Da pedra à nuvem: um itinerário tanatológico à luz da Sagrada Escritura

Abstract

Thanatology dialogues with Biblical Literature to investigate human relations with death and the reactions of the bereaved throughout history, from the Stone Age to the cloud age. The first part presents the multiple access and interpretations that society has made of death and dying, as well as the concepts of physical and symbolic death. In the biblical and extra-biblical world, the concept of life and death pervades the practices and funeral rites, therefore, we analyze the cemetery archeology in order to detect the worldviews present in ancient societies and score existing intersections between societies and the Old Testament religion. The New Testament literature authenticates the practice present in the Old Testament, in which women are the protagonists in situations of death; however, in the New Testament, Jesus legitimates these actions and acts on behalf of bereaved, killed or dying women, synthesized by Jairo’s daughter, the hemorrhaging woman, and Nain’s widow. Following this logic, in the second part, the emphasis is on Jesus and his relationship with death, and the interventions made by him in life-threatening situations, times of mourning and funerals. Jesus is here presented through his humanity, experiencing anticipatory grief himself. We have applied the thanatological methodology of Elisabeth Kübler Ross to identify the stages of grief fulfilled by him. The second chapter ends by exposing Jesus that conquers death. The third chapter answers two questions that are essential to Anthropology: Why to die? Why not to die? The interpretation of death in contemporary times covers multiple issues, such as longevity, techniques to postpone death and the technology applied to the maintenance of life in the terminally ill body. In order to understand these and other quests, we have researched cultural paradigms and ways of establishing relations in contemporary society. In times of virtual connections, the rise of unique rites of passage is common, as grief is exposed in cyberspace, cemeteries become spaces of virtual access and funerals are transmitted online, imposing new paradigms for death at the cloud age. Despite the advances and transformations in the social conception of death and dying, the thanatological hermeneutic shift did not occur with the passage of time and succession of cultures, but with the meaning given by Jesus’ death and resurrection.