Ancient Egyptians, modern Catholics, and cremation

Last November, my wife and I traveled to Boston to visit our son. While there, he took us to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, an extraordinarily rich institution still—surprisingly—not overtaken by extreme wokeness.

The museum has a small but rich collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts whose main attraction, obviously, is mummies. But the exhibition also contains canopic jars. In case you’re wondering what canopic jars are, they are the vessels in which Egyptian embalmers preserved certain organs (the viscera and lungs) they extracted from a body during mummification.

It struck me that, in one sense, the pagan ancient Egyptians in one respect had a greater respect for human embodiment and incarnation than many modern semi-gnostic “Christians”.

Surveys indicate that Catholic acceptance of cremation largely mirrors that of the general population. This should be surprising because, as French philosopher Damien Le Guay has pointed out, burial was for the longest time the funerary practice of Christians while cremation was the hallmark of pagans.

Why did Boston’s canopic jars trigger that association for me? Because they show that it’s not just the taxidermized shell of a body that mattered to the Egyptians. What the embalmers removed wasn’t just “junk,” “medical waste,” or “clumps of cells” to be discarded. Even those elements not put into the mummy case were honored.

This, of course, is not alien to Catholicism. On October 24th, Pope Francis issued his encyclical Dilexit Nos, on the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Our Savior’s Heart is a symbol–but not “just” a symbol–of the center of Jesus’s Love. This is far removed from disincarnate modern thought. (The ancient Egyptian mummifiers also left the heart intact.)

But, you object, the Church permits cremation today. That’s true. Since rescinding its outright ban on cremation in 1963, the Vatican permits cremation today. But much depends on what “permits” means.

The Church “permits”–in the sense of “tolerates”–cremation. But the Church also “prefers” earth burial, in imitation of Jesus who lay in a tomb. It is like Friday abstinence in the United States: the Church in this country “permits” the eating of meat on non-Lenten Fridays provided Catholics perform some other penitential act. But we all also know the dirty little secret: people heard the permission but ignored the condition. The same is true with cremation.

The Church’s preference for earth burial is connected to her preference for bodily integrity, which is why the Church objects to some practices that cremation has otherwise made commonplace. Examples include the scattering of ashes, denying the deceased a final resting place (which is not an urn resting on the mantel over your fireplace), and the commodification of cremains (e.g., crystallizing human ashes into jewelry). It is why the Church generally sought the burial of bodies intact. Something of that same sentiment found echoes in Egyptian burial treatment of body parts, which mirrored something of their concept of life-after-death. (In the Christian West, parcelization of bodies was usually a punishment for serious malefactors, e.g., traitors whose drawn-and-quartered limbs and torso were publicly displayed at various city gates as part of deterrent punishment.)

I find it striking that the pagan Egyptians appear to have a respect for the body similar to what would be later developed more fully by Christians. It was also striking that many Christians seem to be backtracking on their own heritage.

Having written critically about cremation for years, I’ve come to see that the motivations for cremation in the West center on two motives: economics and ecology.

First, ecology. Yes, cremation is usually cheaper than burial. But, I’d argue, it’s not just an economic question. True, cremation costs less and the fact that many people live (Social Security) paycheck-to-paycheck, especially in retirement, bears on the question. Yes, the Church, with its size and cemetery industry, arguably could use its “buying power” better to leverage funeral costs.

But there’s also a cultural shift, too. Leaving a body for burial in a Potter’s Field would also be cheaper, too, but people don’t generally treat their relative’s remains as discardable biomass (even though, historically, incineration is what you did with garbage and medical waste). Acceptance of cremation involves a cultural shift: that a dead body has only a “symbolic” value (which thereby reduces what I’m willing to spend on it) and that what matters is the “memory” of one’s dearly departed. Is this the final triumph of Cartesian person-as-consciousness? Memories, unlike bodies, don’t need final resting places. Has this rendered cemeteries vestigial?

Secondly, ecology. Cemeteries lead to the question of the ecological impact of burial, especially as experienced in America. That question, in turn, collides with contemporary environmental consciousness and climate preoccupations. When one factors in chemical embalming of a body instead of a metal casket in a cement vault, environmental impact is huge and deleterious. And the truth is this mode of burial has elicited a counterreaction that begrudges the dead (even what Leo Tolstoy once described as “six feet from head to toe–all the land a man needs.”)

But Catholics have no obligation to fill the veins of their deceased with formaldehyde or buy bronze caskets and concrete vaults. “Green burial”–unembalmed interment in “green” (e.g., wood) caskets–is growing in popularity among Catholics. Many such caskets are the products of religious orders like the Trappists. We need to recover the idea that the human body is not just a biological by-product that poses only the problem of “disposal” while, at the same time, grappling with environmental questions.

Why does all this matter? Arguably, because reducing the deceased body to merely a biological waste product undermines the Christian perspective of the body as Temple of the Holy Spirit, as well as the Judaeo-Christian perspective (rooted in Genesis) that people are not just another biological species with perhaps a disproportionate carbon footprint. Unless we counter that trend, we will not staunch our society’s gnostic swing that reduces people to consciousness, with their bodies mere instruments or tools attached.

It’s not just a funeral question. Downplaying the body and embodiment underlies many other social issues. It justifies contraception. It lets us pretend that an unborn child with a heartbeat is not a body or person but just a “clump of cells.” It’s why Planned Parenthood fought so vociferously against fetal burial laws, insisting post-abortion remains be treated only as “biological waste.” It teaches us that bearing a child through sexual intercourse versus making a baby in a test tube or petri dish are distinctions without a difference. It insists that by performing mastectomies on girls or giving puberty blockers followed by castration to boys, you can change their “genders.” And, finally, it turns one’s “final resting place” into a mantelpiece or coffee table for the lucky, blowing in the wind or washing out to sea for the less so.

My visit to Boston’s Egypt collection made clear the value of the human body which, although reaching its zenith in Christianity through the Incarnation (which we celebrate next month), was already found inchoately in other cultures like the Egyptian. That should be no surprise, because what’s at stake is the profoundly human.