Nothing Changes When We Die

An Interview with Thomas Berry

What happens when we die? It must be a pretty intimate question for you as an elder.

Berry: In a certain sense. For me it gets less and less a part of my thinking. It's a case that nothing changes, in a sense, when we die. We enter a new place of our existence that is beyond description. It's a deeper mode of participation in what you call the great celebration of existence. But its greatness is in its specifics. We have a feeling, in a sense, of how to approach it, how to deal with it. But how to describe it - it doesn't easily permit itself to be described in a technical way, it's a mythic likeness that we understand.

Do you think individuality still exists after death?

Berry: Yes. Christianity has a clearer perception of that, I think, than other traditions. The idea of the uniqueness of individuals comes from our efforts to understand the person in Christ. There's a saying in the earlier tradition that the individual is beyond, is inevitable. The individual is beyond analysis because he belongs to that unique something which isolates a person into being an individual, of having a unique identity. The individual is unique, irreplaceable, it cannot be replaced, it cannot be confused with anything else. It doesn't go into anything else. Because there is a certain negative aspect of individual, something like genetic coding. The genetic coding is what cuts off the species from other species. And that's why the species is fertile among their components, but does not reproduce with any other species. The individual person has unique values. That is, in some ways, the great contribution of Christianity. That's why the basic belief in Christianity is not in Jesus exactly. We were not baptized in the name of Jesus. We were baptized in the name of the Trinity. So the Trinity is the basic Christian doctrine and Christ becomes the human manifestation of the second person which is identified as the Word of the Intelligent Being of the Divine. So the idea of a transcendent personal deity created the universe distinct from, not separate from, but distinct from itself is the basic context in which Christianity comes and why there is a certain balance of earth-oriented religions. But that's what gets us into trouble because we begin to fail to appreciate that the universe is not an extrinsic creation. It's a manifestation of the Divine, but the Divine is not distinct from but intimately present in creation.

So when we die, if we're talking about a persona of death, our persona remains?

Berry: That is the basic Christian belief. A very distinct, powerful Christian belief, that the individual survives as an individual. Because we are unique beings, we need the resurrection of the body so that in Christian belief, the resurrection of the body is demanded by the belief in the integrity of the individual person. I think St. Thomas says we are not a complete person until the resurrection of the body. We have a great demand for body. What a resurrected body would be, is anyone's guess.

In terms of our present view of the universe being twelve billion light years across, where would this body be?

Berry: If the material of one body is transformed into the material of another body where would that body be - Reincarnation. My guess is you will find the answer to this question a challenge.