live for which the

virtue of patience would be entirely unnecessary. If to be human is to be embodied, all our

projects and activities will have to reckon with the kinds of limits that the body places upon

us, limits that keep us from doing whatever we des ire whenever we desire it. If to be human

is to be located, to live in a particular time and place, we can approach our goals and realize

our desires only in piecemeal fashion, one step at a time. And if to be human is to live within

communities of others who are like us, we will find that companionship necessarily requires

patience. 1 “How,” David Harned asks, “could we hold the simplest conversation if we were

not willing to wait f or the other to speak?” 2

All of this would still be true in a world in which human beings lived much longer than

they do now, in which the maximum human life span had been greatly extended. And all of

this is true even now in a world in which some among us hope and work for a day when an

indefinitely prolonged human life is possible. Nonetheless, it is worth pondering the point of

patience in a world of greatly extended life spans, and it is worth wondering what the role of

patience can be for those who here and now commit themselves wholeheartedly to the

project of indefinite life extension. After all, in our cultural tradition patience once meant

chiefly Stoic fortitude and passive endurance — and then later, reshaped by Christian belief

and the example of Christ, a less harsh and more hopeful but still submissive response to the

will of God. 3 Surely, the ac cents must be somewhat different in a world that aims at, or

achieves, a considerable advance in the human life span.

We can think of indefinitely extended life both as a condition that might one day be

achieved and as a project we might now undertake. How would the virtue of patience be

relevant to each of these?

“A being in unending time would be centrifugal,” Karl Barth writes. 4 Such a self, constantly

moving away from its cent er, would, no doubt, have countless opportunities to explore and projects to pursue. Were our lives centrifugal in this sense, busyness might be their leitmotif;

constant progress and betterment of the human condition might be their aim. Pursuing these

opp ortunities would take time, and successful completion of our projects would be unlikely

without at least some semblance of patience, which would be instrumentally necessary for

such success.

Nevertheless, buried in the deeper reaches of this centrifugal se lf would be a kind of

impatience, which Søren Kierkegaard, using an analogy from farming, characterizes in terms

of “the rotation method.” 5 One way continually to produce a good yi eld is constantly to change

fields — what Kierkegaard calls the “extensive” method of rotation. As an image for life more

generally, it suggests constant movement, constant change, “endless journeyings from star

to star,” erotic attractions without the fid elity of marriage. “This method defeats itself; it is

plain endlessness.” It needs patience instrumentally, as an aid in the pursuit of one goal or

another, but it is fundamentally restless, going nowhere in particular.

The alternative is an “intensive” me thod of rotation — in which, we might say, one goes

deeper rather than farther. As the farmer limited to one field must creatively change crops

and modes of cultivation, so a Don Juan who marries must abandon his desire for novelty

and learn how commitment to one woman can constantly renew love. “The more you limit

yourself, the more fertile you become in invention. A prisoner in solitary confinement for life

becomes very inventive, and a spider may furnish him with much entertainment.” The

intensive method of rotation requires a patience that cuts more deeply into the self, that

marks the inner person and is not simply a necessary means to one or another end. “What

does it profit a man,” Kierkegaard writes in one of his Christian discourses,

if he goes furt her and further and it must be said of him: he never stops going further;

when it also must be said of him: there was nothing that made him pause? For pausing

is not a sluggish repose. Pausing is also movement. It is the inward movement of the

heart. To pa use is to deepen oneself in awareness. But merely going further is to go

straight in the direction of superficiality. 6

Although I will suggest that the restless, extensive method o f rotation gives rise to a life

that is finally misdirected, we should not fail to give it its due. Even if a kind of impatience

and an inability simply to enjoy what is given characterize those who seek to extend life —

and extend it more and more — perha ps we should be somewhat more positive about them

than Kierkegaard is. They are not simply, as he tends to suggest, bored with life. And because

they are not, they remain human. “The devil, above all else, is bored,” writes William F. May. 7

He notes that for medieval moralists the vice of sloth — with its complete indifference to

created goods and the drying up of desire — was “the most terrifying of sins.” 8 Desire, even

when misdirected, even when not rightly ordered toward God, nonetheless acknowledges

the neediness that is the mark of the creature. For someone who still desires any created

good we may have hope; caring for something outside himself, he may learn to wait patiently

upon Goodness itself.

The defect of the extensive method of rotation is not chiefly the danger of boredom. It

would still offer plenty of occasions for joy. The danger is not so much boredom as

mea ninglessness, for such a life has no goal other than simple continuance. And to travel

through life in that condition is better described as wandering than as journeying. Without a

goal, without a home that we are seeking, it becomes harder to explain the point of going on. This is not a matter simply of getting lost now and then while on the way. Man, as G. K.

Chesterton once put it, “has always lost his way; but now he has lost his address.” 9

Hence, the only patience that would have a place within a centrifugal life of endless

opportunity would be entirely instrumental, a necessary means to one or another end.

However important that sort of patience undoubtedly is on many occasions, it does not

require a centered self. As David Shenk notes in his reflections on the world of hypertext that

we now inhabit, a life’s story that moves toward no ending can only meander — or surf, as

we say. 10 Going nowhere in particular, the self lacks any center other than the desire for still

more life; yet life, however long, can never be more than (as Barth puts it) “a fragment which

cries out for continuation.” 11

Thus, as long as our life is extended (however indefinitely) in time, patience as an

instrumental virtue will be needed. It suits our nature, marked, as it is, by temporality. But

human life is also ecstatic. Human desire reaches out beyond created, temporal goods toward

“home,” toward a condition that cannot be characterized simply in terms of ever new and

expanding opportunities — that requires an intensive, not just an extensive, method of

rot ation. “There is,” as Barth says, “no god called Chronos.” 12 Hence, we need and seek “the

reality of duration and fulfillment, . . . which consists in the perfection of the relationship to

God and fellow -man.” 13 This asks of us a patience that is not instrumental but (we might say)

embedded. It requires a willingness to wait upon the universe, or, better, upon God.

Patience tha t is needed simply to gain something we want is no longer necessary when the

desired object has been attained. Of course, there will be other desired things — an endless

array — and patience will be needed as we grasp for each in turn. But in each case it will be

true that, the object of desire having been attained, patience ceases to be relevant. If,

however, the human person is ecstatic — if, as Kierkegaard puts it, the soul does not possess

itself — what we really need to gain is not something external, but our own selves. And the

patience that gains the self is not instrumental. Its “first requirement” is that we understand

that we do not possess ourselves. 14 In waiting upon God, which Kierkegaard called “patience

in expectancy,” the person in whose soul patience has been embedded is already at the

desired goal. 15 Whereas instrumental patience awaits what may happen and is therefore at

the mercy of time, an embedded patience awaits, as Kierkegaard puts it, what must happen

— and what, therefore, can never come too late.

Two important conclusions follow about how we ought to live. First, if we wait upon God,

resting in the Eternal, patience is always essential, whether we get what we want or fail to

get it, whether we get it quickly or slowly. For patience (that is not merely instrumental)

“leaves its expectancy up to God and in this way is always equally clo se to the fulfillment.” 16

Thus, Kierkegaard says of Anna (described in the Gospel of Luke as being “of a great age”

when she rejoiced at the presentation of the child Jesus in the tem ple, Luke 2:36 -38) that,

while her wait, lasting a lifetime, was not “short,” it was “brief.” 17 Were patience only

instrumental, only important as an aid to pursuing our goals, it wou ld be needed more at

some times than at others — more in the pursuit of some ends than of others. But the

patience needed by human beings whose lives are not only temporal but also ecstatic is

always essential, however long or short life may be.

A second i mplication follows about how we ought to live. The Good is slow, Kierkegaard

says, and we must learn that it “can get on” without us. 18 Our responsibility for producing

desired accomplishments is therefore limited. For attention to means rather than ends is central in a life marked by patience. Once again Kierkegaard comes round to the same point:

“He whose means are invariably just as important as the end, never comes too late.” 19 Even

were the human life span extended far beyond what we now experience, the most

fundamental moral conditions of our lives would not be altered. Instrumental patience

would be needed, but always qualifi ed and relativized. A person is not “eternally responsible

for whether he reaches his goal within this world of time. But without exception, he is

eternally responsible for the kind of means he uses. And when he will only use or only uses

those means which are genuinely good, then, in the judgment of eternity, he is at the goal.” 20

Suppose, then, that the condition of our life changed, that our maximum life span were

extended dramatically. Pati ence — in its most important moral sense — would be

unchanged. Or, on the other hand, suppose we never succeed in the project of age -

retardation. Patience — in its most important moral sense — will be unchanged. The length

of the life span does not change the nature of virtue — or, at least, of this virtue.

But what about life -extension not as a condition already achieved but as a project that we

undertake here and now? What does the virtue of patience suggest to us about the wisdom

of such an undertaking ?

In the modern era, and certainly in the twentieth century, impatience marked primarily

our political aspirations. Putting a human shoulder to the wheel of history in order to try to

do God’s work for him, we hoped to fashion, if not a utopia, at least a better world here and

now. In the twenty -first century we have focused those impatient hopes of mastery more on

science than on politics, and perhaps it will prove less intractable.

But what if hope for such mastery fundamentally misunderstands who we are? “Patience

is,” David Harned writes, “simply the embrace of what we are. We are patients, whether we

like it or not; we cannot escape our own nature. We come into the world as patients and we

leave it as patients, but even in our days of greatest strength our condition is no different.” 21

This need not mean simple acquiescence in our present circumstances or the current limits

of human life, whatever those may be — as if we were not also agents. It simply means that

our agency is always limited, qualified by our more fundamental condition as patients

needing patience. This is the lesson William Temple’s father tried to teach his son, who, as a

relatively young man, impatient to be accomplishing his goals, c omplained of lack of time to

get done what needed doing. “William,” said his father, “you have all the time there is.” 22 That

is to say, all the time there is for one who is not wa ndering but journeying, who must learn

to wait for “the coming of the Lord.” Our agency is not mastery but participation in a power

greater than our own.

There is in principle nothing wrong with trying to retard aging and extend human life. But

as a human project to which we must always say “faster, please,” it may bring with it

considerable loss. Three kinds of loss seem especially significant.

First, like Kierkegaard’s farmer who practices the extensive method of rotation, we may

acknowledge no limit to o ur desires. How easily we can forget that aiming at retarding aging

and extending indefinitely the life we now live is not the only kind of mastery, nor is it the

only or most creative display of human agency. The psychologist Paul Baltes noted how, as

we grow older, we adapt to our diminishing capacities through three different strategies — selection, optimization, and compensation. Baltes then provided a beautiful illustration of

this in a story about Arthur Rubenstein, the virtuoso pianist.

At 80, Rubens tein was asked how he managed to still give such excellent concerts. Over

the course of several interviews, he offered three reasons. First, he played fewer pieces

— an example of selection. Second, he practiced these pieces more often — an example

of opti mization. Finally, he played slow movements more slowly, to make it appear as

though he were playing the piano faster in the fast movements than he was actually able

to — an example of compensation. 23

In embracing our status as patients, even and especially in our moments of mastery, we

are protected against the ruinous urge to want everything. We are not lured into wanting

what Michael Sandel called “a world inhospitable to the unb idden,” even the unbidden

diminishment of our own skills and capacities. 24 Wanting everything in politics turned the

twentieth century in terribly destructive directions from which we have yet to recover.

Wanting everything in science and medicine can easily do the same.

As we see ourselves less as patients whose lives are marked by limits, as we suppose

ourselves to have ever -increasing responsibility for overcoming those limits, we m ay lose

one of the great blessings of being human — namely, that, as Sandel puts it, “we are not

wholly responsible for the way we are.” 25 Exercising agency within limits, within boundar ies

shaped by the virtue of patience, may in the end be the secret to a kind of creativity that does

not conceal destructive urges.

Always saying “faster, please” to the project of life -extension may bring a second kind of

loss in its wake — namely, a loss of meaning. “Our stories work best when they have an

ending,” as David Shenk puts it. 26 Without the sense of an ending, it is harder to find

significance in every step along the way. When in his Poetics Aristotle famously characterizes

a story’s plot as a whole having beginning, middle, and end, he compares such a narrative

plot to the life of an organism. “To be beautiful, a living creature . . . must not only present a

certain order in its arra ngement of parts, but also be of a certain definite magnitude.” 27 If a

creature’s size is too vast — “say, 1000 miles long” — we will not, Aristotle thinks, be able to

see its whol eness and unity. Just so, a well -constructed story or plot “must be of some length,

but of a length to be taken in by the memory.” 28 Aristotle does not deny that a truly excellent

poet may b e able to stretch a plot somewhat beyond its capabilities, but he does not think

there are likely to be many whose abilities rival Homer’s. A living being is an organic unity,

and we may not be able to appreciate and savor the goodness of its life unless t hat life has a

shape that does not extend indefinitely: a shape that is marked by beginning, middle, and,

even, end.

I do not wish to underrate the goodness of extended life, nor would I ignore the pleasures

each step along the path of longer life may brin g. But for these steps to have meaning, for

them to give our lives significance, there must be more to them than the overcoming of old

limits. They must go somewhere, have some end, find their place in a story whose overall

shape makes and gives sense. Wit hout that, it may be hard to know why we should go on at

all, and the desire for more life may undercut itself. If we read Pride and Prejudice online, and

in the process follow links here and there indefinitely, we may be enriched in many ways.

But we also suffer a loss of even greater significance, for we lose the point of the story and

the satisfaction of its ending. A third kind of possible loss may be the most important of all. Constantly seeking to

overcome the givenness of life, the limits that circum scribe our projects and our time, we

may also lose a sense of life’s giftedness. It is patience — the virtue that neither grabs nor

grasps, that does not simply say “faster, please” — that makes place in life for its

accompanying virtue, gratitude. For wit hout patience we can receive nothing as a gift,

nothing that comes apart from our own effort and achievement.

When the biblical character Job has lost both his wealth and his children, he says: “ ‘The

LORD gave, and the L ORD has taken away; blessed by the name of the L ORD ’ ” (Job 1:21).

Kierkegaard invites us to observe that when Job has suffered the loss of almost everything

he holds dear, the first thing he says is that the Lord gave. That is to say, “his heart first

expanded in thankfulness.” 29 His first impulse was gratitude for the blessings given him and

now taken from him. Each blessing had not, Kierkegaard notes, “become less beautiful

because it had been taken away.” 30

Of course, someone else — one of us, perhaps — might not respond as did patient Job.

Such a person might well react with impatience. “What he once had been able to do, he now

wanted to be ab le to do again.” 31 Understandable as such impatience is, it blinds us to the gift

we have received, and it makes gratitude impossible.

If the effort to extend life indefinitely may di minish life in these three ways, an even greater

loss may be our inability to see not just life but also old age in particular as a gift — a blessing

that not only requires patience of us but, more significantly, offers the opportunity for

patience.

In the Republic Plato pictures Socrates talking to the aged Cephalus and asking him to tell

them what it is like to be at that point along the road of life. Cephalus grants that some older

people lament their condition, believing that the best things have now be en taken from them,

but he does not agree. Rather, he finds in old age “a great tranquility” when “we are rid of

many and mad masters.” 32 Among those mad masters may be the thirst for longer life. To be

drawing near the end of life can, at least for some, be liberating. It frees us from the tyranny

of accomplishment, teaching us that “real freedom comes at the end of a process rather than

at the beginning.” 33

Without supposing that old age is always tranquil or that everyone will experience it as

blessing, we should nonetheless remember that it may, as Cephalus noted, offer the great gift

of a time for patience and freedom from hurry. That, at any rate, was the testimony of the

Quaker philosopher D. Elton Trueblood, who as himself a man past 80 years of age noted

what he called a “paradox” of the experience of time in old age: “that we can be vividly

con scious of our inevitable temporal finitude and yet enjoy its abundance, because we are in

no great hurry.” 34 Because, that is, we have been given time for patience, because we have all

the time there is.

CHAPTER SIX

A Complete Life

Western culture has relied on two archetypal images to represent intuitions of the wholeness

or unity of life — the division of life i nto ages (or stages) and the metaphor of life as a journey.

Thomas Cole, The Journey of Life

The true cure for death . . . cannot lead simply to an indefinite prolongation of this current life.

. . . It would need to create a new life within us, truly fit for eternity.

Pope Benedict XVI, “Baptism as the Beginning of a Process”

JOHN HALL W HEELOCK , a minor twentieth -century poet — dubbed “the last romantic” in the title

of his oral autobiography — captured movingly some of the reasons we desire more life, ou r

sense (nevertheless) that a complete human life cannot mean an indefinitely extended one,

and the pathos we experience when (as we should) we hold both of these views

simultaneously. Here is his poem, “An Ancient Story.”

Young thrush, heard singing from some hidden bough

In the west wood nearby,

Your tender song recalls to memory

A day, still unforgotten now,

That blessed day when we,

My dear true love and I,

After such sundering, such salt seas between,

Once more together, in this same west wood

Where we so often had together been,

In silence stood,

Listening to your loved song,

Unchanged through all these many years,

And kissed, while the soft May -time green

Swam round us, prismed in our tears.

Oh, if you will,

Sing to us, now as then,

That self -same son g —

We are together still,

Bring back again

That day when all was young.

Or, since this may not be —

When, at a not too far -off time, our time is come,

And, under the cloudy shade

Of some, perhaps, young springtime -flowering tree,

Deep in the earth our bod ies shall be laid,

Oh, from a hidden bough,

Let fall upon us, where we lie at rest,

Together still, your antique elegy,

The half -remembered story

Of two fond lovers, faithful to their vow,

For love’s sake, doubly blest;

Pour out, pour out, upon that quiet air

The pent -up fury and ardor in your breast,

Shatter the silence there

With love’s high plaint amid things transitory —

Oh, if you will,

Sing to us — then as now

Together still —

That self -same song, Life’s fierce and tender glory

Once ours, when all was young. 1

Although my train of thought here is moving, however slowly and deliberately, in a

Christian direction, this poem with which I begin is, I think, essentially pagan. That d oes not

make it any less moving, nor is that a way of saying it is simply misguided. As C. S. Lewis once

put it, “a Pagan . . . is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially the pre -

Christian, or sub -Christian, religious man. The post -Christian man of our day differs from

him as much as a divorcée differs from a virgin.” 2 Christian humanists have always known

that there may be much to learn about our shared human ity from those who are not

Christians. They may often help us to see more fully and think more clearly, even if we cannot

rest entirely content with what may be known apart from Christ.

“An Ancient Story” expresses the understandable hope of lovers for mor e time together.

“Sing to us, now as then, / That self -same song.” It seems both natural and right that they

should desire this. Nevertheless, even if the song of the thrush may be “Unchanged through

all these many years,” they — and we — are not. However much we might long to “Bring

back again / That day when all was young,” this “may not be.” When the lovers are finally

and unchangingly “Together still,” it will be because deep in the earth their bodies have been

laid. And the song of the thrush, then, wi ll be “love’s high plaint amid things transitory” —

love’s grasping for something more in a world that cannot, finally, “Bring back again / That

day when all was young.”

Quite naturally we long for more life — for an indefinitely extended life — and yet th is

may not be. How, therefore, shall we think of the human being? As a vain and futile animal,

doomed to discontent and unable to flourish — for whom life cannot offer a satisfying

completion? As one who, even “amid things transitory,” can attain what we m ight call a

complete life that has a kind of integrity and wholeness, all its threads gathered up into a

meaningful unity? Or, to look from yet a third angle, might there be a way, without thinking

of human life as vain and futile, to acknowledge and make sense of its incompleteness?

Thomas Cole, historian of aging, observes that our attempts to picture a complete life have

relied primarily on two images: life as a series of ages, and life as a journey. 3 While not entirely

dissimilar, these two images invite us to think of life’s wholeness in somewhat different

ways.

Among the most famous descriptions of life’s stages is that given by Aristotle in Book II of his

Art of Rhetoric. Th e subject arises there almost by accident. Because he thinks that “all men

are willing to listen to speeches which harmonize with their own character,” Aristotle

suggests that a student of rhetoric must consider how different listeners will respond to

spee ches they hear. 4 Hence, we need to understand the ages of life if we are to speak in ways

that will appeal to different sorts of hearers.

Aristotle distinguishes three stages — you th, the prime of life, and old age — comparing

and contrasting them with respect to various aspects of behavior. Thus, for example, while

the young prefer what is noble to what is useful, those who are old become cautious,

preferring what they find useful. The young, not yet having experienced many failures (or so

Aristotle supposes), are hopeful and optimistic; the elderly, whose experiences indicate that “all events generally turn out for the worse,” tend “to live in memory rather than in hope.” In

contra st to the young, who “think they know everything, and confidently affirm it,” the old

are constantly adding a “maybe” or a “perhaps” to all that they say. 5

We get the picture. Aristotle has a rather jaundi ced view of old age, and he may

underestimate the disappointments and problems characteristic of youth. But, rightly or

wrongly, he tends to think of the young as passionate, impulsive, and ambitious —

characterized by excess of many kinds. The old are als o marked, though in their own peculiar

way, by excess. They are characterized, as Aristotle’s unusual formulation puts it, by “an

excessive lack of energy.” 6

Perhaps surprisingly, Aristotle actually has fa r less to say about the prime of life. In terms

of physical strength and health, he places that prime — disconcertingly for many of us — at

ages thirty to thirty -five. The mind, he says, reaches its prime around forty -nine years of age.

The reason he says relatively little about the prime of life becomes clear to the reader.

Depicting both youth and old age as excessive in their different ways, he thinks of the prime

of life as a kind of mean between these two extremes. “It is evident,” he writes, “that the

character of those in the prime of life will be the mean between that of the other two, if the

excess in each case be removed.” 7 The conduct of those in life’s prime will be guided by

neither the noble al one nor the useful alone, but by both at once. They face the future with

both courage and self -control. They are neither overconfident nor too hesitant, seeking to

judge in accord with the facts before them.

This middle stage is life’s pinnacle, and in rel ation to it the other two stages constitute

either preparation or decline. The complete life has a rounded shape, a trajectory, but its

stages of preparation and decline take their significance primarily from that prime of life

when we are at the peak of o ur powers and most likely to display the kind of practical

wisdom that flows from virtues well established. It is, it seems, this prime of life that shows

us what a human being at his best, a truly flourishing man or woman, can be — one whose

virtuous acti ons display the logos or reason that distinguishes human beings from the other

animals.

As is well known, however, Aristotle has another — probably competing — concept of

what makes a human life complete. Logos is displayed not only in our doing but also i n what

we might call our beholding — not only in practical but also in theoretical reason, not only

in action but also in contemplation. Having spent the bulk of his Nicomachean Ethics

examining how practical wisdom takes shape in lives of virtuous doing, in its tenth and final

book Aristotle describes that active life as flourishing only in “a secondary sense.” 8

The most complete human life is enacted not in doing but in beholding, in theoria, an

entirely self -contained activity of the mind. It attempts neither to make nor to accomplish

anything, having no further goal beyond the beholding itself. It is, as the ph ilosopher

Kathleen Wilkes writes, rather like seeing: “attainment is predicated at the same time as the

activity: means and ends coalesce.” 9 We have come to call it “contemplation, ” from the Latin

translation of the Greek theoria. Josef Pieper reminds us that “when Anaxagoras was asked,

‘To what end are you in the world?’ he answered: ‘ Eis theorian — in order to behold the sun,

moon, and sky’ ” 10 — a sentiment that bears at least a certain kinship to the famous answer to

the first question in the Westminster Catechism, “What is the chief end of man?” Answer: “To

glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” Such beh olding is unlike our doing in that it aims at no accomplishment. Nevertheless, as Pieper has written, it “emphatically involves interest,

participation, attention, purposiveness.” 11 It i s by no means passive.

The exercise of theoretical reason in beholding has a timeless quality, for its objects must

be, as Amélie Oksenberg Rorty notes, “necessary, unchanging, eternal, self -contained, and

noble.” 12 It thus freely transcends the limits of life’s normal course. The activity of

contemplation is complete in itself and offers, therefore, an image of human flourishing

different from a picture of life as composed of stage s that, taken together, make for a

complete life. And Aristotle himself seems uncertain how to hold together or assess the

relation between these two different depictions of a complete life. The life of theoria, though

it is an activity of what is highest in us, may seem to soar so far above the needs and activities

of what he calls “our composite nature” as to be almost “more than human.” 13 “It is because

he is not sure who we are,” Thomas Nagel tellingly writes, “that Aristotle finds it so difficult

to say unequivocally in what our eudaimonia [our flourishing] consists.” 14

In order to know how best to characterize a complete human life, we have to know what

sort of being a human being is. Much of what Aristotle has to teach us suggests that the

trajectory of a complete life — a fulfilled and flourishing life — will be marked by stages that

move from preparation to o ptimal performance to decline. There is something satisfying

about that picture, which is suited to our nature as organic, bodily creatures. It incorporates

within it the relation between the generations that cuts so deeply into all our lives and marks

us. It includes decline in our image of completion, and, in so doing, prepares us for the day

when “Deep in the earth our bodies shall be laid.” And yet, Aristotle himself forces us to set

a question mark beside this image of completion, leaving us uncertain whether we should

really accept it as a satisfactory understanding of a fulfilled and flourishing human life.

Whatever may or may not be possible, “love’s high plaint amid things transitory” will set

itself against any too -easy acquiescence in this image o f completion. The wholeness we seek

and need may be something that draws us out of ourselves — out of the limitations of life’s

finite course into an indefinite freedom. That, at least, will be true if, as William F. May has

written, “the self turns out to be ecstatic — pitched out beyond itself toward that in which it

finds its meaning.” 15

In the early modern period of Western history, the idea of a life divided into several gene ral

stages or ages took on greater specificity in the concept of the career. Childhood and youth

were a time of preparation for one’s career, and old age became the time when one was “past

one’s peak” or “over the hill.” A career is something for which one takes personal

responsibility, something that requires careful planning. Margaret Urban Walker notes that

many philosophers, however different their views may be in other respects, have thought in

these terms. Thus, John Rawls thinks of human life as live d according to a rational long -term

plan; Bernard Williams describes life’s “constitutive projects” that will “carry us into the

future with a reason for living”; Charles Taylor suggests that we have failed as persons if our

“lives as a whole do not sustai n a meaningful narrative.” They all share, Walker believes, “the

idea of an individual’s life as a self -consciously controlled career. It binds a whole life or

lifetime together in a unified way for which the individual is accountable. The individual’s abi lity to account for this life — to bring forward its plan, project, or narrative plot — testifies

to the individual’s self - control.” 16

When life is envisioned in this way as a career, retirement becomes an obvious problem,

since it seems to bring one’s career to a close and is simply a period of decline. Marking the

end of significant activity, growth, and development, it becomes entirely unrelated to the

previous course of life , which loses its coherence. Hence, we have come to look for ways to

incorporate conscious and continued growth and accomplishment into old age — a

transposition, but also a continuation, of the active life. One way to attempt this is what

Robert Butler ca lled the “life review,” an effort to think through and sum up the meaning of

one’s life and the course it has taken. 17 Butler himself regarded this as a nearly universal

tendency o f those nearing death, a natural attempt to survey and reintegrate one’s past

experience.

Similarly, H. R. Moody has described what he terms “conscious aging.” This is something

other than simply adapting, however successfully, to age -related changes; for adaptation in

itself requires no real growth in consciousness or wisdom. Adaptation does not continue to

advance the course of one’s life. Conscious aging, by contrast, “typically entails a long

struggle” and involves continued active growth, “increasing i ntegration of divergent

elements of the self, both rational and emotional, to yield a more complex structure.” 18

As with Aristotle’s attempt to unravel the relation of active and c ontemplative lives, here

too we must say that we cannot know what it means for our lives to flourish unless we know

who we are. And if we are ecstatic beings, pitched out beyond ourselves, any attempt

definitively to review our lives or integrate fully the ir divergent strands may be futile; for we

cannot find a place from which to see ourselves whole, to catch the heart and hold it still.

That is the profound insight of Book 10 of Augustine’s Confessions. Even those students

who are fortunate enough these d ays to be given an opportunity to read the Confessions are

seldom asked to go beyond Book 8 — thereby missing the point. For when in Book 10

Augustine begins to take stock of how well he is doing in his attempt, since his conversion,

to live the Christian life, he comes to see that this is a question he cannot answer. A reader

beginning the Confessions is likely to get the impression that its author understands the

course of his life, but it turns out that this sort of life review can be done only by God. U nable

to see himself whole and entire, Augustine finally has to acknowledge that our lives are a

mystery to us. “What then am I, my God? What is my nature? A life various, manifold, and

quite immeasurable. . . . I dive down deep as I can, and I can find no end.” 19 God knows the

course of Augustine’s life better than he knows it himself, and, hence, the recounting of that

life must become confession. “I will confess what I know of my self, and I will also confess

what I do not know of myself.” 20 We cannot really determine whether the course of our life,

passing through its various stages, has had the kind of integrity and wholeness needed to

make it complete. The division of life into ages offers a certain sense of completion — but at

the cost of our capacity for free self -transcendence, for beholding a beauty that is timeless.

And the related vision of life’s course as a career offers what is, in the end, only an illusion of

self -control and self -understanding.

Perhaps the somewhat different im age of a journey can give us a unified picture of life —

acknowledging that we are finite beings making our way through life’s course, but without

exaggerating our capacity for control or our ability to know ourselves. To think of life from

this angle, I t urn from Aristotle to Karl Barth, that great twentieth -century theologian of

whom Hans Frei once wrote: “Had he not been a theologian, he would have been more widely

recognized as one of the towering minds of the twentieth century.” 21

In volume III/4 of his Church Dogmatics Barth discusses the ages or stages of life but sets

them into the larger context of vocation, of God’s call to individuals. 22 That larger context, it

seems, incorporates life’s stages into a journey whose end and meaning we cannot entirely

discern. How could we, since the call comes from God, who remains free? “We cannot be

permitted to an ticipate the freedom of God’s commanding, and therefore of His controlling

of our real vocation, by any science of youth and age, however well -grounded.”

Acknowledging that divine freedom, we cannot tell anyone precisely how to determine his

or her calling . We can characterize in general the kinds of limitations that will prepare us to

hear the call, and some of those limitations will be related to our stage in life, but the freedom

of God will have a transformative impact on how we think about those stages . For in any

moment we meet the call of God anew, and, hence, in every moment it is as if we were “just

setting out.”

Having begun with the assertion that we always remain free within our limitations, Barth

can then think through those limits — the kinds o f limits that characterize the different ages

of a person’s life. Like Aristotle, he thinks of three such stages, and it will be useful to set

some of his characterizations alongside Aristotle’s. Each age has, on his account, its special

opportunities and responsibilities.

Like Aristotle, Barth, too, sees in the young an orientation toward the future and a certain

optimistic energy. The past, because for them it has been relatively short, need not, he says,

weigh too heavily upon those who are young. “The t hought of impotence in face of a blind

fate should be far from” them. Having little experience, they need not be slaves of habit. This

depiction — though characteristically Barthian in cadence — is not unlike Aristotle’s; yet, it

is given a different twist . These characteristics are not weaknesses. They are not an extreme

resulting from minimal experience. On the contrary, they provide positive, special

opportunities for acting with a “fruitful astonishment.” And, indeed, a part of the special

responsibilit y of the young is to provide for the older and the old an example of true

youthfulness — a sentiment we can scarcely imagine on the lips of Aristotle.

Every bit as much as Aristotle, Barth realizes that one who is old will have experienced

enough to have r eason for caution, for knowing how little we can often accomplish. But for

Barth this is again an opportunity: “the supremely positive fact that the old man has the

extraordinary chance to live” in faith that God has committed himself to our cause. He has

“the privilege of living . . . in terms of a verse which he has often sung with gusto: ‘With force

of arms we nothing can, Full soon were we downridden; But for us fights the proper Man,

Whom God Himself hath bidden.’ ” Hence, the old person need not live as much in memory

as Aristotle supposed; for true old age should not be marked by “automatic repetition of

earlier answers.” No longer imagining, if he ever did, that he goes to meet God on his own

terms, it is the old person’s “special opportunity” to dis cover that the initiative always lies

with God — and in this discovery to be an example for all who are younger. The “middle years” of life — not, it is perhaps worth noting, the “prime of life” in Barth’s

discussion — are not simply a mean between two ext remes, though there is a hint of that.

Thus, for example, this is the time for us to act with “measured haste” — the time, Barth says,

for venture and work by one who now has a certain amount of experience in life but is not

so close to the end that he mig ht be exhausted or tempted to resignation. With relatively

fewer limitations than mark those at other stages of life, those in the middle years can seize

the responsibilities set before them. Their special opportunity is to be an example — both to

those wh o are older and those who are younger — of people “who are truly ripe for

obedience.”

We can see, then, what Barth has done. On the one hand, he acknowledges that our lives

have a relatively clear trajectory, marked by specific stages. Hence, God claims ea ch of us and

calls us at particular moments in life’s finite course. And if we want to know what God asks

of us, that can only mean what he asks of us at the particular point where we find ourselves.

Barth’s focus, however, is not on the age or stage of de velopment of the person called but on

his relation to the One who calls. I am not, Barth says, to take my age as such seriously but,

rather, to take myself at my various ages “as the creature of God and object of His providence

subject to His judgment.”

“T he particular seriousness of every age does not consist, therefore, in a special attitude

which one has to assume to life in youth, maturity or old age, but in the seriousness with

which at every age one has to go from the Lord of life to meet the Lord of life and therefore

to try to live as though for the first time or as though this were the only age.” Each age of a

person’s life takes its meaning in part from its relation to other ages, but each age also has

its own independent significance. Each is equi distant from the God who calls. Youth and old

age, in particular, do not draw their meaning primarily from that middle stage of life when

we are at the peak of our powers; they are not primarily characterized as preparation and

decline. Each age has its ow n special opportunities; each serves in its own way as exemplar

for the others. A true youthfulness, maturity, and elderliness can mark every age of life.

This means that each person is called by God not simply to progress through fixed stages

of life, nor to fashion a career entirely under his or her own control, but to set out on a

journey, which — because it is governed by the providence of a God who is always free —

must have a course whose ending cannot be seen, though it may be believed. Thus, the chu rch

prays in the liturgy of Evening Prayer: “Lord God, you have called your servants to ventures

of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown. Give

us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but o nly that your hand is

leading us and your love supporting us.” 23

This way of thinking captures some of what Aristotle described as our “composite nature.”

It acknowledges our finit ude. We are bodies for whom, even when all goes well, life moves

inexorably through its course, ending in decline. But we are also free spirits, the truth of

whose being cannot be entirely captured by describing the natural course or progression of

an orga nism’s life.

Most of the puzzles we encounter when we think about aging, or how best to think about

aging, or how to age well, are a result of our two -sided being. On the one hand, we move

inexorably through life toward old age and death. On the other hand , we quite naturally —

and it seems rightly — long for more time, more life. On the one hand, we act virtuously when

we display patience and humility in the face of life’s limits. On the other hand, we quite naturally — and it seems rightly — strive to dis cover ways to retard aging and prolong life’s

banquet. On the one hand, we wear down and lose the zest and freshness with which we once

greeted each new day. On the other hand, we quite naturally — and it seems rightly — look

for ways to regenerate our ene rgies and revive our spirits.

We pass through the several stages of life in their fixed course, but we are also embarked

on a journey of which we cannot see the ending. We have to ask, therefore, whether it might

be a mistake to look for some way to think of our life as complete, all its threads gathered up

into an integrated whole. We might say, as “Lead, Kindly Light,” Newman’s well -known hymn

puts it, “Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see / The distant scene; one step enough for me.” 24

The philosopher Margaret Urban Walker has also tried to retain a sense of wholeness that

is not dependent on any fixed course of stages or on the concept of a career. This sort of life

— based on what she calls “lateral” rather than progressive integration — requires “no

eventually unfulfillable demand for achievement or progress” through a series of stages to a

satisfying end. Lateral integration focuses, she says, on “central lessons, tasks, plea sures,

experiences, or bonds” that are important to us at different moments along the way, though

they may not be linked together purposefully on some linear path or within a chronological

narrative. 25 They are merely stopping points along the way, places we visit and then move on

— not moments in a story held together by authorial purpose.

That is, I guess, one way to think about the journey of life, and it is not without its appeal.

Perhaps it can give us a picture of a complete, flourishing life. But I cannot myself escape the

sense that it leaves us, in the end, with lives more futile than flourishing. Embarked on the

journey of life, we find many pleasant stopping places along the way. But these bear no

necessary relation to each other, apart from the fact that we stop there, so our lives have

continuity only in the obvious sense that “our physical trajectories are continuous.” 26 It is less

a journey than a wandering — more Jean -Jacques Rousseau than Augustine. Barth’s

depiction, frankly religious, of life’s journey may well be better; but, of course, it asks that we

give up the attempt to see our lives as complete, integrated, and whole.

Where does this leave us? Perhaps in different places — some of us with Aristotle, others

with Barth. Or, if it does not seem too quirky, I might say that it leaves us with a choice

between John Hall Wheelock and Pope Benedict XVI.

Think back to “An Ancient Story,” Wheelock’s poem with which I began this chapter. The

poet hears that young thrush singing from a hidden bough in the west wood nearby. The

song reminds him of an earlier day when he and his beloved had stood there listening to that

same song — and kissed in “the soft May -time green.” Sing it again now, he says. Sing “That

self -same song.” Now as then, we are together still. Sing it again, and thereby bring back for

us “That day when all was young.”

But, of course, as the poet knows, “this may not be.” A day will come when lover and

beloved will be together still, but only in the sense that their bodies will be laid deep in the

earth beside each other, under some “young springtime -flowering tree.” Sing it again, the

poet says. Sing you r unchanged song then, too; for then as now we will be together still. Sing

once more of “Life’s fierce and tender glory / Once ours, when all was young.” This is the course of life. Then — now — then. We were once together — then — in this

west wood liste ning to the thrush’s song. We have grown older, but “now as then” we are

together still, listening to that same song. A day will come when we are dead and buried, but

“then as now” we will be together — deep within the earth, surrounded still by the thrush ’s

unchanged song.

The poem gives us the course of a complete life. We are not embarked on a journey of

which we cannot see the ending. On the contrary, we see it all too clearly. Deep in the earth

our bodies shall be laid, for we are bodies — organisms — and this is what happens to

organic life. Nature will carry on its inexorable course, and only the song of the thrush will

remain. That is, indeed, a very ancient story.

And no one should say, it seems to me, that this story lacks power or beauty. It offer s even

a certain kind of satisfaction with the course life takes, an acceptance of our decline. If we

want a picture of a complete life, I suspect we will not do much better.

But does this picture do justice to our composite nature — to the free spirit tha t

indefinitely transcends the limits of our finite condition, that drove Aristotle to contrast the

contemplative with the active life, that compelled Christians to think of themselves as

embarked on a journey whose course they did not know? I think it does not; and I think,

perhaps, the poem itself bears witness that it does not. The “pent -up fury and ardor” in the

thrush’s breast will not quite accept this course of life. It shatters the silence surrounding the

lovers’ graves “With love’s high plaint amid things transitory.” We might borrow a phrase

from Reinhold Niebuhr and call that plaintive love song of the thrush “a tangent towards

‘eternity’ ” in time. 27

What is it that this p laintive love song desires? Is it only more time, an indefinite

prolongation of the present “now” before the coming of the “then”? I suspect that could not

satisfy lover and beloved, for they long for something qualitatively different — a love that

never f ades, that knows no “then” and “now” — of which their love can only be at best an

image and intimation. Consider another poem by another minor romantic poet of the

twentieth century, C. S. Lewis’s “What the Bird Said Early in the Year.” 28

I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear

“This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

“Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees

This year, nor want of rain destroy the peas.

“This year time’s nature will no more defeat you,

Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

“This time they will not lead you round and back

To Autumn, one year older, by the well -worn track.

“This year, this year, as all these flo wers foretell,

We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

“Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,

Quick, quick, quick, quick! — the gates are drawn apart.”

The gates of nature, though, always seem to slam shut again, and we are not quick enoug h

to get through when they hint at possible escape from life’s course. In his homily for the Easter Vigil in the year 2010, Pope Benedict XVI offered a different key to those gates. Noting

how insistently human beings have sought a cure for death, a “medic ine of immortality,” he

suggested that, even were we successful in that quest, “endless life would be no paradise.”

“The true cure for death,” he said, “must be different. It cannot lead simply to an indefinite

prolongation of this current life. It would h ave to transform our lives from within. It would

need to create a new life within us, truly fit for eternity.” 29 If Benedict is right, then until we

taste that true cure in a medic ine of immortality not of our own making, life can only remain

— and must and should remain — incomplete, its threads not yet gathered up into any

unified whole.

This, then, is our choice: “An Ancient Story.” Or an Easter homily.

Afterword

Thomas saw that a being obviously directed toward something else “cannot possibly have as

his ultimate goal the preservation of his own existence!” In other words, the allaying of the

thirst cannot consist simply in the mere continued e xistence of the thirster.

Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation

His last Christmas letter contained a line that should be engraved above every geriatric door.

He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels lik e a

young man with something the matter with him.

Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

HOW, THEN, SHALL we think about the related projects of age -retardation and life -prolongation?

I imagine a conversation among three friends — Artie, Augie, and Frank — who have read

the preceding six chapters. None of the friends supposes he has all the answers. Each is

intrigued by the views of the other two. But each surely thinks his own view best captures

how we ought to think. It might go something like this:

Frank: I’m a little baffled by you two. Both of you say that you think life is a great good for

human beings. You, Augie, even talk of it often as a blessing. But when I say we should try to

prolong it as much as possible, neither one of you seems to agree. If li fe is so good, what’s

wrong with wanting more of it?

Artie: Of course, it’s not wrong in every instance to want to prolong life. But have I ever really

said to you that life itself, just more moments of it, is good? If I have, I should take it back.

What’s good is not simply more life but a complete life — a life that has a certain form and

trajectory, that moves through stages that give it meaning. To die prematurely is to die before

that trajectory is completed. But to want to hang on indefinitely after w e’ve worked our way

to the end of the story doesn’t seem to me to get more of a good thing but, instead, to destroy

what gives life its beauty.

Frank: Has it ever occurred to you that you might be too fond of the word “trajectory”?

Artie: Well, I’ll try not to take refuge in it too often. But my point is simply that life isn’t just a

series of identical moments, coming one after the other and capable of indefinite extension.

The moments of our lives have different meanings — and a different feel — precise ly because

they have different places in the whole. Surely you understand that. You wouldn’t put the first

paragraph of one of your essays at the end; its meaning depends on its location in the

“trajectory” of the entire argument. For you more life is all that counts; for me a complete life

is the good we should desire.

Frank: I can’t see that your notion of completion is more attractive than living on indefinitely

at the peak of my powers, even if that means one moment is pretty much like those that come

before and follow after it. They’d be good moments. More life sounds just fine to me.

Artie: Of course, you assume it would be at the peak of your powers. Do you know the story of

Tithonus?

Frank: Yes, I know it and I’ve thought about it. I never said that prolonged aging was a

desirable outcome of extending life. Longer life has to come in tandem with retarding aging in

all possible ways, physical and mental. But why be a skeptic about what researchers may be

able to accomplish? It’s a brave man who bets ag ainst scientific progress.

Artie: I don’t bet against it. I’m just not sure I’m ready to agree with you about what would

constitute progress. Augie, you’ve been awfully quiet. Where do you come down on this

question? Augie: Well, I’m afraid that I agree wi th you both — and disagree with you both. I surely do

agree with Frank that this life, even with its (sometimes very great) dangers and problems, is

a blessing. So wanting more of it doesn’t seem silly at all. But I also agree with you, Artie, that

life se ems to need what — avoiding the word “trajectory” — I’ll just call a shape. And one of

the things that gives it shape is that at some point it comes to completion.

Frank: So you agree with both of us. I’m not sure how that helps, but what about the

disagreement? You said you also disagree with us.

Augie : Whether our ideal is simply more life or a complete life, in either case something would

still — it seems to me — be missing. I think of us as being on the way toward something we

can’t quite seem to get hold of. There’s a thirst in us that isn’t just a desire for more life or just

a desire for a complete life. I always think of our lives in relation to God. So in one way it

makes no difference whether our lives are long or short; every moment in them is equidistant

from God. In another way, of course, it does make a difference, since this life has a God -given

shape that brings it to a kind of earthly completion. That much Artie has right. But ours is a

composite nature — we’re organisms, but organisms who are drawn out of ourselves toward

God — and Artie sometimes sees only one part of that picture. You, Frank, also see a part of

the truth. It must be true that we should often use our freedom to make life better, but if that

freedom to make and remake ourselves without limit were the only truth about us, we’d be

thinking of ourselves almost as gods, rather than seeing ourselves as creatures in relation to

God.

Artie: I’m not sure that’s quite fair. I grant that we have what you call a composite nature,

that we’re not just bodies. I just don’t know where all this talk about God comes from. Why

don’t we try a slightly different angle? Part of a complete life is that we produce those who

will come after us and, having produced them, we must eventually give way to them. So, even

if it seems paradoxical, part of flourishing as the creatures we are involves going to seed and,

eventually, dying.

Augie: You’re right, I think, that producing and nurturing the next generation, accepting that

they will take our plac e, makes us better people. It teaches us gratitude for the gift of our own

lives.

Frank: Gratitude to whom?

Augie: I suppose that’s a question Artie and I will have to take up another time.

Frank: I can’t say that I feel any strong urge to produce my repla cement. I’m quite content to

hang onto my life for as long as I can.

Augie: I didn’t say you could be replaced; I said others would take your place. There’s a

difference.

Artie: You know, Frank, I’m not sure I believe that you would be content just to hang onto

your own life indefinitely. It’s natural to want to have children, to care for them, and to hand on to them our culture and beliefs. Not wanting to be replaced strikes me as narcissistic, not

virtuous. In fact, in your quite different ways both you a nd Augie seem to forget that living on

and on almost forever might become rather boring. We’re bodies, after all. Human beings

have limited capacities, and we’d eventually run out of new sources for enjoyment. The

goodness of anything, even the best of thi ngs, eventually loses its power to delight.

Augie: Anything? What about the face of someone you love? Doesn’t it at least suggest to you

that there must be a face you would be content to love forever?

Frank: “Natural,” as someone once said, is a word to co njure with. What’s natural, it seems to

me, is to exercise our rational freedom (call it “God -given freedom,” if you like, Augie) in order

to make our lives better and satisfy our desires more fully. Artie, you think we’ll get bored if

we live too long, be cause the capacities of human beings are limited. But let your imagination

soar a bit. Already we’re learning to take baby steps to enhance and reshape our lives. We’re

not bodies; we’re free spirits who for now have to use organic bodies as the best prost hesis

available. Someday we’ll cast them off and be free of the limits you seem to like so much. And

we’ll get a real immortality, not the sort that Augie tries so hard to sell.

Artie: Those are fine words, Frank, though perhaps tinged with just a hint of desperation. But

I don’t think you can actually live in accord with your theory. I don’t think you can love others,

share a life with them and be fully involved in their lives, while all the time thinking of yourself

as detached from the body that connects you to them. And there’s something wrong with a

theory that can’t be lived.

Augie : And I marvel, Frank, that you find my talk of a resurrected body to be an unbelievable

flight of fancy! What you can’t tolerate, I’m afraid, is some contingency and mystery in life.

But it’s just that contingency that makes life sweet and, at the same time, suggests the

promise of something more.

Clearly, this is a conversation that could continue indefinitely; it need not come to an end

here. Books, however, must end, and there is nothing particularly virtuous about forgetting

that. We can never adequately summarize a conversation, but we can try to order our

thinking.

The six preceding chapters have explored in different ways three general angles of vision

that compete fo r our allegiance. Not all are equally persuasive or wise, at least in my view.

But each makes central an aspect of our nature that is genuinely important, and, hence, each

has a place in the conversation.

We may focus on the fact that human beings are orga nisms, embedded in the finite, natural

world and following the trajectory of all organic life through relatively fixed stages of life —

from modest beginnings, to full blossoming of capacities (including the capacity to generate

a successor generation), an d eventually “going to seed.” From this first perspective, our

commitment to age -retardation brings not only benefits but also harms, and should, in any

case, be a modest commitment. We may, by contrast, focus on that which distinguishes human beings from other

organisms; namely, the freedom and reason that allow us indefinitely to transcend the limits

of our finite condition, to make and remake ourselves in ever new ways that may promise

(or threaten) to transcend our organic beginnings. From this second p erspective, the

projects of age -retardation and life -prolongation testify to what is most human about us —

a freedom that knows few limits.

A third alternative discerns in us not only a nature marked by organic limits and rational

freedom but also one that we may describe as “ecstatic.” That is, we are characterized by a

thirst that can be quenched neither by making our peace with the beauty and pathos of the

limits of organic life nor by continual progress in the improvement and extension of our lives.

We are, on this view, drawn out of ourselves toward God, and satisfaction of that longing

could not possibly come from more of this life, however long extended. From this third

perspective, we can and should think it a blessing that our lives are of limited d uration —

not because this life is not good, but because it cannot finally bring the completion needed

for us truly to flourish.

My own view, like Augie’s, is that the third perspective best captures the truth of who we

are and who we are yet to become. Th ere is sometimes good reason, as we age, to feel that

something is the matter with us. There is also good reason to feel that we are young — with

the youthfulness of eternity.

End Notes

CHAPTER ONE : How Shall We Think about Aging?

1. Tom Kirkwood, Time of Our Lives: The Science of Human Aging (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999),

p. 22.

2. Lewis Thomas, “The Deacon’s Masterpiece,” in The Medusa and the Snail: Notes of a Biology Watcher (New York: Viking

Press, 1979), p. 136.

3. The President’s Council on Bioethics, Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness (New York: Regan

Books, 2003), p. 201.

4. Ronald Bailey, Liberation Biology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005), p. 61.

5. Kirkwood, Time of Our Lives, p. 65.

6. Christine Overall, Aging, Death, and Human Longevity: A Philo sophical Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press,

2003), p. 27.

7. John J. Medina, The Clock of Ages: Why We Age — How We Age — Winding Back the Clock (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1996), p. 20.

8. Robert Arking, “Extending Human Longevity: A Biological Probability,” in The Fountain of Youth: Cultural, Scientific,

and Ethical Perspectives on a Biomedical Goal, ed. Stephen G. Post and Robert H. Binstock (Oxford and New York: Oxford

Universit y Press, 2004), p. 181.

9. Stephen Jay Gould, “Biological Musings,” The New York Times Book Review 84 (May 6, 1979): 33.

10 . Nevill Coghill, “The Approach to English,” in Light on C. S. Lewis, ed. Jocelyn Gibb (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1965), p. 61.

11 . For an account of the Voronoff episode, see Arnold Kahn, “Regaining Lost Youth: The Controversial and Colorful

Beginnings of Hormone Replacement Therapy in Aging,” The Jou rnals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and

Medical Sciences 60A, no. 2 (February 2005): 142 -47.

12 . Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), pp.

50 -51.

13 . Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (orig. ed. 1907; Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981), p.

81.

14 . Thomas H. Huxley, “Evolution and Ethics,” the Romanes Lecture, 1893, in Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays (New

York: D. Appleton and Company, 1894), p. 73.

15 . Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), p. 69.

16 . Throughout, quotations from the Bible are taken from the Revised Standard Version.

17 . Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Tithonus,” at www.readprint.com/work -1423/Tithon us-Lord -Alfred -Tennyson . Accessed

November 1, 2011.

18 . Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York

Press, 1998), p. 245.

19. Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right, pp. 244 -45.

20. Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right, p. 29.

21 . John Hall Wheelock, “Song on Reaching Seventy,” in This Blessed Earth: New and Selected Poems, 1927 -1977 (New

York: Cha rles Scribner’s Sons, 1978), pp. 56 -57.

22 . Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), p. 164.

An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Thinking about Aging,” in First Things 212 (April 2011): 37 -43.

CHAPTER TWO : Transitional Humanity

1. Ronald Bailey, “The Methuselah Manifesto: Witnessing the Launch of Immortality, Inc.?” Online at

http://reas on.com/archives/2009/11/17/the -methuselah -manifesto . Accessed September 12, 2010.

2. Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever (Emmaus, PA: Rodale, Inc.,

2004).

3. Raymond Kurzweil, “Human Body Version 2.0,” in Immortality Institute, The Scientific Conquest of Death: Essays on

Infinite Lifespans (Buenos Aires: LibrosEnRed, 2004), pp. 93 -106. Online at http://www.im minst.org/SCOD.pdf . Accessed

September 22, 2010.

4. “Transhumanist Declaration.” Online at http://humanityplus.org/learn/transhumanist -declaration . Accessed

September 30, 2010.

5. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago

and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 2 -3.

6. Ellen Ullma n, “Programming the Post -Human,” Harper’s Magazine 305 (October 2002): 62 -63.

7. Mike Treder, “Emancipation from Death,” in Immortality Institute, The Scientific Conquest of Death, p. 191. Online at

http://www.imminst.org/SCOD.pdf . Accessed September 22, 2010.

8. C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy -Tale for Grown -Ups (New York: Macmillan, 1965).

9. Lewis, That Hideous Str ength, p. 172.

10. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, p. 203.

11 . Roland Puccetti, “The Conquest of Death,” in Language, Metaphysics, and Death, ed. John Donnelly (New York:

Fordham University Press, 1978), p. 1 66.

12 . Puccetti, “The Conquest of Death,” p. 169.

13 . Puccetti, “The Conquest of Death,” p. 170.

14. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 5.

15 . Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), p. 119.

16 . Stephen R. L. Clark, How to Live Forever: Science Fiction and Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p.

47.

17 . Immortality Institute, The Scientific Conquest of Death , p. 7. Online at http://www.imminst.org/SCOD.pdf . Accessed

September 22, 2010.

18. John Gray, The Immortali zation Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death (New York: Farrar, Straus

and Giroux, 2011), p. 213.

19. Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New

York: Hill and Wang, 2009), p. 4.

20 . Noë, Out of Our Heads, p. 40. For a somewhat fuller depiction of the character of organic life, a depiction influenced by

the thought of Hans Jonas, see chapter 2 of Gilbert Meilaender, Neit her Beast nor God: The Dignity of the Human Person (New

York and London: Encounter Books, 2009).

21. Noë, Out of Our Heads, p. 41.

22 . William James, “Human Immortality,” the Ingersoll Lecture for 1898. Ava ilable online at http://www.religion -

online.org/showchapter.asp?title=541&C=624 .

23. Clark, How to Live Forever, p. 115.

24. Noë, Out of Our Heads, p. 164.

25. Noë, Out of Our Heads, p. 33.

26 . Larry Temkin, “Is Living Longer Living Better?” in Enhancing Human Capacities, ed. Julian Savulescu, Ruud ter Meulen,

and Guy Kahane (M alden, MA: Wiley -Blackwell, 2011), pp. 362 -63.

27 . David H. Smith, Health and Medicine in the Anglican Tradition (New York: Crossroad, 1986), p. 52. 28 . Daniel Callahan, The Troubled Dream of Life: Living w ith Mortality (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), p. 138.

29 . David H. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology, vol. 1 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press,

2009).

30 . Hugh Heclo, On Thi nking Institutionally (Boulder and London: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), p. 194.

31 . For Watts’s painting, see: www.artmagick.com/pictures/picture.asp x?id=5875&ame=hope .

32. Nicolas de Condorcet, The Future Progress of the Human Mind. http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/condorcet -

progress.html .

33 . Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth -Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932),

see especially chapter 4, “The Uses of Posterity.”

34. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eightee nth -Century Philosophers, p. 129.

35 . Summa Theologiae, IIaIIae, q. 18, a. 3.

An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “Transitional Humanity” in The New Atlantis 31 (Spring 2011): 82 -92.

CHAPTER THREE : Hoping to Live Forever

1. George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah: A Metabiological Pentateuch, “The World’s Classics” rev. ed. with Postscript

(New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 10 -11.

2. Shaw, Back to Meth uselah, p. 30.

3. Shaw, Back to Methuselah, pp. 12 -13.

4. Shaw, Postscript to Back to Methuselah, p. 255.

5. William Irvine, The Universe of G. B. S. (New York: Macmillan, 1949), p. 317.

6. Christine Overall, Aging, Death and Human Longevity: A Philosophical Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press,

2003), p. 143.

7. Bernard Williams, “The Makrop ulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” in Problems of the Self

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 82 -100.

8. Williams, “The Makropulos Case,” p. 82.

9. Williams, “The Makropulos Case,” p. 89.

10 . Charles Taliaferro, “Why We Need Immortality,” Modern Theology 6, no. 4 (July 1990): 368.

11 . Taliaferro, “Why We Need Immortality,” p. 369.

12 . Steven Horrobin, “The Value of Life Extension to Persons as Conatively Driven Processes,” in Enhancing Human

Capacities, ed. Julian Savulescu, Ruud ter Meulen, and Guy Kahane (Malden, MA: Wiley -Blackwell, 2011), p. 430.

13 . Talia ferro, “Why We Need Immortality,” p. 369.

14 . Williams, “The Makropulos Case,” p. 95.

15. Overall, Aging, Death and Human Longevity, p. 143.

16. Overall, Aging, Death and Human Long evity, p. 166.

17. Overall, Aging, Death and Human Longevity, p. 45.

18. Overall, Aging, Death and Human Longevity, p. 126.

19 . Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1994), p. 226.

20. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, p. 227.

21. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, p. 228.

22. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, p. 228.

23 . Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1976), p. 69.

24 . Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin, 1984), 22.30. 25 . Carol G. Zaleski, “In Defense of Immortality,” in The Fountain of Youth: Cultural, Scientific, and Ethical Perspectives on

a Biomedical Goal, ed. Stephen G. Post and Rob ert H. Binstock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 125.

26 . Jay F. Rosenberg, “Reassessing Immortality: The Makropulos Case Revisited.” Online at http://www.unc.edu/~ jfr/RI -

TMCR1.htm . Accessed November 18, 2010.

27 . C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1955), pp. 223 -24.

28 . Georges Florovsky, “The Resurrection of Life,” Harvard Divini ty School Bulletin 17 (1951 -52): 18.

29 . C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle (New York: Macmillan, 1956), p. 84.

30 . Lewis, The Last Battle, p. 162.

31 . Lewis, The Last Battle, p. 171.

32 . Lewis, The Last Battle, p. 171.

33 . Lewis, The Last Battle, p. 174.

34 . Stephen R. L. Clark, How to Live Forever: Science Fiction and Philosophy (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), p.

116.

35. Clark, How to Live Forever, p. 186.

CHAPTER FOUR : A Generative Life

1. Marc E. Agronin, M.D., How We Age (Philadelphia: De Capo Press, 2011), p. 65.

2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Collier Books, 1962), pp. 251 -52.

3. Erik H. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle (1959; repr. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1980), p. 10 3.

4. Erik H. Erikson, Insight and Responsibility (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1964), p. 113.

5. Erikson, Insight and Responsibility, p. 112.

6. Dan P. McAdams, The Person: An In troduction to the Science of Personality Psychology, 5th ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley

& Sons, 2009), p. 363.

7. Don Browning, “An Ethical Analysis of Erikson’s Concept of Generativity,” in The Generative Society: Caring for Future

Generations, ed. Ed de St. Aubin, Dan P. McAdams, and Tae -Chang Kim (Washington, DC: American Psychological

Association, 2004), p. 247.

8. Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle, p. 103.

9. Edward Collins Vacek, S.J., “Vices and Virtues of Old -age Retirement,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 30, no. 1

(Spring/Summer 2010): 170.

10 . Johann P. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe, vol. 2. Discussion from April 12, 1829. Cited in Paul W. Pruyser, “Aging:

Downward, Upward, or Forward?” in Toward a Theology of Aging, ed. Seward Hiltner (New York: Human Sciences Press,

1975), p. 117.

11 . See my discussion, drawing on the thought of Hans Jonas, in chapter 2 of Neith er Beast nor God: The Dignity of the

Human Person (New York and London: Encounter Books, 2009).

12 . Dan P. McAdams and Regina L. Logan, “What Is Generativity?” in St. Aubin, McAdams, and Kim, eds., The Generative

Society, p. 16.

13 . Don S. Browning, “Preface to a Practical Theology of Aging,” in Hiltner, ed., Toward a Theology of Aging, p. 161.

14 . Richard Sherlock, Nature’s End: The Theological Meaning of the New Genetics (Wilmingto n, DE: ISI Books, 2010), p. 24.

15 . Susan Jacoby, Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011), p. 255.

16 . Larry Temkin, “Is Living Longer Living Better?” in Enhancing Human Capacities, ed. Julian Savulescu, Ruud ter Meulen,

and Guy Kahane (Malden, MA: Wiley -Blackwell, 2011), p. 363.

17 . Jacoby, Never Say Die, pp. 255 -56.

18 . Stanley Shostak, Becoming Immortal (Ne w York: SUNY Press, 2002), p. 196.

19 . Shostak, Becoming Immortal, p. 166. 20 . Shostak, Becoming Immortal, pp. 163 -64.

21 . Shostak, Becoming Immortal, p. 207.

22 . Shostak, Becoming Immortal, p. 208.

23 . Shostak, Becoming Immortal, p. 206.

24 . Temkin, “Is Living Longer Living Better?” p. 364.

25 . Plato, Symposium, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon

Books, 1966), 207d.

26 . Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Ernest Barker (London, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 1252a.

27 . G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1937), p. 19.

28 . P. D. James, The Children of Men (New York: Knopf, 1993), pp. 153 -54.

29 . John Hall Wheelock, This Blessed Earth: New and Selected Poems, 1927 -1977 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,

1978), p. 53.

30 . C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (London and Glasgow: Fontana Books, 1957), p. 141.

CHAPTER FIVE : Patience

1. Stanley H auerwas and Charles Pinches, Christians among the Virtues (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,

1997), pp. 176 -77.

2. David Baily Harned, Patience: How We Wait upon the World (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1997), p. 14.

3. Gerald J. Schiffhorst, “Some Prolegomena for the Study of Patience, 1480 -1680,” in The Triumph of Patience: Medieval

and Renaissance Studies, ed. Gerald J. Schiffhorst (Orlando: University Presses of Florida, 1978), pp. 7 -9.

4. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1960), p. 565.

5. Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson with revisions by Howard A.

Johnson (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1959), pp. 279 -96. For the sake of simplicity I have attributed this view to

Kierkegaard. More technically, it is expressed in the p apers of “A,” edited by Victor Eremita.

6. Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, trans. Douglas V. Steere (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1956),

pp. 217 -18.

7. William F. May, A Catalogue of Sins (New York, Chicago, San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), p. 201.

8. May, A Catalogue of Sins, p. 195.

9. G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World, in The Collected Works of G. K. Cheste rton, vol. 4 (San Francisco: Ignatius

Press, 1987), p. 77.

10. David Shenk, The End of Patience: Cautionary Notes on the Information Revolution (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1999).

11 . Barth, Chur ch Dogmatics, III/2, p. 456.

12 . Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 589.

13 . Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, p. 561.

14 . Søren Kierkegaard, “To Gain One’s Soul in Patience,” in Eigh teen Upbuilding Discourses, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna

H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 169.

15 . Søren Kierkegaard, “Patience in Expectancy,” in Hong and Hong, eds., Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, pp. 205 -26.

16 . Kierkegaard, “Patience in Expectancy,” p. 221.

17 . Kierkegaard, “Patience in Expectancy,” p. 215.

18 . Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, p. 102.

19 . Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, p. 203.

20 . Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, p. 202.

21 . Harned, Patience, p. 182. 22 . Richard John Neuhaus, As I Lay Dying (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 65.

23 . Paul B. Baltes, “Facing Our Limits: Human Dignity in the Very Old,” Daedalus 135, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 35.

24 . Michael J. Sandel, The Case against Perfection (Camb ridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007),

p. 86.

25. Sandel, The Case against Perfection, p. 87.

26. Shenk, The End of Patience, p. ix.

27 . Aristotle, Poetics (New York: The Modern Library, 1954), chapter 6 (p. 233).

28 . Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 9 (p. 236).

29 . Søren Kierkegaard, “The Lord Gave, and the Lord Took Away; Blessed Be the Name of the Lord,” in Hong and Hong,

eds., Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, p. 115.

30 . Kierkegaard, “The Lord Gave . . . ,” p. 116.

31 . Kierkegaard, “The Lord Gave . . . ,” p. 117.

32 . Plato, Republic, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon

Books, 1966), 329c.

33 . D. Elton Tru eblood, “The Blessings of Maturity,” in The Courage to Grow Old, ed. Philip L. Berman (New York:

Ballantine Books, 1989), p. 299.

34 . Trueblood, “The Blessings of Maturity,” p. 297.

CHAPTER SIX : A Complete Life

1. John Hall Wheelock, “An Ancient Story,” The Sewanee Review 81 (January -March 1973): 73 -74.

2. C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), p. 172.

3. Thom as R. Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1992), p. xxx.

4. Aristotle, The “Art” of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (London: William Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons,

1926), 2.13.

5. Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.13.

6. Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.13.

7. Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.14.

8. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs -Merrill, 1962), 1178a9.

9. Kathleen V. Wilkes, “The Good Man and the Good for Man in Aristotle’s Ethics,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amélie

Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 350.

10 . Josef Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 1998), p. 99.

11. Pieper, Happiness and Contemplation, p. 73.

12 . Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “The Place of Contemplation in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ” in Rorty, ed., Essays on

Aristotle’s Ethics, p. 379.

13 . Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1177b26 -30.

14 . Thomas Nagel, “Aristotle on Eudaimonia,” in Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, p. 8.

15 . William F. May, “The Aged: Their Virtues and Vices,” in The Patient’s Ordeal (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana

University Press, 1991), p. 136.

16 . Margaret Urban Walker, “Getting Out of Line: Alternatives to Life as a Career,” in Mother Time: Women, Aging, and

Ethics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 19 99), p. 102.

17 . R. N. Butler, “The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in the Aged,” Psychiatry 26 (1963): 65 -75.

18 . Harry R. Moody, “Conscious Aging: A New Level of Growth in Later Life.” At http://www.hrmoody.com/art4.html .

Accessed February 4, 2011. 19 . St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Rex Warner (New York: New American Library, 1963), 10.17.

20 . Augustine, Confessions 10.5.

21 . Hans W. Frei, Types of Christian Theology (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 148.

22 . Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/4 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Cla rk, 1961), pp. 607 -18. The quoted passages from Barth in

the discussion that follows are all taken from this section of the Church Dogmatics.

23 . Lutheran Book of Worship (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1978), p. 153.

24 . http://www.hymns.me.uk/lead -kindly -light -favorite -hymn.htm . Accessed November 9, 2011.

25 . Walker, “Getting Out of Line,” p. 108 .

26 . Walker, “Getting Out of Line,” p. 108.

27 . Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, vol. 2: Human Destiny (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964),

p. 69.

28 . C. S. L ewis, Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1964), p. 71.

29 . Benedict XVI, “Baptism as the Beginning of a Process: Easter Vigil Homily,” Origins 39, no. 44 (April 15, 2010): 711 -

12.

An earlier version of this chapter appeared as “A Complete Life,” in First Things, no. 219 (January 2012): 25 -31.