Martin Häglund argues in his book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom that what he calls spiritual freedom, or a spiritual life, can only be intelligible in light of finitude: it is only because we will eventually die that it makes sense to ask what to do with one’s finite time. Had we been able to live forever without non-existence ever approaching, we would have no reason to make value judgements or decide how to spend our (finite) time. Therefore, our ability to value things depends on the finitude of our life. Our ability to value things opens up “spiritual freedom.” Spiritual freedom is the ability to choose our own “ends” contra other “ends.” We choose some ends rather than others because we have a finite time to accomplish those ends – to create what we value. Therefore, the freedom to choose one’s ends depends on the finitude of life.¹

Häglund goes on to argue that without God we are only responsible to one another and must therefore justify to one another the values and principles which we hold and to which we hold others—.²  He then argues that socialism can maximize freedom in our individual or collective self-governance and our ability to develop spiritually (to use our spiritual freedom to create our own ends) unhindered by the necessity of wasting our lives producing for the sake of endless capitalist production and accumulation.³ 

I am sympathetic to Häglund’s argument about the spiritual effects of capitalism. Capitalism is, in its very nature, evil. Anything that negates creation as creation—the free gift of creation shared in love and enjoyment is evil, described as Karl Barth as the “nothingness.”⁴  Capitalism does this in that it turns creation into nothing more than a system of commodities, whose only normative value is that of market calculation mediated through contract and enforced competition, and whose only purpose is accumulation though exploitation and ultimately the domination of both man and nature, thereby negating creation as a free gift to be enjoyed in mutual love. I also recognize that many socialist policies increase freedom and human flourishing in that they counter the commodification of life that capitalism enforces. However, Häglund is wrong in arguing that we can overcome systems of class domination and attain spiritual freedom in a purely atheistic framework. His idea that atheism is liberating, or that death is required for spiritual freedom is also wrong. The following will not be a review of Häglund’s argument, or a full engagement with his book. Rather, I will argue for the inseparability of the recognition of God for a truly moral case against capitalism (or other wicked ideologies that dehumanize people and human life) and for the irredeemable evil of death and its irreconcilability with spiritual value.

My argument against death apologetics centers around love. The main reason for this is that love itself (as an experience, a phenomenon, and a reality), I claim, is an undeniable window peering into the horizon of eternity, into the horizon of the infinite God (this idea is most profoundly and beautifully put in the first epistle of John, especially 1 John 4:7–21) and can therefore not be fully accounted for in terms of finitude moving towards death; it is also the highest value and the highest aspect of human life. Häglund dedicates a chapter to the subject of love, arguing that central to love is uncertainty, risk, and continuous effort undertaken as an act of faith in the love one has.⁵ He argues that eternity means that one has nothing to lose, and thus cannot risk anything, and without risk there can be no love.⁶ He argues that grief and love are inseparable: one cannot lose the reality of the pain suffered from the loss of love without losing love itself.⁷ Häglund also claims that our finitude leads us to the fact that we do not own ourselves, but are dependent on others and responsible to others.⁸ 

In setting up why I do not think Häglund’s attempt to reconcile death with love or spiritual value works, I would like to borrow a quote from Alain Badiou:

What kind of world does one see when one experiences it from the point of view of two and not one? What is the world like when it is experienced, developed and lived from the point of view of difference and not identity? That is what I believe love to be.⁹ 

. . .

If “I love you” is always, in most respects, the heralding of ‘I will always love you”, it is in effect locking chance into the framework of eternity. We shouldn’t be afraid of words. The locking in of chance is an anticipation of eternity. And to an extent, every love states that it is eternal: it is assumed within the declaration…¹⁰ 

Love, according to Badiou, is almost an ontological sharing. It is not that you and I share the same thing, or something similar, but we share a world experienced through a “we”, rather than an “I.” Does this kind of love require finality to make sense? According to some studies,¹¹ most children learn about the nature of death and its finality between ages five and seven, and they develop an understanding of the universality of death even later. I have a three-year-old daughter who I am completely sure loves me and my wife, despite not having the slightest idea that we will someday no longer exist. She has a “we” world, of herself, her mother, and her father. This relationship is contingent: she did not have to be born and she could have had different parents. No realization of finitude is necessary: she can say “I love you” and really mean it despite not knowing the first thing about death.

We can also refer to romantic eros. Eros is discriminatory. It cannot be universal: it must be “I love you, and not him/her,” and in that sense it is finite, but this does not require temporal finitude. Real romantic love, as Badiou points out, locks chance into eternity. When one falls in love it retrospectively becomes as though it was always meant to be, even though it is clearly contingent.¹² 

Zizek says that falling in love changes the past in that when one falls in love it is as if one always already had loved (Zizek, Living in the end Times, 28–29). This is because we experience love as something which always was meant to be and always will be, even though we understand that it will end and could have never happened. Nevertheless, the fact that it will end in death is not what gives it meaning. Nobody loves in light of finitude; people love in light of eternity. “I will love you forever” is not made meaningful by the fact that it is actually untrue.

That we are mortal is not the reason we fall in love. We do not fall in love because we will one day die and must therefore decide what we do with our finite lives. We do not fall in love for any discernable reason at all: it is not something we decide. As Slavoj Zizek points out, love, in the context of an individual constructing his or her own life—far from being a decision to improve our lives—is a catastrophe:

When I fall violently and passionately in love, my balance is disturbed, the course of my life is derailed, logos turns into pathology, I lose my neutral capacity to reflect and judge; all my (other) abilities are suspended in their autonomy, subordinated to One Goal, colored by It—indeed, love is a malady? To paraphrase Paul, when we are in love, “we buy as though we have no possessions, we deal with the world as though we have no dealings with it,” since all that ultimately matters is love itself. Perhaps the gap which separates pleasure and jouissance is nowhere more palpable than in the situation when, after a long period of calm complaisant life, with its little pleasures, one all of a sudden falls passionately in love: love shatters our daily life as a heavy duty whose performance demands heavy sacrifices on the level of the “pleasure of principle”—how many things must a man renounce? “Freedom,” drinks with friends, card evenings.¹³ 

Love is not something which enhances freedom; it severely limits freedom. Love is not chosen; it is not something which we evaluate and decide on. As Zizek says:

If I am directly ordered to love a woman, it is clear that this does not work; in a way, love must be free. But on the other hand, if I proceed as if I really have a free choice, if I start to look around and say to myself ‘Let’s choose which of these women I will fall in love with’, it is clear that this also does not work, that it is not ‘real love’. The paradox of love is that it is a free choice, but a choice which never arrives in the present – it is always already made. At a certain moment, I can only state retroactively that I’ve already chosen.¹⁴ 

Love is not a value which one chooses above other values. One does not decide to engage in a relationship because it is something better to do with one’s finite life, or better than other potential experiences. Falling in love is something which happens to you. Love is apocalyptic, in the sense of a revelation imposed from outside, in which the chaos of the world is suddenly given meaning: meaning grounded in the heavenly realm, in eternity. In light of death, love is an absolute tyrannical disaster. Falling in love cuts off entire worlds; simple pleasures are lost. Love comes with anxiety, irreversible sacrifice, uncontrollable attachment, and loss of freedom. The old libertine saying of “why have sex with just one person the rest of my life?” may seem crude, but why would it not be a sound piece of advice? Why is the contemporary capitalist ideology of constant flux, creative destruction, experimentation with all kinds of possibilities, always remaining open to new pleasures and consumption, not more compatible with the finitude of life than love?

Yet love is the ultimate value. One might argue that love as a supreme value can be simply taken as such and included in a utilitarian calculation, —since the value of love is presumably subjective and fulfilling it would give us pleasure that could, presumably, be measured against other pleasures. But this does not work. We would still be left with the question of why it is a value and what it is that makes it valuable. The value of love is not found in pleasure. The value of love does not come from any discernible excitement of the senses, the pleasure you get from sex does not necessitate love, the same with things like laughter. It certainly is not security, or freedom. So what is the value of love?

Some of the greatest insights on love come from the New Testament Johannine literature. John 15:12–13 posits love as a commandment, claiming that love is highest when it is self-sacrificial. 1 John 3:16–17 claims that knowing love comes from knowing Christ’s self-sacrifice, which puts an absolute obligation of self-sacrifice on us and from this obligation comes our obligations of solidarity to one another. This notion of love and of self-sacrifice is not consistent with the idea of creating value within our finite life, especially when taken literally as Christ takes it given that literal self-sacrifice would end the finite life in which one is supposed to create value. But this is what the gospel claims love is. However, the gospel narrative of Christ’s self-sacrifice would be absolutely meaningless without the resurrection: without the self-sacrifice of finitude becoming eternal. Not eternal in the sense of perpetuity—surviving the sacrifice—but of resurrection: transformation into the eternal and transcending the finitude of death.¹⁵

We sometimes read stories about an individual who used their body as a human shield to protect their beloved, dying in order to save them. Why do these stories strike us as ultimate examples of love and of the highest moral value? They do not provide any substantial meaning to the lives of the sacrificed, not even retrospectively. It could very well be that the person who gave their life for their beloved had not thought of doing that at all: it may have never come up in their thoughts. But at the moment when their beloved’s life was in danger, they knew to give their own life to save their beloved. Just like the act of falling in love, self-sacrifice is absolutely freely chosen, but not deliberated, not picked from a number of options. It is not a decision made in order to provide meaning to one’s life in light of death; it is driving headlong into death for the sake of love.

This is because love always participates in eternity: it participates in God. If one were to love in order to provide one’s life with meaning, it would not be love because love cannot serve any utilitarian purpose. Love dissolves identity for difference, it dissolves the “I” for the “we.” To love is to participate in God because it is irreducible to temporal sense making; it cannot fit within a temporal economy of competing values. The ancient Epicureans might warn against love as a hinderance to pleasure, the ancient stoics might warn against any love that threatened the true happiness found in apetheia and harmony with nature, but the apocalyptic Christian would embrace love as a radical attachment to the other in view of eternity. Love can only be made sense of as grounded in God and eternity.¹⁶

The “catastrophe” of love is really only a catastrophe in the context of our secular, capitalist, individualist framework (much in the same way the gospel narrative was a catastrophe for the hierarchical Greco-Roman world). Marx, in the communist manifesto, explains the trajectory of capitalism:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify”¹⁷

and:

“It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value.”¹⁸ 

This is almost self-evidently true: the Lockean notion of the individual as a free agent (free in the sense of having no obligations or constraints, and thus no relationships, since all relationships involve obligations and constraints) in the state of nature, contracting himself into relationship, is the ideology of the secular capitalist world, in that it is assumed whether or not individuals consciously believe in it. This notion of freedom is one in which one’s freedom depends on the will being without restraint and independent. This is a completely voluntarist notion of freedom where obligations must be voluntarily chosen by the will and where one’s choices must depend on nothing but the will (save the laws of nature). Within this framework, love is a catastrophe, one is no longer free, one is tied down, made vulnerable, attached, taken out of a manageable economy of calculated self-interest. The “I” which lays at the basis of the ideology is replaced with a “we.” Identity dissolves into difference. The dissolving identity is, of course, false: we never were free in the Lockean sense, we all begin our lives as infants living through the love of our mother.

Much of the modern secular capitalist ideology that dominates our world posits exchange, exchange value and the Lockean notion of freedom as the highest values. It justifies the commodification of all of human life, since commodification supposedly allows for more freedom. Buy a product, or decide not to, be employed here or there, invest here or there, decide to join this religion or that, hold this political position or another -everything is a commodity for consumption.

However, this ideology also depends on the expulsion of the eternal. One key factor of an exchange relationship is its finitude. A contract regulates a relationship: it assumes that the participants’ interests are not aligned and that they need a legal contract to enforce the conditions. Another part of the logic of the contract is that the relationship is finite—temporally, and in scope.¹⁹ Contracts allow us to get something from a stranger without accepting obligations beyond what we contract with the stranger. A corollary to this kind of contract exchange is violence, not only because contracts depend on the potentiality of violence to enforce them,²⁰ but also because both violence and exchange assume the parties are enemies attempting to take advantage of one another – they assume self-interest.

The assumption of the primacy of exchange is given to the dominant ideology by people like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Adam Smith; and is re-enforced by the institutions of capitalism. This ideology of exchange assumes finitude: everything is limited, and everyone is trying to get as much out of this life and this world as they can. In the face of annihilation, sharing love can simply be a matter of calculation: what will we lose, is it worth it, will I be taken advantage of. If atheism is true in that there is no eternity or transcendent grounding of the Good, any value one builds for oneself can only be grounded in mere will, just like the will to dominate others, or the will to satisfy lusts.

Another type of relationship (other than hierarchy) is communism, defined by David Graeber as any human relationship that operates on the principles of from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.”²¹ Graeber, and I, use the term communism to include all relationships that are arranged from each according to ability and to each according to need (This can be friends sharing a meal, a marriage, social security programs, and so on), on which Graeber writes:

What is equal on both sides is the knowledge that the other person would do the same for you, not that they necessarily will. The Iroquois example [Greaber, earlier in the text, explains how the tribes of the Iroquois organized themselves so that they were constantly dependent on each other for the necessities of life] brings home clearly what makes this possible: that such relations are based on a presumption of eternity. Society will always exist.²²

And comparing that with exchange:

Often there is an element of competition, there’s a sense that both sides are keeping accounts and that, unlike what happens in communism, which always partakes of a certain notion of eternity, the entire relationship can be canceled out, and either party can call an end to it at any time.²³ 

The communist relationship is active at many levels of our everyday lives, but the underlying rational is one of primordial obligations ground in eternity. Take, for example, someone who watches his neighbor’s children knowing that when he needs something, his neighbor will help him. Even if that person is very old, or helping someone who is very old, they will help and share anyway. Why? Is this a valuation in light of finitude? No. It is a primordial obligation: my neighbor and I are tied together: he will always be there for me, and I will always be there for him. Society will always be there.

If I spend hours of my day caring for a dying person, washing them, reading to them, listening to them, why do I do it? Is this a moral valuation? Is it something I deliberated over and decided that this was the best thing to do with my finite time? Is it because I am betting that the dying person’s family will reciprocate? No. This act is an act of love, even if I do not actually have loving affection for the person. The same logic of communism is at play here (similar to people in a disaster area sharing resources).

What is happening here? A utilitarian explanation in terms of maximizing certain goods in a society does not work once one considers different options of what one could do with one’s time and what goods could be maximized by doing them, especially once one takes into account questions of how much happiness a dying person is capable of (compared to someone else), what social capital caring for that person can actually be gained, and so on. A neo-Darwinian account may possibly explain the process by which altruistic behaviors become prominent in a species (although I have my doubts), but not why someone actually decides to act altruistically. For example, placing a man buying flowers for his wife into a Darwinian account of sexual selection does not explain the reason the man himself has for buying the flowers, which is more likely to involve the particularities of his relationship with his wife and the love their share with each.

Another option is that we say that this action is a pure unadulterated, unreciprocated gift, in the Derridean sense of a “pure gift” (which Derrida claims can only be a true gift if it is completely unreciprocated).²⁴ If, however, this action was that kind of gift—the person will die, and the gift will be obliterated—then why is it that I find moral value in what I did even after the person died? Is it because I am happy that I am the type of person that cares for people? Perhaps, but that would make it a selfish act of self-reassurance, to remind myself that I am a “good person.” Or is it that I find moral value in providing a tiny level of comfort to this person’s last moments of life? If that were the case, we would have to account for what that moral value is, leaving us with the original problem.

Or is it that there is something about giving a gift where the gift itself is eliminated, which has value in itself? This question is a good place to jump into where I differ on the nature of “the gift” with people like Derrida. Gifts fit into a social relationship: they are not a separate category, but the nature of a gift changes with the social relationship. A gift in a communist relationship will have a mutuality to it, in that it re-enforces the relationship.²⁵ A gift in a hierarchical relationship can re-enforce the hierarchy and/or create certain on-going obligations (a superior might give a gift in order to demonstrate his benefaction and superiority, an inferior might give a gift that will become a tribute).²⁶ A gift in an exchange relationship might create imbalances that require rapid balancing out with a counter gift, or it might create a debt.²⁷ To go back to the question at the beginning of this paragraph, I would argue that a gift which is eliminated and unreciprocated is no longer a gift, because it would then not function as a gift defining and re-enforcing a relationship.

My answer to the question of what is happening with a person caring for someone dying is that like the baseline communism we have with our family, friends, and neighbors, and like the experience of falling in love, the act of caring for a dying person is a participation in eternity. The act of caring for a dying person appears to us to have significance beyond the death of the individual and beyond ourselves. We do not really believe that death ends the relationship. There is something that tells us that the relationship we have with someone cannot end: it must go on. This is because the relationship exists with an expectation of eternity, even if that relationship is simply one of being around a dying person, one is driven to treat that person as though their significance transcends the short time remaining for them, and that the interactions one has with the dying person is worthwhile beyond whatever short moments of pleasure they may bring (which may be just a few hours). Rather than the relationship gaining meaning through finitude, its meaning is grounded in the expectation and assumption of eternity (not necessarily timelessness, but permanence).

We love because we want to love forever. Unless our relationships are governed by exchange or hierarchy, they are governed by a communism that assumes permanence. These relationships are fundamental to human life, value, and freedom (freedom in a meaningful sense: not the freedom to pick Coke or Pepsi; the freedom to pursue real value). This is why the Pauline concept of death as the final enemy (1 Cor 15:26) resonates; death is the ultimate enemy, of life, of love, and all relationships based on mutuality (communism). Death has no place in love; it is a foreign force imposing itself on something which derives its meaning from what death destroys. The meaning found in love is in its grasping towards eternity, it is an escape from finitude, and it seeks eternity.

Finitude and death do have a place in the kind of relationship exalted by capitalism: exchange. Exchange depends on fluidity, creative destruction, on competition for finite resources for a finite time, and on the knowledge that at any moment any relationship might end. There are no eternal truths, no permanent relationships, no absolute values in capitalism; instead, there are contracts, market calculations, and property rights. Capitalism, as an ideological system, allows for individuals to create their own truths, their own contingent relationships, their own values; but these have no claim on the public sphere, which, under capitalism, has no place for the eternal. Social life is a struggle for individuals to make the best for themselves in a finite world for a finite time. Because of this, any relationship we have cannot be more than a choice aimed at enhancing our own finite lives, reducing relationships to informal market contracts, to commodities.

Capitalism reduces everything to a commodity. This commodification of everything stems from the basic assumptions of capitalism: the homo economicus (which depends on the horizon of finitude, since it is only with the idea of a limited life with limited possibilities that man must become preoccupied with the constant maximization of his own gain), the self-justification of the market (which is all you are left with outside transcendent value except the self-justification of violence), and absolute private property (which stems from the framework of finitude which brings the need to exclude others from parts of the world that you can dominate in order to control the gains and trajectory of your fleeting life). In this sense, capitalism is really the social framework of atheism.

Because the classical view of God is what has historically grounded the Good and the True (from Plato through Aquinas to today), if there is no such reality, one cannot ground true values, there is no “greater good,” no spiritual truth, to draw on an ancient analogy, if there is no sun there will not be any sunlight. Spiritual freedom with no God is not freedom to discover truth (there is no such thing), it is to create value judged by whatever you decide to judge the value by; or whatever the ideology decides to judge value by. The decision to cooperate with others to try and build a framework in which everyone can have access to the necessities of life—overthrowing class systems of domination—or maintaining your position (or go up a bit) within a system of class domination, re-affirming that system, is really just a matter of prudence

Systems of class domination do not emerge from collective deliberation based on what people believe is the best way to run society; they exist through some people securing places of power and leveraging institutions of violence to that end. The ideologies defending class domination also come about in that context. Perhaps it is possible that the desire for liberation from class domination, to free our finite lives from capital accumulation, is enough to convince people to overturn it. But it is risky: it depends on unshakable solidarity and there is always—at least for many people—the promise of “middle management” if you play by the rules of the ruling class. It may be a matter of a simple calculation: can I depend on solidarity? Or do I need to make sure that if there is going to be class domination I am not on the bottom. I am not saying that truly heroic acts of solidarity do not happen, they do; what I am saying is that the logic of finitude and atheism cannot ground it.

Real solidarity is grounded in absolute moral truth, a moral truth that does not stem from freedom to choose between commodity like options but a recognition of the unconditional, the absolute. There are no guarantees in finitude; the only hope is in eternity. Those who act in solidarity against systems of class domination may not explicitly believe in eternity, but they do implicitly participate in eternity: they are driven, like all people, by a morality that transcends finitude whether or not they know it. Real liberation requires the kind of self-sacrifice embodied by Christ: self-sacrifice that is always aimed at the eternal and grounded in God.

In the same way, whether or not one believes in gravity has no bearing on the reality of gravity, whether or not one believes in transcendent truth or eternity has no bearing on the fact that eternity and transcendent truth ground love, solidarity, and much of what is of real moral value in one’s life. You may not believe in God, but the reality of God still bears on your life. Denying that reality gives you no freedom, no meaning, and it cannot ground a politics of solidarity or emancipation, but only leads to moral and spiritual absurdity.

The Christian evangel is that the finitude of death has been conquered by Christ so that finite persons not only desire eternity, but can truly participate in it with eternal life. One of my favorite accounts of this message is found in the writings of the fourth century Persian poetic theologian, Aphrahat, who, by describing the epic of Christ in terms of an invasion of the realm of a personified death writes:

And when Jesus, the slayer of Death, came, and clothed Himself in a Body from the seed of Adam, and was crucified in His Body, and tasted death; and when (Death) perceived thereby that He had come down unto him, he was shaken from his place and was agitated when he saw Jesus; and he closed his gates and was not willing to receive Him. Then He burst his gates, and entered into him, and began to despoil all his possessions. But when the dead saw light in the darkness, they lifted up their heads from the bondage of death, and looked forth, and saw the splendour of the King Messiah. Then the powers of the darkness of Death sat in mourning, for he was degraded from his authority. Death tasted the medicine that was deadly to him, and his hands dropped down, and he learned that the dead shall live and escape from his sway. And when He had afflicted Death by the despoiling of his possessions, he wailed and cried aloud in bitterness and said, Go forth from my realm and enter it not. Who then is this that comes in alive into my realm? And while Death was crying out in terror (for he saw that his darkness was beginning to be done away, and some of the righteous who were sleeping arose to ascend with Him), then He made known to him that when He shall come in the fullness of time, He will bring forth all the prisoners from his power, and they shall go forth to see the light. Then when Jesus had fulfilled His ministry among the dead, Death sent Him forth from his realm, and suffered Him not to remain there. And to devour Him like all the dead, he counted it not pleasure. He had no power over the Holy One, nor was He given over to corruption.²⁸