If suffering seems to mock at life, death’s mockery of life is more blatant still. It is very curious that any man constructing either a way of life for himself or a larger system of life for society should ignore death altogether. Death, after all, is a fact. It was not invented by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages and foisted upon a credulous Christendom. It will happen; indeed it is the only thing that is certain to happen. Now, on the very lowest plane, it is curious that it should be dismissed as a mere incident, and the question of what comes after it disregarded as of no importance. We are all in the position of passengers on a sinking ship; we shall not all be swept into the sea at the same moment, but for all of us the ship is sinking and the sea waiting. An attitude of mind which in this situation can concern itself exclusively with making things comfortable on the ship and not at all with enquiring as to what will happen to us in the sea, is beyond comprehension.

It is not the denial of a future life that is surprising, but the sheer failure to consider the question adequately of what, if anything, comes after death. On the very lowest level, we can say at least this: that when we do die, as we certainly shall, we shall be a long time dead. By comparison with the long centuries of death, our span of life here is arithmetically negligible. We are given the chance to work out this problem in proportion every time a bone is found in Java or in Rhodesia or at Piltdown, and the scientists fall to arguing how long ago the owner of the bone walked the earth. For the scientists, the question lies between those who insist that he lived a hundred thousand years ago, and their more conservative brothers who will not give him a day more than fifty thousand (or some such figures). To the Catholic, and to the man himself whoever he was, the really important question is not how long ago was he here, but where is he now. Wherever he is, if anywhere, he has been for a very long time. If we take the most conservative estimate of the geologists—it is still a figure by comparison with which the fifty, sixty or seventy years of his life on this earth is the tiniest drop in the bucket. I do not for a moment urge that the matter can be settled by a mere piece of elementary arithmetic of this kind. I mention it only as one more reason why we should not dismiss the after-death without the uttermost efforts to discover whether there is in fact any life other than this or any way of discovering of what kind it is. My complaint against Marx, in this as in so many earlier matters, is that he dismissed the question with no consideration at all. And, in my experience, the great mass of the Communists are in no better case. The arguments for survival are totally unknown to them. They deny the next life, it would seem, because Marx denied it; and he denied it without ever having seriously studied it.

But the question remains. Death is always close at hand, the skeleton at every feast; and if as the feast proceeds, the skeleton can be forgotten, even the heartiest feaster must have his intervals of sobriety. And death inevitably poses the question of what life is worth if it must end inevitably in death. To death, our life is going; and if there is nothing after death, then our life is simply a road running away into the ground. But a road that leads to nothing is not of much value or dignity as a road. Man must of necessity ask what his hold upon the future is, for in that lies his hope. This is the fundamental weakness of Communism in the psychological order: that it has nothing to offer the individual for the long future. All his journeying must end inevitably in his perishing.

Everything conceivable is done to conceal this issue. But as with suffering the main effort lies in a deriding of the Christian hope. Heaven is mocked at as an unreal substitute for the rights of men denied upon this earth, but obviously, even for the Communist, the matter could not be left there. They might deride the Christian hope, but some sort of hope must be offered to men. The Christian offers the individual happiness in heaven after death; the Communist offers society happiness on earth at some point in the indefinite future. If one simply compares the two hopes from the point of view of vitalising power, there can be only one answer: the Christian hope is vitalising; the Communist hope is not, save momentarily until men have had time to get over the first excitement of it and by living with it have discovered its emptiness. For in the first place the Christian hope is for the individual human person; whereas the Communist hope is only for our distant descendants. And the Christian hope is based upon the action of an intelligent Being, the Communist upon a blind force which, if it has so benevolent a purpose for the human race, does not know it. In other words, the Communist hope has no guarantee save the statement of men who by their own declaration—but not demonstrably—are the interpreters of the purpose of the universe. So poor a vitalising power has this prospect of a happy collective in the far future to men who themselves must perish first and know nothing of it if by chance it does arrive, that the Communist is forced back, as we have already seen, upon a decrying of human survival after death. Engels has a phrase—“The tedium of personal immortality”—which is far more revealing than he knew. The phrase shows that he and Marx thought so little of the human person that they assumed that he could not bear his own company for more than the space of life on this earth. They could imagine no activity for him once the collective had had all it wanted from him. “Let him be nothing again,” they seem to say, “let the poor creature go. He has no resources in himself and can receive them from no higher being (since there is no higher being) to make his own company bearable even to himself.” This is their confession of failure; they have banked everything on man’s sufficiency; but man as they see him is plainly not sufficient for immortality and they write off immortality therefore as a dream.

In this we see a repetition of a process already noted. Putting God out of the universe leaves man on top, but man is thereby diminished. Thrusting away belief in the next life means that this life is all that matters; and equally this life is thereby diminished. Man and man’s life are greater for having a goal beyond themselves. Its failure to provide a goal worthy of man forces Communism to make the collective and its well-being the goal of human activity. Death ends the human person, but the community continues. In other words, men are simply so many spare parts; provided the community has enough for its purpose, all is well. But the analogy is an unhappy one, for in this case the spare parts are nobler than the machine to which they are subordinated, for they have life and consciousness and it has not.

All history reads us the same lesson of that weariness of life that waits upon all societies when the energy of their youth is spent and the glow has faded from their vision. And from this vision the glow must fade very speedily, so poor a glow is it and so poor a thing does it make of the human person. He has no issue from space. Born in this world of space, held briefly in consciousness in this world of space, dying and buried in it, he is like a man born and kept until death and buried in a prison without windows—the most unspeakable prison of all, in which there is not even a gaoler. He is held under the iron laws of matter, laws to the framing of which no intelligence went and in the inevitable operation of which no intelligence can enter. Yet man has in himself, here and now, an element that is actually superior to space and time. We are constantly being pulled up short by the chain of our own present limitedness, and are constantly fretted by the desire to know and possess things that lie beyond the length of our chain. Of all this, Communism knows nothing. There is in it, as in the extreme totalitarian systems, a present excitement, immensely stimulating by comparison with the flat level of a life which has forgotten God almost as completely as Communism denies Him. Under the excitement and enthusiasm, strange things are being done; ideas are turned into idols demanding, as Edward Watkin has noted, more human sacrifice than any Aztec god; and alongside this, there is altruism and self-sacrifice at a very high level. But all depends upon the total subordination of the individual; and when the excitement wears off, as wear off it must, the individual is left alone with his own worthlessness. Vitality goes and society dies. Marx, as we have seen again and again, did not study the individual, and the individual will destroy his system if only by losing his own effective will to live. To perish, a society does not need a will to die, but only a slackened will to live.